tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post3457441040442239050..comments2024-03-19T02:00:34.750-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Why not annihilation?Edward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger253125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-52422077032122790672024-02-11T17:08:53.903-08:002024-02-11T17:08:53.903-08:00I don't enjoy this, but I've come across p...I don't enjoy this, but I've come across people who are SO evil that even if they were punished and brought back, they would end up doing the same thing. Annihilation is how I'm trying to solve this. When someone is burned in fire they can't hold out forever. Probably will cease to exist at some point. Male sexual sins in my opinion are not as grave as female. A female who gives in to seduction is no longer desirable. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-24223574265493806362020-07-31T19:36:28.840-07:002020-07-31T19:36:28.840-07:00Ed Feser, I think correctly, charges annihilationi...Ed Feser, I think correctly, charges annihilationists that they “take for granted that the person who is damned wants to be annihilated.” Ed agrees with C. S. Lewis that the damned are those to whom God says “Thy will be done” and takes for granted that the damned person is IN EVERY CASE the person whose will is fixed at death on being a person who wants to live a certain type of sinful life forever no matter the cost in personal misery. My strong intuition is that this is unlikely to apply to every single person who is damned. There are some who would want to be annihilated. Let assume for a moment that there are annihilationists (class Y) who will be saved and annihilationists who will be damned (class Z). It seems highly likely that at least some of class Z would choose annihilation over suffering eternally and if they do suffer eternally then God is not granting them their will. Ed mentions the suicidal but does not give us a reason why, at least in some cases, their will is not fixed on annihilation. <br />I submit that the position that makes best sense of all the scriptures and of most people’s intuitions is that some of the damned will choose infernalism and some of them will choose annihilation.<br />Tim Finlayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04201408382802035324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1744567789058013852018-09-01T09:15:58.832-07:002018-09-01T09:15:58.832-07:00As for your last paragraph I would say "Well,...As for your last paragraph I would say "Well, precisely!"<br /><br />For some reason I came back to this thread this morning and reread some of the commentary here. The more I read, the more I find myself feeling that Thomistic philosophy is flawed is flawed at its very foundation, which is Augustine's wretched anthropological musings. I still don't fully understand why the Western Church ran to accept what Augustine was preaching instead of having an ecumenical council on these issues.<br /><br />Feser suggests in one of his posts that when the soul enters into death, the good that the soul may have done in this live drops away and all that is left is the evil, thus dooming the soul to eternal perdition. This idea is based on the same musings of Augustine by which the Calvinists developed their wretched (and utterly wrong) concept of "Total Depravity," i.e., that man is nothing but evil, and even if he does do acts of charity, they in themselves are evil because man is by nature evil. What a wretched (and unbiblical) theology. We Orthodox utter reject it.<br /><br />Man is not free to make a choice in this life between good and evil. The idea of any person having an utterly free will is malarky. Your will is not free is you are A.) tempted by the machinations of your passions and desires, a result of the curse B.) tempted and deceived so that you believe a lie rather than the truth (which makes me wonder why God, who wills the salvation of all, allows us to be deceived by the evil one), and C.) do not fully see the entire range of your choices - in other words, you do not fully understand what it is you are rejecting when you reject God's love, and you do not fully understand the whole end of what sin offers you with its false pleasures. Under those conditions, who can really make a completely "free will" choice?<br /><br />Since you ave endeavored to respond to my initial posting. perhaps you would like to answer some questions for me regarding the eternal state? I haven't found anyone capable of giving me any good answers.<br /><br />https://http4281.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/10-questions/IrishEddieOHarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13239323643595343708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-50739842298018502972018-08-31T22:42:08.453-07:002018-08-31T22:42:08.453-07:00How do you know where purgatory is or isn't?How do you know where purgatory is or isn't?The Smartest Man In The Worldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16640097400986424589noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-6052282052675610302018-08-31T22:34:27.449-07:002018-08-31T22:34:27.449-07:00A person only gets punished for what they are culp...A person only gets punished for what they are culpable for. Your description of the girl makes it sound like she is not culpable, in which case she probably is not in hell.The Smartest Man In The Worldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16640097400986424589noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-67764787345588387422018-06-13T01:59:09.257-07:002018-06-13T01:59:09.257-07:00Yes, apart from infantile sinlessness, perhaps, by...Yes, apart from infantile sinlessness, perhaps, by way of virtue. Given the vices inherent in atheism and agnosticism, this is an unlikely state for them.iwpoehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17751879308012191778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-32259605314572886882017-12-10T06:01:13.273-08:002017-12-10T06:01:13.273-08:00The view of hell, as put forth by Fathers such as ...The view of hell, as put forth by Fathers such as St. Isaac the Syrian, is that the pain of hell is the scourging of God's love, leading to remediation of the soul. The eschaton view of the East is bound up in the healing of the sick soul, whereas the view of the West appears to be, since Anselm and Aquinas took Augustine's ideas of a depraved anthropology and ran with them, God seeking only retribution.