Spinoza on Science and Stress

SCOTT’S GIFT: A PHILOSOPICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By Dick DeShaw

              Thoughts on substance. Here’s how I describe the substance of my life: The lives of human beings are like the fractals of a rocky shoreline (see Benoit Mandelbrot). The symmetrical patterns we seldom see, define the whole of what we are. Carl Jung called these patterns, ‘synchronism.” These patterns are the expression of energy (what the ancient Greeks called, ‘demonstration,’ i.e. knowledge inside us.  This is, by the way, how Spinoza described science, i.e. …”the eyes of the mind.”

            Let me demonstrate with some patterns in my life:

1) In high school I am required to take one math course. I take Geometry. It is Euclidian Geometry, stripped of all its flesh. It is boring. I skip classes to play on the golf team.  I get a D. Afterward I avoid math like the plague.

2) An abortive math attempt in pre-med at university, caused by an unavoidable math requirement. I receive an F.

3) After marrying, I return to university majoring in psychology. There’s a humanities requirement, either English or Philosophy. As a poor speller, I choose philosophy though I don’t know what it is. In that first class the heaven’s opened!  I add a second major in philosophy.

  A favorite teacher influences me towards phenomenology and American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce.

4) Apply to University of Waterloo graduate school in philosophy. Birth control method fails and I leave, taking a social worker job.

5) Return to university at York, (after three years as a social worker), running a group home with my wife and three children. I major in sociology and get an M.A.

6) Decide to pursue a PhD in Social & Political Thought to combine my sociology and philosophy background. I take a class from Brady Polka who introduces me to Baruch Spinoza. The start of the Emendation of the Intellect leaves an indelible imprint on the synapses of my brain. Especially, “…to change my plan of life …was forced to seek a remedy…like a man suffering from a fatal illness…”

7) I move to Kingston with my wife, buy a house, live upstairs and run the first floor as an out of print bookshop. I work with prisoners for a street organization till it loses its grant and teach sociology part-time for St Lawrence College while completing my dissertation long distance.

   Running into problems with the sociologists on my committee (they didn’t want KANTent), and not seeking the advice of my chairman, Brady Polka (which I should have done), I shove my completed dissertation into a shoe box and become a prison guard.

While working midnights in prison, I read Charles Sanders Peirce, who leadsme to the study of logic, mathematics and science. I write several articles on prisons using mathematical models. These are published and republished in a Russian journal of science, two textbooks, the American Journal of Corrections, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and The Whig Standard.

9) Having the bookshop gives me first choice of all philosophy, math and science as well as the opportunity to sell books from my library, particularly all the works of Heidegger and Sartre. I had moved on from phenomenology.

  One day the Queen’s university physics department called. It concerned the library of a physics professor, H.M. Cave, who had died. He had studied in Vienna when quantum theory got its start. We were given his books. What he had was a classic collection of science and math. Among his books were the 3 volume Dover edition of Euclid’s Elements, translated and annotated by Thomas L. Heath. I put Euclid on my shelf and ignored him.

10) Reason didn’t help me cope with the stress of prison. After a prisoner stabs me, I am labeled with PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder) and put on disability. I bring home the “…suffering from a fatal illness…” 

  Reading a book on quantum theory, I seek to understand the mathematical logic, topos theory. My wife goes on line and finds me four topos theorists in Siberia. They refer me to a European philosopher who has written a paper on quantum foam, topos, knots and Spinoza.

  Fascinated, I get out my Spinoza Selections, edited by John Wild. I begin to see Spinoza’s writings as a ‘how to’ deal with inadequate thinking caused by my PTSD.

11)  Reestablish my friendship with Brady Polka and ask him about more complete translations of Spinoza. He refers me to Samuel Shirley: Spinoza’s Complete Works. My daughter buys it for me at Christmas.

  For the first time I read all of the ‘Short Treatise On God, Man and His Well-Being.’  My Selections , edited by Wild, primarily dismissed this work as ‘the immature Spinoza, as many philosophers do. I find it fascinating.

12) My wife’s father is dying in Washington state. We stay with her brother who has an adopted son, Scott, with Duchane’s syndrome. While the disease has ravished his body and taken away his ability to speak, he can type with two fingers, albeit painfully, to communicate with me. I spend much of our visit with him, sharing what I am learning from Spinoza.

  The last day of our visit, a delivery truck arrives with a book for me: A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. It is a gift from Scott which he ordered as a surprise for me, over the internet while we talked. We go to my sisters and in quiet moments, I read the Ethics. Spinoza’s work stops being a ‘how to,’ and becomes living flesh and spirit when I read: 

  “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.” (Ethics, Prt II, Prop. 11, p. 122 in Curley’s Spinoza Reader).  I call this proposition: Scott’s Gift.  My wife’s brother gives us a ’94 jeep and we drive it back across Canada to Kingston. Shortly afterward, her father dies.

   In our discussions, mine verbal and Scott’s typed onto a computer screen with two fingers, we discussed how the universe is like a quantum computer with us as part of the programming. I told Scott that Spinoza says this programming does not stop when we die. Since computers gave Scott the continuing ability to lead his life in some fashion, he loved that thought.

