Envy

How does envy 'work'? Where does the emotion come from?

Proverbs 27:4: Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?

James 3:14-16: But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don't cover up the truth with boasting and lying. For jealousy and selfishness are not God's kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.

1 Corinthians 13:4: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

Envy is a somewhat unusual emotion in that it has no 'good' aspect at all. For instance, when Aristotle was forming his 'doctrine of the mean', he tried to find a 'good' aspect to every emotion (as part of his system where virtue is between two opposite extremes). E.g. anger is good when it protects the vulnerable. Fear is good when it stops us from being complete idiots. Being trusting is good unless we are too trusting and someone takes advantage, and so on. But he could find no 'good' aspect to envy.

To find out what envy is about we need to look at what condition(s) needs to be fulfilled for anyone to experience envy. That is, what is something that needs to happen before you can experience envy?

There may be several answers, but one answer is not being content.

For example, can you think of any situation where someone is really content about XYZ and also feels a lot of envy about XYZ? For example, suppose that someone was really content about how much money they had and frankly did not care about having more money, because it doesn't matter to them at all - they have enough. Can that person feel envious towards someone for having more money than them, given their contentment about money?

Lack of contentment seems to be a basic condition for envy.

OK, so what do envious people do? They make life difficult for the person who they envy if they can.

Now, why is it that a lack of contentment would 'spill over' into basically having something against other people? How does A. Lack of contentment in any way cause B. Having something against other people?

The answer could be that acting enviously gives the envious person a practical benefit...

But it doesn't seem that envy is a 'strategy' to get what the other person has. For example, if you envy someone who has a lot more money than you, then you probably don't think you'll be able to get some of their money by making life hard for them.

In almost all cases of envy, someone's envy will not allow someone to get, practically speaking, what they are envious about. It will also not make society more equal because one envious person will not make society more equal on their own (however, if everyone was envious, then maybe society would be more equal, but it would be a rather unhappy, nasty sort of equality).

Actually, I can't figure out what selfish strategy envy is part of. Even if someone is a complete psycho, cares only about themselves, and has no good emotions at all, I simply don't know what selfish benefit they can get from envy, and I haven't even talked about how unhappy it makes the person that envies.

But I find it hard to believe that there isn't some kind of selfish benefit to envy, even one that is almost never realised. Otherwise envy is a very peculiar kind of selfish act - a selfish act that does not benefit the selfish person.

A second possibility is that envy is not a strategy but an automatic process. Envy could simply be a result of the brain accepting two or three facts: 1. I am not content about XYZ and 2. Someone has XYZ and probably 3. I will let myself feel envy. In this view, envy is like thinking that Pluto is no longer a planet after you hear the news, just an automatic reaction that can happen if you are not content and see people with what you desire.

Anyway, we can map the process of envy something like this:

I am not content about something => a selfish strategy or an automatic process => I feel envy and feel like I am 'against' the person who has whatever it is I'm not content about.

This may be one reason why the Bible teaches people to be content. In other words, the Bible doesn't teach us to be content to make us docile and passive, but because a lack of contentment causes people to experience envy and makes it harder for us to love other people.

Hebrews 13:5: Don't love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, "I will never fail you. I will never abandon you."

1 Timothy 6:6-8: Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can't take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content.

A God with emotions makes sense

Is it really a massive assumption to say that God can feel emotions?

It's true that God didn't evolve and has none of the physical components of emotion, like the release of certain chemicals in a brain, etc. That's true. But think about what emotions involve in terms of reason...

Can you feel anger without perceiving that someone has failed to meet an obligation? I don't think that you can. Can you do something on the basis of, "I will treat others the way I want to be treated," without feeling empathy? No - if you incorporate that value into your actions, then that = feeling empathy. Can you feel envy without perceiving a lack in your life? No, you have to perceive a lack in some area of your life to feel envy, etc.

So acting on certain kinds of practical reasons, or reasons to do with action = feeling certain emotions.

When you think about it logically, one would have to conclude that any kind of practical reason could probably be matched to an emotion. This would include emotions that humans have no experience of if you assume that there are practical reasons that humans never relate to but which other species do (uniquely alien or animal emotions).