<br /><br />I wonder just how much influence Roman society, with its extreme emphasis on the law had on the development of Western theological thinking. Seeing how it is vastly different from Eastern thought, I would imagine it to be quite a lot.<br /><br />I would still like to know how Dr. Feeder or anyone knows for sure that the soul is fixed at death. Private revelation or speculation?IrishEddieOHarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13239323643595343708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-78550501669610280482017-12-06T16:26:47.060-08:002017-12-06T16:26:47.060-08:00I know I'm late to the party but boy, you just...I know I'm late to the party but boy, you just don't have any idea what you're talking about. Seems like your bias has infected your knowledge and reasoning. <br /><br />I have first person experience with this, but it would have taken you a few seconds to prove yourself wrong if you actually cared about the truth instead of just lashing out. <br /><br />Chronic pain has virtually ZERO and I mean ZERO comparison to short acute pain. It is a suffering that encompasses the entirely of your being, with no relief to heal the mind it's akin to sleep deprivation. <br /><br />Not a single patient I have ever encountered would not trade it for acute pain. John Burgerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06021462296956618398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-31314733210355827882017-12-06T13:31:02.844-08:002017-12-06T13:31:02.844-08:00"imagine human faces on which there is writte... "imagine human faces on which there is written only blind, defiant, miserable rage and hatred forever and ever."<br /><br />Yeah, sounds plausible for Hitler or even someone who has made his mission to mock God like these internet atheists.... <br />But how your neighbor or a family member who you know has never come close to exhibiting any of those attributes in her real life.... Then it doesn't sound so great. <br /><br />The problem is we all know the people who drill holes in people's knee caps, rape women or even a detestable girl who never has a kind word for anyone, deserve punishment but the lost, unless there is a hidden prophetic doctrine not yet revealed, are going to be mostly these just average neighbors & family members who were half way, or more, decent people. So it just doesn't track. <br /><br />****The other thing is the deterrent models holds no water because virtually no one who rejects Christ actually believes hell is real and for good reason because then people would be turning to God through coercion. <br /><br />Ultimately this is, as with many doctrines and open questions relating to God's plan, a matter of Faith that God does not make mistakes and does what is right even if we cannot comprehend it and I think the mistake many of us thinkers make is not accepting that. Instead we must data mine every passage and idea so we can cover every conceivable aspect of the Lord's counsel. We make this our Christianity. This our works. John Burgerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06021462296956618398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-36366456846063914592017-01-01T14:58:51.949-08:002017-01-01T14:58:51.949-08:00@Dianelos Georgoudis
You admit that your Orthodo...@Dianelos Georgoudis <br /><br />You admit that your Orthodox Church, like my Catholic Church, holds to and teaches a hellist position. Here's a question I have for you:<br /><br />How does this position square with the Scripture which states that the Church is the "pillar and ground of truth?" The Church, according to this Scripture, can only teach truth, therefore, to oppose the Church is to oppose truth (and be called a heretic for your trouble). In addition, if we question the absolute of the Church teaching the truth, then where is the truth? The search for the truth becomes a Protestant Wild West Show, with everyone claiming that their beliefs are "THE truth."<br /><br />How would you respond to this problem?<br /><br />Thanks!IrishEddieOHarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13239323643595343708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-3602865765466321352016-12-23T05:03:37.304-08:002016-12-23T05:03:37.304-08:00Modern Thomists tend to cherry pick Aquinas in an ...Modern Thomists tend to cherry pick Aquinas in an attempt to civilize his conception of Hell. That’s an admirable endeavor, given Aquinas’ horrific words:<br /><br /><b>“the unhappiness of the damned surpasses all unhappiness of this world.”</b><br /><br /><b>“The disposition of hell will be such as to be adapted to the utmost unhappiness of the damned.”</b><br /><br /><b>“there will be nothing in the damned but what is a matter and cause of sorrow; nor will anything that can pertain to sorrow be lacking, so that their unhappiness is consummate.”