Pain is subjective, so infinite fire would eventually become numb and meaningless. Equally there are a great many evils and all of them would be infinitely represented. So let me see now, this infinite hell would have whores and harlots of all genders, ages and quirks one can imagine, and more. It would have as much drink and drugs as you want, and probably offer any state feeling or sensation one could ever want. I assume you can take what you want [rape murder] but assumedly death is not possible or you die and pop up again, then do it all again kinda.
The problem with ‘hell’ is when its in this finite limited world! But really, hell only works here doesn’t it? It all gets a bit like a computer game otherwise [like a highly modded skyrim or something].
In the world we can trace everything we would call hellish to causality i.e. Things specifically of the world.
I personally don’t believe in hell, punishing someone in eternity for finite crimes does not seem like a just treatment. I would even say that a proportional punishment may seem like a bad idea; as we do not see the punishment before it is “to late”, the actual act of punishing will be somewhat pointless and would likely not deter others from committing crimes nor rehabilitate the “criminal”. However, from a theoretical point of view pain, sorrow, fear etc. does not have to “become numb and meaningless”. That you get used to a pain or an unpleasant thought is strongly connected to mechanisms in your brain. As you likely wouldn’t bring your brain to hell I am not sure that one could count on that infinite and eternal punishment in hell is theoretically impossible.
Wouldn’t deities have created much more obedient creatures than humans if they wanted control. Moreover, an easy way for them to gain control would likely be to show themselves to us and tell us what to do. If divine creatures wanted us to obey them, or if they wanted us to suffer infinite pains, I think they would interact more directly with us instead of waiting for us to die. The concept of hell seems, to me, to require that an evil power rules the universe and if that power wants us to suffer as much as possible it seems to be doing a pretty bad job. If you want to find sources of immense suffering I think you should look for other stuff than deities.
Hi, i agree with you about punishments ~ especially as ones crimes are largely causal and the individual didn’t make many of the decisions they thought they had made themselves. Really punishment is a causal means of an attempted fix, to change things in the world [discourage others etc].
We don’t take our brain with us when we die, but surely pain is a bodily thing anyway. You get medical cases of people who cant feel and sometimes cause themselves damage as a result, this is simply due to a missing gene. There is a level where the consciousness experiences pain but it is surely derivative of the nervous system. Having said that, if the soul can experience pain, then theoretically it could do that for an eternity. However i think that it’s because the consciousness subjectively experiences, that it doesn’t have the property of pain as such. Otherwise it couldn’t have the ability no block pain out or otherwise not feel it at all.
Aside from that, if one felt pain for a lengthy duration it would become the norm and ineffectual. Its mostly the shock value and immediacy that makes pain work.
Dan~
Yea they didn’t know jack shit about anything back in the day did they. I guess there was an idea of balance and people do do evil, so it would seem that to restore balance they would have to be punished. Considering how intelligent Taoist are/were i am surprised they thought the soul was to blame, when clearly we don’t know where the soul comes from and are not the reason for evil in the world [which is causal].
Balance to me would involve an education and restoration of an individual!
Even if pain as such would be impossible to experience without a body, it is not the pain as such that in unpleasant. I know that it sounds strange but there have been people who lost their ability to feel the unpleasantness of pain but kept their ability to experience the pain itself.
There is obviously the possibility that we are immortal souls but that our “after death” existence is not determined by gods. If we truly are souls and our brains provide us with stimuli that makes us experience, one could imagine that such stimuli could come from other sources than brains. If we leave our brains after death and wander around in the universe we might receive lots of random stimuli from other sources. Even if such stimuli would be rare one could still have a future with infinite numbers of random experiences caused by random stimuli and possibly more sensible stimuli if one would end up in a brain again.
One could even imagine that every one of us very recently arrived to the brains that we currently occupy and that we most likely will leave these brains very soon. “Our” memories are obviously stored in the brain and the soul may be “fooled” to think that it has experienced everything that “we” have, simply by that it gets access to these memories that the brain has stored. Once the soul leaves the brain this access is gone and the soul will just experience whatever its stimuli “brings”. Thinking about memories is obviously also a form of experience, an experience caused by memory holding structures in the brain that causes stimuli to the soul.
One could even imagine heavens or hells in such situations; if strong stimuli causes strong emotions, places were the stimuli is extremely strong would cause extreme strengths of the feelings. There may even be infinitely strong stimuli. Some cosmologists think that there are singularities of infinite density in the middle of black holes. Being sucked up by a black hole, which is maybe not so unlikely as they pull everything towards them, could lead to a very long time of infinitely strong feelings, experiences, qualia or whatever one prefers to call it. Unless you are able to do control such events I guess that you can hope for, if it would happens, is that the positive emotions of happiness, warmth etc. would outweigh the negative emotions of pain and sorrow. From an utilitarian point of view I guess that the correct action, in some way, would be to do whatever you can to get some sort of influence over if and how such events will happen even if the chances of gaining that influence might seem very small.
Indeed, there is a pain gene and people without it don’t feel pain, …but they still feel ‘pain’ e.g. Emotional distress or mental anxiety.
That memories are occupants of the brain, surely means we wont be judged upon then for they will simply no longer exist.
But a non-benevolent deity may judge us upon our actions because it’s who we are at the end of life. Yet children die without getting the chance to do much, and one would assume they wouldn’t be judged so pointlessly. Without the constraints of the world we wouldnt act badly, our actions are in context to the world and not to whatever we were prior to life. Surely we can say that the person after life is the same as the person prior to it, given that the entire set of worldly factors would be gone.
Otherworldly judgement is an utterly pointless exercise!