  Several months after the death of my wife’s father, Scott decided to let himself go into the programming of the universe, rather than be placed on a machine which would have to do his breathing for him.

13) I get Vol I of Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza.  I consider Shirley more a poet of Spinoza translations and Curley the scholar.  Together they made me see that Spinoza formulated his theory of knowledge in the Emendation and the Short Treatise.  Curley especially opened up the Short Treatise for me.

  After writing these works, Spinoza, as Gilles Deleuze says, ‘expressed,’ his ideas in his later works, especially the Ethics. Spinoza never leaves the foundations of knowledge that he formulated in the Emendation and Short Treatise but he gives them flesh in ethics, hermeneutics, religion and politics.

14) Reading Spinoza, I realize that while he was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and others, his theory was warp and woof a demonstration of Euclid’s Common Notions.  I pull down my Euclid’s Elements and begin to read it for the first time. Heath was an excellent scholar. His notes place you back in the ideas and currency of Euclid’s times. He put back on Euclid the flesh that mathematicians have stripped off.  As both Euclid and Spinoza said, the common notions of equality and ‘the whole is greater than the part,’ are the foundations of thinking. This is substance.

  Equal is the glue that holds together logic, mathematics and ethics. I suggest that Spinoza cannot be understood without seeing the influence of Euclid’s Common Notions in his thinking.  They are recurring themes.

  Finally;   ‘A point is that which has no part,’ is the essence of Spinoza’s idea of God, (Eternity = Now) and the essence of human life. Buddha discovered this as ‘Nirvana.’

  Later on I also found, in a neglected book on my shelf, that Euclid’s Common Notions were the foundations of George Boole’s, The Laws of Thought that created the mathematical language of computers.

  Euclid, Spinoza and Boole are the heroes of my thinking along with contemporary thinkers; Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe) and a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio  (Looking for Spinoza).

  I suspect my  nephew Scott smiles and approves of how I have used the gift he gave me.

zHOW TO PLAY LIFE: UNDERSTANDING (The Chapter I could not write
while my body and spirit were in prison)
“A) Rhetorical figure transposing a term from its original concept to another and similar one.
B) In its origin, all language was metaphoric; so was poetry. “ Lionelli Venturi 1
PART ONE: THE ABSTRACT LIE
     Since we are born with it, the ultimate question for humanity is: what is life? Using a golf metaphor, the questions we ask about life can be sorted into one of three groups:
1) Abstract Lie
2) Hitting Impulse
3) Natural Swing
     What is life? This question is like a shout on the canyon rim of what we know. It returns as only an echo of what language can express. Not even modern philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze’s valiant efforts can fill in the chasm between what we know and what we express, (reason).2
 The seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza, was aware of the paradox of the gap between knowledge and expression that language creates. He said it was Nature’s work to give us, ‘true ideas’3  but some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work and help us to understand things distinctly.  Among these we include all relations which have reference to different things. These we call, “beings of reason.”4
 Spinoza has been called a rationalist but this is only humanistic slander. Spinoza knew all true work was in Nature and that the work of our intellect is to understand how Nature guides our work of reason.
 Reason and the actions that follow from it are the work that energy has given us to do. As physicists know, all work is the result of energy. Reason is a staircase to understanding. 5
Understanding is a gift from Nature that unfolds in our work.
 Spinoza was the prophet of how we understand that Nature is immanent in our bodies, souls and minds, just as it is in the ‘soul’ of everything in the universe from quark to dark matter that sends and receives information.
 Using abstract words like ‘nature,’ ‘reason,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘mind,’ we fall screaming into the chasm between knowing and expression. Wittgenstein calls this: “language on holiday.”6
 Wittgenstein says meaning is the use we give words and in my paper: ‘Has Philosophy Ignored Spinoza’s Theory of Science?’ I explore Spinoza’s use of the abstract words like those above, as ‘tourist traps.’ 7
 So what do we do if all the language we use cannot transverse the gap between knowing and expression?  At its best, we can realize that language conveys metaphors that transpose expression into a like of knowing.
 In the Emendation, Short Work on God, Man and His Well-Being and the Ethics,’ Spinoza sets out a method of inquiry, cumulating in ‘intuitive science,’ which builds on the foundations of the master architect of how we live in the space we inhabit: Euclid. 8
 Because not even Spinoza can emulate the clear and distinct demonstrations of Euclid’s, which he adored, Spinoza fell into tourist traps. The chief one was ‘God.’
 A host of misunderstandings have arisen in the interpretations of Spinoza’s theories, such as seeing Part One of the Ethics as an ‘ontological argument for God’s existence.’ 9
 Spinoza, however, was more consistent in building on the foundation of Euclid than those individuals who have interpreted him. The metaphor of Euclid’s Geometry runs throughout the corpus of Spinoza’s work. We must all use metaphors which describe how and where we live, to express what we know.
 This is our work and Spinoza says, when we realize we are, “…a part of Nature…(and) follow the laws of Nature…this is divine service…” 10
 I am an old man. The condensed energy which has gathered into my body and its work will soon be liberated into what Spinoza calls, ‘mind.’ Some information scientists have called this substance; ‘It from Quibit.”11  The first and second laws of thermodynamics guide my expectation.
Since I was young, two questions have framed my work: 1) What is the meaning of life and all that? 12  2) How do I hit a golf ball?  The first question is too abstract and has misled too many people to use. Not even ‘42’ suffices, even though with a scientific inclination, I would like it to do so.
 Golf is an innocuous metaphor to those who, like Mark Twain, see golf as a good walk spoiled. I apologize for seeing it as a good walk made better.

