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

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According to Baruch Spinoza, we think because thinking is a tool nature gave us. Just as early humans picked up rocks and used them as tools, ideas are the tools of the brain which give us our understanding of the world. Ideas are the building blocks of thinking.

But what are ideas? Philosophers since Plato have taken great flights of fancy with this concept and built castles in the sky. Spinoza brought the concept of ideas down to the ground and even to the elementary particles whose whirl makes this ground hold us up. Spinoza defined ideas as innate knowledge of things that exist.

Today, with a language and concepts that did not exist in Spinoza’s time, we can say ideas are the icons that nature gives us as tools for thinking. Using a computer metaphor to describe ideas, we can reformulate our use of ‘thinking.’

What is thinking? Here is a precise definition: Thinking is processing information through logic gates of zero and one. Unprocessed information is in a quantum state of both zero and one. This definition avoids the detours we inherited from Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, but it needs to be mapped out on a common highway of understanding.

The guides of this project, are three seminal thinkers who are its inspiration; Baruch Spinoza, George Boole and Seth Lloyd. Honorable mention can be given to the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle and Euclid.

Working backwards from the destination to the roads that must be travelled, we start with Seth Lloyd’s Programming The Universe, (2006), where he describes the universe as a giant quantum computer which programs everything that exists, from the simple to the complex. We can extrapolate from this metaphor and suggest the human body is a quantum laptop and our brain the hard drive.

Before Humanist hubris sets in, we should realize every thing that exists, quark up, is also a quantum laptop. The sparrow hopping around on the grass, feeding on seeds is as hooked up to the web as we are.

Every epoch has its technical metaphors to help understand the ideas being generated. Because the purpose of this work is to examine ‘how’ and not ‘why’ we think, it is perfectly okay to use the ‘how’ of our age – the computer. Children of the 21st century use the language of programming at almost the same time as they learn, “want a cookie.”

We begin with Spinoza who began with Aristotle and Euclid, treating Spinoza’s writing as if it were a website blog. Spinoza’s two early posts; Curing the Intellect (Emendation); Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being, and his last post, The Ethics, both discuss how we are programmed to think and how this knowledge cures us from the spam, external forces and emotions placed in our minds. Uncured, the spam can become a virus and cause our hard drive to crash.

One thing we are not programmed to know is why we think. Spinoza used his seventeenth century language to describe what today we would call the ‘halting’ problem. Asking ‘why’ is a question that goes into an infinite regress and never stops.

Spinoza describes the intellect as having two parts: understanding and reason. Understanding is nature’s universal logic inside of us:

“The understanding is purely passive; it is an awareness in the soul of the essence and existence of things; so that it is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing but it is the thing itself that affirms or denies in us, something of itself. 1( Spinoza Complete Works, 2002, p.82 S. Shirley trans. M. Morgan ed)

A comment on ‘soul.’ ‘Soul’ is another word on which theologians and philosophers have built mazes of thought, even more confounding than Escher graphics. For Spinoza, the soul is the power which is turned on in us by nature, that makes us run as laptops. …”The soul is an idea which is in the thinking thing, arising from the reality of a thing which exists in nature.” 2
(Shirley, p. 95)

A scientific word for soul, as Spinoza describes it, would be energy. Because of the first and second law of thermodynamics, we can understand why Spinoza says our soul is eternal, i.e. not created and will never die, but only be liberated in form. (what this means I do not really know but I like it).

Back to understanding. For Spinoza, understanding is the Alpha and Omega of the intellect. True ideas begin in the understanding as an awareness of the existence and essence of a thing, (that which makes a thing what it is), and in the understanding as a grasp of the wholeness out of which these things are generated. Between these two singularities of experience are the way stations we call, ‘reason.’

Because reason is based on language and language is based on symbols, operations and ”…signs by which relation is expressed and by which we form propositions”, it tends of wander in the deserts and wilderness of abstractness.3 (Geo Boole, An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, 1958, Dover p.27). We get ideas of ideas of ideas, says Spinoza, until we have lost our way back to the things that generated them.

