Why Suffering is Eternal and the Body is Forever

Speaker 1

It’s my pleasure now to introduce our keynote speaker for this morning, Adam Miller. Adam is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He and his wife, Gwen Miller, have three children. He received an MA and PhD in philosophy from Villanova University as well as a BA in comparative literature from Brigham Young University. He is the editor of An Experiment on the Word and the author of Badu, Badu, Marian and St. Paul: Immanent Grace. Also, Rube Goldberg Machine’s Essays in Mormon Theology, Speculative Grace, Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology, and also Letters to a Young Mormon. He is the co-editor with Joseph Spencer of the book series Groundwork: Studies in Theory and Scripture, published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. And serves as the current director of the Mormon Theology Seminar. Please welcome Adam.

Adam Miller

Well, it’s my pleasure to be with you here today. Lincoln mentioned that my most recent book Letters to a Young Mormon came out just a couple months ago. I have a couple of these with me today. If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re interested, you could pick up a copy from me. Special discounted conference-type price, of course. As your keynote speaker today, I’m in a little bit of the awkward position of maybe being the person in the room who is least knowledgeable about transhumanism. But I’ll do what I can here with the perspective that is mine, and you can maybe help me make good on the difference.

Adam Miller

Now the title of my talk, a little provocative, "Why Suffering is Eternal and the Body is Forever." Let me say a little something first about Mormonism, and then I’ll try to say something about transhumanism.

Adam Miller

In one sense, Mormonism begins, as every Christian tradition does, in Palestine in the first century with the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In another sense, Mormonism begins in America in 1830, with the publication of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s prophetic inauguration of what Paul called the fulness of times. A time when God would gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him. That’s from Ephesians.

Adam Miller

Mormonism as a Christianity is both very early and very late. Mormonism embraces the Bible’s prophets, Psalms, Gospels, and Epistles but is suspicious of the Platonisms that have since come to color Christian self-understanding. Skeptical of that syncretism, it sidesteps Trinitarian creeds and understands itself as a kind of clean recovery of Jesus’ own ancient Christianity. But Mormonism is also very late, and its enthusiastic reboot of the earliest Christian tradition is itself profoundly contemporary, American, democratic, humanistic, and sympathetic to modernity’s implicit materialism.

Adam Miller

This double move characterizes in general a Mormon approach to salvation. By adding something new, for instance the Book of Mormon, the old is recovered, that is, the Bible. By coming a second time, Christ will rescue a world that he has already saved. Understanding a Mormon response to transhumanism will depend, I think, on understanding both dimensions of this weird eschatology, where salvation is always both already given and not yet accomplished.

Adam Miller

So, a couple of points then about Mormonism. In one version of the Mormon story, every atom is an agent, every agent bears a spark of intelligence, and all such intelligences are though somewhat disorganized, coeternal with God. Because agency is primal and distributed, freedom and suffering are coeternal. I am free to act as I will, but so is every other agent. My agency is simultaneously limited and empowered by the freedom exercised by countless others, each in their place. I am free to act, but because everything is free to act, I am also continually acted upon, in ways that I did not choose and cannot control. Agency is a strength whose inseparable condition Is availability for suffering. Salvation depends on learning to work with such suffering in a way that blesses rather than curses the compounding web of interdependencies that make agency possible.

Adam Miller

A second point, familiar, I think. There is no such thing as immaterial matter, Mormon revelation says. "All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter." That’s from section one hundred and thirty one. Matter is matter. Some is fine, some is coarse, but everything is material on this account, and spirits, though different from bodies, are akin to them.

Adam Miller

A third point. In the beginning, God fashioned a likeness for each kind of thing, and going one step further, He began working to fashion some things in the likeness of His own image. These spirits, fashioned in the likeness of God’s own body and spirit, are the sons and daughters of God. They are the people that have now, and-- that have and do now fill in passing our world. But our spirits alone, however fine and pure, were like God’s Spirit only in part, because unlike God’s Spirit they had no bodies. Mormons believe that both the Father and the Son are embodied, and that their divinity finds its full expression in their willingness to bear the strength of a coarse body’s magnification of spirit, suffering, and agency. Joseph Smith taught this plainly, too. The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s. The Son also. It’s from section 130.