So a basic emotion, a chemical emotion, like anger is actually an act of practical rationality or exercise of practical reason. In the case of anger: someone not meeting a perceived obligation.

And rationality is something that is very broad and goes way beyond evolution. Rationality is something not even restricted to the physical universe! It is something we could share with robots, aliens, and even creatures outside our universe.

So, at the end of the day, that's why I think that a God who feels emotions makes sense if you interpret emotion as rationality to do with action. Because a God who acts is a God with some understanding of emotion, of what it basically is, even if God's version of emotion is very different to ours.

And, of course, any creator God is a God of action, because God has proved He/She/It acts. Of course, a creator God has created the universe.

Going beyond this issue, a vague 'God who acts', who feels something like emotion, is different from a loving God who cares deeply about His creations, like the Christian God. But I don't see why God having no love is seen automatically to make much more sense than God having love. We probably feel that the existence of a loving God needs more of an explanation than a God of pitiless indifference. But if you, on the other hand, assume that finite reason cannot understand an infinite God, then how do we know an (infinite) God of love needs more of an explanation than an (infinite) God without love? If we can't use finite reason to understand what's going on when it comes to God?

'I'm not perfect' versus 'I am a sinner'

Everyone will admit that they're not perfect. And this seems to be the same thing as saying you're a sinner (i.e. that you have flaws). But if someone said to you, 'I am a sinner', that would sound like a much more serious and humble statement than 'I'm not perfect'. So what is an explanation for this?

I think the difference is that saying you're not perfect is saying you have flaws, but it doesn't mean that you're actually failing to fulfill your moral obligations towards others. Whereas saying 'I am a sinner' indicates not only that you are not perfect, but also that you're failing to fulfill all your moral obligations.

The difference could be analogised to two different styles of grading. You usually don't have to get a 'high distinction' (A+) to perform decently on an assignment. You can usually do OK with just a 'pass'. Although it may not be as impressive, you're still getting your degree. So, on one view, you can have flaws and still be doing everything you should be doing as a person.

On the other hand, saying 'I am a sinner' implies more of a view where you're not even getting a pass. You're just not meeting all of your moral obligations towards others.

In terms of how each view can go astray, the 'I am a sinner' view can be misinterpreted so that someone thinks of themselves as a pathetic failure (which is bad because the Bible encourages humility and the acceptance of forgiveness, not a complete lack of self-esteem). Whereas the 'I'm not perfect but everything is basically OK' view can lead someone to be unaware of obligations that apply to them (because there are more moral obligations applying to them than they think, e.g. 'don't steal' if they are a thief).

Here is a parable that seems to refer to the two views:

Luke 18:9-14: "Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else. For I don’t cheat, I don’t sin, and I don’t commit adultery. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Anxiety

Phil 4:6-7: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

What would have to be true for these verses to be giving good guidance?

I think it would have to be that Christians have almost no control over the major events and occurrences in their life, although it often seems that we do. Instead, God must really be the one in control, who orchestrates the major and many of the minor points of our life. Otherwise worry would be the proper, rational response.

The reason for saying this is that anxiety and worry are always about trying to control something that you believe you have power over, and/or the feeling that it will be awful if you mess something up that you can mess up.

So for example, if I didn't think that I had any control over whether a job interview went well, but I just turned up determined to go through with it, then it stands to reason I wouldn't worry at all about how it would go. It's only if I thought I had it in my power to make or break the interview that I would worry.

Also, if I'm taking an exam that isn't very important then I won't worry either, because I can't mess things up by doing badly. Even if I have the power to do well or do badly, the fact that I don't care how I do on it means I'm not going to try and exert any control over its outcome beyond just turning up and doing it. My lack of concern for control means I won't worry about it.

So it's obvious that anxiety and worry is about control: about believing you can control and affect whatever issue or thing you're worried about.

So for God to tell Christians, "Do not be anxious about anything," God is pretty much saying we have almost no control over the major events of our life, or that they can't be messed up against God's will. Otherwise we ought to try to control these events, and therefore should experience a lot of anxiety and worry as part of that control. Also see Matt 6:24-34 where God says the only things that we should worry about are things that we can obviously and easily affect.