</b><br /><br /><b>“the unhappiness of the wicked after reunion with their bodies will be greater than before, since they will be punished not only in the soul but also in the body.”</b><br /><br /><b>“The damned will pass from the most intense heat to the most intense cold without this giving them any respite:”</b> (Isn’t it extraordinary how much Aquinas thought he knew about hell and the suffering of the damned!)<br /><br />And none more infamous than this line:<br /><br /><b>“In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned. . .So that they may be urged the more to praise God. . .The saints in heaven know distinctly all that happens. . .to the damned.”</b><br /><br />But the worst line is where Aquinas says that hell is “adapted to the utmost unhappiness” of the damned. In this life we may experience terrible suffering, but, as I noted above, there is always room for more. It could be more intense or it could last longer. But in hell, if we are to believe Aquinas’, God ensures that the damned experience the “utmost unhappiness” so that their suffering is worse along both the dimensions of duration and intensity than any suffering and sin that will have occurred during the entire lifespan of this universe. There is no justice, let alone mercy, in such infinitely disproportionate cruelty, and so it is nonsense to suggest that a good God would perpetrate such evil.<br /><br />Aquinas argues that punishment must be commensurate to the crime. <b>“Since punishment is measured in two ways, namely according to the degree of its severity, and according to its length of time, the measure of punishment corresponds to the measure of fault, as regards the degree of severity, so that the more grievously a person sins the more grievously is he punished:”</b> This implies that the degree of punishment should be commensurate to a given degree of suffering, and that, if God is just, the degree of suffering inflicted on the damned will not vastly exceed the degree of suffering commensurate to the suffering caused by the sins of the damned themselves. But, taking Aquinas at his word, while God may vary the severity of punishment along the dimension of intensity, he will apply uniform duration that ensures the delivery of infinitely disproportionate punishment.<br /><br />But what if the damned keep on sinning throughout eternity (a popular rationalization)? It’s hard to imagine why they would given the adaption of their environment to their “utmost unhappiness”. They’d have to be mad, in which case they deserve our sympathy and God’s help, not His condemnation. The least a good God would do would be to put them out of their misery.<br />John G Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11155637543577325033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-10767579656498569432016-12-22T16:01:21.845-08:002016-12-22T16:01:21.845-08:00”Personally I find that the mere fact that people ...”Personally I find that the mere fact that people see the tension and try to find a solution is a healthy sign. So, to answer the question, I think it's not like anybody “knows” the solution. Rather when they find a solution which limits the tension they figure it must be true on this account alone.” @DianelosGeorgoudis <br /><br />Yes, I agree that the tension is a sign that people are troubled by the thought of never ending punishment, and one of the popular rationalisations used is that the damned want to be damned. If people believe that hell isn’t so bad after all because “the damned are in hell on their own free will which God respects” and that the negative judgement of “hell only represents the judgment of the people in heaven, and that in fact people in hell live in the world they chose for themselves and feel quite comfortable in”, then my particular critique in this thread doesn’t apply. <br /><br />But if Hell is as Aquinas describes it, then it’s not a place like that. You can cherry pick Aquinas to paint his views in a better light, but taken as a whole, his writing on hell contains views that can only be described as abhorrent.<br /><br />Aquinas makes the explicit claim that hell is tailored to maximize the unhappiness of its residence. In this life, even when we feel terribly miserable, it is always possible to imagine ways we could feel even more miserable. But, if we are to take Aquinas at his word, then in the next life God will find those ways to make us more miserable.<br /><br />This turns God into a villain of unequaled proportions. Along both dimensions, duration and intensity, the suffering of the damned is worse than all the suffering and sin that has ever or will ever occur throughout the lifespan of this universe.John G Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11155637543577325033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-74006810702872135342016-12-22T15:48:49.920-08:002016-12-22T15:48:49.920-08:00”it's not so particularly surprising a claim.”...<i>”it's not so particularly surprising a claim.”</i> @Brandon<br /><br />I’d use “ridiculous” in preference to “surprising”.<br /><br /><i>“you have tap-danced to amazing lengths just to avoid correcting a basic mistake, no matter how much of a fool you had to be to do it.”</i><br /><br />Unlike you, I have not contradicted myself, and I am not denying assumptions that any reasonable person would accept. You’ve done nothing to establish the plausibility of the counter-intuitive premises you must maintain in order to defend your position.<br /><br /><i>“plausibility is an extrinsic measure depending on context. It is also a notorious unreliable one.”