Ironically, when reason failed me, I could only find solace in the writings of a man who has been called a ‘rationalist;’ however, after making repeated and failed runs at being an academic and ending up in prison, what made me a kindred spirit with Baruch Spinoza was not reason, but stress disease.
Addiction to adrenalin highs as a prisoner guard, bottomed out in despair after a prisoner tried to kill me and some years later, I found a young prisoner who had hung himself on Mother’s day.
This came to me from someone on the net. Maybe it’s going around this February. My response follows:
” The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.
Do not try to \”find yourself\”, you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, \”This is who I make myself\”.
Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, \”Fuck You!\”. Rembember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.
The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free” Author unknown
MY RESPONSE: Congratulations on finding such a pure example of bad humanism.
This potpourri of narcissim violates common knowledge and experience, feelings, logic, science, philosophy, reason and understanding – (Wittgenstein’s ‘now I know how to go on.)”
Science removed humans from the centre of the universe where religion had placed us.
This writing puts humans back in the centre, like dog poop on a sidewalk; poop in which you can’t help stepping.
The question of God, as Spinoza said, is a question of what we know or ‘what is it in which we have stepped??’
- It isn’t ourselves and it isn’t poop.
The writer is right though in saying that putting ourselves at the centre of the universe is meaningless.
The conceit of meaningless is the lazy opposite of thinking, which requires work.
1) The Language Shuffle
In preparation for this topic, I read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Reading Wittgenstein is the intellectual equivalent of having your mouth washed out with soap for using naughty words.
However, reading Wittgenstein is the necessary propaedeutic for discussing a philosopher’s theory of knowledge. As he said, “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” 1
Spinoza had similar concerns: “Indeed, most errors result solely from the incorrect application of words to things.” 2 This is why Spinoza’s first work, where he begins to develop his theory of knowledge is called; Emendation of the Intellect. Like Wittgenstein, Spinoza knew thinking had to be cured of its ‘mental’ intoxicants.
To stay free of the mental traps which accompany emotions, Spinoza knew he had to redefine words like: ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘reason,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘idea’ and even, ‘God..
‘Understanding,’ is the most important word in Spinoza’s lexicon. Most of us read it as fixed stuff in our brains, i.e., ‘Now I understand algebra,’ but, as Wittgenstein says:
“Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all – for that is the expression which confuses you. But ask yourself: in what sort of circumstances do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on?” 3
Content analyses of Spinoza’s works suggest he used understanding as the alpha and omega of how to think. It is his guide for the ‘conatus,’ or the striving of the organism to preserve and enhance itself.
Understanding begins when objects in the universe inform us they have an individual and specific existence. It completes the circle when, as Einstein says, we are able to break out of the prison of self-interest…”by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 4 Spinoza says reason is not “…the principal thing in us” but only like a staircase to understanding.5 His theory of knowledge was not the brainchild of a rationalist.
Many Spinozians believe there were two sides of Spinoza, even two Spinozas;’ the immature writer of the Emendation and Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being and the mature Spinoza of the Ethics and subsequent works. This view violates content analysis.
Spinoza begins his development of a theory of knowledge in the Emendation and completes it in the Short Treatise, which was so radical, he was afraid to make it public.
For Spinoza there are three ascending levels of how we can perceive the universe: For Spinoza there are three ascending levels of how we can perceive the universe: 1) Opinion, 2) True Belief and 3) Science. Opinion is the source of doubt and error in our thinking. Opinion arises from misconstruing the place of individual things in our random experiences and use of signs. Spinoza believed only individual things have existence, not general or universal ideas.
A ‘true belief,’ is “…a strong proof based on reasons,” 6 Spinoza said. Reason is not the third kind of knowledge or science, although it demonstrates a true path to follow to the understanding of science. Science “…does not consist in conviction based on reasons but in immediate union with the thing itself.” Science does what true belief cannot, “…make us enjoy intellectually…what is in us…” 7
[Note: Spinoza’s separation of science from reason (true belief), may have been due to an insight into the nature of things that physicists call, ‘’entanglement’8’ and to a related notion, ‘synchronicity.” 9 Reason, (true belief), operates in local knowledge while Spinoza’s concept of science is generated by non-local knowledge. Because of quantum weirdness in the universe and our brains, scientific discoveries leap over reason by jumping out of the whole].
Science is the highest level of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge in the Short Treatise, but by the time he writes the Ethics, he has substituted the words, ‘intuitive knowledge,’ to describe the third kind of knowledge.10
White and Stirling translate this phrase as “intuitive science.” 11 Wittgenstein says the word, ‘intuition,’ is, ‘an unnecessary shuffle.’ 12.
Now for a radical hypothesis on Spinoza. After developing a theory of knowledge that reaches its highest apex of science in the Short Treatise, Spinoza devotes the rest of his writing primarily to ‘true belief or reason.’ No wonder he gets misidentified as a rationalist.
Why does Spinoza do an unnecessary shuffle on science?
First, his ‘true belief’ background, was in theology and philosophy. It is easy in both disciplines, to let language go on ‘holidays.’ 13 While Spinozians always praise Part One of the Ethics, with its so-called, ontological argument, George Boole suggests it is not very logical. 14
Near the end of the Ethics, Spinoza says his demonstration in Part I was only ‘true belief,’ and inferior to the knowledge of particular things (that he describes as science in the Emendation and Short Treatise.15
Another reason for Spinoza’s shuffle might be his times, making him cautious about revealing his true belief about science. His motto was ‘caute.’ Spinoza’s admonition at the end of the Treatise and his turning back from publishing the Ethics, suggest this.