A true method arises out of common notions or ideas, which we all hold. That gives us our ideals of truth, justice and equality. These are way stations which clear and precise thinking can use to journey to the original ideas that started the trip. Spinoza calls this journey, ‘intuitive science,’ and says it has two elements of basic construction: first, a true idea exists in us as a natural instrument and, second, we need to understand a greater number of natural objects.

Once these foundations are laid, the understanding can guide reason around all the detours that can waylay it, directing it instead to the unity of knowledge, which is the goal of thinking. So Spinoza says thinking begins with our ideas of things. But what is a thing? The Oxford dictionary says a thing is, ‘whatever is or may be an object of thought.’ (Concise O.D., p. 1347)

The solipsistic virus which has infected human thought since antiquity and given its modern emphasis in Descartes’ cogito, is sent into our hard drives by this definition. The thing is an object of our thought, says this virus. Consequently, all kinds of confusion has been the result of this perspective, ranging from idealism to realism.

Spinoza put a virus checker in our hard drive when he gave the thing an existence, independent of our thinking and said this thing produces the ideas which become our thinking. Things are real and our thinking only results in ‘things of reason’ which have the quality of relations, or, as we say with the much misused word, they are ‘relative.’

We have never discovered what a thing is and I suspect we never will, even though there are physicists who are trying to get a TOEhold on the universe. (Theories Of Everything). This ‘what,’ is just another way of expressing the ‘why’ of the halting problem.

So we can turn to George Boole, the nineteenth century logician who is the father of mathematical logic and consequently, the language of computers: Boolean algebra. Boole was concerned, not with discovering what a thing is but rather how a thing operates in language. Boole redirects Aristotle’s fundamental axiom of philosophy and makes it a fundamental law of thought:

“That axiom of metaphysicians which is termed the principle of contradiction, and which affirms that it is impossible for any being to possess a quality, and at the same time, not to possess it, is a consequence of the fundamental law of thought, whose expression is ^x2 =x.”4
(Boole, Law of Thought, p. 49)

With this move, Boole unites logic and mathematics:

“We have seen (II.9) that the symbols of logic are subject to the special law, ( x²  =x). Now of the symbols of number, there are but two, viz 0 and 1, which are subject to the same formal law. We know that = 0 ^, and that 1² =1 and the equation x ² = x, considered as algebraic, has no other roots than 0 and 1.   5 (Boole, Law of Thought, p.37).

Boole had discovered the foundation of what Seth Lloyd calls, ‘logic gates’.

“Since the 1854 publication of ‘An Investigation of the Laws of Thought by the logican, George Boole, of Queen’s College, Cork, it has been known that any desired logical expression, including complex mathematical calculations, can be built up out of NOT, COPY, AND, and OR. They make up a universal set of logic gates.”6 (Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe, p. 32, 2006)

Binary theory became the language of computers and Seth Lloyd redefines a thing in this language of information as a ‘bit.’ “What is a bit?” I asked. Replies come thick and overlapping: ‘0 or 1,’ ‘Heads or tails.’ ‘Yes or no,’ ‘True or false.’ ‘The choice between two alternatives.’ All of these answers are correct. The word, ‘bit’ stands for ‘binary digit.’ ‘Binary’ means consisting of two parts, and a bit represents one of these two alternatives.  7 (Lloyd p.18)

This explains the first part of the precise definition of thinking; ‘Thinking is processing information through logic gates of zero and one.”

Thinking is a selective process of using language, once we discover the existence and essence of a thing or bit, but scientists discovered the universe does not operate this way. Things in the universe can be both a wave and a particle and both 0 and 1. A cat in a box can be both alive and dead. This is called, quantum weirdness. Even scientists admit they do not fully understand why the universe operates this way.

This is why the second part of the precise definition of thinking includes; ‘unprocessed information is in a quantum state of both zero and one.” One of the difficulties in understanding Spinoza’s works come from his intuitive glimmer of the state of quantum weirdness and his refusal to treat reason and language as the last word on any subject unless it returned to the thing (bit) out of which it sprung. Like Boole, Spinoza realized that logic and mathematics are two expressions of the same way of thinking about a thing.

