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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. .

2

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.

3

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.

I was talking to Scott about Spinoza. Next thing I knew, he had brought up a website of the translated works of Spinoza.

“Oh, there is Curley,” I said. “He is the newest translator of Spinoza’s works.” Then I forgot the incident. Scott did not.

A Purlator truck pulled into the driveway. I was handed a package. Inside was Edwin Curley’s, A Spinoza Reader, (Princeton Press, 1994). Scott, despite his inability to speak, had ordered it online for me.

Several days later, I was reading it and these words changed my whole understanding of Spinoza: “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, Part II, Prop II, p. 122, Curley).

Spinoza said we think because things exist.

Scott died a few months later and his soul melted into the fabric of the universe and accompanies my soul on its journey. “…the Soul is an Idea which is in the thinking thing, arising from the reality of a thing which exists in Nature.” (Chapter XXIII, p. 95, trans. A. Wolf in Spinoza Complete Works, Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan, Hackett Publishers, 2002).

Why do I use the ‘F’ word? When I was a prison guard, I found that the two most common words used by prisoners were ‘respect,’ and ‘f***.’ A prison is a very f****ed up place. Anger and despair hang like a morbid tapestry on the walls.

The prisoners respond to their situation with F.T.W. (F*** The World).

One Christmas Eve I saw a sign on a cell door when I was walking down the range: ‘No one is merry here so f*** off!’ But the world where prisoners say we live and the one in which they live when they leave the joint is also f***ed up. I do not need to tell you why. Just look; anger, hate, war, religion and politics. Do I need to go on?

I discovered philosophy as a young man and fell in love with it. The first philosopher I read was Martin Heidegger. The way to do philosophy, he said, was to live in an author’s work until you are carried out of it.

The man in whose work I was living when I went inside prison was the nineteenth century American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. Though I feared mathematics because I was poor at it, Peirce taught me to lay aside the math bogeyman. I grew to love the concepts of mathematics and related fields of logic and science.

Which meant that, on midnight shifts I would walk down black ranges, briefly flicking my light into the corner of every prisoner’s cell, then return to the office and the light of reason as I began to read books on math, logic and science.

But reason was not enough. Philosophy had given meaning to my earlier jobs first as a construction worker, then in child welfare. But reason failed me inside prison. I became addicted to adrenaline highs, suffering the lows and eventually becoming so melancholic I did not want to live.

But then one of the science books led me to Spinoza by referencing a website in Siberia where a European philosopher was comparing Spinoza’s notion of substance to current scientific thinking. I had encountered Spinoza in university but did not think I needed him. Now suffering the increasing pain of the stress disease I had acquired in prison, I knew I needed help.

I needed to learn how to rethink my life and the world. Philosophers would call what Spinoza teaches, his ‘theory of knowledge.’ I would say rather, it is tools for living. I began to use Spinoza’s ideas as I did my keys as a prison guard; keys to unlock barriers to understanding the universe.

Every occupation has a specific tool to do the job. Keys are the most important tools a guard uses, just as an accountant uses numbers.

Over my desk I have a life maxim adopted as my rule of conduct. Albert Einstein said we can all live in a prison of our thinking:

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us, ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

Einstein, who was a Spinozian in his philosophy, is describing why the world and our thinking about it is so f***ed up. This world is of our own making. The cons are accurate in their assessment. But the universe is the whole out of which all adequate thinking must come.

Acknowledging that the whole universe is greater than all our collective egos is the first key to unlocking the barriers to our understanding. The conceit of human nature is to think we know it all. But modern science has proved in a decisive way through Heisenberg and Godel that we do not. AA’s second step says it all. We ‘came to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.’

As infants inside our mothers, we probably experience the security of this whole, just before we are pulled screaming out into the world. It is filled with baffling objects (including the one that slaps us on the butt). Piget says these objects do not even have permanence until we are around six months old. So we begin our experience in this world f***ed up.