Adam Miller

God then convened a heavenly council, the story goes, and gathered His spirit children. He sketched a plan, offered us bodies, and promised ultimately their redemption. The price to be paid here was the gift itself; a world composed of spirits joined to bodies that could ramify both the reach of their agency and their openness to the agency of others. Bodies promise to magnify across the board our ability to feel, see, think, love and act. And as a result, they also promise to magnify our ability to suffer; to suffer sensation, emotion, loves, losses, desires, pains, even ideas. A third of the hosts of heaven balked at the proposal. God’s plan seemed too risky, too vulnerable, too open ended, too self-emptying Satan led a rebellion. The remaining two-thirds cast their lots with God. Heaven was riven by God’s promise of a body. Satan and his angels lost the war in heaven, but in effect they still got what they wanted. They avoided mortality. Their damnation is imposed for all time by God’s willingness to grant their fearful wish that they will be forever free of the bodies that God had hoped to give them.

Adam Miller

A fourth point. However, the weakness and temptations that attend a body are often severe. Failing to trust God is easy to succumb to fear, desperation, confusion. It is easy to sin when the costs of a body are so high. This world’s amplification of our suffering can seem far out of proportion to its amplification of our agency. I’m not sure that’s the right-- that’s all right.

Adam Miller

The promise extended through the grace of Christ is that God knows this. Embodied, He feels what we feel. While mortal, Enoch conversed with God face to face, and he was given a sweeping vision of the world’s future. Enoch saw that after he and his city were taken up, the whole world would sink into sin. "And he beheld Satan, and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness. And he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced." This is from Moses chapter 7.

Adam Miller

Struck, Enoch turned to God, only to find that having watched this scene with him, God too was weeping. "And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept. And Enoch bore record of it, saying, How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth tears as the rain upon the mountains? And Enoch said unto the LORD, How is it that thou canst weep, seeing that thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?" Enoch is astonished. The heavens weep. God can suffer? Don’t God’s perfections and holiness shield him from this trouble? Isn’t the fact that He exists from all eternity to all eternity enough to free Him from sorrow? And the answer apparently is no. It’s not enough. There is no such enough that could free God from the passibility, the openness to suffering that conditions and empowers the agency that He shares with us. Or if there were, such freedom "would amount to damnation itself." God’s grief at our coldness is both real and divine, and rather than compromising his divinity, his openness to suffering composes it.

Adam Miller

A fifth point here that accompanies, actually, this current slide. In the Book of Mormon, God’s people experience the present as already redeemed by a future that has not yet arrived. On this model, faith in Christ plays out between believing that Christ was yet to come and living as though he already had. It plays out between the present concretion of a realized salvation and a future redemption of the suffering and loss that will necessarily continue to suffuse the same. If suffering inevitably conditions a material world packed with and founded on agency, and if God’s own divinity is principally manifest in his willingness to redemptively bear the vulnerability and self-emptying that the redemption of such agency requires, then we should expect no different for ourselves. Because time and matter are real for both us and God, the work of redemption is open-ended and ongoing. It will continue as long as agency and the openness to suffering that conditions it exist. But crucially, because this work is never done, salvation can only be given if the pivotal event of redemption is already operative in the world, even before the work of redemption is done.

Adam Miller

The good news of the gospel, the Christian imperative, is to live our lives in full light of the redemptive peace that Christ has already accomplished and given, and then with our hearts untroubled and unafraid, God will empower us to save a world that still suffers ruin.

Adam Miller

A final point about Mormonism. To be material is ultimately to be embodied. And to be embodied as a human being is to be gendered. All human beings, male and female, are created in the image of God. The Proclamation on the Family says, "Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." As a result, salvation while hinging on individual agency is always a collective endeavor. It depends on a willing and ongoing affirmation of the intimacies and interdependencies that put real human bodies in contact and keep them in motion.

Adam Miller

Well, in light of that, let me try to say then a few things about the possible relationship between Mormonism and transhumanism. Let’s consider first what we’ll call the first general scenario of transhumanism. This first scenario involves two key components. One, we assume that we will soon learn how to radically enhance human life in terms of its strength, intelligence and capacity for pleasure through a variety of genetic, pharmaceutical, and technological modifications. And two, we assume that it will soon be possible for death itself to be indefinitely postponed through techniques of radical life extension that, barring catastrophe, will allow human bodies to live healthy lives for as long as they wish.