The reason I believe it is true, is that Spinoza developed the gift he received in understanding, (‘now I know how to go on,’), from his circumstances. His philosophy grew out of stress, what we might call PTSD, today.
How can Spinoza be described as an ‘ivory tower’ philosopher, in light of what he said at the start of the Emendation?
“By persistent meditation, however, I came to the conclusion that if only
I could resolve, wholeheartedly, [to change my plan of life], I would be giving up
certain evils for a certain good. For I saw that I was in the greatest danger and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength, however uncertain it might be- like a man suffering from a fatal illness, who, foreseeing certain death unless he employs a remedy, is forced to seek it, however uncertain, with all his strength.” 16
This is not language on holiday. Spinoza found, ‘how to go on,’ (understanding), in exploring a theory of knowledge that would cure his intellect of the inadequate thinking that was caused by the circumstances of his body. Just as ‘mental,’ bewitches us in language, so it does in discussing the health of the body.
Having found a theory of knowledge that cumulated in science in the Emendation and Short Treatise, Spinoza began a preliminary study of the passions that arise in our body as a result of circumstances that affect us, and further developed it in the Ethics. This study, as he clearly notes, is carried out by reason,’ not science.
If Spinoza lived today, when neuroscience is making significant discoveries, he might have included these discoveries in his discussion. How excited Spinoza would have been with Jean-Pierre Changeux’s, Neuronal Man 17 and Antonio Damasio’s, Looking For Spinoza:Joy,Sorrow and the Feeling Brain.18
After the Treatise, Spinoza carries out ‘true belief’ discussions on ethics, religion and politics. However, his understanding of science is always peeking around the edges of these works. In them, science takes a not unnecessary shuffle in God talk, considering his time.
What would Spinoza’s theory of knowledge be like in our day? What is the difference between scientific and ‘true belief’ thinkers in our understanding? We need Spinoza’s definitions of God for this.
Curley says, “Spinoza’s God is an ultimate principle of explanation.”19 Spinoza’s discussions on God in the Treatise, describe it as the operative and generative cause of every single thing that exists. For Spinoza, God and nature are abstract words describing the same thing. This is how Spinoza could say God is immanent in everything that exists in the universe, including us.
Spinoza says we know two attributes of God: thought and extension. Thought is the operative cause and extension, is the generative cause of everything that exists. We have thinkers whom we relate to as operative causes or ‘true belief,’ and we have thinkers we relate to as generative causes or seminal. The former are related to language and ‘strong proofs,’ (logic) and the latter are the ‘seed’ or ‘semen’ in the evolution of our thinking.
Spinoza’s understanding of Euclid is seminal. Contextual evidence supports this conclusion. Then there’s Aristotle. The ‘true beliefs’ influence in Spinoza’s life, starts with Descartes, then Hobbs, Bacon, Maimonides and others, more, ‘true belief,’ influences than seminal ones.
II. Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.
In the Emendation, Spinoza lays the foundation of his theory of knowledge and completes it in the Treatise. This foundation, which never changed throughout his writing, is based on the operation of science and its language, mathematics/logic.
Bertrand Russell says we are inclined to take the ‘logical foundation of things,’ including mathematics, for granted. 20 Spinoza discovered the logical foundation of things in Euclid. This turned Spinoza’s thinking away from religious and secular goals for his life. He rejected God as a transcendent goal or end of living and said God is the immanent logic in everything that exists in the universe. 27
This discovery got Spinoza kicked out of the Jewish religion, barred from contact with all Jews, including family, and lost him his job. It is suggested it almost cost him his life when a hit man, sent by the synagogue, tried to kill him.
Talk about trauma! Spinoza’s ‘fatal illness’ talk, was no sham. 29 Having secular goals yanked away, he examines wealth, fame and pleasure and says they will not endure nor satisfy. Spinoza says there is only one goal or good that never fails humanity: “…the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.” 21
In the Emendation, Spinoza identifies this knowledge as science, although his description is caught up in the language shuffles of ‘essence,’ and ‘intuition.’ Human perfection is the one goal of science. Everything else is useless, he said. To achieve this goal, Spinoza sets out to know as much of nature as he could, to reform society. All of Spinoza’s works are based on this endeavor. 22
However, we have to be sure our own thinking is not messed up: “…we must devise a way of healing the intellect…so that it understands things successfully without error and as well as possible. “ 23 This begins with understanding how we perceive nature, to know both nature and our power of knowing it.24
Spinoza says we inherit most of our ways of knowing things, through what we experience and the language by which we express these events. The former is limited to only our experiences, and the latter, as Wittgenstein says, can ‘bewitch us,’ and both lead into error.“ 25
So we turn to education, (self and taught). We learn to seek the causes of things in the accumulated wisdom of humanity. But, the proofs of our teachers are often in conflict, catching us up in language games of, ‘webs of belief.’ 26
When Spinoza called reason, ‘true beliefs,’ he was being gracious, wishing reason could be confined to ‘adequate ideas ’and ‘common notions.’27 Reason, however, is a child of language and caught up in its inherent relativity or shuffles.
