A comment about "Annihilationism and Eternal Conscious Suffering"

In an article titled "Annihilationism and Eternal Conscious Suffering", Parableman uses an example based upon relativistic physics to demonstrate that the doctrines of Annihilationism and Eternal Conscious Suffering (the destruction of the soul in Hell versus the eternal torment of the soul in Hell) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The argument is to suppose that observer Bob has piloted his starship sufficiently close to a black hole to suffer an extreme amount of time dilation from the point of view of observer Alice, who remains at rest a large distance away from the black hole. Bob would therefore experience some finite period of suffering (presumably due to radiation orbiting the hole or tidal forces due to the extreme curvature of spacetime there) followed by destruction at some point inside the event horizon of the black hole. On the other hand, Alice could observe that this finite period of suffering for Bob has been dilated to an infinite amount of time in her reference frame.

My comment is that Bob's consciousness of suffering will at some point not have any kind of meaningful counterpart for Alice. As far as Alice is concerned, Bob will eventually be time-dilated to the extent that even the motions of his constituent molecules will essentially cease. Insofar as consciousness is based upon the motion of molecules such as neurotransmitters within the human body, Bob's consciousness will have ceased according to Alice's observations.

To be specific (and what follows assumes that I haven't made some terrible error in black hole physics), we could observe that it would take a finite amount of Alice's time for Bob to reach an arbitrarily choosen distance x (as measured by Alice) from the event horizon and an infinite amount of time to cross that distance x. In Bob's reference frame, it would take him a finite time t to cross his measurement of the distance to the event horizon. The smaller we choose x, the smaller t will be. I would argue that t could be choosen sufficiently small to preclude Bob having any type of conscious awareness of suffering over the interval t. If Bob is not suffering over the interval t, then from Alice's frame of reference, he cannot be suffering over the infinite amount of time it takes him to cross the distance x.

Since Parableman's adopted definition of the doctrine of Eternal Conscious Suffering for his argument does not apply if Alice only observes Bob to be conscious for a finite duration of time, Bob cannot be both Enternally Conscious and Annihilated in this case.