A possible exception to this is that, if we reject what God obviously and unambiguously wants for us, then we can completely go against God's will. But even then God could work around it, and in any case God is assuming in these verses that we won't do that.

Did God design our brains to enjoy sin?

God is responsible for the way our brains are designed, and the design of our brains makes us enjoy some things and not others. Actions that involve doing the wrong thing can be enjoyable, although in the long-term they create suffering. So did God design our brains to find wrongdoing (e.g. pride, envy, hatred) enjoyable?

No. Part of the answer is that the way free will works (it seems) is that we have the power to change our brain structure over a long period of time. Free will gives us the power to make certain things enjoyable and other things not enjoyable to our brains (here is a link to a good article on the science supporting this view, click 'show transcript').

So we have the power to change our brain structure against the way God intended our brains to function. An example of this might be someone who occasionally gives in to anger. They start getting angry more and more as they stop giving people the benefit of the doubt. Then they start assuming the worst about people. This process literally changes their brain structure, so the angry person changes their brain into one that 'thrives' on rage and anger.

But this is not the way God originally intended their brain to work.

OK, so why did God design us so that anyone would ever find it a good idea to change their brain structure in bad ways?

Our desire to do this is actually an unintended byproduct of something good. It's important that everyone has a sense of self-interest. If we had no sense of self-interest, then people would forget to eat, sleep, and would do things like walk off cliffs without any fear of death. Our sense of self-interest keeps us alive and enables us to perform very many sensible, everyday actions.

But there's not just 'good' self-interest, there's also 'bad' self-interest. We have various needs and wants (like food, security, shelter) and messing other people around will sometimes fulfill them better. Bad self-interest is e.g. murdering someone if it will make your life easier, or abusing someone to get them to do what you want.

God can't give us 'good' self-interest without making us aware that our life would be easier if we did 'bad' self-interest sometimes, and thus all sin.

For this reason we all change our brain structure to find 'bad' self-interest enjoyable to some extent - like pride, envy, unjustified anger, and so on. Sometimes, those things will fulfill our needs better than being honest. It wasn't in God's original plan for our brain structure but free will gives us the power to do it.

And God had to give us these needs and wants, because if we had no needs and wants then we would be self-contained 'social islands', which is not a better situation.

But isn't there evidence that personality can be influenced by our genes?

Yes, but there's a reason why God made it like this. To start off, there's an important difference between personality and character. Character is about good and evil, personality is about everyday (non-moral) choices. Personality can never be morally bad (when it's defined as choices not connected to moral issues), although it can be 'inconvenient' in some ways.

If God designs much of our personality, then God is not thereby encouraging or enabling us to sin. I think that God gives us certain personality traits to glorify His plan (like if you are an extrovert God may want you to meet a lot of people and encourage them in some way or something, so God designs you to be an extrovert). So there's really no problem if God has a hand in designing our personalities.

If God designed us to have flaws in our character then there is an issue, because that would make God the author of sin. But I don't think there's evidence for this view in the same way there's evidence that our personality is designed partly by God. Studies will show that personality has a genetic aspect, but it doesn't show that with an evil or good character.

Practically, these ideas can be encouraging - we are becoming more like our true selves when we reject the 'dark side' of our nature (Gen 1:27; Col 1:15). We are not betraying 'natural' desires to do wrong, actually we are becoming more like the kind-hearted people God intended us to be.

Objective morality: God is love, mind is love, consciousness is love

It's often said that morality is only 'objective' if there's a God. But what is that supposed to mean? How is morality any more 'objective' if a God exists? I think the following situation would make morality objective in a very significant way, if it was true:

Imagine that just like being physical is part of our concept of 'a stone,' so loving and rejoicing in doing the right thing is part of what it means to be a 'mind' or 'conscious.' Love and goodness is to consciousness what being physical, or existing in the universe, is to a rock. Mind/consciousness is a kind of substance or thing that follows different rules to physical stuff. One of these aspects of mind, different to rocks, is loving and being good. So mind is love.