! Ever since a friend took me to the Spokane Country Club to caddy when I was ten, I have had an epiphany of both special beauty and subsequent practical frustrations which I have never been able to reconcile.
 An example of the first part of the epiphany is standing on a links course surrounded by water as the sun rose and folded the contours of the grounds in brilliant to fading shades of purple. 

  The second, as all golfers know, is a ‘shank shot;’ the result of trying to hit the ball a mile and it travels 50 yards or so to the left or right.
 While golf is an innocuous metaphor, it is also an apt one. It is close to Nature and has the uncanny ability to display the Nature of those who play the game. A duffer is a duffer wherever you find them in life.  Look up the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘duffer!’ 13
 Every individual who makes golf their work (professionals), have teachers who have taught them their swings and help to correct the bad habits which creep into all swings.   
 Euclid laid out the course in which we live (space) and Spinoza taught how to play that course (understanding). Of course pros have other teachers who help them fine tune their swings.  As Spinoza said, one of life’s great blessings is sharing with like-minded individuals.
 While these friends, some in books and others in daily interaction, are too numerous to mention, some are chief: George Boole developed the Laws of Mind from Euclid’s Common Notions, and brought together logic and mathematics in Boolean Algebra which underlies the language of artificial thought – the computer. 14
 Albert Einstein, through his Theory of Relativity, brought time and the curvature of space into the course of space Euclid described. 15   He is part of the revolution which helped develop non-Euclidian geometry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which, while not discarding Euclid’s original formulation, greatly enhanced it.  Einstein was also a student of Spinoza in his beliefs and in discussing social relationships.
 The neuroscientist, Antonoio Damasio, has reintroduced Spinoza’s theories of mind and body into a modern context of neuroscience and a theory of feelings which is separated from theories of emotion which had confused the two.16   Feelings, said Spinoza, are the direct manifestation of Nature’s gift of understanding (the eyes of the mind). 17   Damasio demonstrates why this is so.
 I first discovered Seth Lloyd’s work in Scientific American and open each copy expecting new discoveries from him (as I did this month). 18   I then bought Lloyd’s book, Programming the Universe, and consider it one of the most important works in the current evolution of human thinking. 19 Lloyd is an information scientist who follows George Boole in developing Euclid’s foundations on the axioms of thinking. 
 Moe Norman was a Canadian golfer and savant who brought together golf and nature. Moe taught me the failure of trying to hit a golf ball.  Gilles Deleuze, who considered Spinoza the prince of philosophers and wrote two books on him, takes reason to its limits in, ‘What Is Philosophy’ with Guatlari.19  This is a magnificent effort and understands philosophy as expression.
 Rose DeShaw, my partner in freedom of the spirit is teaching me the art of practical expression. She is the incarnation of Spinoza in my daily life.  
Now I have introduced my teachers. Let’s see what they taught me about life.
Euclid began his description of the course on which we play out our lives with these words: “A point is that which has no part.” 20  This may be the most profound statement ever uttered by a human being. It not only acknowledges the chasm between knowing and expression but jumps into it with total abandonment.
We live in eternity. The point where we appear is our tee-off in space and time. Scientists call this point a fluxation. We appear, play a few rounds in space and time and then leave the course (death), maybe to play another course in space and time. Possibly, if they exist in what scientists hypothesize as universes, in the mulitiverse.  
This popping in and out of space and time, birth and death, is fact but all the rest is pure speculation. Religious  teachers have speculated about this popping from viewpoints as varied as the resurrected individual goes to a ‘heaven’ to live with an anthropomorphic God or is extinguished as an individual and ‘absorbed into the supreme spirit in Nirvana.’ 21
Spinoza says we …

     ”feel and know by experience that we are eternal. For the mind
feels those things that it conceives in understanding no less than those it has in  memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees and observes things are the demonstrations themselves.”22

As I get older, I find the energy which the universe has given me to do my work has become very narrow in its focus as I face its liberation back into the universe.
    Everything I do today seems to focus on researching scholars which the universe has sent my way: Euclid, Spinoza, Boole, Seth Lloyd, Antonio Damasio, Moe Noman and most recently Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. My wife, Rose says she is jealous that the universe gives me books when I need them. She sees it as somewhat of a mystical process but I see it as a prcoess of what science calls, ‘entanglement,’ (what I think Spinoza meant by the third way of knowing).
    I have always loved research and abhorred writing. (thus my non-productivity in the academic area). I only write when the semen of research evokes the pain of birth and then it is usually a still birth.
    That idiot, Price, the anthropologist for whom I was a research assistant at York, told me the left side of my brain was undeveloped because I came from blue-collar roots. This was because I spelled ’sceptic’ with a ‘c’ rather than a ‘k.’  Anyway, I had spent a lot of time learning how to do the method of content analysis and applying it to the Toronto Native Times, an aboriginal paper. I never gave my results to him. We subsequently lost that paper on our many moves.
    However, this method has become vital to my research and I suspect that this is because philosophers don’t know how to do content analysis so that they fail to recognize Spinoza’s indebtedness to Euclid in all of his philosophy (and why he was not a rationalist).
    Deleuze & Guattari in ‘What Is Philosophy?’ say Spinoza is the ‘Prince’ and ‘Christ’ of philosophy. because he was aware that there is only immance and not transcendence. Nevertheless, these two magnificent thinkers, who I think understood philosophy better than anyone else, failed to see Duclid’s influence on spinoza and consequently  they were only sophisticated,  warmed up reationalists.
    Philosophy is, as Spinoza understood, only our own work and not nature and thus only a ‘being of reason.’ I suspect it is this failure of Deleuze to understand Spinoxa that resulted in his suicide.

