10 April 2026
Since my last post, I have a few things to report. I have continued studying Indonesian (working through Hantarto Widjaja's epic 4,637 word vocabulary list, which is almost like a great novel, maybe Moby-Dick, for its texture, themes, and sense of adventure). Waiting for Margot was not selected as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Prize. I spent my time dealing with computer maintenance and some minor but absorbing health issues.
I also listened to the radio a lot, the greatest share to the local NPR station (KPBS), but also conservative and Christian AM talk radio, two Los Angeles stations (KNX and KFI), and once, at night, a conservative talk radio station in the Bay Area, along with some music stations in San Diego and occasionally in Mexico.
I decided to change different things, one of which is that I'm trying to draft what I write (more often) using pen and paper.
I read some novels. Currently reading A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, his memoir covering becoming president of the US, and the majority of his first term.
I see in these last few months an emphasis on news media and politics, which I think is one ingredient in where I'm going next. The other note being fiction. So I am considering the two projects of analysis of news and fiction from an MSL/VMH perspective.
23 April 2026
I find myself beginning to see problems with extended MSL, and also the motivation to fix them. So it's time to start making "patches" of it. These are not necessarily as high-quality as Formulalessness and previous Following posts. With those, I tended to try to think through everything I could, really engaging my brain. But my brain is tired now, and will not lift burdens the same way. However, hopefully these patches help answer some questions (even if they open up new ones). I don't see myself going at a rapid pace in fixing things, and I don't intend to push myself to look for flaws, for instance by re-reading previous posts of the blog. If you think you find a flaw, see my page for MSL problems and solutions, which has a link for submitting problems.
24 April 2026
I have had a hard time identifying myself as a Christian, over the last few years. Identity is not necessarily about truth. My views on the truth of Christianity are basically the same as in Formulalessness. I think philosophy suggests the Bible may be true, with some force. It supports some distinctively Christian doctrines. Exactly how true this makes Christianity, I haven't done the work to say. I don't rely on the Bible or the truth as independent authorities. But identity is more about, would I vote for Christianity if it was on the ballot. Or, am I on "team Christianity"? Notably, for me to do this, I have to make the scenario in which the truth says Christianity is untrue, and I identify with that fact, somehow part of Christian identity. I don't want to abandon the truth, whatever it is, and I think overall that is the wrong thing to do.
I have been comfortable saying "I would be classified as a Christian by non-Christians" (perhaps by scholars of religion). But until now, I have not been comfortable saying I was a Christian. Most Christians are not willing to say they are Christians if "being Christian" can mean just anything. Here are two conditions (there may be more I'm not aware of in this moment) which, if satisfied, allow me to say I'm a Christian, a version of Christianity I would vote for, whether it turned out to be true or not. These conditions are in contrast to my overall experience of the Christian world I've participated in. (Probably there are conditions I would make that I'm less aware of, which were assumed by that world.)
1. Christianity as a form of Judaism. I'm not primarily interested in things like obeying the Mosaic law, more so here the mentality of people living in exile, particularly their ability to see, conceive of, remember, and talk about unhappiness, mourning, defeat, and tragedy, as well as patience and survival, the ability to keep going despite not winning. Christianity as contrasted with Judaism lends itself to triumphalism and toxic positivity. Also, there is a distinctive but not necessarily good element to Christianity which can be seen in cultures that put grace over repentance. This keeps people mired in sinfulness longer than necessary and multiplies victims. I see less of this in Judaism. An extreme (that is, logically consistent) version of this grace culture is Calvinism, another one universalism, both of which VMH contradicts. (Though God is on "team universalism", the reality is that not everyone will necessarily be saved.)
2. Christianity as truth. The previous condition, I've been aware of for some time, but this is the new one that seems to put me over the line. Christianity can be seen as a family religion. For many, or most, it is. But when it was new, it was about truth. The truth is what it is -- may validate your existing beliefs, which hold together your community, or not. Christianity as truth opposes the practice of believing what you do because it is what the people you like believe. It is dangerous -- potentially alienating and producing conflict. Christianity as truth says "question Christianity" -- if it's true, then so much the better for it. Yet it also says "commit to Christianity if it's true", commit not to questioning, but to true belief and the process of seeking true belief. It says that Christianity needs to be good (in a good form) according to reality (God, and people's real situations), not according to definitions of goodness agreed on by the church (or by the secular world, for that matter). (Since "Christianity as truth" is a new thought to me, I may be leaving something out, but I think that's enough to get started.)
What do I do with this Christian identity? I'm not sure. I probably won't change much anytime soon, except feel more comfortable saying I'm a Christian.
27 April 2026
I gave up on this book partway through (toward the end of the first of two roughly equal-length parts). I did not maintain the momentum needed to get through. (The book has no chapters, just the two parts, and the prose is 19th century, not optimized for 21st century readability. I probably wouldn't have had a problem with it if I had read it straight through, but I found I couldn't pick it back up after a while off, had lost connection to what was going on.) From what I read, though, I recommend it.