Adam Miller

With certain conditions, I believe that Mormonism may be exceptionally well positioned to respond positively to such developments that seem, to one degree or another, inevitable. To the extent that transhumanism actively enhances human agency, relieves suffering, heals bodies and extends family relationships, I believe Mormonism will welcome its advent. In general, a Mormon cosmology sufficiently blurs the line between the natural and the supernatural that human initiatives to bring about God’s declared purposes perhaps even with something as radical as resurrection, need not be by default, suspect. Salvation on a Mormon account has always had, for all its emphasis on grace, pragmatic, roll-up-your-shirt-sleeves, do-it-yourself kind of flavor. "If we go to hell," Joseph Smith once claimed, "we’ll turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it." That’s Joseph Smith.

Adam Miller

However, I think that there are two significant limitations here that come into play with respect to the kinds of enhancements that Mormonism would see as desirable. The first limitation has to do with the sacrality of the human body, and the second limitation has to do with the nature of suffering and the temporally complex character of salvation. For Mormons, both God the Father and God the Son are embodied, and our deep connection to the Divine is partly rooted in the fact that our human bodies are fashioned in the likeness of theirs. The value of any enhancement would be weighed, I think, against the extent to which it fundamentally altered the given structure of the human body. Also, because it’s seen as an essential characteristic of premortal, mortal, and post-mortal identity. Enhancements that rendered gender excessively classic or inconsequential would be especially suspect, I think. Further enhancements that consistently made it more difficult for people to be materially connected to and knowingly interdependent with those nearest to them, perhaps especially with one’s spouse, children, extended family, I think those would be seen as coming at too great a cost.

Adam Miller

But an acknowledgment of the deep connection between suffering, passability, and agency may, on this score, be even more salient. If these enhancements were to alter human experience by masking the fundamentally temporal, material, and agential character of life, then they may do little more than substitute a grand fantasy of satisfaction for the reality of a divine joy. If time and matter are real and our agency is always co-conditioned by vulnerability to the agency of others, then it will be impossible to definitively solve the problem of desire. Satisfactions and pleasures may happily come and sadly go, but they are a passing byproduct of salvation, not its horizon. Salvation depends not on bringing desire to a finally satisfied end, but in shifting our relationship to desire and suffering in such a way that they are themselves redeemed.

Adam Miller

When considering the problem of sin, we should note how it’s entirely possible to pursue good things in a way that is itself sinful. We should note how it’s also entirely possible in the midst of trouble and suffering to none the less find ourselves in the presence of God. This curious state of affairs corresponds to that weird eschatology in which salvation is both always already given and not yet achieved. On the one hand, we must pursue the good that we do not yet have, and care for the suffering that we have not yet addressed. But on the other hand, if we do not pursue this transformation on the basis of a received peace that already passes understanding, then we will inevitably pursue such other goods in a way that is not good for us. Only an already received redemption can offer firm ground for the work of saving a world that is still in desperate need of redemption.

Adam Miller

If the transhumanist scenario is understood as a way of redeeming the world that need-- that need to account for and live-- sorry. If the transhumanist scenario is understood as a way of redeeming the world that needs to account for and live in the light of an already accomplished perfection-- that sentence isn’t coming together. Let’s skip that one. The point here is that the eschatological tension between a gracious 'already' and the urgent 'not yet' has to be maintained.

Adam Miller

It’s my view that were humans to live indefinitely long and healthy lives, that the need for religion would become increasingly apparent. If people lived for a thousand years, what would that much time show? It would show more and more definitively the vanity of satisfaction and the futility of trying to render ourselves once and for all invulnerable to time, materiality, and suffering. Living for only a few decades as we currently do, it’s easier for us to buy the illusion that if we just had a little more time and a few more resources, maybe we could make good on life’s deficiencies and achieve some kind of permanent and frictionless satisfaction. But I think that illusion is the fundamental fantasy at the root of sin itself.

Adam Miller

The truth is that though human enhancements might change the nature of the costs imposed by time and bodies and though in light of them, suffering may take more subtle and unfamiliar forms, the bottom line costs of existence would remain the same. The cost of agency would always be openness to suffering and the cost of life itself would always be the fact that life is passing. Living for thousands of years, our need for God in religion, I think, would grow rather than decrease.

Adam Miller

I think radical life extension would test the limits of a human capacity for grief. I think it would also test the limits of a human capacity for boredom. As time tutored us in the fact that though we may indefinitely postpone life’s final passing away, life will itself remain an inevitable passing. Though we might continue to live and thus never stop changing, time will still extract its costs in terms of change that never ceases.