Hi, Owen. I think it’s wonderful that you are discussing philosophy in highschool. I didn’t discover philosophy until my third year in university.  When I did – the heavens opened.
  While I originally spent much time in existentialist thought (and certainly experienced, ‘angst,’) I am presently focused on Baruch Spinoza, Euclid, George Boole, the scientist Seth Lloyd and the neuroscientist , Antonio Damasio.
  When sharing philosophers, you will find that often they have gone on, as Wittgenstein said, ‘to language games on holiday.’ When speaking to your English class, as much as possible, use your ordinary Australian words.
 Doing my B.A., I once wrote an existentalist paper describing the dump in our small college town where my wife and I worked metals to make money for food while we went to school. Got an A + on it.
  This weekend, I worked at a Music Festival doing a presentation which I called, The Old Philosopher. (I can do this because I am 72).

  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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1)    The Language Shuffle

In preparation for this topic, I read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Reading Wittgenstein is the intellectual equivalent of having your mouth washed out with soap for using naughty words.

However, reading Wittgenstein is the necessary propaedeutic for discussing a philosopher’s theory of knowledge.  As he said, “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”  1

Spinoza had similar concerns: “Indeed, most errors result solely from the incorrect application of words to things.” 2 This is why Spinoza’s first work, where he begins to develop his theory of knowledge is called; Emendation of the Intellect. Like Wittgenstein, Spinoza knew thinking had to be cured of its ‘mental’ intoxicants.

To stay free of the mental traps which accompany emotions, Spinoza knew he had to redefine words like: ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘reason,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘idea’ and even, ‘God..

‘Understanding,’ is the most important word in Spinoza’s lexicon. Most of us read it as fixed stuff in our brains, i.e., ‘Now I understand algebra,’ but, as Wittgenstein says:

“Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all – for that is the expression which confuses you. But ask yourself: in what sort of circumstances do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on?” 3

Content analyses of Spinoza’s works suggest he used understanding as the alpha and omega of how to think. It is his guide for the ‘conatus,’ or the striving of the organism to preserve and enhance itself.

Understanding begins when objects in the universe inform us they have an individual and specific existence. It completes the circle when, as Einstein says, we are able to break out of the prison of self-interest…”by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 4        Spinoza says reason is not “…the principal thing in us” but only like a staircase to understanding.5 His theory of knowledge was not the brainchild of a rationalist.

Many Spinozians believe there were two sides of Spinoza, even two Spinozas;’ the immature writer of the Emendation and Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being and the mature Spinoza of the Ethics and subsequent works. This view violates content analysis.

Spinoza begins his development of a theory of knowledge in the Emendation and completes it in the Short Treatise, which was so radical, he was afraid to make it public.

For Spinoza there are three ascending levels of how we can perceive the universe: For Spinoza there are three ascending levels of how we can perceive the universe: 1) Opinion, 2) True Belief and 3) Science. Opinion is the source of doubt and error in our thinking. Opinion arises from misconstruing the place of individual things in our random experiences and use of signs. Spinoza believed only individual things have existence, not general or universal ideas.

A ‘true belief,’ is “…a strong proof based on reasons,” 6 Spinoza said. Reason is not the third kind of knowledge or science, although it demonstrates a true path to follow to the understanding of science. Science “…does not consist in conviction based on reasons but in immediate union with the thing itself.” Science does what true belief cannot, “…make us enjoy intellectually…what is in us…” 7

[Note: Spinoza’s separation of science from reason (true belief), may have been due to an insight into the nature of things that physicists call, ‘’entanglement’8’ and to a related notion, ‘synchronicity.” 9 Reason, (true belief), operates in local knowledge while Spinoza’s concept of science is generated by non-local knowledge. Because of quantum weirdness in the universe and our brains, scientific discoveries leap over reason by jumping out of the whole].

 Science is the highest level of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge in the Short Treatise, but by the time he writes the Ethics, he has substituted the words, ‘intuitive knowledge,’ to describe the third kind of knowledge.10

White and Stirling translate this phrase as “intuitive science.” 11   Wittgenstein says the word, ‘intuition,’ is, ‘an unnecessary shuffle.’ 12.

Now for a radical hypothesis on Spinoza. After developing a theory of knowledge that reaches its highest apex of science in the Short Treatise, Spinoza devotes the rest of his writing primarily to ‘true belief or reason.’ No wonder he gets misidentified as a rationalist.

