Therapeutic Truth

Sometimes we believe things because of the process of therapy. If a therapist says "try thinking of your inner life as a bunch of people who take on different roles, see if that helps your problem" (what Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is based on), and it does help, you probably won't be absolutely certain that you have a bunch of people who make you up as a community, but your credence in that will rise, and you may trust as though that belief were absolutely true.

Similarly (though this isn't exactly therapy), if a therapist like Freud says "your religious belief is created by a subconscious mechanism of wish fulfillment" and, when you hear of that, you think "it can't be true, can it? Can it? ... It must...", as though after thinking about it, you see that it is true, and then you lose your belief in God, obviously not founded on faculties aimed at truth-seeking, then that loss of belief can be taken to show that your religious belief was founded in wish fulfillment. (Was it really? Was it only founded in wish fulfillment? You did want it to be true as you would any good thing. Well, since you lost your belief, the therapy worked, so the ideas involved in the therapy must have been true, or "therapeutically true", as much as the notion that there are many people in you because IFS works.)

To be fair (to therapists), beliefs produced through the therapeutic process can be helpful (the goal of therapy), or even true, if the therapist is responsible to the truth.

We tend to believe whoever heals us, whoever changes us, or has decisive psychological power over us (often, whoever abuses us), whether or not they really know what they're talking about.

Phenomenology of Hardening

Epistemic status: provisional.

I realize that I've been adding more to the idea of hardening, or finding that I have to clarify issues with it. The topic is important, so that's justified. But I wish that I had figured all of this out before I started writing about it. Normally, a blog is a good medium for working on thoughts. But if you say something that concerns risk, it seems good to have a finished product before you say things that might mislead or alienate people, for being incomplete presentations of a concept. However, since I have so few readers (as far as I know), perhaps I have time in which to develop what I have to say.

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What would it be like to harden yourself? How would it feel on the inside? Well, you have to reject God and cease to listen to his voice. So you would be conscious of rejecting God. You would make the decision irrevocably. You would reject with your whole being. Buber said evil is never done in a whole-souled way, and I can see something to that here. You have to violate a part of yourself to make this decision. But you can do that, and if you harden, then that is what you do.

What would it feel like to be in a state of being hardened? I'm not sure. One possibility is that you just wouldn't care that you were hardened, or what God cared about. This seems like a likely phenomenology of being hardened. Another might be that you don't care about those things but pretend to yourself that you do care, knowing that you pretend. I'm less sure that that kind of thing happens, but if it did, I think it could be a case of hardening, because the self-deception could be deliberate enough and knowing enough.

Much of what I am concerned about when I think about myself hardening is getting into ease. Ease can lead to a kind of nihilism on a deep level. But I haven't hardened yet, if I am indifferent. I may be in a state of danger, but I haven't made the fatal step.

Is it possible to have made that decision and then forgotten you did so? If you did so, you wouldn't care about the question. If you feel that you don't care, but you choose to turn to God for salvation, then you weren't irrevocably hardened.

I don't think very many people have consciously and knowingly rejected God in this life in an irrevocable way. The next life (the Millennium), will last a long, but finite time, and toward the end of it is when I would expect to see the most hardenings actually happen. What we do now, at any point along the way, can affect how close we get to that possibility. Whatever sins or idols we love more than God, that we hold onto, are things that could lead us into hardening someday. But, the door is not shut. Unless you know that the door is shut, since you decided deliberately and irrevocably to shut it, and don't care that it is shut.

Size of God

Epistemic status: provisional.

Traditionally God is assumed to be of infinite "size", where "size" can be cashed out as power, speed, energy, capacity, or something like that. Under the traditional view, God's mind contains a literal infinity, the awareness of all possible thoughts (each one of the real numbers is there, and all the possible interrelationships between the real numbers, and so on).

I don't know what the Bible says about this -- whether it commits us to that view or not. Also, I am unsure what to think, in terms of MSLN. I want to say that there are no actual infinities. In which case, God is not infinite.

