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06 May 2026
"That which exists should exist, unless it is sin" -- an MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle. This is a reason people are supposed to live forever, unless they wed themselves to sin permanently. Does this mean that every entity will live forever, as long as it's not sin? Every glimmer of light, every gust of wind, every speck of dust, every line at the grocery store?
Yes -- but, for impersonal beings, to be can be exhausted by being remembered. As long as God remembers them, they exist. Whereas for personal beings (humans, spirits, many or all animals), to be requires the ability to exercise free will.
A line at the grocery store, or a garden party, or the excited moment when an election is called, are things made up of personal beings. Do they exist just by being remembered? I think so. Does your past self exist as anything other than memory? I would say, no. So then those ephemeral personal states exist (once they have happened), as memory, and all they need to continue being is to be remembered.
I've said (IIRC) that God's memory is static, like frames of a film. So the gust of wind from yesterday does not exist in the sense that he necessarily experiences it blowing all the time. But it does exist in a suspended state, like we do when we sleep.
What about heaven? In extended MSL, the existence of heaven (as in, the final state of rest for God and those in tune with him) is everlasting, but only because God erases its contents periodically to free up experience bubbles. This destroys at least some entities (glimmers of light, I would presume). This is necessary for personal beings to be able to exercise, act out, their free will. Perhaps another MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle is that "The impersonal exists to serve the personal". The glimmers of light in heaven exist to serve the personal beings who see them, so that the personal beings can live. Some people need glimmers of light to be who they are (their final identities include being poets, cinematographers, or illustrators, for instance). Eating plants, building things out of metal and wood, etc. is OK. The glimmers of light can be "eaten" (annihilated for the purpose of a personal being). Further, impersonal beings are just part of some or many personal beings, likely God if no one else. (In that every object is an experience experienced by a person, and thus is part of their experience body.) For a personal being to change in what they are in heaven is OK. (So the metaphysical/ethical principle is "Change is OK if it is not change into sin".)
An animist might see in plants, even in metal, some kind of spirit of its own, apart from a human, angel, demon, God, etc. Extended MSL may not be able to rule that out. However, we might say that even if pieces of metal have spirits, glimmers of light don't. We would just suppose that the number of personal beings was considerably bigger than previously supposed. (Personal identity: when does the material in a piece of metal receive the spirit and thus really become a piece of metal? If you melt two pieces of metal together, do you get one spirit? Personal identity in extended MSL might be worth discussing elsewhere, although I don't plan to pursue it unless doing so helps deal with a problem I become aware of in extended MSL.) However, I think that if you go far enough in saying that things that you can sensorily or noetically see must all have their own spirits, are all personal beings, you eventually get to a point where you can create spirits just by, for instance, counting higher than anyone else has counted (bringing new numbers into being). If you do this enough in heaven, you might create spirits that didn't exist before heaven started, and eventually if people (or pieces of metal) do this enough, there will not be enough experience bubbles left to keep heaven going, assuming you can't destroy sinless spirits.
Possible workarounds: the obvious one is that animism must have its limits. Much of the spirit in the natural (or noetic) world, which some would call impersonal, but which animists see as personal, is really God. He is the spirit of the trees, metal, and glimmers of light. Another thought is that there are a finite number of spirits, but they are incarnated in multiple forms over time. Possibly, when a dog dies, its spirit sleeps until entering into a new dog body. Another possibility is that things that are very numerous, like ants, or numbers, have one spirit (maybe one per ant colony, and one for all conceived-of integers, one for all conceived-of real numbers, etc., or just one for all conceived-of numbers of any sort), this spirit connecting to many bodies. When we conceive of a number no one ever has before, perhaps it is the case that the number spirit grows a new limb, which is just a new part of it, not a new spirit.
(I see myself using "metaphysical/ethical" -- in MSL, to be is to ought to be, and thus metaphysics can be about "what God should do with reality, and will, if possible".)
(There could be a "finite/ethical" problem (a problem for finite personal beings, not a metaphysical/ethical problem for the Universal being), around knowing which things we're allowed to use, which are really impersonal. We should do our best with the evidence we have, I guess -- this is more or less an empirical problem. Weird outcome of this idea: we might think it's a bit more likely that plants have spirits than chemicals do, and replace our vegan diets with chemicals.)