I had a box in which was a skull with an exposed rubber brain on which were rubber maggots, and a loaf of bread.   I explained to those who came up that the bread represented our life and was NOW.
  I told them each slice of bread was like an incident in their life – both happy and sad. 
  I made 2 piles of bread – things they felt hate for and things they loved.
  Then I told them inside the box was the cause and sometimes the cure for all the world’s problems.
  They would stick their hand in and feel around.
   I asked them what they felt. Sometimes they identified it as a brain.
  Then I’d open the box to reveal the brain with the maggots.
       “This is a brain filled with hate,” I said. “And it causes all the world’s problems.”
   Then I went back to the piles of bread which I reminded them was NOW, and I said: “An old philosopher (Spinoza) said every time we thing about something in the ‘hate’ pile, we bring hate back into the NOW. the place we presently occupy. Things like anger, guit, greed and the rest, only have the power we give them. They produce the emotions that cause hate in the world.
  But we can stop thinking about the ‘hate’ pile and focus on the other pile, the ‘love.’ Here we find truth, beauty, science and so forth.
  It doesn’t hurt to memorize quotes from thinkers you appreciate and focus on these when the ‘hate’ pile seems to be taking over your thinking.
  This is a simplified version of Spinoza’s ideas. He is quite complex when you read him.
  While very simple, the presentation with the brain and the bread was quite effective on that summer afternoon.
  Think of something you can do using ordinary language that can show ideas to your audience.
   Let me know how you do. Have a happy slice of NOw doing your presentation.
 
Dick DeShaw

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2) Entropy: Information or things (bits) in the universe

3) Entanglement: Quantum state of things in the universe (i.e. 1 (yes) or 0 (No). Generates information in the universe.

4) Eternity (Now): The point at which things give us information. (Buddist Nirvana)

More on this to come

   ” 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.

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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

Dawkins has given us Delusion as a handbook as to why we must reject the notion of a superhuman in the sky who justifies our baser emotions and actions. All right thinking people, owe Dawkins their thanks.

Some of the early Humanists, like Leibnitz, were guided by baser emotions while others were genuine believers in Theism. Still others simply tried to save their skins. All knew science had to supplant religion as a source of knowledge but they tried to hide this fact in mystical abstractions of human cognition (I think, I exist).

Shakespeare caught the transfer of transcendence from God to man by Humanists, with the words, ‘Man is the measure of all things.” Many scientists, including Dawkins, have been poisoned by this theism made flesh, ever since Humanists elevated human thinking to God-like proportions.

A thorough-going scientist who has magnified an appreciation of natural selection, I’m sure Dawkins would be mortified to realize his Humanistic assumptions have been conditioned by Theistic thinking. Theism is the enemy of science, whether it is in the hands of a religious dogmatist or a Humanistic apologist.

Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed how we play language games. In reply to a theistic question, Wittgenstein said that he did not play this language game. When Dawkins attacks the theistic use of the word, ‘God,’ and those who use it, as well as his definition of himself as an atheist, he illustrates that he is still caught up in religious language games. Since these games are one of the main threads of language, this is not surprising.

A recent cartoon by Don Piraro catches the result of Humanism’s influence on Dawkins (as well as the source of his delusion). The scene is heaven. God is staring at an information kiosk which shows an outline of the human brain with an x inside and the words, ‘You AreHere.’ God is saying, ‘Is this someone’s idea of a joke?’(2)

At the time Humanism developed, around Descartes’ Cogito (I think, I exist), another philosopher flirted briefly with Humanism, then left. His name was Baruch Spinoza and he described God *as the operative and generative cause in every single thing that exists. (3)

‘Operative’ is another word for logic and ‘generative’ for evolution. Spinoza struck a fatal blow to Theism when he says our universe, (nature), was never created but only generated. (4) But he also struck a blow to Humanism when he says that logic is not a creation of our brain (as Humanists assert), but the very fabric of the universe, (nature). (5)

Like George Boole would later rediscover in the nineteenth century, Spinoza also realized mathematics and logic are two expressions of the same subject. (6) Religious critics, using their language game, labeled Spinoza an atheist and tried to ban his writings. Humanist critics of Spinoza, used their theistically-soaked language to describe Spinoza as a ‘rationalist’ and a ‘pantheist.’ The Humanists have been more successful than the religious in muting Spinoza’s message.

Spinoza redefined God as the logical force that generates nature. This is a God of science, which is why Albert Einstein embraced this view. Dawkins wants to limit the use of the word, ‘God,’ to Theism, but Spinoza and Einstein expanded the concept.