Spinoza says the human race would have been kept, “…in darkness to all eternity if mathematics, which does not deal with ends, but with the essences and properties of forms had not placed before us, another rule of truth.”8 (W. Hale White & Amelia Stirling, Ethics of Benedict De Spinoza, Oxford, 1937, p. 41)

As Spinoza says: “…men decide upon matters according to the constitution of their brains and imagine, Rather than understand things. If man understood things, they would, as mathematics prove, at least be all alike convinced if they were not all alike attracted.” 9(Ibid, p. 45)

Because our bodies are quantum laptops and our brains the hard drive, we are also subject to quantum weirdness. This quantum weirdness is the source of both the strength and weakness of our thinking. Because of quantum weirdness, our hard drive is able to think beyond binary choices. Poetry is one example of this ability, as are the creative ideas of humans, down through history.

In A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, Spinoza gives us a description of the weakness that comes from quantum weirdness. He says our, “vital spirits…when the body directs them towards one place while the soul directs them towards another place, they bring about an occasion in us, those peculiar fits of depression which we sometimes feel without knowing the reason why we have them.”10 (Shirley, Ibid, p.88)

There is a wealth of possibilities in following up this idea in relation to mental illness. However, Spinoza, on many occasions, equates the inadequate thinking that comes from emotions and runaway imaginations, as being insane. I had a high school psychology teacher who said, ‘Mental illness is just an exaggeration of normal behavior.

Boole took the thing our of solipsism and placed it in language, but because of quantum weirdness, Seth Lloyd has returned the thing or bit to its place in the universe as that which is processed through logic gates, whether it be a particle, wave or an object of our thinking.

According to Seth Lloyd and information theory, everything in the universe both sends and receives information. I suspect this is what Spinoza meant when he said, ‘God thinks.’ We think out of this wholeness. We do not know ‘why,’ but we know, ‘how’ we think. We process information through logic gates as parts of the whole which inform us of their existence and quiddity.

In the obituary page of yesterday’s Globe and Mail, I read of the death of the mathematician, Detlef Gromoll, who discovered the ‘Soul Theorem:’

“In the soul theorem, published in 1972, Drs Gromoll and Cheeger were studying the properties of certain surfaces that could have flat regions or curves like the outside of a sphere but not regions shaped like saddles. They found that the properties of such surfaces, infinite in extent and existing in any number of dimensions, could be deduced from a finite central core region.

Dr Cheeger said it was his colleague who suggested calling this finite region, the ‘soul’ of the objects, because it captured the essence of the infinite expanse around it,” just like inside a person,” Dr Cheeger added.”11(Kenneth Chang, June 23, 2008, p. 11)

I like to think how excited Spinoza would be today if he had the scientific discoveries we have, to enrich his discussions of how we think.

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Ancient Greek thinkers used the word, ‘logic,’ to describe the process of trying to make sense. These thinkers made up rules, like a game, for how to play logic. The rules got very complex.

Today you can learn Polish logic in a game called, ‘Wff & Proof.’

The original Greek thinkers, (we call them, philosophers), believed that logic and its rules were part of the fabric of the universe. Today, many philosophers believe logic is only a game man has invented.

In this respect, making sense of the world depends on where the person who observes it, is positioned. There is much truth to this idea which is called, ‘relativity,’ but it even makes our world more complex. We will call this truth, ‘a thing of reason,’ so as to distinguish it from what we will later discuss, as a ‘thing of understanding.’

Like the ancient Greek philosophers, the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, believed logic was in the universe but it was not just a part; it was the whole of the fabric. He called it nature or God.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, believed logic was the expression of a true reality or ideas of which our present existence is only a shadow. His predecessor, Aristotle, got rid of Plato’s mysticism and placed logic in universal expressions of ideas that existed in. ‘With these ideas we make sense of things,’ he said.

This seems sensible. But the more abstract language is, the more complex it becomes. Spinoza grabbed Plato and Aristotle by their tales and flipped them around. .