According to the introduction by Adam Gopnik in the edition I read (2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition), the good characters (an altruistic secret society) are not believable. But perhaps the book is a form of speculative fiction, where human nature is like the ray guns or Mars of science fiction, the subject of speculation. Someday we may walk on Mars, someday unbelievable good characters may be real.
One moment was strangely good and recommended Balzac as a skilled writer. A character is seen as good and bad, back and forth, as more information is revealed.
The book discusses the backstories of its altruistic characters, showing how some altruistic people may come to altruism.
For all this, I will recommend this book, but only provisionally, since I quit partway through.
06 May 2026
I thought about it and decided not to pursue either the news or fiction analysis projects. I think I will take in the news, and read fiction, casually.
I'm reading The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham and have a few more books I might read. Perhaps I will add a philosophy book to the list.
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.)
06 May 2026
Living enables repentance. Those who get insufficient time to live may have insufficient time to complete their repentance. If you die at age 5, you don't get as much time in this life as someone who dies at age 80. You get the 1,000 years of the Millennium just as they do, but the lost 75 years is significant (if there's literally 1,000 years, that's about 7% of the time you could have had).
That's (I think) about how I say things are in Formulalessness. But it occurs to me, maybe God would just give people who die at age 5 a head start on the Millennium. They could be resurrected 75 years earlier than those who live to be 80.
On first inspection, this looks rational, and I'm not sure why God wouldn't do that (or enact some other plan that also gives people time to make up for dying young).
Any problem just saying that? It takes away somewhat from the moral weight of working to prolong people's lives. It's still good to help people live longer if your brain is part atheist as I think is the case with many believers -- the atheist in you doesn't believe people live beyond this life. (Or maybe you aren't an atheist, but like the author of Ecclesiastes, you are a theist who believes that there is no afterlife.) It's also good to practice respect for that which exists, which should continue existing forever unless it is sin. (That opens the question of "does that mean that gusts of wind, specks of dust, garden parties, and other small and ephemeral things should last forever?" -- something to consider in another post.)
(This leaves aside purely deontological issues like, suppose murder or failing to help people live longer just are wrong -- somehow we know that. Extended MSL does factor in deontology. The thing that we need to maximize (consequentialism) -- holiness -- contains deontology in it, which may be known, at least to a significant degree. This knowledge of what deontology demands or recommends is not something I think I can necessarily derive from the first principles of extended MSL, but there are a lot of real things that I can't derive that way, which must be known through some kind of other observation. Likewise there are pragmatic concerns: how can you have a society with murder, or without people helping each other live longer?)
The Bible (I think, maybe) makes it sound like everyone is resurrected at once. At least, that's the impression remaining in my brain from when I read about this topic in New Wine for the End Times. So if that's the case, that would be a reason to think that people who die young get less time to develop spiritually than those who live a "full" number of years.
The Bible seems to give some support to the idea that there can be some kind of "awakeness" after death but before the Resurrection, at least in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Maybe both the rich man and Lazarus died before age 80? (Or whatever age is the real standard.) So then they got some time to catch up, before going back to "sleep", awaiting the Resurrection.
The way that all makes it sound, it sounds unlikely, but still maybe possible, that people won't have their lifespans corrected by getting extra time before the Resurrection, or something like that. (I can't think of a reason from extended MSL, and I can think of reasons for and against from the Bible, given above). In case it still matters, it lends some weight to the idea that extending people's lives gives them a better chance of being saved from hell, and thus some additional weight on acting like that's true. There are other reasons for acting that way (respecting the preservation of personal beings, behaving like a good atheist since in a way we often tend to be atheists / non-afterlife theists, and deontology).
06 May 2026
For finite beings (like us) our experience bodies (the total of what we can experience, affecting and being affected thereby) is (as far as I know, for humans at least) one experience bubble (unit of unified experience, what we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, intuit, and imagine at once in the present moment). But in theory it could be more than one, if some finite being can experience in more than 3+1 dimensions. It could be possible to experience two 3+1 dimensional experience bubbles if there is a fourth dimension to separate and hold in the same frame the two 3+1 dimensional bubbles. The Universal person's experience body consists of multiple experience bubbles (one for each creature's experience bubble / experience body, plus a number of others, for instance to be an effective Speaker and Universal person of Legitimacy).
I feel like I have sometimes used "experience body" to refer to "experience bubble" -- a warning. Hopefully the right meaning can be inferred from context.
11 May 2026
Recently I suggested that God would give everyone an extension on the Millennium if they didn't happen to get a full life on earth in this life. I thought there was nothing in extended MSL against it. But I was forgetting two principles: evil beings could negotiate against that outcome, and God might allow the risk to exist because we need to take some responsibility for the salvation of others. Some things are guaranteed by God, and some aren't, and this extension may go either way.
It can't be the case that at creation you get no chance to be saved, so we must have some kind of Millennium, since very few if any of us are holy enough for heaven at the end of this life. We have to live some amount of time. Missing out on a little bit of life (a bit, or even a lot, of our ~80 years) might be allowed by God. Whereas missing out on a lot (a lot of our 1,000 years, if that is literally how much time we get in the Millennium) would not be allowed by God. I suppose this means that fairness may not be guaranteed, but (significant) opportunity is.