But humans have minds, so why aren't we completely loving? Because our mind is localised in (based off) a brain, and the brain isn't 'love.' Our mind pulls us in the direction of loving others unconditionally. But our brain isn't love, and so we have a source of thinking that isn't love. This ends up 'pulling' us into thinking thoughts that aren't loving. Our mind gives us the free will to follow either side. This means that humans have to fight our (non-mind) brain to love in accordance with mind, whereas mind by itself is so loving that it IS love (God is love). (Read more about this dualistic assumption here.)

The question is: why did God make us brain-Minds instead of 'Mind' by itself? Couldn't God have taken away the possibility of evil? The answer is that to be pure mind you basically have to be God, I think. So the above setup (which makes sin very likely) needs to be the case.

A sketch of a Christian theory of emotions

I think that it would be interesting to lay out a Christian 'analysis' or 'theory' of emotions, in the style of secular psychologists', but from a Christian point-of-view.

Here's Robert Plutchik's categorisation of emotions (a secular psychologist) to get an idea of what I mean:

Primary emotions (stronger to weaker versions):

Ecstasy / Joy / Serenity
Admiration / Trust / Acceptance
Terror / Fear / Apprehension
Amazement / Surprise / Distraction
Grief / Sadness / Pensiveness
Loathing / Disgust / Boredom
Rage / Anger / Annoyance
Vigilance / Anticipation / Interest

Second order of emotions (more complicated combinations of the first order):

Love = Ecstasy + Admiration
Submission = Admiration + Terror
Awe = Terror + Amazement
Disapproval = Amazement + Grief
Remorse = Grief + Loathing
Contempt = Loathing + Rage
Aggressiveness = Rage + Vigilance
Optimism = Vigilance + Ecstasy

The reasoning behind this secular categorisation is that, first of all, we have emotions due to evolution, and now we want to find out how our emotions fit together in a hierarchy. All emotions seem to have equal status and come from the same source indiscriminately, which is evolution. The best marker for identifying them would be through a) how intense they are, and, b) whether they are a result of any combinations or whether they are 'primary'.

Now take the Christian view. The Christian view must be different. We don't necessarily disagree that emotions come to humans through evolution (I don't), but the point of them is to reflect the emotions of God. Ergo, our emotions may have evolved, but they evolved to reflect what God's consciousness is like and what emotions He feels.

I'll get to why a 'God' would feel emotions later. Before that the Christian has the problem of morally bad emotions, like pride, envy, and so on. How do we explain the existence of morally bad emotions if God is perfect?

The answer from a Christian view must be of course that not all emotions are on the same level. Our good and morally neutral emotions come from God, but our morally bad emotions come from sin. That's how God doesn't have morally bad emotions, and yet we do even though our emotions are made in God's image.

So you would construct a Christian hierarchy maybe a bit like this:

Emotions that come from God (morally good or morally neutral):

Primary emotions:

Love

Second order of emotions (a more complicated expression of the first emotion, from 1 Cor 13):

Patience
Kindness
Contentedness
Humility
Desire to relate to others as equals
Desire to serve others and not oneself
Anger only when seriously provoked
Always forgiving
Delighting in love and truth
Urge to protect others
Trust
Hope
Perseverance
Sadness, grief at loss
Diligence when it matters
Carefulness when it matters
PLUS, all other morally neutral emotions (won't bother listing them)

Morally bad emotions that are not felt by God, but come through sin:

Unjustified impatience
Cruelty/desire to inflict pain
Envy
Boasting/arrogance
Pride
Rudeness
Selfishness
Short temper
Delighting in misfortunes/evil
Disliking the truth/lying
Paranoia
Being willing to give up on important things too quickly
Insensitivity to pain, loss, grief
Carelessness

This is basically just a morally bad flip-side of the first list.

Let me make clear that when I say 'morally bad emotion' I don't mean a negative emotion like sadness, I mean a morally bad emotion. It's perfectly possible to be really depressed about life and stuff in general and be morally perfect.

Basically the Christian view would be something like this:

God has only good or morally neutral emotions. The ideal state is for us to only feel the emotions that God feels.
But:
Humans sin.
Which means:
We have the ability to feel bad emotions.
Because:
Free will + emotion = the freedom to feel emotions that don't reflect God's nature, but which God allows us to feel to give us the freedom to reject Him and the love that He represents.