Ever since, we have tried to make sense of the objects surrounding us. This active search to make sense is what we mean by an idea. Some philosophers, such as Plato have mystified this word, but a word is all it is.

Spinoza says the second key to unlocking understanding is when this search latches onto objects. Spinoza calls them, ‘singular things,’ or things which are unique, one of a kind. He says this is how our mind works, or brain for those who do not like the word, ‘mind.’

Using the key of existence, we spend our lives trying to unlock how we relate to these objects or singular things and how they affect us.

I suspect this is how an animal understands the universe. They do not get past their immediate reaction to the thing that exists. My dog reading his pee mail.

But as humans we have complicated the is-ness of objects with language: ‘ma-ma’ ‘dog.’ ‘Christian, Jew or Muslim.’ Forgetting that all objects are singular things, i.e. one of a kind, we group them and order them as to how they affect us. In other words, we abstract objects into categories of general and universal descriptions of how they relate to our lives.

Language is not only what makes us human but also what makes us, among animals, the only ones who can f*** up. Humans are the only animals who can abstract emotions away from their direct purpose of relating to actual objects in a here-and-now way into ideas of anger, hate, guilt, greed, repentance and so forth. Abstract emotions are restraints, chains around our consciousness that separate us from our natural existence in the universe. No wonder our world is f***ed up.

The remedy to this problem caused by the excesses of language is Spinoza’s third key. He says we have ‘common notions’ which can unite our thoughts into adequate thinking or reasonable ideas about the universe. Some of these notions are basic physical facts of our lives, the kind physics scholars explore. .

Not everyone agrees on what Spinoza means by ‘common notions.’ Some seem to have gone on language holidays in their discussions.

As I read and reread the second part of Spinoza’s Ethics, I began to realize why he used a geometric method. It relates to Euclid’s Geometry, which was the only geometry that Spinoza knew. ‘Common notions are the foundation of our reasoning’, Spinoza says.

Common notions run throughout the discussions of early philosophers. Aristotle says they are ‘the necessary principles…the truth of which it is not possible to prove… and reason dwelling in the soul.’

Today’s mathematicians and scientists would call them ‘axioms,’ a less prosaic term than the ancients. No ‘reason dwelling in the soul.’ But what we have gained in preciseness, we may have lost in content.

Consider Euclid’s five Common Notions:

1) Things which are equal to the same thing are 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

5) The whole is greater than the part.

What do we see? The common notion of equal, one which is almost invisible to

us. While seldom paying attention to it, we use it all the time. When we add two and two to equal four, we pay attention to the numbers, the operation and the result, but not to the equal glue which holds it all together.

This is the way I suspect it was for Spinoza. For him, the common notion of equal was more caught than taught, running through the entire corpus of his work, especially parts two and five of the Ethics. While never specifically addressing it, the common notion of equal is the reason he calls his major work, Ethic.

Spinoza is not alone in this catch. Equal underlies all of the major works of humanity, while going missing from profane writings like Mein Kampf. The Common notion of equal is, of course, the essence of ethical thinking and the impetus behind the idea of justice. If ethics is the main idea of religion, as Spinoza suggests, than the common notion of equal is its wellspring.

The warp and woof of mathematics is also the common notion of equal. Without it you cannot do mathematics. In fact, the organizing principle of all mathematical thinking is the common notion of equal. Because of this, mathematical ideas are the model of adequate or reasonable thinking.

Spinoza says the superstition of religion:

‘ would have been sufficient to keep the human race 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. ‘

The residues of religious superstition still persist in philosophy, seeping through

humanistic, transcendental and interpretative strains which think they must battle scientific ideas to maintain liberal ethics. In prison we called these kinds of ideologues,

‘do-gooders,’ (individuals who make their own ideas more important than the reality of the situation).

Such philosophies try to model Spinoza in their own image, dismissing his geometric method while speaking of mathematics as ‘misguided.’ I suspect these individuals are terrified of a symbol in any other form than language. They ignore Spinoza’s harsh critique of language like the word, ‘Being.’ (Yes, I was carried out of Heidegger). They are algorophobes who turn their fear of ciphers into mistrust towards the field in which they are an abstraction.