</i><br /><br />You keep trying to escape the logical conclusion of my argument by insisting that its premises are disputable. You’ll need to do better than that. I agree that my premises can be disputed, but you can dispute anything. Some philosophers argue about the law of noncontradiction. I hope you don’t try to escape down that route.<br /><br />Here are some of my key premises again:<br />(1) Suffering increases as its duration increases; i.e. the longer it continues the worse it gets. (There is no logical error here. The severity of punishment depends both on its intensity <b>and</b> its duration.)<br />(2) Suffering increases as the number of people experiencing it increases.<br />(3) Different kinds of suffering can be compared and judged better or worse. (No numbers needed.)<br />(4) Milder suffering experienced for a longer period can exceed intense suffering experienced for a shorter period.<br /><br />I’ve provided concrete examples in support to each of these premises, and all you’ve done is gainsay them. <br /><br />Given my example of preferring a burnt finger to the death of my pet, it’s clear that we often use our preferences to determine for ourselves which, among very different kinds of suffering, is worse. My immediate subjective preference for my dog to live over burning my finger supports my third premise that different forms of suffering can be compared against each other, and, despite your claim to the contrary, we do not need to put numbers on these relations. Our preferences about what will involve greater or lesser suffering may turn out to be mistaken, but that in itself supports the my premise. There will be a truth to the matter. And the practical difficulties we face in determining these things are not a problem for an all-knowing God. He knows what we will prefer better than we do ourselves.John G Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11155637543577325033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-31428666392777802552016-12-21T12:18:20.196-08:002016-12-21T12:18:20.196-08:00@ John G Thomas
”Still, I’m curious. How do you k...@ John G Thomas<br /><br /><i>”Still, I’m curious. How do you know these things? Aquinas’ authority? Divine revelation?”</i><br /><br />This question is not addressed to me, but I'd like to offer what I believe is the charitable answer. <br /><br />Theology is hard. Thus it is certainly a reasonable to trust in 2.000 years of Christian tradition being right, especially given the huge body of intellectual work that has gone into it. So many Christians of perfect reasonableness and good will believe in hellism. Even professional philosophers, such as Feser here. A few years back I had the chance to discuss hellism with William Lane Craig and I can testify he very strongly believes in hellism. <br /><br />On the other hand there is clearly a tension between hellism and our sense of the divine. Just by looking we see that the greatest being we can conceive would not send a sentient being to never-ending suffering. It is interesting to observe how people deal with this tension. One idea, which I believe forms part of the CC teaching, is that the damned are in hell on their own free will which God respects. (It seems to me that it's one thing to say that by sinning people choose to go to hell and another altogether to say that people who find themselves in hell choose to stay there – but the difference is not always made explicit.) Another idea in the neighborhood is annihilationism (and there is some indirect evidence that this is Pope Francis's personal belief). Another is that the suffering in hell only represents the judgment of the people in heaven, and that in fact people in hell live in the world they chose for themselves and feel quite comfortable in. Another that there is never-ending punishment in hell, but of such a nature that the total sum is not infinite. <br /><br />Personally I find that the mere fact that people see the tension and try to find a solution is a healthy sign. So, to answer the question, I think it's not like anybody “knows” the solution. Rather when they find a solution which limits the tension they figure it must be true on this account alone. Dianelos Georgoudishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09925591703967774000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-11256922759377483252016-12-21T10:28:39.516-08:002016-12-21T10:28:39.516-08:00@Greg
Sorry for responding so late; I was sidetra...@Greg<br /><br />Sorry for responding so late; I was sidetracked and only now did I think about your latest criticism to my anti-hell argument. You write:<br /><br /><i>”You misunderstand the point of the example. I'm not claiming that these statistics are true. I'm showing why the inference from (8) and (9) to (10) is invalid.”</i><br /><br />Yes you are right. The hypothetical statistical model you suggest proves that that inference is invalid. Interesting. I learned that when using probabilities in one's propositional logic one should be more careful and use explicit numbers or at least explicit inequalities. <br /><br />In any case I feel quite confident I can fix this problem, and I might also strengthen (2). I will try when I have a little more time. Thanks very much for your feedback. If you'd like to send me a note to my email dianelos@gmail.com I could contact you directly with my improved version. <br /><br />We disagree on many things, but I am sure we agree that God is truth, and thus that whoever serves theological truth also serves God.Dianelos Georgoudishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09925591703967774000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-64563258394163526602016-12-21T05:43:34.728-08:002016-12-21T05:43:34.728-08:00So you do know something about Hell after all!