Why does Spinoza do an unnecessary shuffle on science? 

First, his ‘true belief’ background, was in theology and philosophy. It is easy in both disciplines, to let language go on ‘holidays.’ 13  While Spinozians always praise Part One of the Ethics, with its so-called, ontological argument, George Boole suggests it is not very logical. 14

Near the end of the Ethics, Spinoza says his demonstration in Part I was only ‘true belief,’ and inferior to the knowledge of particular things (that he describes as science in the Emendation and Short Treatise.15

Another reason for Spinoza’s shuffle might be his times, making him cautious  about revealing his true belief about science. His motto was ‘caute.’ Spinoza’s admonition at the end of the Treatise and his turning back from publishing the Ethics, suggest this. 

The reason I believe it is true, is that Spinoza developed the gift he received in understanding, (‘now I know how to go on,’), from his circumstances. His philosophy grew out of stress, what we might call PTSD, today.

How can Spinoza be described as an ‘ivory tower’ philosopher, in light of what he said at the start of the Emendation?

      “By persistent meditation, however, I came to the conclusion that if only

      I could resolve, wholeheartedly, [to change my plan of life], I would be giving up

certain evils for a certain good. For I saw that I was in the greatest danger and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength, however uncertain it might be- like a man suffering from a fatal illness, who, foreseeing certain death unless he employs a remedy, is forced to seek it, however uncertain, with all his strength.” 16

            This is not language on holiday. Spinoza found, ‘how to go on,’ (understanding), in exploring a theory of knowledge that would cure his intellect of the inadequate thinking that was caused by the circumstances of his body. Just as ‘mental,’ bewitches us in language, so it does in discussing the health of the body.

            Having found a theory of knowledge that cumulated in science in the Emendation and Short Treatise, Spinoza began a preliminary study of the passions that arise in our body as a result of circumstances that affect us, and further developed it in the Ethics. This study, as he clearly notes, is carried out by reason,’ not science.

            If Spinoza lived today, when neuroscience is making significant discoveries, he might have included these discoveries in his discussion. How excited Spinoza would have been with Jean-Pierre Changeux’s, Neuronal Man 17  and Antonio Damasio’s,  Looking For Spinoza:Joy,Sorrow and the Feeling Brain.18

After the Treatise, Spinoza carries out ‘true belief’ discussions on ethics, religion and politics. However, his understanding of science is always peeking around the edges of these works. In them, science takes a not unnecessary shuffle in God talk, considering his time.

What would Spinoza’s theory of knowledge be like in our day? What is the difference between scientific and ‘true belief’ thinkers in our understanding? We need Spinoza’s definitions of God for this.

Curley says, “Spinoza’s God is an ultimate principle of explanation.”19   Spinoza’s discussions on God in the Treatise, describe it as the operative and generative cause of every single thing that exists. For Spinoza, God and nature are abstract words describing the same thing. This is how Spinoza could say God is immanent in everything that exists in the universe, including us.

Spinoza says we know two attributes of God: thought and extension. Thought is the operative cause and extension, is the generative cause of everything that exists. We have thinkers whom we relate to as operative causes or ‘true belief,’ and we have thinkers we relate to as generative causes or seminal. The former are related to language and ‘strong proofs,’ (logic) and the latter are the ‘seed’ or ‘semen’ in the evolution of our thinking.

      Spinoza’s understanding of Euclid is seminal. Contextual evidence supports this conclusion. Then there’s Aristotle. The ‘true beliefs’ influence in Spinoza’s life, starts with Descartes, then Hobbs, Bacon, Maimonides and others,  more, ‘true belief,’ influences than seminal ones.

      II. Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.

      In the Emendation, Spinoza lays the foundation of his theory of knowledge and completes it in the Treatise.  This foundation, which never changed throughout his writing, is based on the operation of science and its language, mathematics/logic.

Bertrand Russell says we are inclined to take the ‘logical foundation of things,’ including mathematics, for granted. 20 Spinoza discovered the logical foundation of things in Euclid. This turned Spinoza’s thinking away from religious and secular goals for his life. He rejected God as a transcendent goal or end of living and said God is the immanent logic in everything that exists in the universe. 27

This discovery got Spinoza kicked out of the Jewish religion, barred from contact with all Jews, including family, and lost him his job. It is suggested it almost cost him his life when a hit man, sent by the synagogue, tried to kill him.

Talk about trauma! Spinoza’s ‘fatal illness’ talk, was no sham. 29   Having secular goals yanked away, he examines wealth, fame and pleasure and says they will not endure nor satisfy. Spinoza says there is only one goal or good that never fails humanity: “…the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.” 21

In the Emendation, Spinoza identifies this knowledge as science, although his description is caught up in the language shuffles of ‘essence,’ and ‘intuition.’  Human perfection is the one goal of science. Everything else is useless, he said.  To achieve this goal, Spinoza sets out to know as much of nature as he could, to reform society. All of Spinoza’s works are based on this endeavor. 22

However, we have to be sure our own thinking is not messed up: “…we must devise a way of healing the intellect…so that it understands things successfully without error and as well as possible. “ 23 This begins with understanding how we perceive nature, to know both nature and our power of knowing it.24

Spinoza says we inherit most of our ways of knowing things, through what we experience and the language by which we express these events. The former is limited to only our experiences, and the latter, as Wittgenstein says, can ‘bewitch us,’ and both lead into error.“ 25

So we turn to education, (self and taught). We learn to seek the causes of things in the accumulated wisdom of humanity. But, the proofs of our teachers are often in conflict, catching us up in language games of, ‘webs of belief.’ 26

When Spinoza called reason, ‘true beliefs,’ he was being gracious, wishing reason could be confined to ‘adequate ideas ’and ‘common notions.’27 Reason, however, is a child of language and caught up in its inherent relativity or shuffles.