Another way of putting it is this:

Free will + emotion + doing the right thing = feeling only the good and morally neutral emotions that God has (e.g. love).
Free will + emotion + doing the wrong thing = feeling a morally bad emotion, which God did not originally intend minds to feel, like e.g. unjustified hatred of someone, or envy and pride.

So this would be a different hierarchy or system of categorisation than in the secular world. In the secular world no emotions are 'out-of-place' for a human to feel. It depends on the situation. For a Christian, morally bad emotions are not in our true nature, which is why a) God doesn't feel them, b) why they can only be felt if you choose to sin and, c) why they damage our psychological well-being, unlike loving emotions.

So why would God feel emotions at all? Aren't emotions physical things?

I think it must come from the trinity in some way - God for some reason exists as one being in a community of three persons, and our name for the relationship between them is 'love'. God then gave this love to us. This (somehow) must be the case in a way that we just can't understand with finite reason (more on this here.)

One way of looking at it is that when God made us in our image He gave us something (a mind) that is meant to be love in some way like God.

So just like being physical is part of our concept of 'a stone,' so loving and rejoicing in doing the right thing is part of what it means to be a 'mind' or 'conscious.' Love and goodness is to consciousness what being physical, or existing in the universe, is to a rock. Mind/consciousness is a kind of substance or thing that follows different rules to physical stuff. One of these aspects of mind, different to rocks, is loving and being good. So mind is love.

So why are we tempted to have morally bad emotions in the first place?

Because our mind is localised in a brain, and the brain isn't 'love.' Our mind pulls us in the direction of loving others unconditionally. But since we use our brain to think, and the brain isn't love, we are pulled into thinking thoughts that aren't loving. Our mind gives us the free will to follow either side. This means that humans have to fight our (non-mind) brain to love in accordance with mind, whereas mind by itself is so loving that it IS love (God is love).

The question is: why did God make us brain-Minds instead of 'Mind' by itself? Couldn't God have taken away the possibility of evil? The answer is that to be pure mind you basically have to be God, I think. So the above setup (which makes sin very likely) needs to be the case.

What is consciousness, how does it work, and why does it love?

...Some metaphysical speculations...

Where does consciousness come from?

You could theorise that it comes from a kind of existence where 'reality experiences itself' rather than 'reality describes what exists'.

What does that mean? Well, when you're conscious you experience very vivid sensations in your mind; the redness of a car, the sound of birds chirping, and so on. Your brain isn't just saying 'OK there's a red car, there's some sounds' and so on, it actually makes you feel the sensations that it is processing. The processing circuitry of the brain doesn't just describe, it also experiences. Experiencing versus describing is what I mean by 'reality experiences itself' versus 'reality describes what exists'.

Another way of putting it is that the brain could theoretically just describe redness (like in a computer program) and never 'feel' redness in the Mind's eye, but it does. This is kind of like reality itself experiences red, rather than merely describes red in the equivalent of a lot of 1's and 0's.

From where comes this 'reality experiences itself' kind of existence that could be thought of as consciousness?

We normally think of the universe as having a solely 'descriptive' kind of existence. The physical laws of the universe describe the universe down to a tee. If you knew the mathematical laws governing the universe, then you would know (effectively) everything about the universe. If the universe is merely a description of some information about laws, then that doesn't seem to leave much room for a 'reality experiences itself' kind of existence.

What's more, almost every kind of reality that we can imagine seems to be missing that special quality that would make a 'reality experiences itself' kind of existence something that you could predict from it.

I think that one needs to use another idea of reality to answer this, radically different to our universe, where it is easy to draw such a connection.

One feature of every world that we can comprehend is that it is always filled with distinctions. Distinctions between various heights, sizes, lengths, dimensions, wavelengths, etc.

Is it possible that there is a mode of reality where there is existence with no possibility of distinctions? A distinction-less, 'undifferentiated unity of everything'?