If that is the case, then perhaps the size of what can be created and what can be thought is limited by God's "size". The universe may be extraordinarily large and detailed, and also, in each communication between God and creature, enormous numbers of complex simantic words are related, so that appearances can appear to be of what they are. And God communicates with an extraordinary number of creatures. God shows us what there is and also knows what we may potentially see, what may follow from one presentation of a simantic word (the barking dog may become a friendly dog -- two parts of the meaning of the simantic word that is that dog).

So it looks as though the size of God is very large -- I couldn't quantify it, but as a proxy, maybe someone could calculate the "size" of a computer that could simulate every detail of our physical world, all our perceptions, and all the interrelationships between them which are of practical, aesthetic, or otherwise personal significance.

This possible limit on the size of God would then be a limit on how many people could be created, something relevant to the rest view of population ethics.

"Whereof One Cannot Speak" (Without Degrading...)

I found this blog post from another blogger when I was trying to find "whereof one cannot speak..." to use in this post. He makes the point that Wittgenstein (source of the quote) initially was interpreted as saying that since we don't know that God, beauty, etc. exist in as rigorous a way as scientific things, that it was meaningless to try talking about them. But that Wittgenstein's later notes say more that these realities exist, but that talking about them degrades them.

If we find that talking about God or beauty (etc.) degrades them, then we perhaps do not talk about them or act on them, and to the extent that our epistemology, the way we trust so that things are real to us, is practical, we don't trust them as much as if we could have spoken of them and acted on them in some way. Does God want to be taken as an unspeakable mystery? Or would he rather we approached him as according to our concepts as they are, though they make him into a cheap formula to us? I think the way of relationship is somewhere in the middle. A trustworthy, mature spousal relationship (I would guess) is a good model for a good interpersonal relationship. I like what Ursula LeGuin suggests, about how spouses can cross an abyss of difference very casually, when they relate. I would say that they speak words to each other, which mean something different to each of them, and yet basically the same.

I would assume that in any spousal relationship, there is both the relating to what is known and to what is unknown. If we approach each other with respect, we allow each other to be what we are, and this lets us trust each other without fully understanding each other. If we relate to God with respect, we can use the words we know to use about him -- and they are the same words he uses to speak to us about himself or any other conceivable topic, although he understands them in a somewhat, but not fatally, different way than we do.

Witness Epistemology

Witness epistemology: "I know things as a witness, not as a being pretending to omniscience. This is what I see. I do not know if it is anything more than my perception." This admirably humble and limited point of view is unpopular. Why? It just feels wrong? It doesn't lead us to seek the truths we need to survive or to do what needs to be done for others?

Those are possibilities. Another is that it may lend itself to solipsism. Solipsism is not an attractive view to most people, and things that can go down a slippery slope to solipsism may be suspect. If suspect enough, we "know" them to simply be untrue. In this case, "knowing" is a kind of shutting down of the ability to believe, to harden oneself against pathological beliefs. So to say "I know things as a witness" is to say "I know what I experience, and only that". All we need to add to that to get to solipsism is "Somehow the only things that can be are the things that are knowable", which philosophically sounds suspicious, but which we might "know" to be true, or feel a strong bias toward believing as true.

Surely, following something like "whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent", we can only talk about what we know of. Or at least, that sounds like it makes sense on some level. But then we like to make the leap that what we don't talk about, or oughtn't talk about, doesn't exist. We don't have a right to concern ourselves about it, so we should live as though (or pretend that) it doesn't exist. And so if we are fully epistemically modest, we seem to tend to have to be solipsists.

Gating Off Voices, Part 2

After posting Gating Off Voices; Especially Ones That Speak of ECT, I realized that there were some more things to say on the subject.