Adam Miller

Compare here, for example, the pop culture vampire as a model for transhumanism and radical life extension. For the vampire, the extension of life itself inevitably becomes something to be suffered. Every cable TV vampire worth their salt finds their existential crisis heightened rather than ameliorated by their quasi-immortality. I think this would be the upshot. We would given-- the more time we’re given, the more we would feel the need for religion.

Adam Miller

In this sense, transhumanism may be doubly beneficial with respect to the work of redemption. It does what can be done to heal, strengthen, and enhance what it means to be human, while perhaps despite itself, simultaneously revealing the limits of that very project. It both spurs us to redeem what has not yet been redeemed while forcing us to recognize how much of that salvation ultimately depends simply on how we relate to what is already given.

Adam Miller

Let’s consider then, for a moment, what we could call transhumanism’s second general scenario. The second general scenario involves the possibility of transferring human memory and personality out of a flesh and bone body and into a digital substrate. That’s the previous slide. Here we go. I don't want to spoil what’s coming next here necessarily. This scenario, I think, is both more stark and markedly more speculative. The scenario, I think, comports poorly with a Mormon understanding of God as embodied, a Mormon understanding of salvation, and I think basic facts about the character of what it means to be a human being.

Adam Miller

We’ve already seen that on a Mormon account, "The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fullness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fullness of joy." That’s from section ninety-three. To willfully sever mind from the body would be to willfully reject a fullness of joy, then.

Adam Miller

First, even granting that such a scenario may be possible, it would not, on a Mormon account, amount to the advent of a kind of immaterial existence, since there is no such thing as immaterial matter. And though human memories and personalities might swap substrates in such a scenario, that is the biological for the mechanical, the necessity of some material substrate remains. Further, Mormonism would argue that were such a download of identity possible, the process itself would profoundly attenuate the character of what’s transferred.

Adam Miller

Note, for instance, how the possibility of the first more realistic posthuman scenario of human enhancement depends on the possibility of augmenting what is human with what is not human. This kind of enhanced posthumanity is only plausible because a human way of life is already intertwined with what’s neither biologically integral to us nor straightforwardly human. Human experience does not present itself as fundamentally representational and self-contained. Rather, consciousness presents itself as always already dependent on what is external to it, and as always already outstripped by the contexts and foreign agencies that shape it.

Adam Miller

We have no good reason to think, I think, that the pattern of information that constitutes my identity is neatly contained in my brain. And it seems to me that consciousness is fundamentally a kind of fragile ecological phenomenon that is both exocranial and even exosomatic. It has to do with feedback loops of relationships between me and the environment around me. The pattern that constitutes an individual life depends not just on that life’s own agency or biology, but on that life’s vulnerability to and dependence on all the other agencies at work on it and around it. That is to say, the pattern of information at stake in my identity most likely includes not just what’s in my brain, but what’s located in my whole body, and further, much of what’s located in my environment. In this sense, the plausibility of the first transhumanist scenario, I think, argues against the plausibility of the second.

Adam Miller

It’s also true, though, that the above approach to identity that I’ve just described fits well with Mormon doctrine. According to Mormonism, it’s impossible to save myself by myself. As Joseph Smith put it, we can’t be saved without our families, nor they without us. There’s a crucial sense in which, both philosophically and theologically, my wife and children are literally part of who I am. And were some part of my brain with its patterns of memory and patterns of reaction transferred to a digital substrate, I think the attenuation would be so severe as to no longer resemble who or what I was. And what I was, was a material body and spirit embedded in complex webs of agency and vulnerability. In order to reproduce myself in a digital substrate and thus save it in any meaningful way from death and hell, we would have to reproduce the other minds, lives, and worlds that make me who I am, God included. And that’s a tall order.

Adam Miller

Concluding thought, then. In a revelation detailing the Mormon doctrine of eternal marriage, Joseph Smith quotes with a slight twist a critical passage from the Gospel of John. The altered verse reads, This is eternal lives, to know the only wise and true God and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. This small alteration in the verse, the substitution of eternal lives in the plural for eternal life in the singular, summarizes the key aspects of a Mormon approach to transhumanism. On the one hand, the shift from the singular to the plural indicates an openness to the idea that with the length and quality of our lives radically extended, we may live many, many lives. More, it indicates an openness to the idea that my life even now is already intertwined with and dependent on a complex network of things, ideas, and people. such that life itself is already enabled and enhanced by what lies beyond it. In this respect there is no reason in principle to fear human enhancements that comport with basic Mormon doctrines.