He said ideas are not abstract. They are expressions of concrete things.

Only the whole of things exist. There is no universal idea in nature. If we want to make sense of our world, we have to make sense of the things in it. This is a logic of things and their operations in nature.

Spinoza’s logic had the potential to be simple and not complex, but because of the baroque nature of seventeenth century writing style, he failed to accomplish simplicity. In an age where religion ruled, science had to be hidden behind God-talk.

While Spinoza had little patience with Plato’s, ‘ideas in the sky’ approach and dismissed him disdainfully, his relation with Aristotle was more one of a pupil who has outgrown his teacher. Aristotelian ideas are woven throughout Spinoza’s writings, even though he sometimes pulls some of the stitches loose and discards them.

Spinoza’s true mentor in science was Euclid. It was in Euclid that Spinoza discovered the logic on which he modeled his thinking. This is why The Ethics is written in geometrical form and why quotes and examples from

Euclid, punctuate Spinoza’s writing. .

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In Euclid, Spinoza discovered what the logician, George Boole, later rediscovered, that mathematics and logic are only two expressions of the same subject.

When Spinoza applied what he had learned in Euclid and Aristotle, to theology, it did not go so well for him. He was kicked out of the Jewish faith. No Jew was allowed to communicate with him. There is even a story that the synagogue put out a hit man on Spinoza, )Vh()/ tried to stab him.

Alienated from friends, family, career and church, a stress-damaged Spinoza was thrown into the world of Gentiles. He landed among the other malcontents of his community; free thinking humanists who had banded together around their latest fad; reading the writings of Rene Descartes.

Spinoza did to Descartes what he had done to Aristotle, absorbed him and then flipped him on his tale. Descartes’, ‘I think I exist,’ which has unjustly become the egocentric expression of modem thought, Spinoza turned into, ‘things exist, I think.’ Spinoza was strongly influenced by Descartes’ scientific methodology but his contribution to making sense of the world of logic was modeled after Euclid.

Spinoza says the foundation of thinking are, ‘common notions,’ and he took the common notions (or axioms), directly from Euclid’s listing of them as four different expressions of equality, and the statement, ‘The whole is greater than the part.’

Later, George Boole, the nineteenth century logician, would take Euclid’s common notions and make them the axioms of his Laws of Thought. They are the foundations of his discovery that enabled the most important tool of our age to develop: the computer.

In the common notions of Euclid, both Spinoza and Boole discovered the foundations oftbinking. Armed with this discovery, Boole was able to reduce all mathematics to 1 and 0 and to describe the logic gates; (and, or, not and identity), that operate by this binary mathematics.

Whenever a computer is opened, the ideas of Euclid, Spinoza and Boole, guide us in the thinking that makes sense of our world; logic made simple and reduced to gates that open and close. It is a simple step from gates in a computer to doors in our lives.

Before we make this step, however, we must ask why Boole, like Spinoza, obscured this simple step in complex language. Here we have our answer: language.

In his first book on how to cure our intellect, Spinoza finds a contradiction. We know what exists independent of language as an immediate perception (things of understanding), but we need language to describe this knowledge. This leads to abstraction and complexity or ‘things of reason.’

This leads to the dilemma all thinkers’ experience. We know what we want to say but when we try to articulate this in speech or written words, the results seem woefully inadequate.

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Poets dance around this stammering with metaphors, but Descartes, Spinoza and Boole are not satisfied with metaphors, as they are not the, ‘clear and distinct’ ideas that these thinkers want to achieve with logic and language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book on the problems of language, Philosophical Investigations, and suggested … “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (1ge). Note that this statement itself is a poet’s dance. As Wittgenstein said, language does certainly, ‘bewitch’ us.

The problem arises because conceiving things and collecting them as parts into a whole or separating them out of a whole into its parts, (Boole, p. 32), is a singular innate activity of our brain (things of understanding).

Once, however, we begin to compare the relation the parts have to one another and the whole, we enter into the complexities of language (things of reason), and this is a communal activity. The grunts or primitive recognition of things that exist, give way to all the sophisticated twists and turns that language can take.