The ancient Greeks believed in demonstrations, not in external proofs about the things we experience (reason) but rather how these things ‘coincide’ with the operation of the brain we call thinking.   This is what Spinoza meant by ‘immediate union with the thing itself or science.

Thomas Heath’s introduction to Euclid’s Elements is the best description of the language and concepts at Aristotle and Euclid’s time. A quote from Aristotle shows how he uses the word, ‘demonstration.’ It plants the seed of Spinoza’s usage:

      “Now that which is per se necessarily true and must necessarily be

      thought so, is not a hypothesis nor yet a postulate. For demonstration

      has not to do with reasoning from outside but with the reason dwelling

      in the soul…It is always possible to raise objection to reasoning from

      outside, but to contradict the reason within us, is not always possible.”28

Euclid is ‘projaculated’ throughout Spinoza’s writings; Spinoza’s intellectual father. Euclid’s common notions, emphasizing equality, are, as Spinoza understood, the foundation of mathematics and ethics.

The word, ‘equal,’ is so common, it is often overlooked. However, it is the glue that holds mathematics and logic together. Euclid’s common notions on equality are:

1)    “Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.”

2)    “If equals be added to equals, the whole are equal.”

3)    “If equals be subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal.”

4)    “Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another.” 29

Their profundity is only surpassed by the simple line with which Euclid began his

definitions: “A point is that which has no part.” 30 No wonder Spinoza considered Euclid the master!

            Spinoza’s understanding of God/Nature was derived from Euclid’s fifth common notion:  “The whole is greater than the part.” 31

It was in Euclid’s Common Notions, that Spinoza discovered the logical foundations of things. These notions we take for granted: equality and whole/part, are the operations of the brain that coincide with things themselves.

Science is the operation of our brains that adds, subtracts, and coincides parts and wholes to find them equal. This is the operation in our brain that leads to the discoveries of mathematics and logic and ultimately unites them.

What is science? Spinoza could go only so far with his insight by saying it is”…immediate union with the thing itself.” 32 The discussion continues with George Boole’s, Laws of Thought, 33 and Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe. 34   Lloyd’s work gives an overview in which to fit Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.

The universe is made up of single things, (bits). These singular things send and receive information. All information is generated and operates through logic gates of 1 or 0, yes or no.  The universe is in a quantum state of both 1 and 0, (waves and particles) until information is processed.

The first and second laws of thermodynamics, informed by entropy, say that these singular things are conserved as energy and expanded as information. A singular thing could be as diverse as an atom’s spin, a hippo stepping on your foot, or a riot inside prison.

Our body receives information from the whole of information and the singular things (or bits) which express it. This information is processed by ‘senses,’ in our neuronal system.

The neuronal system, like the rest of the universe, is in quantum flux. The system is not binary until certain events occur. If our brain is like a computer, it would be a quantum one.

Neurons pass information from one to another through synapses (electrical or chemical gaps). Following George Boole and Seth Lloyd, we can describe synapses as logic gates. The information in those logic gates can be processed as 1 or 0, (yes or no) or both 1 and 0.

This passing is throughout the entire body, not just the brain. All physiological systems are guided by synapses which even hover in our DNA, determining whether we will be human or a rat. (Same DNA).

Neuroscience is a relatively young discipline which will give us a wealth of understanding about how the brain operates and how language arises and operates in our brain. These discoveries will confirm George Boole’s laws of signs as paths of logic gates, (synapses) in the brain. 

III Spinoza’s Tourist Traps

In the Emendation, Spinoza says: “the…intellect, by its inborn powers, makes intellectual tools for itself.” 35 He also says: “…in order to know that I know, it is necessary that I must first know.” 36 In other words, singular things send us information. Spinoza redefined mental constructs as intellectual tools that we use, in going on in our thinking. ‘Mind,’ ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ ‘idea,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘certainty,’ ‘objective essence,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘body,’ are different intellectual tools to demonstrate how we receive information from singular things and their totality in the universe, (Nature/God).

Each tool has a different function in Spinoza’s theory of knowledge. ‘Mind’ is the totality of information. He calls this totality, ‘substance’ and its expression, an ‘attribute.’ The sending and receiving information by singular things (including us), is a subset of mind or a mode. He calls this, ‘soul’.

This totality of sending and receiving information is Nature/God. The singular thing and the information it sends are expressions of the same thing. Mind, (thought) and body (extension), are identical. There is no ‘mental’ in the universe or in us. ‘God thinks,’ is not an anthropomorphism by Spinoza

            For Spinoza, the totality of information is not bounded by space and time. The unbounded, he calls, ‘eternity’. Modern scientists waver in their opinions about this.