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One thing I could have cleared up, had I noticed it, relates to this passage:

If God doesn't exist, then hardening doesn't matter, so if hardening matters, it matters how we relate to God, and sometimes it is best to deliberately shut out some of the pathological voices in order to hear his better.

I think this is correct, if we take "hardening" in a narrow sense (only as that which is caused when we shut out the voice of God). But in a broader sense, deliberately shutting out a voice can be dangerous, whether God exists, or not. Could it be that by committing to God, or to a particular understanding of God, we are setting ourselves up for a bad outcome, perhaps the worst outcome possible? We might die young and in pain (the worst outcome according to materialism?) or we might go to a hell of annihilation or ECT (the worst outcome according to Christianity and Islam, assuming one of them is true and we are committed to the other). It might seem like the best position is to not commit to anything, but that is a kind of commitment in itself. It matters what we choose, so we should apply critical thinking, which can make various paths appear doubtworthy, and despite that tendency of critical thinking to produce doubt, we may choose a path. Even remaining in a state of "they're all doubtworthy so I won't choose" is doubtworthy.

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In the previous Gating Off Voices post, I laid out two approaches to bad voices: shut them down, or add other voices so that you have a better connection with the overall truth. Can these two be related?

Here's one account of belief: All we have access to are possibilities. That's what we see. But sometimes, as we add possibilities to our stock of things that we can imagine, simply to imagine a possibility causes other possibilities to seem untrue. It's like how God can't truly understand love and still choose to prefer evil.

So then, to know any truth, including by adding truths, could potentially shut out bad voices. I think that adding truths as a tactic is more trusting, because with it, as you stop trusting truths, you tend to trust more truths at the same time. In fact, it is only by trusting more truths that you can shut out any, on this model.

First Thoughts About Time

Epistemic status: very provisional.

Definitely see also Second Thoughts on Time.

In our experience, time is a part of consciousness. I don't see how conscious experience can change without time being part of consciousness. If everything that exists is consciousness, then time is part of consciousness.

I don't see a need to claim that God is timeless. Rather, his consciousness has a time to it, which is the "master clock" of the universe. It's possible to perceive the flow of time faster or slower, but if you enter a stretch of time at tG (God's time) = X, and exit at another point, tG = X + Y, what happens in the interval of length Y might get experienced at a different rate than God's experience of time, but you would enter the stretch of time at X and leave it at X + Y. You can imagine it like, if it takes longer than God's rate of experience over the interval length Y, it's like you traveled on a curved path to go from the same starting point to the same end point, where God traveled a straight line. Or, perhaps we travel over paths more quickly than God does, and it's his path that is more curved.

These are some quick, first thoughts about time, what I would like to argue. Maybe later I will think more about time and flesh them out.

Gating Off Voices; Especially Ones That Speak of ECT

Epistemic status: provisional.

31 May 2021: see this addendum.

Gating Off Voices

Not every voice is worth listening to. Sometimes there are voices that tell you you are worthless, a failure, or doomed, or ones that tell you that this life is all that matters, or ones which are other people's misinterpretations of you, or their agendas for you -- there are probably other unworthy voices that are out there.

So it can seem appealing to shut those voices out, to irrevocably invalidate them, so that you can get on with your life.

But what if you're wrong about which voices are unworthy, and one which you shut out might be the voice of God? There is some danger of hardening here.

The state of mind where you put up no resistance to the voices that try to colonize your mind is one in which it is difficult or even impossible to follow God with your whole being. Perhaps your real disposition, underneath all the colonizations, is one of following God with your whole being, if that state of non-resistance to colonization is something you can't help. But if you can help it, it isn't clear to me that preferring non-resistance (such that you don't try rejecting any voices) is a better way to avoid hardening, since that preference roots you in a stable and seemingly undefeatable belief or believing regime, the one in which you can never commit. "I can never commit to God" may be just as hardened as "I reject God".