When discussing his laws of thought, Boole cautions, ” … that this is a law of thought, and not, properly speaking, a law of things.” (p.30). In his, Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd, an information scientist disagrees. Lloyd says the universe was generated the same way our thinking is, out of things, (’bits’ in computer language), through logic gates: (and, or, not and copy), into complex relations.

Because our thinking and the universe manifest the weirdness of quantum mechanics, this is not a straightforward process, as on a digital computer. A thing can be both existent and not existent until a choice is made to put it through a logic gate. This is why relativity is an important part of human understanding.

Lloyd says the universe is a giant quantum computer – ‘It from Quibit.’ We can trace the complexity of the universe to the things (bits) and the logic gates (and, or, not, copy), out of which it was generated.

Spinoza, devoid of the advantages of logical mathematics and quantum mechanics which we have- (how excited he would have been about this development!) – nevertheless generated out of Aristotle and Euclid, a theory of knowledge which is echoed in its modern counterparts.

How do we make sense of our world? By the doors that have opened or closed, (logic gates), that have generated our universe and understanding; how these doors operate in our thinking about the whole of nature (God).

This is how Spinoza suggested we could cure our intellect from inadequate thinking and runaway emotions. Let’s be practical.

I wanted to get a PhD and teach in university. I made two separate attempts at getting a PhD in philosophy. On both occasions, circumstances closed the door and I eventually chose to go to prison (as a prison guard) ..

I loved this job (maybe too much). I loved the adrenaline highs. After a prisoner tried to kill me, and observing too many brutal” and violent events,

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the highs became downs. I had to leave the prison, stress damaged. Steel bars closed behind me.

I have known many Jude the Obscures who have never recovered from academia, and many prison guards who have never recovered from adrenaline downs. Some have killed themselves.

But it was this last closed door that led to my discovery of a stress damaged philosopher whose purpose in life became to cure his intellect and to teach this method to his neighbours.

Spinoza said his purpose in life was 1) to taste union with Nature/God. 2) Produce true ideas in himself. 3) Make all these things known to his neighbours.

I am privileged to be a neighbour of Spinoza. His purpose is now my purpose. This is a door that can never close. If he is right, it is open for all eternity, generating the logic of the universe.

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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.

I contemplated suicide. Spinoza says, “…those who commit sucide are of weak spirit and are completely overcome by external causes, opposed to their own nature.” (Ethics, part Iv, Prop 20). This was not a moral judgment by Spinoza but an identification. He had been there.

Those who make Spinoza an ivory tower philosopher, amaze me. They are probably the same people who identify him as a rationalist. Spinoza, in as clear a way as possible, describes his stress disease in the Emendation of the Intellect. He says it was a sickness that could lead to death. He then identifies his chief purpose as finding a method to cure the intellect, (beginning with his own), from the malady of inadequate thinking and runaway emotions.

He completes this task in The Short Treatise on God, Man & His Well Being. Having accomplished it, he applies his method to ethics, religion and politics.

The philosophers who identify Spinoza as a rationalist, dismiss the Emendation and Short Treatise as immature, and only identify with his latter works, corrupting his message. This is as sensible as saying Bertrand Russell’s contribution to The Principia Mathematica and Albert Einstein’s works on Relativity were done when they were young and only their mature works count.

After almost 17 years I left prison on disability, carrying that misnomer label, Post Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the infection that had been hurting my family and myself for years, continued.

Reading Lee Smolin’s ‘Three Roads To Quantum Gravity’ I was introduced to Topus theory, a mathematical form of logic. I wanted more information and went on the internet. I found 5 topos theorists in Siberia who had posted a paper by the European philosopher, Rainer E. Zimmermann, ‘Loops and Knots as Topoi of Substance: Spinoza Revisited, on their website.