Adam Miller

On the other hand, however, this shift from the singular to the plural also neatly summarizes why Mormonism might balk at the possibility of transferring consciousness to a digital substrate. To live not just an eternal life, but eternal lives, depends from a Mormon perspective on our willingness to share with God the kind of vulnerable and divine life that He already enjoys. And that we’re given to understand, is an embodied and material one. Thank you.

Adam Miller

We have time for some questions, some tutoring, some education, objections, various kinds. In the green shirt?

Speaker 3

If I understood, one of your proposals is the necessity of the body as well as the necessity of gender. There’s a quotation from The Proclamation on the Family and also you raised a concern about the plasticity of gender. And at this conference last year, I gave a presentation about transsexual policy in the church handbook and also criticized the lack of litmus tests for discerning gender, which is considered to be a spiritual binary. I was wondering if you could speak to and defend, if you would, provide a litmus test for discerning gender and I guess [inaudible] on why it is binary in a discernible fashion.

Adam Miller

This is a good question. As I was falling asleep last night, I thought to myself, you know, I bet the first question tomorrow is going to be on gender. I was totally right. Probably that was three or four other hands. I could have picked anyone probably, and that would-- probably would have been-- wouldn’t matter who I picked, it would have been the first question. I tried to choose my words very carefully. My position was that as Mormons, we would be worried about rendering gender excessively plastic, which would be an attempt to recognize on my part that there is a kind of plasticity inherent in our mortal, at least, experience of gender. There’s a kind of plasticity to it, such that I think on straightforwardly empirical grounds, we would have to hold that this-- it doesn’t cash out into some kind of neat binary or neat duality. There’s a range of experience and there are even a range of bodies available to us as human beings that people themselves had no part in choosing in the first place. What I think would worry Mormonism in particular would be to lose the sense of gender altogether. I think Mormon experience is organized around a kind of polarity and gender experience, but I don’t think it’s necessary to a Mormon worldview to see that as a strict binary. And I don’t think, for instance, that we know much at all about-- though we claim that gender is both premortal and postmortal, I don’t think we know what that amounts to. What it would amount to say, for instance, that a spirit is gendered. I don’t know what that would mean exactly. So did I avoid the question sufficiently? Was that Christopher?

Speaker 4

I appreciate the considerations about identity and with regards to concerns around mind uploading. I wonder if you could speak to the extent to which those same concerns apply to things that we do already accept in Mormonism such as death, resurrection, or translation.

Adam Miller

How we would preserve identity across the boundaries between death, resurrection, and--

Speaker 4

[crosstalk]. You’re being removed from that interconnected web of relations, of selfhood, and yet those don’t-- do those pose the same kind of problem? Is there a difference in quality?

Adam Miller

That’s an excellent question. For my part, I’m tempted to say that they do pose the very same kinds of problems. The notion that identity could be preserved beyond the body and beyond my own experience of death, how that’s possible, I don’t have the faintest. Given what I understand about what it means to have the kind of identity that I have, the way that its structured in relationship to the world around me, the way that it has a kind of historical momentum, the way that that’s tied to my embodiment, the way that my identity is itself never singular but always plural and never quite settled. I think, yeah, I think the same concerns would apply for me with respect to preserving identity past the boundary of death. It’s probably why-- I mean, that’s probably connected directly to the fact that I really don’t understand resurrection at all. Which may be no surprise to the rest of you, but that’s an excellent question. Yeah, down here.

Speaker 5

I feel really bad. I missed the very beginning of this, but maybe--

Adam Miller

It wasn’t that great. The ending was better.

Speaker 5

It probably was. I’ll have to watch it online, but when I came in, right at the end, you’re making a comment, and so maybe I messed up because we’re just beginning, but as I understood your comment, you’re kind of saying that uploading is a problem because it creates kind of this idea of insubstantial or spirit without a body, and that’s a problem for Mormonism. But I think most of us who believe in uploading actually think that there’s an information theory reason to think that whatever you upload to has to have a physical structure. If our mind is a big piece of information, that information has to be represented by something. And that means. . . that that seemed to me to be compatible with Mormonism very highly because that is what Joseph said when he said you know there is no such thing as insubstantial matter and there is no spirit without a substrate. And so maybe you can tell me why you think they’re incompatible if what uploading really is, is moving from one substrate to another. Because isn’t that what resurrection is? Resurrection moves to a different substrate, specifically a body that’s supposedly different from our body now. So how is that different than uploading and why do you really see any incompatibility here?

