Spinoza on Science and Stress

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.

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