I had been introduced to Spinoza in graduate school. I was intrigued by what connection he could have to the vertex of modern science. I got out my university, Spinoza Selections, edited by John Wild (one of the philosophers with the ‘immature’ judgement of the Emendation & Short Treatise)

This was some time in 2000. I have been reading and meditating on Spinoza’s works almost every day since. In this respect, I have taken Edmund Husserl’s notion of adumeration to an excess. When I got my M.A. in Sociology, I learned the method of content analysis and this discipline has enabled me to see that the ideas Spinoza develops in the Emandation and Short Treatise are refined in his masterpiece, The Ethics, but are nevertheless the foundation of his work.

Spinoza broke with the humanist tradition which was being developed by post-cartesians and Leibniz in science and religion. Humanism is one of the prevailing ideologies of our age. Whatever way it swings, transcendental or atheist, Spinoza would say the positions are not logically possible.

Spinoza, who was limited by seventeenth century science, and was only adequate in appying it, prefigured the science of our age in his ideas.

This is why a philosopher of science, like Zimmermann and a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio (Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow & The Feeling Brain), find Spinoza applicable to modern ideas in science.

Spinoza stated the purpose of religion was teaching ethics and God is only known through …”the world of nature.” Since we live in, and draw all of our thinking out of this whole, we cannot be atheists.

Like Bill Wilson said, in AA’s 12 Steps, Spinoza would say, true understanding begins with:

Step 1 “We admitted we were powerless over inadequate ideas and emotions’ (substituted for alcohol) – that our lives had become unmanageable’ and

Step 2 – “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

These are the first steps in dealing with stress disease. Any therapy that does not begin with these two steps, will fail.

The other day, at a doctor’s visit, my wife said, ‘Dick is cured of his PTSD.” “No!” I said. “I will never be free of stress disease, but now I understand what it is and how to deal with it.”

Like Spinoza, I first discovered ethics in religion and went through a series of religious programs. I am indebted to these systems for teaching me the hermeneutic method of reading a text and the importance of memorizing maxims. But what these religions did and what Christ taught, seem to be contradictory.

When I discovered philosophy, I went through a series of ways of describing God, beginning with Kierkegaard’s, ‘absurd paradox,’ so this question has always been important to me. As I’m sure Spinoza would, I eschew the pantheism label, as it is only an attempt to draw the discussion back into transcendent ideas.

What we mean by the symbol, ‘God,’ is revealed in nature without an anthropomorphic connotation. Why, we do not know, but as Spinoza said, it is a tool of our thinking, our essence.

These, then, are the ideas that guide this site and will develop as it does. I am presently working on Spinoza,’s contribution to the soul of science, along with Aristotle, Euclid, George Boole and Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On The Cosmos. A paper is forthcoming and will be posted here.