Adam Miller

A couple of thoughts. It’s also a very good question. One, I’m hesitant to see consciousness as reducible in some straightforward way to information. I’m hesitant to do that. But that’s kind of a side note to your question. I think I-- and I eventually made the more or less the same point that you did, that from a Mormon point of view, even if you did change substrates from kind of biological substrate to maybe kind of mechanical substrate, it’s still all material substrates in the end. And I think I meant to just-- I meant to kind of clear ground there with respect to what I think would be a kind of naïve conception of uploading your mind, that you could in some way be free of body, period. Right. Which I think-- which I think people who-- people who actually have given some time and care and attention to what’s involved in transhumanist ideas would not be-- would not fall prey, I think, in general to that kind of naïve assumption. But I think it’s true that even if you could-- even if you could transfer from one material substrate to another, all the material problems that apply to a material body would still apply to you as a material mechanical thing. The problem of time, of suffering, of agency, of loss, I think all of those things would still end here. It wouldn’t solve those problems, though it might ameliorate them to some degree.

Speaker 6

Yeah, so I was actually going to ask a question precisely about what you just ended on. A large part of what you were talking about was about the fact that if life is extended, then suffering also extends, because that continues in one way or another. Now, I can’t speak to all sorts of suffering because it’s way more complex than, say, simply being bored or something like that. You didn’t have to mention that.

Adam Miller

Boredom can be a kind of suffering, right?

Speaker 6

Yeah. It can be. You have to mention it, so that-- I’m taking that as an example. Things like boredom or sensation, experiences, emotions, all of these kind of things are things that we experience because something is being processed within our minds, right? There’s a circuitry there. Now, if you have access to that, if we are indeed in a transhumanist future where you can access all of that, and you can, at will, turn those sort of circuits on and off, then how can you say for certain that your suffering is going to feel [inaudible]?

Adam Miller

Yes, I don’t think that kind of scenario in which you would have that degree of control, it doesn’t seem plausible to me. But even if it were possible, it strikes me as a very neat and dis-- a very neat and tidy description of what hell would look like. Right. Hell would look like that scenario in which you could-- in which you could have absolute control over whether or not you suffered something. And I think that’s what we-- on my reading, that’s what we get with the--

Speaker 7

[crosstalk] I mean we can all basically do it now, but I mean totally [inaudible].

Adam Miller

It seems to me that the difference is say we take something straightforward like sensation, like capacity for for tactile sensation. The very possibility of tactile sensation depends on my passivity in relationship to the sensations that I’m receiving, right? Such that the very possibility of sensation itself depends on my openness to suffering an impingement from things that I can’t control. If I were in total control of what I did or didn’t sense, I think the end result would be I would lose entirely my sense for what was real and what wasn’t.

Speaker 7

But we already have devices that are giving us happy sensations that aren’t real to give us a sensation of, say, something going on in a video game. And conversely, we have things such as anesthetics that remove sensation so that we don’t have to feel things. So we’re already doing that and we can imagine doing that to an ever greater extent and I’m not quite sure why something like an anesthetic and a [inaudible] that allows you to play a video game would be your definition of hell.

Adam Miller

I don’t think-- on my view, it’s not the case that salvation looks like the scenario in which you are forever and permanently happy because you can avoid all possible suffering. Right. [inaudible]. And from my point of view, I think happiness always derives as a kind of byproduct of a certain relationship to things that we can’t control. If we take the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction as primary, then it always ends up being as something that I could control, as something that I could administer to myself, rather than just being a kind of byproduct of my relationship to things that aren’t up to me, then I think it always ends-- that kind of satisfaction always ends up being empty. And it always ends up in some ways being more painful than the satisfaction that it gives us.

Speaker 7

Yeah. I mean, we could probably talk about this more later. But to me, when you keep on saying satisfaction now, it’s clear that you’re not just talking about happiness in a very simple setting, because I also tend to think that what we strive for is satisfaction, so we’re trying to accomplish things, not so much that we just want to be happy or [inaudible] something else.