Do...<i>So you do know something about Hell after all!</i><br /><br />Don't be an idiot child. As was explicitly pointed out, this is <i>how hell is traditionally defined</i> (including Aquinas, so bringing him up simply shows that you again don't know anything about the topic you are jawing incessantly about); and, notably, it doesn't require knowing anything about what it is like to experience it, which only an idiot would base conclusions about the doctrine on, since nobody would know except those who had actually been there. In any case, it's not so particularly surprising a claim; we've just gone through a ridiculous comments thread in which you have tap-danced to amazing lengths just to avoid correcting a basic mistake, no matter how much of a fool you had to be to do it. People will endure a great deal to avoid having to change their ways.<br /><br />As for the rest:<br /><br /><i>You’ve given no reasons to doubt the intrinsically plausible assumptions...</i><br /><br />(1) They are not "intrinsically plausible"; plausibility is an extrinsic measure depending on context. It is also a notorious unreliable one.<br />(2) Your attempts to defend the notion that suffering increases with duration have (a) made the logical error of directly inferring conclusions about one measure from a claim about a measure not commensurable with it; (b) involved an apparent equivocation on what it is to suffer more that you have not justified; and (c) required the comparison of suffering to a physical substance. None of this is anything but junk.<br />(3) As previously noted, intuition does not adequately answer any of the logical criticisms raised against you. Only kooks and snake oil salesman play as fast and loose with commensurability as you do.<br /><br /><i>When I lose my dog I don’t need to attach units of measurement to my suffering to know that it is worse than burning my finger. </i><br /><br />Of course you do; otherwise you literally don't know what you are talking about and have no reasons for drawing the conclusion you do. If you cannot answer the question "Worse in what way?", which at least establishes the measurement dimensions, then your claim that it is worse means nothing: it's just a statement with nothing to justify it and nothing substantially to analyze it into. If you cannot specify, at least roughly, how it is worse, so as to establish at least roughly the kind of units of measurement, you cannot compare it with anything else. This is all extremely elementary.<br /><br />In any case, it's become quite clear that you have no actual argument of any note to back up your claim and that you are indeed committing the logical fallacies previously noted.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-81921876389429277932016-12-20T05:16:49.353-08:002016-12-20T05:16:49.353-08:00“... the unrepentant decidedly prefer punishment t...<i>“... the unrepentant decidedly prefer punishment to the repentance from their wrongdoing that would end their punishment.”</i> @Brandon<br /><br />So you do know something about Hell after all! And not even having been there!<br /><br />I find it puzzling why people would prefer to remain in a place Aquinas says is <b>“adapted”</b> to their <b>“utmost unhappiness”,</b> and why they would wish to continue to <b>“pass from the most intense heat to the most intense cold without this giving them any respite ...”</b> But I bow to your greater expertise on the matter. :P<br /><br />Still, I’m curious. How do you know these things? Aquinas’ authority? Divine revelation?<br /><br />You’ve given no reasons to doubt the intrinsically plausible assumptions that suffering increases as its duration increases, that less intense suffering over a longer period of time can be worse than more intense suffering over a shorter period of time, and that it is possible to make a reasonable judgement about which is worse among different kinds of suffering. I provided examples for you, but you’ve not provided any counter examples yourself other than your unsubstantiated claim that <i>“suffering mild discomfort for a long time, however long, does not equal the pain of a crucifixion.”</i> Do you have some <i>“principle of aggregation”</i> or some notion of <i>“commensurability”</i> that helped you determine that? You followed up by immediately contradicting yourself, but more in tune with your other comments, stating <i>“they are not even the right kinds of things to be compared”.</i> That suggests that you have a principle of incommensurability hiding somewhere. Why don’t you bring it out and attempt to substantiate it?<br /><br />It’s ironic that you fuss about my use of rainfall as an analogy for suffering after you attempted to use speed and temperature. As I explained, speed and temperature are poor analogies for suffering because they do not increase in line with their duration, but rainfall, a better analogy, like suffering, does increase in line with its duration. No analogy is perfect, but rainfall is a much better analogy for suffering than speed or temperature.<br /><br />In response to me noting that I know which is worse, burning my finger or losing my pet dog Oscar, you claimed that I <i>“cannot measure “worse”; even crudely, approximately, or by estimation without there being a measure of worse; to allow greater or lesser there have to be units, even if only rule-of-thumb units.”