Because all things, including us, are subsets of mind or the totality of information, everything is, always has been and always will be. Therefore, the part of us which is the subset of mind can never die and is eternal. This is what Spinoza means by necessity. The soul is how we receive information through our receptor, the body. It is the form of mind that has duration. This tool ceases when duration ends and translates into a different form in the totality of information.

Simply put, the soul, like the body, dies. But the conservation of energy and expansion of information it demonstrates, is eternal.  Spinoza means, by ‘body’, what physiologists and neuroscientists understand as body. (The brain, like head, legs and so forth, is body. There is no mental substance). Spinoza, however, says body was never created but existed in a different form before it was generated (evolved) to its present form.

Different scientists have expressed the translation of information by saying the DNA of humanity exists in our genes; we are condensed energy, waiting to be liberated. Stardust.

When Spinoza said creation never happened, the soul dies with the body and God is the totality of information (mind) in nature, this did not make him very popular with religious people.  So he hid these comments, mostly in footnotes in the Short Treatise that were not meant for public consummation. These ‘heresies’ did, however, leak out. Spinoza’s redefinition of God has only been appreciated by select individuals like Einstein.

An ‘idea’ is a neurological connection of our body to the information sent us by things. Understanding is the eternal causal connections of how to go on, that is in the totality of information (mind) and finitely in our brain (body). ‘Certainty,’ ‘objective essence,’ and ‘truth,’ are different linguistic moves in describing how we receive information.

In his attempt to understand that the universe is made up of singular things that send and receive information, Spinoza took us on a philosophical holiday. But the anthropological tourist traps were fun.

IV Spinoza and Modern Science

Spinoza’s concept of science was as old as Aristotle and Euclid, as modern as information theory.  His concept of God as the operative and generative cause of everything that exists, finds its equivalent in ‘It from Qubit.’ 37 Spinoza’s theory of knowledge operates in the same way as ‘logic gates’ operate in information theory.

            We could wish Spinoza had said more about science as his third kind of knowledge, not disguised it in the shuffle of God talk, but his cover-up was necessary. Today we can put Spinoza’s theory of knowledge into the context of modern science.

            It begins with George Boole’s The Laws of Thought. 38   His investigation into the laws of thought gave us Boolean algebra which underlies the language of artificial thought – the computer.

            Like Spinoza, Boole believed, “…language is an instrument of human reason and not merely a medium for the expression of thought…” 39   However, Boole does a modern rationalist shuffle on Spinoza’s concept of science as “…immediate union with the thing itself…”

Boole comes down on the side of what is called, ‘modernity,” even though his actual discussion leaves the question of demonstration versus modernity, open.40

            However, Boole considers his three laws of signs as, ‘instruments of language.’ His first two laws are operations of the brain, independent of language and the source of language. 41   Essentially, we do not model our thinking on mathematics and logic but rather they are modeled on the operations of our brains.

            Here are the three elements of Boole’s laws of signs: 1) Literal symbols as x, y, & c, representing things as subjects of our conceptions.  2) Signs of operations as +,-, x, standing for those operations of the mind by which the conception of things are combined or resolved so as to form new conceptions involving the same elements.. 3) The sign of identity, =. 42         Using these three elements, Boole classifies language:

    Class I

            “Appellative or descriptive signs, expressing either the name of a thing

            or some quality or circumstance belonging to it.” 43

Class II

“Signs of those mental operations whereby we collect parts into a whole or separate a whole into its parts.” 44

  Class III

“Signs by which relation is expressed and by which we form propositions.”45

            Frege, Russell and Whitehead expand significantly on Boole’s discussion of ‘class.’ 46   For them, the elements got lost in the class. Frege’s idea of thought is confined to Boole’s third class. He does an idealist shuffle. 47

            Boole’s genius was in his next step, after introducing the laws of thought and classifying them. He produces the “…axioms which the symbols introduce…” 48   He draws the general axioms from Euclid:

            “1st. If equal things are added to equal things, the wholes are equal.”

                “2nd. If equal things are taken from equal things, the remainders are equal.” 49

            While we will not repeat Boole’s ingenious application of the rule of transportation, to draw an analogy between logic and algebra, while realizing its limitation, he comes to the conclusion that gave birth to the language of computers, the special law of logic: X2 =X: 50

“Now of the symbols of number, there are but two, viz, 0 and 1, which are                    subject to the same formal laws. We know that 02 = 0 and that 12=1;

and the equation X2=X considered as algebraic, has no other root than 0

and 1.” 51

            Thus began the discipline of mathematical logic.  This discipline has grown rationally well beyond Boole’s early description.

            Boole, like many modern thinkers, misidentified the elements of science as language, when they were operations of our brain. This is why today’s ’science’ has separated into parts and seldom finds its way back into the whole.

            Spinoza’s theory of knowledge was based on the operations of the brain, which he derived from Euclid’s common notions, (as did Boole). Spinoza called this process, ‘ideas of ideas’, (reflection) which gives us method.