The ancient Greeks believed in demonstrations, not in external proofs about the things we experience (reason) but rather how these things ‘coincide’ with the operation of the brain we call thinking. This is what Spinoza meant by ‘immediate union with the thing itself or science.
Thomas Heath’s introduction to Euclid’s Elements is the best description of the language and concepts at Aristotle and Euclid’s time. A quote from Aristotle shows how he uses the word, ‘demonstration.’ It plants the seed of Spinoza’s usage:
“Now that which is per se necessarily true and must necessarily be
thought so, is not a hypothesis nor yet a postulate. For demonstration
has not to do with reasoning from outside but with the reason dwelling
in the soul…It is always possible to raise objection to reasoning from
outside, but to contradict the reason within us, is not always possible.”28
Euclid is ‘projaculated’ throughout Spinoza’s writings; Spinoza’s intellectual father. Euclid’s common notions, emphasizing equality, are, as Spinoza understood, the foundation of mathematics and ethics.
The word, ‘equal,’ is so common, it is often overlooked. However, it is the glue that holds mathematics and logic together. Euclid’s common notions on equality are:
1) “Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.”
2) “If equals be added to equals, the whole are equal.”
3) “If equals be subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal.”
4) “Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another.” 29
Their profundity is only surpassed by the simple line with which Euclid began his
definitions: “A point is that which has no part.” 30 No wonder Spinoza considered Euclid the master!
Spinoza’s understanding of God/Nature was derived from Euclid’s fifth common notion: “The whole is greater than the part.” 31
It was in Euclid’s Common Notions, that Spinoza discovered the logical foundations of things. These notions we take for granted: equality and whole/part, are the operations of the brain that coincide with things themselves.
Science is the operation of our brains that adds, subtracts, and coincides parts and wholes to find them equal. This is the operation in our brain that leads to the discoveries of mathematics and logic and ultimately unites them.
What is science? Spinoza could go only so far with his insight by saying it is”…immediate union with the thing itself.” 32 The discussion continues with George Boole’s, Laws of Thought, 33 and Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe. 34 Lloyd’s work gives an overview in which to fit Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.
The universe is made up of single things, (bits). These singular things send and receive information. All information is generated and operates through logic gates of 1 or 0, yes or no. The universe is in a quantum state of both 1 and 0, (waves and particles) until information is processed.
The first and second laws of thermodynamics, informed by entropy, say that these singular things are conserved as energy and expanded as information. A singular thing could be as diverse as an atom’s spin, a hippo stepping on your foot, or a riot inside prison.
Our body receives information from the whole of information and the singular things (or bits) which express it. This information is processed by ‘senses,’ in our neuronal system.
The neuronal system, like the rest of the universe, is in quantum flux. The system is not binary until certain events occur. If our brain is like a computer, it would be a quantum one.
Neurons pass information from one to another through synapses (electrical or chemical gaps). Following George Boole and Seth Lloyd, we can describe synapses as logic gates. The information in those logic gates can be processed as 1 or 0, (yes or no) or both 1 and 0.
This passing is throughout the entire body, not just the brain. All physiological systems are guided by synapses which even hover in our DNA, determining whether we will be human or a rat. (Same DNA).
Neuroscience is a relatively young discipline which will give us a wealth of understanding about how the brain operates and how language arises and operates in our brain. These discoveries will confirm George Boole’s laws of signs as paths of logic gates, (synapses) in the brain.
III Spinoza’s Tourist Traps
In the Emendation, Spinoza says: “the…intellect, by its inborn powers, makes intellectual tools for itself.” 35 He also says: “…in order to know that I know, it is necessary that I must first know.” 36 In other words, singular things send us information. Spinoza redefined mental constructs as intellectual tools that we use, in going on in our thinking. ‘Mind,’ ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ ‘idea,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘certainty,’ ‘objective essence,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘body,’ are different intellectual tools to demonstrate how we receive information from singular things and their totality in the universe, (Nature/God).
Each tool has a different function in Spinoza’s theory of knowledge. ‘Mind’ is the totality of information. He calls this totality, ‘substance’ and its expression, an ‘attribute.’ The sending and receiving information by singular things (including us), is a subset of mind or a mode. He calls this, ‘soul’.
This totality of sending and receiving information is Nature/God. The singular thing and the information it sends are expressions of the same thing. Mind, (thought) and body (extension), are identical. There is no ‘mental’ in the universe or in us. ‘God thinks,’ is not an anthropomorphism by Spinoza
For Spinoza, the totality of information is not bounded by space and time. The unbounded, he calls, ‘eternity’. Modern scientists waver in their opinions about this.
Because all things, including us, are subsets of mind or the totality of information, everything is, always has been and always will be. Therefore, the part of us which is the subset of mind can never die and is eternal. This is what Spinoza means by necessity. The soul is how we receive information through our receptor, the body. It is the form of mind that has duration. This tool ceases when duration ends and translates into a different form in the totality of information.
Simply put, the soul, like the body, dies. But the conservation of energy and expansion of information it demonstrates, is eternal. Spinoza means, by ‘body’, what physiologists and neuroscientists understand as body. (The brain, like head, legs and so forth, is body. There is no mental substance). Spinoza, however, says body was never created but existed in a different form before it was generated (evolved) to its present form.
