Lucid, clear explanation (as is usual from @xriskology) of the grave risk posed by utopians with power & money:
1. #Utopian visions are inherently self-rationalizing. Their revolutions can never fail, they can only *be* failed.
2. #Utopianism is more or less always exclusionary. "If the Christian heaven were to include atheists, for instance, it wouldn't be heaven."
@FeralRobots @xriskology I'd just like to note that Brexit was/is clearly a utopian project (harking back to an idealized English past that never was) and has caused horrendous, ongoing damage in the UK. From a Putinist point of view the Ukraine invasion was a utopian project—to rebuild the pre-1914 Russian Empire and regain past tsarist glories. And so on.
When you visit a utopia, always look for the mass graves and the blank places on the maps that used to be cities.
@cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology "I have never seen a fictional utopia that was distinguishable from hell." – James Blish, more or less
"There were no children, and no animals." – JB, *The Day After Judgement*
That old fascist had his moments.
@ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology I always figured this applied equally to heaven. Nobody who wants to live anywhere "for eternity" has considered just how long eternity is, even if you consider it equivalent to merely the lifetime of the universe.
@VoxDei @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology the only way I could make sense of heaven’s eternity was to think of eternity not as endless time, but as timelessness, as removal from the flow of time. Which would make heaven a single, perfect, timeless moment, without past or future, change or decay.
Doesn’t detract from the rest of the discussion re utopias though.
@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology Yeah, but if time isn't passing, how are you experiencing it? If you can think, time is passing in some form, and at that point it's probably worse because it'll take you about ten minutes to get bored, and then you're trapped.
@daskeit @ravenonthill @FeralRobots @xriskology Actually @cstross there's a Laundry idea for you. A Christian sect that has worked out how to actually bring about the Second Coming, for real, and with absolutely everyone to spend the rest of eternity in heaven. Any true Christian is surely duty-bound to support that, and yet a bit of thought reveals either it's an utter horror, or else you have lost the capability of boredom and are therefore no longer human.
@VoxDei @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology
I’m not sure we *could* conceptualise what it would be like to exist outside time - maybe because time, like space, is a Kantian synthetic a priori concept; or maybe for much the same reasons underlying Nagel’s essay asking what it’s like being a bat.
The point being the inability to visualise it isn’t a refutation, it just means we’re inherently limited in what we can understand based on our own experience.
@VoxDei @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology
For an actually serious answer though, ask an actual philosopher or theologian - the nature of eternity is actually an interesting question and topic of discussion.
See eg. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eternity/#DiviTime under the header “Divine Timelessness” or something like https://philosophy.jhu.edu/faculty-books/eternity-a-history/
@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology
Is it? I'm not a philosopher, I haven't read Kant et al, so maybe I'm way off. But it seems to me that all the perception of time passing is, is the perception that event B follows event A (whether or not it actually does).
The actual nature of time and what we would perceive in its absence is irrelevant to the question of whether we would eventually get bored, as long as our brains continued to process as before (and therefore we would perceive time whether it existed or not).
And if they didn't continue to process as before (much more likely, IMO!) then we have ceased to be human. At that point, you have died and been replaced by something that just thinks it's you.
@daskeit @VoxDei @ravenonthill @FeralRobots @xriskology It seems to me to be a pointless question. Time is part of our measurement framework, to be outside the measuring framework means there's nothing to quantify. "Outside space and time" like "divinity" is just bullshit from start to finish.
@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology (In case it wasn't obvious, I am arguing that heaven is another fictional utopia. Just one that, unlike the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever libertarians think their end-state is, its proponents aren't expected to actually produce when they get the chance.)