A true method follows the path by which we receive information from the singular object as ideas, (synaptic connections) re: their existence and essence – what makes them a certain kind of thing) and relates them to other ideas.

To know, we must first have a true idea, (synaptic connection). The information we receive from singular things, teaches us how to go on, (understand) in our use of this information. We relate these ideas to other ideas (synaptic connections) of how to go on and connect them to the unity of information out of which they arose.

            If we follow this method in our understanding, Spinoza says, we understand, “…both our own powers and the order of nature.” Therefore, we can lay down rules for our own guidance of how to go on and, by understanding, the order of nature, restrain ourselves from, ‘useless pursuits.’  This is Spinoza’s whole method or theory of knowledge.52

All of the operations of mathematics are ways we can think about how to go on, (understand). Wittgenstein said: “We do not realize that we calculate, operate with words and in the course of time, translate them sometimes into one picture, sometimes another.” 53

Language finds its direction in symbols and operations but finds its ‘bewitchment,’ in relations, or, as we so often misuse the word, ‘relative’ thinking. Wittgenstein’s pictures.

The shuffle of language leads to what Spinoza calls, ‘inadequate thinking.’ 

This is a beginning in understanding the radical break. Spinoza made with the philosophies of his day and how his work reverberates in modern concepts of science. All of the labels that have been applied to Spinoza: rationalist, humanist, atheist, pantheist,  are attempts to co-opt him back into the fold of the bewitchment of our intelligence that he left when he wrote the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being.                                                                             

Caute

REFERENCES

            1) Wittgenstein, L. trans. Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan

            2) Spinoza, B., trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael Morgan, The Complete Works, 2002, Indianapolis, Cambridge, Hackett

            3) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 61e

            4) Herbert, N. 1985, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Garden City, New York, Anchor/Doubleday, p. 250.  Herbert ends his book with Einstein’s quote.

            5) Spinoza, Shirley, op cit. p. 100

            6) Spinoza, B. trans & ed. Edwin Curley, 1985, Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol 1, Princeton, Princeton U. Press

            7) Spinoza, Ibid p. 102

            Albert, D.Z. and Galchen, R. March, ‘09, A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity, Scientific American, pp. 32-39

            9) Peat, F.D. 1987 Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, New York: Bantam

            10) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 475

            11) Spinoza, B. trans. White, H.L. and Stirling,   The Ethic of Benedict D. Spinoza, 1937, 4th ed. London: Oxford U. Press

            12) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 54e

            13) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 19e

            14) Boole, G. 1854 (1958 ed.) An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probability, New York” Dover,, pp. 185-218

            15) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 475

            16) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 379

            17) Changeux, J. trans. Gorey, L. 1985   Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, New York: Oxford, Oxford U. Press

            18) Damasio, A. 2003, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, New York: Harcourt

            19) Curley, E. 1994, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, Princeton: Princeton U., p. xxiv

            20) Russell, B. 1919, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin

            21) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 11

            22) Ibid pp 13-16

            23) Ibid p. 11

            24) Ibid p. 15

            25) Wittgenstein, op cit. p. 47e

            26) Quine, W.V. Ullian, J.S. 1970, The Web of Belief, New York, Random House

            27) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 478

            28) Euclid, trans. Heath, T. 1956, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Vol 1, New York: Dover, p. 118

            29) Ibid, p. 155

            30) Ibid p. 153

            31) Ibid p. 155

            32) Spinoza, Curley, op cit. p. 102a

            33) Boole, op cit.

            34) Lloyd, S. 2007, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, New York: Vintage/Random House

            35) Spinoza, Shirley, op cit. p. 10

            36) Ibid

            37) Lloyd, S., NGY, .J. Black Hole Computers, Scientific American, Nov. ‘04, pp. 52-61

            38) Lloyd, op cit.

            39) Boole, op cit. p. 24

Thank you, Alastair,  for posting this Sunday Times review of Graham Farmeleo’s book on Paul Dirac. It came at an opportune time.  Several comments in the review were applicable to a significant discovery I made about Spinoza last week, which has been fermenting in my brain since then.
    Although I have been reading and meditating on Spinoza’s writing for 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

Richard Dawkins is not aware of it, but his latest book, The God Delusion, has driven the last nail into the coffin of Humanism. (1) By taking on the mantle of Nietzsche’s madman (God is dead), and making it respectful, Dawkins has destroyed forever the link between religion and science that Humanists forged. After Dawkins’critique, can any intelligent person use the word, ‘God,’ today, without feeling embarrassed? And yet we hang around the Best Seller lists, feeling a loss as the excesses of theism and anthropomorphism slowly drain any credibility from the deity. In reaction, some individuals fled east to the sound of one hand clapping. But it’s a shock to lose the word altogether.

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.

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We live in a complex word and it seems hard to make sense of it.

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.

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Ironically, when reason failed me, I could only find solace in the writings of a man who has been called a ‘rationalist;’ however, after making repeated and failed runs at being an academic and ending up in prison, what made me a kindred spirit with Baruch Spinoza was not reason, but stress disease.

Addiction to adrenalin highs as a prisoner guard, bottomed out in despair after a prisoner tried to kill me and some years later, I found a young prisoner who had hung himself on Mother’s day.

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