Different scientists have expressed the translation of information by saying the DNA of humanity exists in our genes; we are condensed energy, waiting to be liberated. Stardust.
When Spinoza said creation never happened, the soul dies with the body and God is the totality of information (mind) in nature, this did not make him very popular with religious people. So he hid these comments, mostly in footnotes in the Short Treatise that were not meant for public consummation. These ‘heresies’ did, however, leak out. Spinoza’s redefinition of God has only been appreciated by select individuals like Einstein.
An ‘idea’ is a neurological connection of our body to the information sent us by things. Understanding is the eternal causal connections of how to go on, that is in the totality of information (mind) and finitely in our brain (body). ‘Certainty,’ ‘objective essence,’ and ‘truth,’ are different linguistic moves in describing how we receive information.
In his attempt to understand that the universe is made up of singular things that send and receive information, Spinoza took us on a philosophical holiday. But the anthropological tourist traps were fun.
IV Spinoza and Modern Science
Spinoza’s concept of science was as old as Aristotle and Euclid, as modern as information theory. His concept of God as the operative and generative cause of everything that exists, finds its equivalent in ‘It from Qubit.’ 37 Spinoza’s theory of knowledge operates in the same way as ‘logic gates’ operate in information theory.
We could wish Spinoza had said more about science as his third kind of knowledge, not disguised it in the shuffle of God talk, but his cover-up was necessary. Today we can put Spinoza’s theory of knowledge into the context of modern science.
It begins with George Boole’s The Laws of Thought. 38 His investigation into the laws of thought gave us Boolean algebra which underlies the language of artificial thought – the computer.
Like Spinoza, Boole believed, “…language is an instrument of human reason and not merely a medium for the expression of thought…” 39 However, Boole does a modern rationalist shuffle on Spinoza’s concept of science as “…immediate union with the thing itself…”
Boole comes down on the side of what is called, ‘modernity,” even though his actual discussion leaves the question of demonstration versus modernity, open.40
However, Boole considers his three laws of signs as, ‘instruments of language.’ His first two laws are operations of the brain, independent of language and the source of language. 41 Essentially, we do not model our thinking on mathematics and logic but rather they are modeled on the operations of our brains.
Here are the three elements of Boole’s laws of signs: 1) Literal symbols as x, y, & c, representing things as subjects of our conceptions. 2) Signs of operations as +,-, x, standing for those operations of the mind by which the conception of things are combined or resolved so as to form new conceptions involving the same elements.. 3) The sign of identity, =. 42 Using these three elements, Boole classifies language:
Class I
“Appellative or descriptive signs, expressing either the name of a thing
or some quality or circumstance belonging to it.” 43
Class II
“Signs of those mental operations whereby we collect parts into a whole or separate a whole into its parts.” 44
Class III
“Signs by which relation is expressed and by which we form propositions.”45
Frege, Russell and Whitehead expand significantly on Boole’s discussion of ‘class.’ 46 For them, the elements got lost in the class. Frege’s idea of thought is confined to Boole’s third class. He does an idealist shuffle. 47
Boole’s genius was in his next step, after introducing the laws of thought and classifying them. He produces the “…axioms which the symbols introduce…” 48 He draws the general axioms from Euclid:
“1st. If equal things are added to equal things, the wholes are equal.”
“2nd. If equal things are taken from equal things, the remainders are equal.” 49
While we will not repeat Boole’s ingenious application of the rule of transportation, to draw an analogy between logic and algebra, while realizing its limitation, he comes to the conclusion that gave birth to the language of computers, the special law of logic: X2 =X: 50
“Now of the symbols of number, there are but two, viz, 0 and 1, which are subject to the same formal laws. We know that 02 = 0 and that 12=1;
and the equation X2=X considered as algebraic, has no other root than 0
and 1.” 51
Thus began the discipline of mathematical logic. This discipline has grown rationally well beyond Boole’s early description.
Boole, like many modern thinkers, misidentified the elements of science as language, when they were operations of our brain. This is why today’s ’science’ has separated into parts and seldom finds its way back into the whole.
Spinoza’s theory of knowledge was based on the operations of the brain, which he derived from Euclid’s common notions, (as did Boole). Spinoza called this process, ‘ideas of ideas’, (reflection) which gives us method.
A true method follows the path by which we receive information from the singular object as ideas, (synaptic connections) re: their existence and essence – what makes them a certain kind of thing) and relates them to other ideas.
To know, we must first have a true idea, (synaptic connection). The information we receive from singular things, teaches us how to go on, (understand) in our use of this information. We relate these ideas to other ideas (synaptic connections) of how to go on and connect them to the unity of information out of which they arose.
If we follow this method in our understanding, Spinoza says, we understand, “…both our own powers and the order of nature.” Therefore, we can lay down rules for our own guidance of how to go on and, by understanding, the order of nature, restrain ourselves from, ‘useless pursuits.’ This is Spinoza’s whole method or theory of knowledge.52
All of the operations of mathematics are ways we can think about how to go on, (understand). Wittgenstein said: “We do not realize that we calculate, operate with words and in the course of time, translate them sometimes into one picture, sometimes another.” 53
Language finds its direction in symbols and operations but finds its ‘bewitchment,’ in relations, or, as we so often misuse the word, ‘relative’ thinking. Wittgenstein’s pictures.