(An illustration of this kind of reality above, click to enlarge)

I believe this is what 'infinity' symbolises. A mode of being without distinctions encompassing the ALL, the everything. See my argument for this view here, and here[2].

I think that the 'reality experiences itself' kind of existence probably comes from the world without distinctions, the 'undifferentiated unity of everything', the being of God. This is a reality which grounds all possible things in its being, it is the 'being itself' of theologians. This distinction-less unity experiences being reality itself.

This may allow one to argue for a 'reality experiences itself' mode of existence to do with God. But surely, human consciousness is pretty far from the distinction-less, infinite 'ALL' that encompasses everything...

Ah, but you could think of it like this: human consciousness results from a 'blend' of the undifferentiated unity with our brains. The uniting of the distinction-less world and a human brain creates qualia (consciousness) as the 'cherry on the top' of the cake of the brain.


(Picture of mind versus matter above, click to enlarge)

So God's consciousness is an 'undifferentiated unity of everything that experiences being reality itself', and He localises this consciousness within our brain, creating an 'undifferentiated unity that experiences being reality itself when it comes to our brain'. That is, humans have access to an 'reality experiencing itself' mode of existence that applies only to our brain. This makes intuitive sense - we feel our consciousness as a single whole containing everything we are, coming up out of our brain.

God's gift to us is that He allows the brain to access His world. This makes us conscious because we access the 'reality experiences itself' mode of existence that God has (confined to our brain).


(Picture of this process above, click to enlarge)

So to sum up,
a) consciousness comes from infinity, properly conceived as distinction-less existence,
b) we are conscious because God 'localises' distinction-less infinity within our brain. This allows our brain to access distinction-less existence applying to the area of our brain.

But why is God (the infinite 'undifferentiated unity') love? (1 John 4:8)

A = A in our world. The chair a person is sitting on is/equals a chair.

That's the law of identity, the most fundamental law of logic.

Is there an 'A = A' for a world without distinctions, the world of undifferentiated unity?

I think it is love. An active, conscious identification with what exists as opposed to things just passively existing. It is love rather than a mere 'identifies with what exists', because the 'identifies with' is conscious. To put it in a rather abstract way, a conscious 'identifies with' must be love rather than a mere 'A = A'.

Podcast: Do Christians give up thinking?

Podcast Notes:

-Do Christians give up thinking? When you become a Christian, does that mean that you lose the use of your reasoning? Why does Christianity have such an emphasis on action rather than reasoning?

Title: Do Christians give up thinking?
Time: 15:29 minutes
Size: 7.1 MB mp3

Direct link to the audio file (Right click and 'Save As')
Link to the audio file page

Further reading:

-What was I referring to when I talked about souls being infinite? And humans being partly infinite and partly finite?
-A look at 'active' versus 'passive' thinking on the issue of objective morality.
-Where does love come from, the most primary emotion in theology?
-What is a soul?
-Why is God good?

Where do our emotions come from? 1: Love

In this series I'll discuss some metaphysical speculations on where our emotions come from: love, anger, jealousy, truthfulness/dishonesty, empathy, and so on. I think this is very important because of the challenges that evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience present to unsophisticated Christian beliefs. It has been noted that religion tends to have the view that our feelings and sinful emotions are just 'there' and we just have to 'deal' with them and repent of them where required. The evolutionary psychology view of our emotions coming from a complex evolutionary history involving reciprocal altruism and kin selection tends to present a compelling, albeit very depressing view of human nature. So this post will discuss the most basic human emotion (and as it turns out God's most basic emotion) love; what emotions are; why a god would feel emotion just like we do; and why we have a distinction between 'head stuff' (e.g. reading a book that you agree with on how to be a calmer person) and 'heart stuff' (e.g. that book having absolutely no effect on your behaviour whatsoever).

Just like infinity is a very different number to any finite number, so very different stuff goes on in the infinite world compared to what goes on in our finite world (i.e. the physical universe).

One interesting point about finite existence is that on a metaphysical level it's quite passive. So while the goings-on of the physical universe are not passive, as we see particles flying around, on a fundamental level the nature of finite reality doesn't seem like it would change. In other words, the universe would just seem to go on forever. Inanimate matter just seems to follow a predetermined course, A causes B, which causes C, which causes D, ad infinitum. Not very exciting on a *metaphysical level* (metaphysical: the world behind appearances).