In that case, you always take a risk of being hardened, so, fearing and respecting the fact of that risk to the appropriate degree, you might as well choose the path that helps you serve God best as you understand him right now, in hopes that he will keep working with you so that someday your understanding presents no obstacle to loving and trusting him. If God doesn't exist, then hardening doesn't matter, so if hardening matters, it matters how we relate to God, and sometimes it is best to deliberately shut out some of the pathological voices in order to hear his better. God can see you trying to hear him, and knows your true disposition, and wants you to succeed in hearing him.

A mind that shuts out voices is in danger of becoming intolerant and totalizing. It's important that whatever you do psychologically, whether in the realm of perception, emotion, willing, or intellectual believing, you do it as though God exists. Among other things, God is one who wants you and everyone else to be saved, who is the father of you and everyone else, and whom you and everyone else can trust. With God's Spirit, we don't see things through the lens of control and self-preservation. We can believe firmly without mistreating or enslaving people.

Reality must be that which we can think about?

Does all this give a rationale for refusing to listen to voices that say something like "You have a tiny but non-Pascalian chance of going to a hell of eternal conscious torment"? The thought that you could go to hell might cause you to love and trust in God more. Certainly that's how it seems to have worked as a part of evangelism in the past. Probably it is not necessary to believe in eternal conscious torment (ECT) for that purpose. (Annihilation is sufficiently motivating, and sometimes even that is not necessary to motivate people.) But ECT got people to take God seriously, which is part of loving and trusting him.

On the other hand, the thought of hell, or of ECT specifically, can easily not have that effect. So it's fine to ignore it if it takes you away from God.

(I don't believe that MSLN gives reason to believe in ECT and from what I've read from other people as of today (25 May 2021), I'm fairly confident that neither does the Bible, although I should address that question in more detail at some point.)

I think we might have the effective attitude of "whatever our belief structure, we know that ECT doesn't exist". The thought of ECT is so horrible that if we took its possibility seriously, we would go crazy, and going crazy is a priori not an option for thinkers. Well-being trumps truth -- but we could even claim that truth actually always contains well-being. (Maybe this claim makes sense from this perspective -- to think, feel, and intuit in one whole means that the knowing itself is healed of its fragmentation, and healed knowing perhaps inherently creates and requires healthy knowers.) As an epistemological principle, we could claim that what actually is is always in line with truth, and thus not have to deal with ECT. Something like this seems to be what people may already believe implicitly, at least with respect to ECT.

It does seem odd to say that things which are too horrible to think about productively can't actually happen. We see horrible things happen, but maybe they're not horrible enough? Is there some point at which, as things become more horrible to imagine, they cross a line and become impossible?

So it's not that the inherent horribleness of ECT makes it impossible, it's that when we know that it is impossible, we implicitly know that something else is true which for some reason allows horribleness to happen, but not ECT.

What kind of metaphysical reason could back that up? Certainly the God of MSLN could. Materialism could, as well. Probably other beings or realities could. Whatever it is, it has to be able and willing to (or "disposed to", in the case of impersonal reasons) exclude possibilities, and specifically exclude ECT. We might think that we know for certain that ECT-affirming Christianity and Islam aren't true, but that annihilation-affirming versions of them could be true.

The Proportionality of Truth

Another approach could be to say that belief in ECT causes us to disregard the proportionality of truth. Truth is always a thing which has its relationships. If we really took the possibility of ECT seriously, if it has a vanishingly small likelihood, then if it dominates all the rest of our thinking, we no longer see anything else. But that "anything else" is far more likely than the likelihood of ECT. So to know the truth, we have to take into account all the good of all the "anything else"'s, and those possible goods should not be ignored.

I think MSLN is likely -- I'm sure my credence will vary over time, but let's say today it is 90%. In 90% of possible futures, as long as I remain true to God, I will experience infinite (or, more accurately, everlasting) positive utility. What do I think my credence is of non-MSLN outcomes? As I see things now, there's a tight, perhaps 1 to 1 connection between the idea that reality only consists of consciousness, and MSLN. So what is my sense that there could be reality in addition to consciousness? Maybe 10%. Within that 10%, how much room is there for ECT? I don't really know, but I can try to guess, based on reasons why ECT might exist.