The shuffle of language leads to what Spinoza calls, ‘inadequate thinking.’
This is a beginning in understanding the radical break. Spinoza made with the philosophies of his day and how his work reverberates in modern concepts of science. All of the labels that have been applied to Spinoza: rationalist, humanist, atheist, pantheist, are attempts to co-opt him back into the fold of the bewitchment of our intelligence that he left when he wrote the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being.
Caute
REFERENCES
1) Wittgenstein, L. trans. Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan
2) Spinoza, B., trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael Morgan, The Complete Works, 2002, Indianapolis, Cambridge, Hackett
3) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 61e
4) Herbert, N. 1985, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Garden City, New York, Anchor/Doubleday, p. 250. Herbert ends his book with Einstein’s quote.
5) Spinoza, Shirley, op cit. p. 100
6) Spinoza, B. trans & ed. Edwin Curley, 1985, Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol 1, Princeton, Princeton U. Press
7) Spinoza, Ibid p. 102
Albert, D.Z. and Galchen, R. March, ‘09, A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity, Scientific American, pp. 32-39
9) Peat, F.D. 1987 Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, New York: Bantam
10) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 475
11) Spinoza, B. trans. White, H.L. and Stirling, The Ethic of Benedict D. Spinoza, 1937, 4th ed. London: Oxford U. Press
12) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 54e
13) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 19e
14) Boole, G. 1854 (1958 ed.) An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probability, New York” Dover,, pp. 185-218
15) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 475
16) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 379
17) Changeux, J. trans. Gorey, L. 1985 Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, New York: Oxford, Oxford U. Press
18) Damasio, A. 2003, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, New York: Harcourt
19) Curley, E. 1994, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, Princeton: Princeton U., p. xxiv
20) Russell, B. 1919, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin
21) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 11
22) Ibid pp 13-16
23) Ibid p. 11
24) Ibid p. 15
25) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 47e
26) Quine, W.V. Ullian, J.S. 1970, The Web of Belief, New York, Random House
27) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 478
28) Euclid, trans. Heath, T. 1956, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Vol 1, New York: Dover, p. 118
29) Ibid, p. 155
30) Ibid p. 153
31) Ibid p. 155
32) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 102a
33) Boole, op cit.
34) Lloyd, S. 2007, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, New York: Vintage/Random House
35) Spinoza, Shirley, op cit. p. 10
36) Ibid
37) Lloyd, S., NGY, .J. Black Hole Computers, Scientific American, Nov. ‘04, pp. 52-61
38) Lloyd, op cit.
39) Boole, op cit. p. 24
Re: “By your lack of response, I assume that you’ve put me in the ‘crazy person’ category.
Obviously you have mistaken me for an academic. I like to make a distinction beween ‘academic’ and ’scholar.’ Academics tend to critique everything from their own paradigm of knowledge, rather than understand.
Scholars pursue understanding, even if it overthrows an accepted paradigm.
To understand your theory of emissions would take a long more time than you have given me. I have been working on the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, for over ten years and I am just beginning to understand his theory of knowledge.
Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe) says that “…the more original and imaginative the paper that I submit, the more quickly and harshly it is rejected.” (p3). This is in a chapter that was left out of his book, because it was too technical. This is all online, Chp. 7, Director’s Cut: It From Quibit).
Since you appear to be rejecting most of establishment physics, you must expect ‘harsh rejection’ and being put in a ‘crazy person’ category. Do not expect otherwise. But also, DON’T GIVE UP!’
Spinoza divided knowledge into (1) opinion (2) true belief or reason and (3) science. Most people operate by just opinion, including many academics. True belief is just a thing of reason that is a stepping stone to understanding. Science, for Spinoza is what the ancient Greeks called, ‘demonstration,’ or reason living inside of us, not external observation.
Spinoza called this phenomena, ‘intuition’ but, as Wittgenstein says, this word is an ‘unnecessary shuffle.’ I believe what Spinoza meant by science is best represented by Seth Lloyd and Antonio Damasio’s works. Lloyd says: “…entanglement is responsible for the generation of information in the universe (Programming, p. 119). Damasio describes ‘feelings’ as a superposition of body and cognition. (Descartes Error pp. 143-147).
Understanding is the logic of the universe that lives within our ability to think and act.
I do not understand your work yet but I am willing to pursue your idea of paradigm. I do however, wish you would do more showing why establishment physics is wrong than just to state that it is.
Also, as a philosopher strongly influenced by Spinoza’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of abstract thinking, I find your very abstract critique of the ‘abstractionist paradigm’ as Wittgenstein would say, ‘bewitching.’ This is not a critique of your ideas but of your methods of presenting them.
Spinoza said, “Some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work and they help us to understand things distinctly. Among these, we include all relations which have reference to different things. Thse we call ‘beings of reason.’ (Collected works, Edward Curley trans. Vol 1, p. 92.
As you can see, I am a philosopher with a strong interest in science but not a physicist. My critique is only about being clear and distinct in your presentation, not a critique of content.
Continue your work.
Dick DeShaw
(This was written as a response to a challenge to list one book that is most important to the ages 4, 14, 40 & forever)
Here are my selections but first a confession: (Actually three). The works of each author are more than one book because the whole is greater than the part.
Second, One of my selections is a repeat, since work important for adolescents is exponentially more important for ‘Forever,’ only for different reasons.