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This baby grew into an adult with an Oedipus complex. God the Father, an anthropomorphic spawn of Mesopotamia, that troubled area we now call Iran and Iraq, had been split into the hydra heads of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This God ruled as the King of Religion. This was a king of jealousy and wrath. No wanted to incur his displeasure. Especially since economic and political well-being, even life itself depended on being on the right side of this king. The early fathers of Humanism saw the wrath of the church fall on Galileo and Bruno. Whether they were prudent, like Descartes or ambitious like Leibniz, they tried to wed the infant bastard, science to an other-worldly notion of God the Father. This poor bastard was never legitimate, though there are still individuals today who try to couple the natural and the transcendental. The bastard idea bided its time and nursed its resentments until it was time to kill the father. As books like The God Delusion. on the best-seller lists, indicate, now is the time. A Jewish scholar, Baruch Spinoza, danced briefly with the fathers of Humanism but then went his own way to discover the God of Science. He had already been excommunicated from the Jewish faith along with any contact with people from that faith due to ideas of God he had drawn from Euclid, the ancient Greek father of geometry. Spinoza’s method of thinking and the axioms as foundations of that thinking is derived from Euclid’s Elements. It is not an intellectual stretch to suggest that both Spinoza’s model of ethical human behaviour and his conception of God were foreshadowed in Euclid’s Common Notions. (The 13 Books Of Euclid’s Elements, 2^nd Ed. Dover, 1956) Aristotle called the common notions,’reason dwelling in the soul.’ The first 4 common notions deal with that glue which enables mathematics and ethics to work: equality. The 5^th common notion: ‘The whole is greater than the part,’ led to the concept that ultimately defined the God of Science as ‘substance of reality.’ Unlike some philosophers, Spinoza believed philosophy should be practical. So he began with a practical problem that was somewhat exacerbated by his circumstances. He was kicked out of the Jewish congregation, losing his ability to work any longer in his father’s business because Jews were forbidden to associate with him. Spinoza asked what was, ‘The supreme good of life?’ If it was wealth, Spinoza was out of luck. The fame he was achieving was not that positive, considering someone tried to kill him for his ideas. Although he liked his beer and his pipe, Spinoza was not big on indulging himself for pleasure.So when he examined wealth, fame and pleasure as goals, Spinoza had some experience in the practical possibility of their failure.Finally Spinoza decided the supreme good we can seek, that will not fail us, is…’the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.’The God of Science was identified as operating by the same rules of logic as nature, or, as we would probably call it today, the universe. God or nature is the same wholeness out of which we think and experience life. This is what Spinoza meant by substance.Having identified God with nature and alienated himself forever from the established faith, Spinoza went one step further. He broke from establishment philosophy, from the past to the present, by denying man’s reason as the source of truth. For Spinoza, logic is not an invention of man but is embedded in the fabric of nature: “Since, then, Reason has no power to lead us to the attainment of our well-being, it remains for us to inquire whether we can attain it through the fourth and last king of knowledge. Now we have said that this kind of knowledge does not result from something else but from a direct revelation of the object itself to the understanding.’  (Spinoza: Complete works, trans Samuel Shirley, Hackett, 2002) Modern scientists since Gödel and Heisenberg have discovered this fact about human reason. Because of this, Humanists who make our thinking the measure of all things are as upset with science as they once were with Spinoza. Because Spinoza identifies God with Nature, he denies that God is a transcendent Father In The Sky. Spinoza sees all anthropomorphic identification as a conceptual error that has led humankind into dark ignorance. Spinoza’s ideas made him enemies in all the religions of his day, but he had an even more dangerous and subtle group of enemies in the Humanists, who had spawned their bastard version of the God of Science. Religious enthusiasts wanted to destroy Spinoza’s works, but the Humanists perverted his ideas and tried to destroy his soul. They misidentified him as a ‘Rationalist’ and labeled his earlier works, the place where he developed the foundation of his thinking, as ‘immature,’ and therefore unimportant. In 1673, Spinoza was on his way to the Hague to publish his most famous work, The Ethics, when he discovered two sets of enemies lay in wait for him. He turned back. The Ethics had to be published by his friends in secret, after his death. Ultimately, all the Calvinists and Catholics, his immediate religious foes, could do to Spinoza, was to ban his books and put them on the church index of banned books. But the Humanists, who were identified at that time as Cartesians, have been more effective. Now Spinoza’s God of Science has been almost completely eclipsed in misinterpretation. This was no conspiracy plot. Spinoza’s Idea of God and human nature was so radical that his words really did not make sense until our present century. The discoveries that enhance their understanding are being made by science, not religion or philosophy. Spinoza’s enemies did not understand what he meant by the nature of God and man. For Spinoza, God is the perfect unity of all the individual things that exist. Each human being is one part, or in computer language, one bit, as is everything else in the universe We know our connection to this unity in two ways; 1) we have a body 2) we think. Like everything else in the universe, our thinking and our bodies are only different expressions of the same substance. The Humanists separate body from thinking. Spinoza didn’t.God is an extended and thinking substance for Spinoza. Until recently, most scientists would have accepted the concept of extended but been skeptical of the thinking description. Now however, some scientists think every particle in the universe receives and sends out information.As the scientist, Seth Lloyd says: ‘The universe is made of bits . Every molecule, atom and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.” (Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, Vintage Books, 2007)

Modern science has a new name for Spinoza’s attributes of God.

The first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is extension.

The second law of thermodynamics (expansion of information), is thought. Lloyd explores these attributes.

Science has caught up with Spinoza’s idea of the God of Science.

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