Maybe some kind of God or god-like being might ordain it (like the Stringent Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster). He would use it to motivate people to care about things. Maybe a human society would. But one could also imagine a sadistic god.

Would humans want to torture other humans everlastingly? Maybe a few would, but what are the odds that they would take over the future, and be able to resurrect you to be part of their sadistic world? We have to imagine a world where people would even bother to remember whatever made you up, in order to faithfully reproduce you (to the extent that's possible) and then torture you (or that copy of you?). Are people (personal beings) really that sadistic? Or would they get bored of that instead? Dystopian futures are certainly possible, but are they likely, and likely to affect you, and will they actually attain ECT? "Eternal" is a long time, and hard to guarantee, unless you have something like complete sovereignty over reality.

So something smaller than 10% allows for ECT, perhaps something very small, perhaps as high as 1%. (These numbers are made up, but reflect my subjective sense today.) I feel like 1% is as high as I would go, as an extremely safe assumption that would definitely exceed the real probability, so as to have a "safe" estimate of the risk.

One remaining filter is, if ECT exists, will I ever be subject to it? Or, in other words, what percentage of existing beings will ever be subject to it? This filter reduces the likelihood further. If ECT is meant as a punishment, then what if most beings simply adjust and stop meriting the punishment? If ECT is meant as sadism, how much do sadistic personal beings update their sadistic satisfaction to match large quantities of people tortured? Or are 1,000 tortured as gratifying as 1,000,000, so they don't bother with more than 1,000? To the extent that sadism is basically just a form of hedonism, why don't sadistic hedonists wirehead, or put themselves in experience machines? They could get away with that much more easily than actually torturing people, in the likely case that sadism is not popular.

Maybe some altruists who are not hedonists would be willing to torture people for all time for the tortured people's own good? To bring justice to someone is to take them seriously as a moral agent. These altruists would have to be unaware of the likelihood that MSLN is true. (As would any of these hypothetical people who might cause ECT.) To torture people who don't really deserve it seems like a risky thing to do, given that there might be a God who has to suffer whatever suffering you cause those you are punishing, who alone has the right to judge and punish people, knowing as he does the actual truth of who deserves punishment. If you exact torture with enough gusto or commitment, maybe you have hardened, since torture is not something that God inherently likes.

Is it likely that altruism will evolve into something that seeks to exact eternal conscious torment in the secular timeline? That sounds somewhat far-fetched, especially given the possibility of thinking of MSLN. But there is some possibility of it. Maybe a particularly worldly-minded religious movement could do it. But for every worldly-minded religious movement that might do it, there would be others that wouldn't.

To return to the subject of gods: Could a god (a superpowerful being) know that MSLN wasn't true? God can know that MSLN is true (if it is), simply by knowing that everything exists, fundamentally, by his will (evil follows from the wills of beings other than him, whose freedom he wills). But other superpowerful beings, no matter how much they could find out, would probably be vulnerable to doubts that the God of MSLN might exist. This would lower such a god's confidence that it could torture us with impunity.

I think, again trying to make an extremely safe assumption, that at most 1% of all beings in an ECT-affected reality actually experience ECT. This assumes that ECT-infliction is not done throughout history, it is (exceedingly?) unlikely that anyone could bring back past people to be tortured in a future present, and when ECT-infliction is done, it generally doesn't affect the whole population, and the likelihood of it happening at all is somewhat low.