Finally, I did not read any of these books until I was in ‘Forever.’ I am 72 and contemplating how the specific bundle of condensed energy which is myself, will soon be liberated into the universe.
I grew up in a blue-collar family where no one read to me. My father subscribed to men’s magazines like True and Argosy. My mother read romance, ironically a magazine to which my writer wife sold an account of our honeymoon, years later.
My only childhood books were cheap supermarket specials; fairy tales and bible stories till I discovered comic books, graduating from Disney to Mad and then Classics Illustrated which led me to the books they illustrated. This meant James Fenimore Cooper’s, ‘The Deerslayer,’ ‘Dicken’s, ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ and Hugo’s Les Miserable’s.’ Cooper was a magnificent storyteller and his works were illustrated by Howard Pyle.
At age fourteen I was into horror, especially H.P. Lovecraft. Age forty was the age of reason for me, especially Kant, Hegel and the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. But reason failed me in my late forties.
I became disillusioned with academia and became a prison guard in the federal system. Soon caught up in the anger that dripped from prison walls like blood in a slasher movie, I stopped reading.
Fortunately, a prisoner tried to stick a shiv in my gut. Diagnosed with Post Trauma Stress Disorder, I was off for 3 months on stress leave. I began to read again. Back at work, I went on midnight cowboy shift where I could read between each walk on the ranges.
I pursued reason in philosophy, science and mathematics to no avail, when a young man hung himself on Mother’s Day, leaving a note for his mother saying ‘I can’t be a good Christian.” Reason crumbled. Giving the kiss of life to cold, dead lips evokes the horror of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’
My wife discovering that I was trying to get prisoners to kill me, made me see a psychologist who got me out on disability. Two years later I retired. But I brought the horror home. Then I discovered the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza. My recovery began.
So my selections are personal. At age 4 I recommend all of Andrew Lang’s fairy tales. Childhood is a time for wonder, explored in fantasy and imagination. But we have to grow up. Wonder gives way to the pursuit of goals that will make us agents in our own lives.
Many of these goals are only fantasy and imagination, so adolescence at fourteen is the time to discuss another form of thinking, guided by the laws of nature and expressed in mathematics and science. At fourteen I recommend Euclid, ‘The thirteen ‘Books of the Elements,’ (translated with introduction and commentary by Sir Thomas L. Heath (in 3 volumes), Dover press.
I specifically recommend this editor because Heath was a scholar of scholars and his commentary is invaluable in understanding ancient Greek thinking. Most people had to endure Euclid’s Geometry at adolescence, stripped of its charm and wonder, which only the original conveys.
Three of the seminal thinkers in my life discovered Euclid at adolescence. He changed their lives and thinking, forever. They are Baruch Spinoza, (whose writing is projaculated with Euclid), Charles Sanders Peirce, (the father of Semiotics) and George Boole, (the father of mathematical logic and the language of the computer).
Euclid’s Elements can teach a fourteen year old the wonder and precise thinking of mathematics, which is the foundation of science. At age forty, Albert Camus says we wake up to the loss of wonder in our lives. We face a crisis of meaning. Sports cars, trophy wives and cheerleader moms, are some expressions of shallow responses to this dilemma.
I faced a crisis of reason myself at 40. My mentor, Baruch Spinoza, faced just such a crisis in his twenties, not long after reading Euclid began to define his life. Because of Spinoza’s beliefs, he was deprived of his religion and any contact with his religion and family as well as his livelihood as a businessman. Spinoza said he was…” forced to seek a remedy…like a man suffering from a fatal illness.” He found this remedy in…” the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.”
So for age 40, I recommend, ‘The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (2 vols). I especially recommend Spinoza’s early works: ‘Treatise of the Emendation, (Cure) of the Intellect’ and his ‘Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being,’ where, influenced by Euclid, Spinoza developed his theory of knowledge, based on the differences between opinion, reason and science.
Spinoza says reason is a stepping stone to a higher form of understanding which he called science, similar to what Aristotle described as …”reason dwelling in the soul.”
In his masterpiece, ‘The Ethics,’ Spinoza deals specifically with the emotions of angst that especially overwhelm 40 year olds and how it can be overcome by being…”in harmony with the order of the whole of nature.”
Forever, as should now be expected, is Euclid’s ‘Elements.’ But we return to this work not to learn how to think but rather to explore the wonder of thinking, which can be imparted to a 4, 14, and 40 year old, equally, but probably best to the 4 year old.
Consider how Euclid began his Definitions: ‘A point is that which has no part.’ The wonder of the universe and our existence in it is caught in this definitions. I think it defines liberation. Whatever that is.
Thank you, Alastair, for posting this Sunday Times review of Graham Farmeleo’s book on Paul Dirac. It came at an opportune time. Several comments in the review were applicable to a significant discovery I made about Spinoza last week, which has been fermenting in my brain since then.
Although I have been reading and meditating on Spinoza’s writing for almost a decade and have especially read the Emendation, Short Treatise and Ethic, over and over, last week I realised Spinoza does not consider science to be a rational activity but rather an intuitive one. (Short Treatise on God, Man And His Well Being, Chapter IV, ‘What Comes From Belief,” pp 102-104 in Edwin Curley’s, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol 1, especially see fn a on p. 102).