Adam Miller

Yeah, and I think that something else has-- I think that something else has pivotally to do with the things that I can’t control. Such that, for instance, let’s just take a little really simple scenario in which I come home from work and I’m tired and I just want to sit down for a moment and relax and have a glass of water—I'm a Mormon, I can’t have a beer when I get home at the end of the day—and just relax for a moment, right? I just wanna relax. But my child comes in the room, right? He’s eight years old. He needs help with his homework. I don’t want to do that. He’s impinging on me in all different kinds of ways. And I don’t want to be impinged on. It’s very uncomfortable. But the moment in which-- the moment in which I forget about what it was that I wanted that would have satisfied me and instead give my attention to what I couldn’t control and didn’t want, that’s the moment in which the space for something like an actual joy can open up in my relationship to him, when I forget about me and what I wanted and what I could control, and instead give myself over, right? Submit my will to the will of my son. And a kind of inversion of the classic Christian formulation. That’s the moment in which something like joy is possible. And I think that depends on maintaining a robust role for things that aren’t up to me in our experience of the world. Something like that. But we can talk more later too, yeah.

Speaker 8

There’s one direction in which this could go, and I it’s not that I think it’s it’s not useful, but I think you can easily stalemate because the question is beginning to bifurcate along traditional faith versus empirical divisions. And that is, at the bottom, there are certain things that might be [inaudible] doctrine. And then there are certain things that might be [inaudible] experience. And you’re trying to navigate between them, and I appreciate the subtlety that you’re trying to create. So I would like to just back up a little bit to the essence of all of those questions and say that, for example, in the gender question, as we discover more about the spectrum of gender and the multiplicity of it, if we look at that as just one exemplar, what do you say about the process of any theology that has doctrinal underpinnings to be schooled by the evolution of experience of what we learn. I mean, a simple one is Catholic Church obviously got schooled by Copernicus and Galileo, fine. This is much more subtle, what we’re talking about right now. What is the nature of meaning in human experience? What’s the nature of embodiment? What’s the nature of experience in time? And that sort of thing. So, if we just start from the profound thing of gender, which is really only a few decades old in terms of being kind of a publicly understood thing, and how does that school religions and churches? And then going beyond that, the questions that were just asked, how might the you know-- do we have to have an emissary like Ray Kurzweil actually upload himself and he says, actually everything’s fine, and then-- and a number of other people do that to then come back down and have certain religious tenets which say embodiment is necessary to reevaluate? What do you say about that whole process? Because you’re right in the flux of that.

Adam Miller

Very good questions. I think the gentleman who spoke right before me today could have nailed that dialectic on the head, right? That it is a kind of painful, ongoing process of negotiation in which we attempt to incorporate present and future discoveries with the things that we’ve already come to understand as fundamental to our experience of the world. And there’s no other way to do it than to hash it out by way of long, ongoing, often painful negotiations.

Speaker 8

Would you say that a finer understanding, even from a religious perspective, would require emissaries, that is, pioneers, to actually just go out and do it? And it may be tragic, or it may not be, but they ought to do it and then tell us what it’s like. And then we try to integrate that into our common philosophies and understanding what it means to live along. So if you say that it’s an-- that even if you disagree with uploading into a silicon substrate, it’s probably going to be necessary that somebody does it, because otherwise we’re really kind of silent.

Adam Miller

Well, I mean, I think to the degree that emissaries are necessary, we would want to seal it as a two-way street as well. And I think that we would also want to pretty carefully distinguish between the fact that something is possible and the fact that, that possibility would be desirable. And even though-- even if it were the case that Kurzweil were to demonstrate to us that such a downloading of consciousness were discreetly and compactly possible, we would still be left, I think, with the basic religious question of whether or not such a thing would be desirable. That would be a conversation in which religion would not just need to be schooled by empirical facts on the ground, but would need to bring to bear normative claims that would shape how we respond to those empirical facts. Yeah, good question. Are we out of time? Is that-- do we want another? One more, Lincoln says. Ma’am.

Speaker 9

Thank you. For coming. I’ve really enjoyed hearing what you had to say. My question to you is: do you feel like a dissected frog?

Adam Miller

Do I? You know, when that example was used, the gentleman said, you know, you’d carve it all up and if you put it all back in the same order, something is missing, something’s still not quite the same. And it occurred to me, yeah, the thing that’s not the same is that the frog is dead. The frog was alive before and if you put it all back the way it was, it's not alive any more. No, I feel alright though. I feel-- as a professional philosopher I have a high degree of tolerance for a variety of [crosstalk]. Yeah, maybe something more like that. Thank you very much.