So if there's a 90% chance that as long as I am true to God (something which shouldn't be impossible as long as I keep caring about it) I will experience an everlastingly good outcome, and there is a 0.01% (1% of 1%) chance, at most, that I will experience ECT, then the approach of truth is to say I must take the 90% chance of good life forever as a substantial plenitude of potential well-being, which is overwhelmingly real to me, sustaining and building-up to think about, and the 0.01% chance of ECT, while real, does nothing to diminish the 90% of good that is promised. If the 90% can't diminish the 0.01%, the 0.01% can't diminish the 90%.

(Does this mean that God can bear what we consider unbearable forever if he has enough counterweighing good experience? And thus he could bear the pain of ECT for all eternity without relieving it? Here's a reason why not.)

If you can see things that way, I think thoughts of ECT aren't overwhelming. This is proceeding according to an epistemology of this kind of truth, of seeing what is dark but also seeing what is light, and seeing it as a whole. This can be contrasted with a kind of survival epistemology, which sees the avoidance of death and suffering as the criterion when processing reality (instead of looking at reality as a whole for its own sake), which thus focuses (or hyper-focuses) on threat.

This approach does not shut out voices, but adds them, still to accomplish a similar goal.

This may be the answer to the question "Does ECT dominate reason?". ECT does not dominate reason, because as long as we have a significantly more likely "eternal conscious rest" to contrast with it, we will take ECR more seriously than ECT, proportional to ECR's likelihood, no longer "mugged" by threat.

Bad voices close you off to reality

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned voices that say "you are worthless, a failure, or doomed, or ones that tell you that this life is all that matters, or ones which are other people's misinterpretations of you, or their agendas for you". What's interesting about all these voices is that they close off access to other voices. If you're worthless, then you no longer access God's voice, the God who feels your pain and puts up with your sin -- real costs to him indicating real value. Likewise, how can you know that you are a failure, or doomed? Only if you close off your mind to possibilities, including the possibility (the likelihood) of God. When people misinterpret you, they tend to want to limit you, and when they have agendas for you, they want to commit you to some kind of commitment. All of these things try to get you to see just one part of reality.

What is Unbearable to Legitimacy

Epistemic status: provisional.

In my notes for my review of Sharon Rawlette's Feeling of Value, I noted that it is possible to feel pain which is unbearable, but which neither ought to be, nor ought not to be.

The unbearability causes (in the realm of "is") a person to react against the pain, but that does not mean that the pain really should (in the realm of "ought") be acted against, nor that they believe that it should be acted against.

But what would it mean for legitimacy itself (God himself) to find something unbearable? It would mean that it ought not to be. Legitimacy itself would be unable to accept it -- this sounds exactly like it really should not be.

Greatness of God

Anselm of Canterbury said that God was a being than which no greater being can be conceived". We somehow think that God by definition must be the greatest being.

Perhaps this is the correct way of going about things. However, we must be careful to understand what greatness really is. If we don't, then we will believe in images of God which are "the greatest which can be conceived according to the tastes of humans like ourselves". Those tastes may, or may not, be aligned with God's tastes.

Can God Understand Love and yet be Evil?

What can we know about God by examining the simantic words?

Can an evil being truly understand love and remain evil? How about the opposite? Can God truly understand sadism (or whatever other lovelessness) and remain good?

Do sadists truly understand sadism? Then they would understand the consequences of their sadism. They never do, never feel the affliction of those they torture as the afflicted one feels their affliction. Someone who understands sadism fully who also understands love fully will prefer love over sadism.

Can Good Experiences Balance Out Eternal Conscious Torment?

If you were in hell, God would feel it, just as you did. He would experience your firsthand experience, which would be of hell and nothing but hell. But God is aware of other experiences, some which are not hellish. So would God be able to bear eternal conscious torment, that which came from really knowing what it was like to be you-in-hell, simply by also experiencing all the non-hell experiences firsthand?

We might think about the analogy of a body. Maybe you have a severe chronic pain that affects one part of your body. But you are also undergoing a pleasurable experience in another part of your body. If the pleasurable experience is strong enough, and chronic, could it allow you to experience your pain forever? I think it could, but only by taking your awareness away from the pain. And in that respect, you wouldn't really be feeling the pain anymore, although in some sense it would still be there.

