Formal Mormon Theology

[Chap]

Gosh, what fun!

An earlier example of this kind of thing may be inspected here, for comparison:

Mathematical principles of theology, or, the existence of God geometrically demonstrated. In three books. ... By Richard Jack, ... 1747

[Gadianton]

I enjoyed it Ego.

You seem to divide the self into will and feelings. You categorize pride and love as modalities of will, and pleasure and pain as a modalities of feeling.

You say that a person can't know pleasure without pain, is that also true for pride and love; a person can't know love without pride, if not, why not?

I somewhat agree with pain and pleasure being necessary for each other, but it's not so simplistic. A person born into the world and abused terribly may never be able to properly experience pleasure. A person born with every advantage may experience basic pleasure, but heightened capacity for suffering if the ease of life is stripped away. A person could become used to an easy life, and even then experience psychological pain. Lots of people with idyllic lives kill themselves and lots of people with bad lives suffer through it. Sometimes crippling pain, when it just turns off, it's gone, and wow, there really isn't a lengthy greater appreciation.

But I still basically agree with the idea of an interrelation between pain and pleasure. However, can you frame that in a platonic world? It's a holistic idea: like the yin and yang make a circle, and the yin has the little dot of yang within it and the yang a little dot of yin. But I think in Platonism, nothing would preclude pleasure from existing as it is, in an ideal form; and if that form transmits all the way to the physical realm, then it's a question of how close of an approximation is the triangle in the physical realm? There is no dependency on appreciating squares or rectangles in order to understand triangles.

To me, pride, love, pleasure, and pain are all functions of embodiment within an ecosystem, and the idea that there is an ideal form of love, or a God -- that is not a construct of our ecosystem and is not embodied -- "loves us perfectly" by some external standard is preposterous, for one, and ultimately meaningless even if is true. Every time Dan eats a steak at a fancy restaurant, it's far more meaningful for Dan than it is for the cow, and it doesn't help the cow at all that God has ordained the cow for Dan's use, or that some ultimate codification of truth says that burnt cow flesh tastes good and prescribed for the enjoyment of man.

[Dr. Shades]

Tell me the last time you picked a person at random and willed yourself to love him or her.

So what are you saying are the reasons behind a person feeling “love” for someone, absent of having an initial determination to try to love them?

It's a feeling that either happens or doesn't.

At some point from a first date (or even during a first date) a person makes a determination that they want to try to love the other person. Don’t they?

Absolutely not. Assuming you have a significant other, do you love that person because you merely flipped a coin and decided to try? Why did you choose to try with that person and not someone else?

Whether or not love is best described as a will or a feeling, the following is the rest of the postulates I wrote a couple years ago about love under the assumption that it is a will.

Your assumption is 100% wrong.

[I Have Questions]

So what are you saying are the reasons behind a person feeling “love” for someone, absent of having an initial determination to try to love them?

It's a feeling that either happens or doesn't.

At some point from a first date (or even during a first date) a person makes a determination that they want to try to love the other person. Don’t they?

Absolutely not. Assuming you have a significant other, do you love that person because you merely flipped a coin and decided to try? Why did you choose to try with that person and not someone else?

On that journey to the point where you love someone, there must have been a point where you decided to commit to trying to love that person. Love doesn’t sneak up on you, you have to work for it. So you must, at first, have a will to try to love, before you end up having love.

[Dr. Shades]

Assuming you have a significant other, do you love that person because you merely flipped a coin and decided to try? Why did you choose to try with that person and not someone else?

On that journey to the point where you love someone, there must have been a point where you decided to commit to trying to love that person.

Nope, not at all.

Love doesn’t sneak up on you, you have to work for it.

Nope, you don't have to work for it. It sneaks up on you.

So you must, at first, have a will to try to love, before you end up having love.

Wrong.

You still didn't answer the questions. Do you love anyone? If so, why did you try to love that person as opposed to someone else?

[I Have Questions]

On that journey to the point where you love someone, there must have been a point where you decided to commit to trying to love that person.

Nope, not at all.

I don’t see how that can be. People who grow to love each other, don’t start that path with a love for each other. They start it with a will to see if they can love each other. Otherwise people would be walking down the street meeting people whom they “love” immediately. If that doesn’t happen (and it doesn’t) then people first feel a physical attraction (that’s not love) and then determine to pursue that attraction to see if they can find love. This feels like basic relationship analysis that is commonly accepted.

Love doesn’t sneak up on you, you have to work for it.

Nope, you don't have to work for it. It sneaks up on you.

I disagree with your assertion, and I’ve given examples of why I disagree.

So you must, at first, have a will to try to love, before you end up having love.

Wrong.

You're not the authority on this.

You still didn't answer the questions. Do you love anyone? If so, why did you try to love that person as opposed to someone else?

