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It's much harder to imagine heaven than hell. In fact it takes no faith at all to believe in hell, only an open eye. You don't even need a pair of them
https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue/status/1092892656110206976
https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue/status/1092892656110206976
I could never in my heart believe in heaven. None would disagree, I think, that for heaven to be heavenly would require a radical transformation of human nature, radical for each human admitted therein
This is in fact what the gospels promise: a transformation of one's character, an alignment with god, and this is supposed to make you moral, and everyone who is moral, through the grace of god, will dwell in eternity, drawing ever asymptotically closer to the perfection of god
This type of transformation of the character, were it to happen all at once, would be very much like a death, and certainly theologians acknowledge this. But if it were to happen very gradually, like the ship of Theseus, it might not feel like a death, but an affirmation of life
And if we were slowly subsumed into god, then ultimately there would be no difference between us and god, and as in Spinoza, we would merely be moments of god, or attributes of god, possessing divine perceptions and divine morality, a kind of cosmic vore
So we can see how theology contains all of the same questions as the philosophy of consciousness, namely questions about continuity, about the mutability of identity, and about the nature of more powerful minds, topics such as meta-ethics and superintelligence
Emmanuel Swedenborg (a name which sci-fi has reached into the past to touch with the name of a superintelligence) believed that moral behavior was necessary but insufficient for salvation, and that it was the duty of all men to cultivate their minds
Swedenborg told a story of a man who so desired heaven that he went to the desert to live as a hermit; he achieved virtue through fasting, prayer, privation, & silence; like most hermits his material poverty was matched by mental poverty, but he never committed a single sin...
Swedenborgâs heaven is richer, more complex than earth, with many more colors and shapes; it is a higher dimensional space. When the hermit arrives, he is bewildered; the theological conversations of the angels are far above his head, and he never prepared his mind for them
God sees that the man is ill-suited for heaven, but that he is saintly and undeserving of hell, so he sends him to live in eternity in his sinless hermitage. The man is not fit for any other life. And now he is very unhappy, because he knows the desert will be his for eternity
Swedenborgâs heresy assumes that heaven is static, and that man in heaven must also be static. But in a sense, the divine must be static, and perfection must be static, because variance is the provenance of imperfection
And this is another way that theology intersects the philosophy of consciousness, because consciousness is a kind of relation to time, a statefulness that changes, and those mutable states are the fundament of perception
William Blake was greatly influenced by Swedenborg, and he knew of this volatility well, which is why he wrote, in his famous proverbs of hell, that eternity is in love with the productions of time https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1080558276167659520
Blake believed that salvation was by beauty, that is, that the creation and the perception of beauty was the criteria of salvation, and he thought that Christ was an artist, and a greater god than YWHW, that YHWH created the world of moral law, and Christ liberated us from it
But backing up a bit, let us try to envision paradise. We can conceive of a world without discomfort, without fear, without suffering, without pain. This is perhaps childish, but it has an obvious appeal.
The problem with a painless heaven is that we know it must also be a desireless heaven, because desire is always a kind of pain. And we also, most likely, conceive of God as having desires. So suffering must be possible in heaven, because it is an attribute of the divine
This is a kind of reverse theodicy, because life without desire would be much impoverished relative to the lives that we lead now. Indeed the texture of our experience is primarily given to us by the nature of our desires, and by their satisfaction and frustration
Upon reflection we notice that all of the good things we cherish have been forged in hell. Without suffering, charity has no proper object. Without the intolerable, tolerance is meaningless. Without the possibility of failure, achievement has no value https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739449446019074
It is no contradiction for a thing to arise from its opposite. If hell is the wellspring of heaven, then why should we prefer heaven to hell? But no, no, no, let us try again. https://twitter.com/gritcult/status/1039072783857270784
Suppose heaven is a state of being which is not lacking in pain or suffering, but merely a better version of earth: everyone is immortal, everyone is moral, everyone is smart, and everyone is lucky. There is no disease and everyone is the best possible version of themselves
This world may seem wonderful, but itâs scarcely better than before. Natural selection must be arrested in heaven because if it werenât, then in our state of unlimited prosperity and trust, we would quickly evolve into rabbits: infinitely fecund, endlessly cheery, exceedingly dim
Intelligence is a solution to a very particular problem: it is a tool we have evolved to play games of deception. Giraffes have long necks to eat leaves from high branches, and humans have big brains so they can lie and detect lies. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330756207407105
So there are no genetics in heaven. Is there carnal pleasure? Blasphemy! But does one raise a family? Could it be that in heaven we surrender this most sublime facet of our humanity? No one is ugly or mean, everyone is as good as everyone else, all your choices are meaningless
Is there labor in heaven, and capital? Blasphemy again! And yet, what good is life without work and competition? For how many millennia would you like to live in idyll and luxury? And what of debauchery? In your laziness will you also know temperance?
And if there is no danger of death, if there are no enemies, then what meaning really can we find in life? In America we have learned how prosperity, paradoxically, can be a hardship of the same magnitude as privation, though the pain is subtler and slower https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1079436222148136961
What remains then? Praising God, an endless righteous hedonism of spiritual ecstasy? So heaven is wireheading? Such a place seems much poorer compared to my life today.
And yet I am told I merely lack imagination, that heaven is beyond all possibility of human cognition. But as I see it, itâs either lobotomy through ecstasy, or through loss of the faculty for pain, or death masquerading as subsumption into the divine
We know paradise is impossible, we know that attempts to âcreate godâs kingdom on earthâ end in tears, but we cannot formulate a political or a religious worldview without an orientation towards an ideal https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1067792602567630848
There are those on the right who think the number of humans must greatly decrease, perhaps by war, disease, or other cataclysms, and this may be so, but I wish to conceive of a scalable social structure, which is maximally eugenic yet maximally humane
I want to live in a society where freedom is granted only in proportion with demonstrated capacity for responsibility, where strength and intelligence and beauty are virtues, where choices are few but meaningful because they have important consequences
Blake believed in a hierarchy of gods in heaven; theodicy is because our world was created by a lesser god. He thought the world of our lesser god was an illusion, and pain came from false perception
I think if the doors of perception were cleansed, there would be nothing left
I think if the doors of perception were cleansed, there would be nothing left