God would be aware of our pain, as fully aware of it as we would be. So if God really knows what it's like for us to undergo ECT, he does so without being able to rest, even if on some level he knows that there is much that is good.

Book Review and Postview: Omnisubjectivity by Linda Zagzebski

I read Omnisubjectivity, by Linda Zagzebski. This book is short (43 pages of actual material), and I wouldn't recommend buying it, for the price. But if you find it at a library, I might recommend reading it, if you are interested in the concept of God directly experiencing the experiences of his creation, from the perspective of a Catholic philosopher. Zagzebski's approach might be a little more to the taste of someone from a traditional Christian background than my own writing is.

It might be good to know that she wrote an essay on omnisubjectivity titled "Omnisubjectivity" in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, volume 1, ed. by Jonathan Kvanvig. This also looks like something I would prefer checking out of a library to buying.

In this review, I focus on how Zagzebski's project interfaces with my own, or gives me reason to connect with some of her "news" (she brings up issues that come from the world of classical theism).

I don't think that Zagzebski would have reason to object to my philosophy, at least in my basic project where it might overlap with hers, because we both affirm that omnisubjectivity is something that does not involve God being identical to the consciousnesses of creatures, of which he has subjective knowledge.

In her understanding, God makes a constant renewal (my words) of his awareness of other beings, like we do when we practice human-scale empathy. He experiences what he's experiencing, rather than what we are experiencing, but his experiences are (perfectly) faithfully copied from our own.

In my understanding, God experiences the exact experiences of his creatures, but is different from them by experiencing more than those exact experiences, including some which are private to him. God is able to be himself by being more than our consciousnesses -- a certain kind of distance made possible by being even more conscious, rather than less.

Zagzebski defends her theory from the idea that God is made a sinner by being subjective to our sinful conscious states. I would defend my theory by saying that a person is sinful based on their disposition or heart, not based on their experiences. If a demon overtakes a person and causes them to be angry, it's not necessarily because the person really wants to be angry, and that shouldn't count as sin -- it doesn't in God's eyes, although humans may still be suspicious.

Zagzebski brings up counterfactual subjectivity. Is it possible to experience the experiences of people in possible worlds? I hadn't thought of that possibility. Is it necessary for an omniscient God to experience the experiences of every counterfactual consciousness? For today, I will say that I favor saying that possible worlds only exist as imaginations, and therefore have no reality of their own. God need not experience what only exists as an imagination if such imaginations have not been imagined. It might be useful, somewhat like Zagzebski says, to think counterfactually for the purpose of doing the right thing better. If imagining someone's thought process in a human, empathic way is useful, then why not use omnisubjectivity to actually know, rather than guess at, the way someone would feel in a given situation?

However, I do not think that people can be perfectly predicted, because their free will has not acted yet. So God could only guess, and would consider multiple possibilities.

Because the book mentions them, I'll briefly mention the divine attributes of timelessness, immutability, and impassibility. I don't see a reason to think that God is impassible (can't feel emotions). (Zagzebski doesn't think impassibility and omnisubjectivity are compatible, and I agree. She does think immutability and timelessness are compatible with omnisubjectivity.) I can see that following immutability, one might arrive at impassibility. But I would say, yes, there is some element of God which is immutable, and another which is not, and figuring out the difference is important. I don't see a reason, at this time, to think that God is timeless.

Perhaps most salient for me right now is the question of Eternal Conscious Torment. Does God experience the torment of hell for all eternity? Zagzebski does not address this issue in this book, although she mentions that God may be able to timelessly apprehend a timely reality in one moment. I don't think this is really the same experience though. I think a timely experience is one which is experienced in time, and so omniscience requires being in time, such that ECT lasts forever for any omniscient God (if ECT exists).