In the infinite world I believe that reality is metaphysically very exciting. So instead of things passively existing as themselves (what I call the 'A = A distinction of finite existence') in the infinite world there is a basic kind of 'activity' going on. So instead of 'A = A' (passive metaphysical existence) it is 'A => A'. Infinity is, for some reason, endlessly remaking itself, again and again, ad infinitum; it has already done so an infinite number of times in the past and will do so again an infinite number of times in the future.

So in this endless procession, you have infinity, infinity remaking itself (a basic kind of activity), and that infinity remaking itself again and again ad infinitum.

An interesting problem with this, which actually helps clarify things, is that there are no distinctions in infinity. This would seem to invalidate what I just said, because I just said that A => A and if there are no distinctions in infinity then A can't remake itself, because there are no distinctions allowed (see what I mean by 'no distinctions' here). Nevertheless, I think that something like A => A can fit with a world in which there are no distinctions. It would mean that 'A going-to' is the same as 'A arriving-at', but it doesn't mean that the basic activity I'm talking about in 'A => A' can't be going on. So A => is the same as => A, but there's still a '=>' instead of an '=' as in finite existence. So instead of a procession of infinity endlessly remaking itself, the 'previous infinity' and the 'next infinity' actually blend into the same thing because there are no distinctions. What you have is a basic impulse: love, which is A => A distilled into its basic essence without distinction: infinity loves itself.

The way God makes a human is that first of all He gets a finite brain going... He sets up a finite brain that handles reasoning, knowledge, and a lot of other things. Then after the brain exists He connects the brain to infinity, *but* only in such a way that the brain handles most things. So the brain handles reasoning, knowledge, and a whole lot of other stuff, and infinity 'handles' whatever the brain doesn't handle. So there's enough left over for infinity to do stuff that the brain doesn't do. That is, free will and consciousness which can only exist in the infinite world (this is why our consciousness encapsulates in a single thought everything we are, our entire past, personality, habits, choices, everything about us in a single moment, because there are no distinctions in infinity/our consciousness).

This is how you can get conscious beings that aren't God. If it was *just* infinity then you'd have God and nothing else. But by getting the brain to handle a lot of stuff, you can get something that's conscious (i.e. a human) that isn't God, because there are non-infinite parts (finite parts, being infinitely less than God, can make a distinction between God and not-God. Although the finite is from God as well, it's from God in a way that's so insignificant compared to God that a distinction emerges).

So where does love come from, the most basic and primary human emotion? Through the infinite part of us, our consciousness, we tap into the A => A of the infinite world. So we share the primeval love for everything that exists that God has.

Ah, but we don't love paintings, rocks, and galaxies in a way anything like we love other people. Sure, we think nature has some value, but obviously people are worth so much more than a lifeless galaxy.

But this actually goes perfectly with this theology, because there's just so much more *stuff* within a person than in the universe! Actually, you could have a billion universes, to the power of a billion universes, to the power of a googol universes, and what you'd have, in this theology, would be something infinitely, inconceivably less significant than a single person. A googol^googol universes is merely finite, although large. But what I'm saying is that our brain is connected to an infinite soul, to which the finite can have little comparison. So that explains why we love other people so much more than finite stuff. If love is existence loving existence (infinity loving itself), then an incredible amount of love should be given to partly infinite humans compared to finite matter. This also explains why the Bible says that you should love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, much more than we even love ourselves, literally with every fibre of our being, because the absolute infinite = everything.

So we love and know about love because the part of us that's actually infinite is in the eternal process of loving itself, loving existence, loving other people and loving God because infinity loves itself. But through free will, another thing we get from actual infinity (which our finite minds can never understand, as it's an infinite thing) we have the power not to love like we ultimately are, which is sin, and everyone uses their free will to sin, for an extremely powerful reason (see other posts on this site for this).

In the next posts in this series I'll talk about other emotions, like empathy, truthfulness/dishonesty, selfishness, jealousy, anger and so on coming from this infinite process I've speculated on.