</i><br /><br />When I lose my dog I don’t need to attach units of measurement to my suffering to know that it is worse than burning my finger. My preference tells me which is better and which is worse. I have sufficient measure in my preference for a burnt finger over a dead Oscar, just as I have sufficient measure in my preference for a dead Oscar over ten years of burnt fingers. Economists can gauge people’s preferences in the market with reasonable accuracy by taking account of such things as buying habits relative to product pricing and product availability. But we know ourselves whether we prefer apples to apricots without looking at the numbers. An all-knowing God, unlike economists, would know with perfect precision the nature of people’s preferences. And people often work things out for themselves with never a thought for units of measure. We don’t need to take precise measurements using numerical values to know that a long spell in prison is worse than a short one. We can measure the sentence in months or years, but experience itself, not the numbers, will tell the prisoner most reliably just how much suffering is involved in sentences of different lengths. <br /><br />Some things are easily determined, some things are difficult to determine, and God knows the rest. If William Paley is right and <b>“God Almighty wills and wishes the happiness of His creatures”,</b> then He will know precisely our measure of happiness and our measure of suffering. And, being good, He won’t torture anyone forever.John G Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11155637543577325033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-79117773087791841992016-12-20T04:50:45.779-08:002016-12-20T04:50:45.779-08:00@Greg
I agree that remembering our past punishmen...@Greg<br /><br />I agree that remembering our past punishment and knowing our future punishment would make the psychological suffering involved in present punishment worse, but it wouldn't affect the physical pain we felt. The same person would feel the same amount of physical pain all the way along. Everyone experiencing never ending suffering would prefer to forget their past suffering and knowledge of their future suffering if they were given the choice in advance. (Memory also raises interesting questions about personal identity, but that would take us further off track.)John G Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11155637543577325033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-52806862634937841512016-12-19T20:25:16.261-08:002016-12-19T20:25:16.261-08:00As I suggested earlier, one could attempt to comme...<i>As I suggested earlier, one could attempt to commensurate intensities and durations of suffering using the decided preference criterion</i><br /><br />The decided preference criterion, though, is not a principle of commensuration; it is one element of what could be one. To apply it in practice, you need to have decided preferences, which requires empirically discovered facts about preferring entites when their preferences are decided. To do an actual comparison requires this information; without this information, there is no commensuration. (But this is not really a disagreement with your comment, just that I would not say your first sentence the same way.)<br /><br />Preferences in any case are somewhat tricky if we are talking about hell; hell by definition is a punishment of the unrepentant, so by definition, the unrepentant decidedly prefer punishment to the repentance from their wrongdoing that would end their punishment. This needn't be an insuperable problem, but it does raise tricky questions about how preferences are serving as a measurement of suffering here.<br />Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-18930142714256682952016-12-19T20:13:41.382-08:002016-12-19T20:13:41.382-08:00@ John G Thomas
Someone who is tortured tomorrow ...@ John G Thomas<br /><br /><i>Someone who is tortured tomorrow not knowing that they were tortured yesterday still suffers twice as much as someone who is tortured today but was not tortured yesterday.</i><br /><br />Even if you had a principle of accumulation, this cavalier treatment of memory would undermine the purported connection between accumulated suffering and rational preference, since that people would prefer to suffer for two days, with their memory of the first day's suffering erased after the first day, than to suffer for two days continuously.<br /><br />And you can contrive cases in which people would prefer the option with far <i>more</i> accumulated suffering, if they won't remember some large chunk of it. Is it obvious that someone would choose two days of continuous suffering over four days of suffering, only one day of which they will remember?<br /><br />@ Alexander Gieg<br /><br /><i>One can dig deeper into his answers to the point of determining exactly how many burns are worth the life of his dog given the many different ways the dog could die, and even plot a multiple axis chart based on the table.</i><br /><br />As I suggested earlier, one could attempt to commensurate intensities and durations of suffering using the decided preference criterion. It is important to recognize that this does not furnish relative values of 'the accumulated suffering' of losing one's dog and 'the accumulated suffering' of being burned. You can make claims about your tipping point: the number of burns you will endure before you choose to give up on your dog.<br /><br />But it doesn't follow that the loss of your dog is 'worth' that many burns, for it doesn't follow that the ratio yielded by this method has any sort of general applicability. One might consult one's preferences to discover that one prefers equally a month of excruciating pain in the hospital and a year of less painful convalescence in the home. It doesn't follow that one would likewise prefer equally two months of excruciating pain in the hospital and two years of less painful convalescence in the home.