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Strange7 comments on Overcoming suffering: Emotional acceptance - Less Wrong
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This dialogue follows the most compelling (to me) scene in C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce". A saved woman is trying to coax a man she knew in life to join her in heaven while the narrator and his guide look on. She clearly acts in such a way as to reveal a preference that the man join her. But nothing he does, not even remaining in Hell for all eternity, makes a bit of difference to her emotional state.
Do I want her miserable? No. Do I think she cares, really cares about the man she's trying to help? Well... no. I don't think that's what "care" means; she lacks empathy for him. I recently acted in such a way as to get myself a baked potato. I don't really care, in the deep and meaningful way I care about other people, about having gotten a baked potato - and I'm not even devoid of potato-related emotional feelings, I would have been disappointed if it had caught fire and I was pleased when it turned out nicely.
Do I like being sad when my friends are sad? Well, no, not really, I don't have sadness-asymbolia. Would I rather not be sad when my friends are sad; do I want to deny them that power, as C. S. Lewis suggests would be only just? No! I don't want to go around helping people just because this is written somewhere on my abstract list of preferences, acting in numb glee and feeling nothing that responds to my environment.
I don't know what I want, Sir.
In numb glee I suspect you wouldn't act at all, or have preferences in any meaningful sense.
From a very scattered and informal study of the modern concept of the Christian god, it seems to me that He's up to something like this: 1) Fabricate or otherwise acquire a large batch of souls for some unknown larger purpose. 2) Realize the manufacturing process may be flawed or contaminated somehow. 3) Set up a procedurally-generated test environment (aka observable reality) for the souls, complete with self-replicating interface shells (aka human bodies). 4) Set up "good enough," "repairable," and "reject" bins, labeled heaven, purgatory, and hell respectively; souls in the first and third bins get put into stasis by what amounts for all practical purposes to sensory deprivation. Sit back and watch the test process run. 5) Double-check the specs for the unknown larger purpose, and pass/fail rate for the already-sorted souls, realize that tolerances have been set way too strict. Possibly also some sort of problem with other gods sneaking in and stealing the goods? Unclear. 6) Set up a temporary avatar in the test environment (aka Jesus) to announce the new, lower standard, since it's qualitatively rather than quantitatively different, and yet-unsorted souls can partially reconfigure themselves to adapt. 7) Eventually, full batch will be incarnated and test environment will go through an elaborate self-destruct sequence.