We can impact mental processes by messing with the meat, so the meat can’t just be reflecting something else - the meat has to be at the least an integral part of the processing itself.
In fact the massive scope of things we can do to the mind by messing with the meat pretty much relegates the theorized recorders to the role of merely reflecting. If our minds were safely ensconced away in extraphysical souls it wouldn’t be possible to get them drunk by throwing booze at a meaty reflection of them.
In order to have a model where we have extraphysical souls that are in control of our bodies that isn’t disproven by booze you have to go all the way to the D&D model - booze on a physical brain can’t get an extraphysical soul drunk, but the extraphysical soul can knowingly pretend that Thag is getting drunk, even though neither Thag or the booze really exists. This does require that Thag’s sentience be nonexistent, though - under the D&D model we don’t so much have eternal souls; we are the figments of the imaginations of things that aren’t us.
(Er, which means that nobody on earth goes to heaven or hell at all under that model, because none of us exist, even as minds. To keep this vaguely related to the topic of the thread and all.)
I find it curious that people assume if we are eternal beings that we will experience time similarly to how we experience it as mortals (or experience it at all)
If there is a God I doubt he/she is constrained by time. Even though we cannot conceive of an existence without time my guess is that time just doesn’t exist in an afterlife.
How’s this for a definition of heaven: direct exposure/closeness/oneness to/with God.
ISTR the movie What Dreams May Come sorta takes that angle. Hell sucks, but ultimately you end up where you want to be. I like it. It comports to a God who will embrace any who want to be embraced, and also won’t try and control how you feel about stuff (free will).
In my worldview, without time there cannot be change of any kind - motion is, for example, change is position as time passes. So in the absence of time, everything is perfectly static - no motion, no conversation, no thought. A world without time (specifically, the passage of time) is a static snapshot. It seems to me that without time, sentience itself is impossible - and thus, no form of meaningful existence would be, either.
Of course, there’s time and then there’s time. God could be unconstrained by our time, the same way I’m not constrained by the running time of a movie. I can take the Catwoman movie and run time forward and backward, pausing it, stepping through it, viewing it all from the outside. I’m experiencing my own time, but I’m outside of Catwoman time. God could be outside of earth-time the same way - our entire timeline could be spread out before him like frames of a movie, in which it only looks like time is passing from the inside.
Under this model, we wouldn’t stop being in the timeline/movie when we “went” to heaven - the ‘us’ in the timeline wouldn’t go anywhere and a separate copy of us would just be spontaneously created in god’s reality, like that copy of Halle Barry I have locked up in my basement. This copy would then experience God’s time the same way God does, which (as far as time is concerned) is the same way anybody experiences the time they’re in - they can move around and do things and be different from one moment to the next.
To start, it might be 1/3 Heaven, 1/4 Purgatory, 1/3 Hell.
But as time goes by and those in Purgatory and Hell start to truly repent, they go to The Good Place. And Hell isnt physical torture (for most), it’s just the realization that you aren’t in heaven and you are denied the grace of God and it’s your fault.
Leaving only those who led others to do evil being roasted down in the nethermost depths. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.
That seems like a rather arbitrary exception to God’s mercy.
Plus I’m pretty sure most people have led other people do evil. I’m pretty sure at least once I was rude to somebody and that caused the other person to be rude back to me in return.
It specifically establishes that that they were roasting specifically because they were leaders who made other people be evil, rather than for their own evilness or for some other reason?
Hell cannot be properly described as “punishment”, though, because punishment is a tool for behavior modification, to discourage the actor from engaging in that particular behavior. Released souls are not actors, so any punishment that is visited upon them cannot change their behavior: consignment to Tartarus can only be revenge. A deity that has a vengeance need is not only detestable, it is clearly too weak and lacking in character to be suitable for the universal sinecure.
There’s the alternative possibility that it’s not so much revenge as throwing away the combustible garbage. That does require the deity in question to have no empathy or love for the people it’s discarding, of course, but it’s pretty normal for a craftsman to carelessly discard failed projects even while it loves the successes that it lauds as a reflection of its own creative skill.
But, if my timing is off and I fall out of the deity’s good graces shortly before I die, before I have a chance to repent, I get to burn in hell for having bad timing.
On the other hand, if I do very bad things but keep up on my penance, I can stay properly in the deity’s window of grace, as long as my demise is properly timed. Seems like the whole repentance thing is license to be evil but still make it to the good place.
The mechanism of the distribution of the heres-after seems deeply flawed.
Purgatory, ok, but isn’t hell a one way ticket in the Christian tradition? What good is repenting then? If I was eternally punished I’d rather curse the deity than doing any repenting that gets me nowhere.
Well, then I’ve learned something new today. I’ve always believed there was no way out of hell because you’d be…DOOMED.
ETA: just another thought. If this is the case, then why did they have to invent purgatory at some time? I’ve always thought they did it to squeeze in a get-out-of-jail card into the myth.