As Spinoza says, ” …science which does not consist in convictions based on reasons but in immediate union with the thing itself…” Science makes us enjoy intellectually what is in us, (paraphrase of a sentence presented in negative about true belief/reason).
As the review about Dirac says: ‘…he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagination… Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.” (p1) and :”[Dirac's] ideas came as intuitions. They were not derived from experimental observations but from contemplation of pure mathematics.” (p.2)
These two comments gave me an example of what Spinoza called his third kind of knowledge in the Ethic: intuitive knowledge,” as Curley translates (Part II, Prop 40, sch II) and “intuitive science,” as White translates. (Ibid).
Spinoza says humanities thinking would have been kept in darkness;” …if mathematics, which does not deal with ends but with the essences and properties of forms, had not placed before us, another rule of ruth.” (Underlining, mine – Ethic of Benedict De Spinoza, trans. W. Hale White & Amelia H. Stirling, Oxford, p. 41, Appendix to Part one). I like White’s translation of this passage better than Curley’s because, as any mathematician can tell you, the essence of mathematics is, ‘forms.’
Where am I going with this? In the Emendation, Spinoza says he is confronted with a dilemma. (p. 20, Curley). How can you articulate something which cannot be expressed in language, (a true idea) – and why should you try?
Reason is the child of language, but, as George Boole said, there are three laws of signs: 1) Literal symbols, such as x, y and etc., representing things as subjects of our conceptions. 2) Signs of operation as, +, -, x, standing for the operations of the mind by which the conception of things are combined or resolved so as to form new conceptions involving the same elements. (note – this is Euclid’s Common Notion: The whole is greater than the part). 3) The sign of identity- relations from which we form propositions (p. 27, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought On Which Are Formed The Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, Dover). Obviously Dirac believed the first two laws of signs preceeded and were more important in thinking about the quantum world, than the third law of signs: identity which produces language and the relations of one sign to another which we call reason.
This could be an example of what Spinoza called, ‘intuitive science’ i.e. science based on the logical/mathematical operations in our mind that makes us enjoy intellectually what is in us. Reflecting on this, I realized Spinoza limited the laws of mind by making them the exclusive property of science. I would redefine ‘intuitive science,’ as ‘created intuitions and include at least four subsets of this set: 1) Science (logic & mathematics) 2) Art 3) Music 4) Poetry – in which we examine’ the forms of language. All of these operate by the same law of signs as mathematics and have an emphasis on the first two laws, except poetry, which turns language around so we can examine its intuitive form.
I’m sure Dirac could have said all this with mathematics, in an elegance that language hinders. Thank you for this article.
The Sunday Times January 11, 2009
———————————————————————————————The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton. In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize. He died 25 years ago, yet no biography has appeared until now. It is not hard to see why. As a man he was pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it’s gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.
These considerations might seem to doom Graham Farmelo’s project. But he rescues it by turning it into a panoramic survey of 20th-century physics, from Einstein’s relativity to string theory, scaled down in difficulty for unscientific readers, and showing how Dirac’s ideas interacted with those of colleagues and rivals. He also uses previously unreleased family papers to probe Dirac’s strange personality. Born in 1902, he was the son of a widely respected Bristol schoolteacher of Swiss descent, an expert in modern languages and a pioneer of Esperanto. Dirac blamed his father for his own oddities. At mealtimes, he told a colleague late in his life, he had been forced to eat with his father in the dining room and speak nothing but French, while his mother, brother and sister ate in the kitchen. However, there is no trace of this domestic tyranny in the family letters Farmelo has unearthed. It appears from them that Dirac had a happy childhood and a loving relationship with his father. Without his father’s encouragement he would never, it seems, have got to Cambridge, where his career took off.
Possibly his account was an unconscious attempt to shift blame for a family tragedy. In 1925, his elder brother Felix had committed suicide. Dirac clearly regarded him as an inferior, had not spoken to him for some years and would pass him in the street with an expressionless stare. It may be that guilt over this episode led him to reconstruct his childhood and make his father responsible.
Farmelo believes that the cause of Dirac’s condition was not paternal cruelty but autism. Like many autistics he was extremely taciturn. His fellow students invented a unit, “the Dirac”, for the smallest imaginable number of words someone could utter in an hour. He was literal-minded and lacking in empathy. The only time he was known to weep was when Einstein died. In the question time following one of his lectures, a student ventured that he did not understand an equation on the blackboard. Dirac remained impassive until prompted, and then replied, “That is not a question, it is a comment.” He did not see the point of literature or art. Looking at an impressionist painting, he remarked, “This boat looks as if it was not finished.” Urged to read Crime and Punishment, he worked through it sentence by sentence, and concluded it was “nice”, though “in one of the chapters the author makes a mistake: he describes the sun as rising twice on the same day”. He loved cartoons and comic strips, especially Mickey Mouse and Blondie, but found Peanuts too subtle.
His interest in politics was aroused by his friend the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, and under his influence he swallowed the Soviet recipe for universal happiness with gullible enthusiasm. Visiting Russia in the 1930s, he remained unaware that millions were dying of famine as a result of collectivisation and he dismissed British press reports of Stalin’s purges as exaggeration.