<br /><br />It should also be emphasized, as you recognize, that this is a mere catalogue of an individual's preferences. Every individual will have a different preference function, and none of them will satisfy uncontroversial criteria of rationality like transitivity. As I've noted, it can't be assumed that if someone prefers X for t to Y for t, then he will prefer X for n*t to Y for n*t. So this approach cannot be used to make non-question-begging claims about "the amount of suffering in the universe."Gregnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-49985848727662226792016-12-19T19:51:13.993-08:002016-12-19T19:51:13.993-08:00I should add, incidentally, that if we are talking...I should add, incidentally, that if we are talking about an ordinal ranking of subjective preferences, it creates another problem that doesn't exist in John G Thomas's assumption that suffering is analogous to rainfall: it becomes a question how you get a measure of suffering for the totality of conscious beings through the totality of the history of the totality of the universe; this is not an entity with identifiable subjective preferences, so one would need principles of aggregation to get a unified measure from an extraordinarily large (and when we are considering all conscious beings, extraordinarily diverse) set of different measures. This is a distinct issue from the previous one, but related; measures you end up with cannot appear out of nowhere, but must come from something, and if you move from some measure to another measure, you have to have some identifiable means of doing so, or you have reasoned fallaciously.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-81354428042788224402016-12-19T19:34:29.454-08:002016-12-19T19:34:29.454-08:00One can take a subjective approach and treat a &qu...<i>One can take a subjective approach and treat a "utility function" as generating an ordinal scale of preferences without any resort or need for a cardinal translation.</i><br /><br />This doesn't affect the matter; subjective preferences are not commensurable with units of duration, either, and therefore one cannot begin with units of duration and draw from them conclusions about subjective preferences without further information. Indeed, moving from objective to subjective just compounds the problem, because we then need a specific subjective measuring process -- subjective measures don't exist independently of particular psychological facts the way units of duration can, and one would need to specify the psychological facts involved and establish that they actually yield the function assumed.<br /><br />Units of measurement do not require a cardinal scale; ordinal scale units of measurement are ranks, which simply are different kinds of units. It's thus important to grasp that ordinal measurements are not in this respect fundamentally different from cardinal measurements -- like cardinal measurements, they require common measure. It would be a sign of stupidity, for instance, to move directly from a cardinal unit measurement of some mineral property to the Mohs scale, which is an ordinal measure; the two will not be commensurable, and further information would be required to get from one to the other. <br /><br />The basic point is that commensurability is required for measurement, period; you can't get around this by switching kinds of scale -- in fact, it compounds the problem.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-51340040747561151542016-12-19T18:29:48.710-08:002016-12-19T18:29:48.710-08:00@ Brandon:
You cannot measure 'worse', ev...@ Brandon:<br /><br /><i>You cannot measure 'worse', even crudely, approximately, or by estimation without there being a measure of worse; to allow greater or lesser there have to be units, even if only rule-of-thumb units</i><br /><br />Not at all. There's a hidden premise in your argument that any discussion of these matters must involve cardinal units. That isn't necessarily the case. One can take a subjective approach and treat a "utility function" as generating an ordinal scale of preferences without any resort or need for a cardinal translation. How the function works internally may be exceedingly difficult to determine, but its "output" given such and such "inputs" can be easily "recorded" and taken at face value.<br /><br />John G Thomas is taking that approach when he discusses one burn vs. losing his dog vs. a sequence of burns. One can dig deeper into his answers to the point of determining exactly how many burns are worth the life of his dog given the many different ways the dog could die, and even plot a multiple axis chart based on the table. That table would be completely <i>real</i> insofar as, for John, that's the precise way in which he himself values his finger and his dog.<br /><br />Extending this approach one can most definitely identify, in practice, a (dis)utility suffering function 'f' in which f(Hell) > f(x) for any 'x' other than Hell (including x = "all the suffering of all the being in the entire history of the universe"), which incidentally is precisely what the Bible says Hell is, and take this as a premise for any further reasoning without any difficulty whatsoever.<br /><br />Therefore, your explicit exigence for a cardinal (dis)utility function as a necessary pre-requisite is something that requires justification itself. Why is it that you think an ordinal (dis)utility function cannot be used?