The discussion on the use of the word, ‘God,’ might seem like just semantics if it was not for the important result which leads us beyond Dawkins’ delusion and illustrates why Alcoholics Anonymous has been so successful.

Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, realized that he and every other alcoholic needed a truth greater than themselves to combat this disease. At a crucial point, a friend handed him, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Influenced by the book, Bill avoided religious dogmatism when he was setting up AA and defined God merely as a ‘higher power.’ AA, which had been dangerously close to being sucked into secularism, instead became a source of help to individuals, no matter what their beliefs.

Spinoza redefined God for a specific purpose. Like Bill Wilson, he realized that he suffered from a deadly illness that affected both his body and mind. This was inadequate thinking which was being caused by circumstances of life and runaway emotions. Today we would call this, stress disease.

His first book states his clear purpose, that of, curing the intellect, (7) All of Spinoza’s major works are an expansion of this purpose and depend on his description of intellect’s two parts in this book – understanding and reason.

Spinoza said things of nature force their existence and essence (that which makes a thing what it is), on our passive understanding. We have a true idea that a thing exists and what it is. When I look at a park, I see existing things which I have learned to name: trees, grass, birds, squirrels. Even if I did not know their names, I would know they are different things that are really there.

Names start the second part of the intellect – reason. We begin the process of abstraction when we group of bunch of single things under one name, like ‘tree.’ Spinoza says the single thing is real but not the generalization. The pine is not the same as the maple, nor is it the same as the other pine.

Science, Spinoza says, collects single things together, examines what they are, how they are same and different and fit into the unity of nature. The process starts with the awareness of the single thing in our understanding, goes through the abstraction of reason and returns to the single thing with increased understanding.

Inadequate thinking occurs when things get caught in the abstraction of reason and do not return to the single thing in our understanding. The logician, W.V. Quine, calls this, ‘being caught in webs of belief.’ (8) Humanism is one of those webs.

Religion, Spinoza notes, has many of these inadequate concepts; sin, evil, good, bad, heaven, hell and the devil, are a few examples. No wonder the religious leaders did not like Spinoza. He probably only escaped being burned at the stake because he died before they could grab him.

Spinoza says,* “the more we understand singular things, the more we understand God.” (9) It is hard to twist our minds around Spinoza’s idea of God because we have been so soaked in an idea of God as exterior to us. Spinoza’s God only exists in single things and their unity in matter and thought. It is this union that has produced humankind’s use of the word, ‘God,’ in its many incarnations from totems and taboos to Theism.

As Spinoza says: “We consider it, therefore, impossible that God should make himself known to men by means of external signs. And we consider it to be unnecessary that it should happen through anything than the mere essence of God and the understanding of man; for as the understanding is that in us which must know God, and as it stands, in such immediate union with him, that it can neither be nor be understood without him, it is incontrovertibly evident from this that nothing can ever come into such close touch with the understanding as God himself can. It is also impossible to get to know God through something else.” (10)

Some feminist should have purged Spinoza from his use of the word, ‘him’ but as he tells us in the appendix to part one of the Ethics, he does not believe in an anthropomorphic God. Spinoza has taken away the idea of God in the flesh and instead, given the idea a logical form.

Dawkins is battling a fleshly use of the word, ‘God,’ while failing to recognize the evolution of the word to a logical expression because he is still caught in the wriggling web of Humanism. Dawkins still believes logic is a product of man’s mind and not the fabric of the universe. This is Dawkins’ delusion.

In the same year, Delusion was published, (and has deservedly ridden the Best Seller List since), another important book was published which has not been given the acclaim it deserves. Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, by Seth Lloyd. (11)

Lloyd describes the universe as a quantum computer and every single thing that exists, from the smallest particle of matter to the universe itself as operated and generated out of logic gates. This is a modern scientist’s seminal equivalent of Spinoza’s God Of Science. What Lloyd would describe as the universe programming all that exists from the simple to the complex, is the same as when Spinoza says “Now in the first place, we have said to God, no mode of thought can be ascribed except those which are in his creatures.” (12)

Dawkins’ delusion is the Huma nists belief that we program our thinking, rather than realizing everything that exists is programmed by the universe and everything that exists expresses the utterance that modern scientists are calling, ‘information theory.’

Like Spinoza and Einstein, we can call that phenomena, ‘God,’ if we want to! We should not call it atheism, as that is logically unsound.

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