He showed no interest in women until he was in his thirties. Acquaintances assumed he was gay. But as his powers as a mathematician waned he became more susceptible, and was snapped up by a garrulous Hungarian divorcée, Manci Balazs. They married in 1937, and she bore him two daughters. Physical love came as a revelation. “You have made me human,” he exulted. But she had not really. For her he remained an “emotional cripple”. His literalism was a continual headache. He drew up, in tabular form, an explanation of why he could not use the endearments customary with lovers, since they were not literally true. “What would you do if I left you?” yelled Manci. After a moment’s thought, he replied, “I’d say, Goodbye, dear.” Dining arrangements in the Dirac home do not seem to have been much more liberal than those he attributed to his father. Silence was observed at every meal, so that he could concentrate on eating, and no drop of alcohol was allowed anywhere, even in recipes.
But the tittle-tattle of Dirac’s daily life is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is his thought, and from that the majority of readers will inevitably feel excluded. It is not Farmelo’s fault. He explains patiently how momentous Dirac’s breakthroughs were. In 1927, he perfected an equation that “described the behaviour of every single electron that had ever existed in the universe”. It sounds staggering, but since most of us would not understand the equation even if Farmelo had cited it, we can only gape like ignorant bystanders. We might as well be urged to admire the colours in the infrared spectrum.
What does come across, surprisingly, is how far Dirac’s methods seem like those of an imaginative writer. His ideas came as intuitions. They were not derived from experimental observation, but from contemplation of pure mathematics. His discovery of antimatter followed this pattern. He deduced from his equations that if electrons exist, anti-electrons must exist also, though nobody had ever observed one. The universe, he suggested, was composed of equal parts of matter and antimatter, and though, for some unknown reason, human experience is confined almost entirely to matter, there may be parts of the universe made of antimatter. Most physicists greeted this with derision. Yet within months an experimenter at Caltech had photographed a positron or anti-electron; nowadays, Farmelo points out, particle accelerators generate billions of anti-electrons and anti-protons daily for use in industry and medicine, where positron emission tomography allows doctors to see inside patients’ brains and hearts.
Dirac’s decline makes sad reading. It was a joke in the Bohr group that physicists burn out in their thirties, and in this respect Dirac was true to type. During the second world war, J Robert Oppenheimer invited him to join the Manhattan Project, but he declined, possibly, Farmelo thinks, because he was too attached to his routines – another autistic symptom. In post-war Cambridge, although still the Lucasian Professor, he was an irrelevance. They even took away his departmental parking space. Sick of such slights, Manci persuaded him to accept an Eminent Professorship at Florida State University, where he became a revered curiosity. The fascination of Farmelo’s book lies in its earlier chapters, which challenge us with the paradox of a mind at once maimed and mighty.
The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo
Faber £22.50 pp539
A response to poet, John Barlow when he wrote: ” The first questions just don’t seem to languish within the terminologies which sunk the ship of philosophy.”
When I was a guard in prison, reason failed me and I almost went down with the ship. This is why grabbed on to the coat tails of Spinoza. When philosophy went onto the “terminologies” that became humanism, Spinoza was being mentored by philophers of the first question, such as Aristotle and Euclid. Because Spinoza was a product of his age, (as we all are), he flirted with the ideas of the ‘cogito’ that reached their absurdity in Husserl’s ‘Transcendental Phenomenology. Quote: “In this book, then, we treat of an a priori science (’eidetic,’ directed upon the universal in its original intutuitability,…blah, blah, blah.” (p.5, Author’s Preface to the English Edition.” Ideas, Collier Book)
Like you and any other person who fell in love with phenomenology in my outh, Husserl also had many ideas such as you state:” Consciousness is always consciousness OF something. There is nothing as consciousness that seemed so exciting compared to the other school of philosophy that was in vogue in those days: Language Philosophy. Years later, however, I now agree with Wittgenstein that: ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
That is why, when reason (philosophy) failed me, the Spinoza writings that were most meaningful to me (and still are) were the early writings, where he developed his theory of knowledge: Emendation (Curing) Of The Intellect & The Short Treatise on God, Man & His Well-Being. I learned that reason was only a process hat begins with and ends in understanding, (what he called ‘intuitive science,” and I am calling, “created intuitions,” until I find a simpler and better word that conveys Boole’s symbolism (x2=x).
Yes, at times Spinoza’s…terms, seem as airy as Husserl’s, as you say. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza contrasts ‘True Belief,’ (as distinguished from what W.V. Quine calls; The Web Of Belief (one of my favorite books), or reason from scientific intuitions. I am working on a hypothesis that, after developing, ‘intuitive science,’ in the Emendation & Short Treatise, Spinoza employed true belief or reason for the rest of his writing and that’s what can make them seem, ‘airy.’
After all, Spinoza was a product of his age. That does not diminish the brilliance of the rest of his writing, especially, the Ethic, but it should cautions against the …bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” that reason (true belief) creates since this is the mode that Spinoza chose, once he had established its limitations. This is why Spinoza has been mistakenly labeled a rationalist.
I’d like to quote your insightful comments in your e-mails along with this reply, on my website. In the spirit of x2 = x. Dick DeShaw p.s. I imagine I am somewhat of an apostate to Spinoza scholars.
We live in a big universe. It is getting bigger everyday.
We live in a big universe. It is getting bigger everyday.
But the universe is only about a fourth of the size of the dark matter and energy that surrounds it. Nobody knows if that is all there is. We did not even know about dark matter and energy till recently. Our planet is small.