<br />Alexander Gieghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12282340926229637743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-2967055742954692972016-12-19T17:56:07.189-08:002016-12-19T17:56:07.189-08:00If you reread my last reply with the example of bu...<i>If you reread my last reply with the example of burning my finger and losing my dog, you’ll see that we don’t need “units of measures” or “units of different kinds” to figure out which among different scenarios involving “different kinds of suffering” is worse.</i><br /><br />This is an extraordinarily dimwitted thing to say, because it is literally logically impossible. You cannot measure 'worse', even crudely, approximately, or by estimation without there being a measure of worse; to allow greater or lesser there have to be units, even if only rule-of-thumb units; so suffering being worse requires that there be units of measure in terms of which this can coherently be said. If, as in the scenario in question, we are starting with duration alone as our original kind of measure, our original measure is duration; unless 'suffering being worse' <i>reduces to nothing more than</i> saying it lasts longer, there must be some way of moving from duration-units to worse-suffering-units. If there is not, it is a <i>logical fallacy</i>, and it does not matter if people do it, any more than with any other fallacy.<br /><br />The same goes with comparing intensity and duration. Since intensity and duration do not use commensurable units, they must be translated, using relevant methods and additional information, into some kinds of units that are commensurable. If there is no coherent and identifiable principle of commensuration, the move is a <i>logical fallacy</i>, and it is dimwitted nonsense to appeal to intuitive plausibility to justify it, just as it is nonsense to appeal intuitive plausibility in the dimwitted attempt to justify any other fallacious reasoning.<br /><br />The claim that has been questioned is your claim that by duration alone the suffering of each damned soul would eventually outweigh all of the suffering of all of the conscious beings in the entire history of the entire universe. (Actually we've had three logically different claims, one based on the infinite/finite distinction, which I pointed out made an error about the infinite; then the comparison between finites; then the comparison between finites involving ceteris paribus principles, which, as I pointed out, require that one actually prove that other things are equal before they can legitimately be used to prove anything. This is the second one, which is the version involving the least logical bungling. But all three involve commensurability issues. Incidentally, the 'each' is the one point at which your stupendous ignorance about the topic of hell, despite your dogmatic claims about it, is relevant: you have already had to qualify it.) This quite clearly requires commensuration between duration and the units of measure by which one would measure the collective suffering of all conscious being throughout the entire history of the entire universe.<br /><br />Thus you require a principle of commensuration. What is it? What is your reasoning for it? How does it make your comparison claim work?<br />Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-70020592124867595272016-12-19T17:55:29.138-08:002016-12-19T17:55:29.138-08:00The question at hand is the immorality of traditio...<i>The question at hand is the immorality of traditional notions of Hell as never ending suffering.</i><br /><br />No, the question at hand is a specific claim you made in the course of your argument for this, which has to do with the relation of suffering and duration. This is an elementary logical issue: what is being criticized is a particular premise in your argument, and the grounds on which it is being criticized has nothing to do with morality or hell. Thus the latter are irrelevant, and not the question at hand. I mean, seriously, even my freshmen undergraduates can figure out issues of logical structure like this.<br /><br /><i>You want to believe that, when people say that suffering accumulates, they are making a mistake analogous to saying that speed accumulates or that temperature accumulates.</i><br /><br />(1) Unless you're a Buddhist, almost nobody says "suffering accumulates", and always when they do, they mean that it intensifies because of an actual causal process of accumulation -- like memory giving extra force to current suffering, or (in the case of Buddhists) karma. You are the only idiot I've ever come across treating it as if it accumulated magically on its own. It's not a mistake to say that an effect of an accumulating process is cumulative; it's a sign of stupidity to think that you get a cumulative effect without an actual cumulative process.<br /><br />(2) Suffering is not a physical substance like rain. Rain accumulates because it can neither be created or destroyed, but must continue to exist unless it is transformed into something else, and so adding more. This is not how experiences of any kind work.<br /><br />(3) Raining can be intense and endure but the <i>intensity and duration of rainfall are not commensurable</i>. What is commensurable is <i>physical volume of water</i>. In order to talk about how intensity and duration relate to the cumulative effect, they have to be translated, by means of empirically discovered generalizations allowing the translation, into units of volumes of water so that they can be commensurated.<br /><br />(to be continued)Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.com