I didn’t try, I determined to put my effort into to loving them, and love grew from that. The starting point isn’t “love”. It’s physical attraction, common interests, a recognition of a kindred spirit etc. Love comes after you’ve determined to spend time and effort building upon that initial connection. People make a determination to give a relationship a go, long before they are “in love”. That’s a demonstration of having a will to love.

Just saying “Wrong” is a pretty inadequate response, perhaps you can give a fuller, more considered reply in future, with examples and explanations of why you think love turns up as a surprise, regardless of effort.

[Ego]

It looks like it would be helpful if I skipped ahead to the part of the theology where I talk about the Light of Christ and the progression of love.
I pull these remarks mostly from the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion from his book Prolegomena to Charity.

The steps and progression of love:
1) Saturated experience suggests that the world is not how a person thinks.
First a person has some sort of saturated phenomenon; an experience that overwhelms the senses or ability to comprehend in some way. This suggests to a person that the way they have represented the world within their mind, full of ‘intentional objects’, is not an accurate depiction of the noumenal world, or the world as it really is.

2) The person gets the idea that another person is a conscious being independent of himself.
This is related to what biologists call the theory of mind, the ability humans and some animals have to intuit that other creatures have minds like their own. In philosophy this epiphany is known as sonder. It is characterized by realizing that other people are not merely objects in the world, but other conscious beings. Sometimes people will express their sonder like ‘I realize that everyone else is the main character of their own lives just like I am for mine’. Marion used the example of staring into someone’s pupil and realizing that entirely beyond our consciousness, is another consciousness staring back at us through that eye.

3) The person is enjoined or called to fulfill moral law in relation to the other person.
Marion said that after a person has this realization of sonder, that they would feel an imperative to act morally towards the other person, whereas they might have had little regard for doing so before. He is vague as to the source of this injunction, but Mormon scripture would posit that it comes from the light of Christ, “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man⁠, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.” (Moroni 7:16) and later in verse 18 this is identified as the ‘light of Christ’. Now arguments abound within philosophy about what moral law entails, so that is why I talked earlier about the golden rule as a baseline, which is something Jesus taught, and rooted it in the will to power and pleasure to make it more concrete. Perhaps this injunction is best described as a feeling, in the case of charity/altruism, that would make it a feeling of compassion.
This leads me to present the first theorem about love:
General love
A will to power and joy for another person is a manifestation of love. (Theorem 2)
A distinction between particular love and general love was made by Jean-luc Marion though he did not use those terms to describe it. It's not very complicated; particular love is the love that a person has for a specific other person while a general love is the love that a person has for any other person whether stranger or friend. I term that will to power and joy for another as general love. General love has a scriptural basis in Jesus’s 2nd great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). I will explain particular love later.
Logical proof:
Consciousness is part of true essence [post. L] so a person having a will that the consciousness of another person experience power and joy unifies the true essence of the other with his own as he innately has a will to power and pleasure for himself [post. K].

4) The person acts according to the light of Christ’s injunction if he has a will of love but refuses if he has a will of pride.
This point would be why I am hesitant to accept that love is characterized solely by the feeling. Because I think it is entirely possible that a person has a moment of realization and compassion for another, but ignores it for selfish designs, and conversely, I think it is possible a person might feel an urge towards cruelty, perhaps in revenge, or for some other reason, but choose to temper themselves because they understand the harm it would cause the other person to experience (again necessitating that they understand that the other person is an independent conscious being).

Alternative to positing a strict will of love vs a will of pride, the theology works well and in some cases better if it is assumed that it is the inherent nature of a person to have a will of love, but that it can be inhibited in degree. Under these circumstances God would have an infinite will of love simply because he freely let go of all inhibitions (or perhaps never had them to begin with) and Satan has pure pride because he has inhibited all of his love. Love might be able to be considered more akin to a feeling in these circumstances, because the injunction or imperative to love would come from within as part of a person’s core essence as a feeling, loving another would be simply allowing this to be manifested and not choosing to inhibit it (though natural man doctrine suggests inhibiting it is the default state for a mortal).
That being said, I don’t think that is what Dr. Shades has in mind when he says it’s a feeling, however he is being rather vague so I don’t know.

[Marcus]

On that journey to the point where you love someone, there must have been a point where you decided to commit to trying to love that person.

Nope, not at all.

Love doesn’t sneak up on you, you have to work for it.

Nope, you don't have to work for it. It sneaks up on you....

It sounds like you are conflating love with attraction.

[I Have Questions]

Nope, not at all.


Nope, you don't have to work for it. It sneaks up on you....

It sounds like you are conflating love with attraction.

That’s also my thinking about Shades’ responses.

[Dr. Shades]

Nope, you don't have to work for it. It sneaks up on you....

It sounds like you are conflating love with attraction.

Not at all. I most definitely know the difference.