But abstraction is abstraction. Mathematics is first a way of thinking and acting. It is only a language of abstraction for specialists. Almost all the residue philosophers are dressed in the armour of ethics as they go forth to critical battle. I suspect they would be shocked to know the common notion that guides them is the same ‘equal’ that has created mathematics.

It is irrational to dismiss the value of mathematics and science in understanding the universe. Whenever any activity that uses mathematics and science goes astray, it is caused by ideologues, not their discipline in thinking and acting.

This third key, the common notion of equal, unlocks barriers to understanding so that we can use reason. Armed with the keys of the wholeness of the universe (also a common notion), the singularity of existing things and the guidance of seeking what is equal in all things, our thinking can be adequate (reasonable) and not f***ed up.

The world is f***ed up because we think and act with inadequate ideas; ideas which are confused by emotions and corrupt the imagination. Spinoza spends considerable time showing how powerful, confused emotions and corrupt imagination are. Reason cannot stand alone against this confusion and corruption. This is why, of course, that Spinoza is not a rationalist.

Our understanding needs a cure (emendation) from what he calls this ‘deadly disease,’ of confused emotions and corrupt imagination. The three keys are the scalpels to perform this surgical operation.

I needed such an operation. I had lost the desire to preserve my life. I was no longer actively striving to profit in my life. This is what Spinoza means by the word, ‘conatus.’ As he says, “seeking the normal profits of humankind: riches, fame and the pleasure of sense,” make our own thinking inadequate and are the sign posts of the ‘deadly disease.’ We need to go down the equal path for our true profit.

In saying this, Spinoza echoes the words of Christ and many other ethical teachers such as Buddha, Mohammed, Red Cloud and Immanuel Kant.

Then he lists four ways we gain ‘practical advantage.’

First, it teaches us how to free ourselves from the prison of our myopia, confused emotions and corrupt imaginations as Einstein stated, ‘by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.’

Second, we learn how to respond to the things and situations that seem to f*** up our lives. All things are of equal value in our experience of the universe, both the things we judge good and those we judge bad. Just as two plus two equals four, these experiences will all add up as reasonable in the long run. We just need patience. The doors that close are just as important as the doors that open.

Third, this teaching, …”contributes to the welfare of our social existence since it teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one and to envy no one. It teaches everyone, moreover to be content with his own and to be helpful to his neighbour….”

Fourth, it teaches us why an equal society would be best for its citizens. Spinoza’s political theory has been much discussed and admired by individuals from the left to the right of varied and diverse stripes.

Finally, Spinoza teaches what to do when circumstances and situations f*** up our emotions. Since I suffer from stress disease, these situations may seem very petty to an outside observer. However he has given me a simple program which I try to follow carefully. It has five steps: When I encounter such a situation, I:

1) Identify what emotion is occurring (anger, fear, etc)

2) Separate this emotion from the situation that caused it

3) Separate this emotion from the baggage of past & future.

4) Relate this emotion to the common notions of equal and the place of the part

(me) in the whole.

5) Identify how this emotion is affecting my body (usually an adrenaline rush)

and use adequate thinking to place it into a proper context.

In step four there occurs a somewhat ironic twist in Spinoza, which he obscures by ‘God talk.’ This relating has to be emotional. Spinoza hints at this when he says only a stronger emotion can annul another emotion.

Reason, Spinoza says, is not effective against emotion. “This love to God,’ he says, is the highest good which we can seek according to the dictates of reason.” So, for Spinoza, the highest good which reason can attain is an emotional attitude towards reality, (the whole). He has tried to sneak emotion in as reason.

He says, :’emotion that arises from reason, is necessarily related to the common properties of things.’ Reason is the wag of the tale of understanding.

We can call this attitude, love, wonder or many other words inspired by religion and mystics but I prefer the word my cons used, ‘respect.’ While they turned this word inward, toward themselves, as a need, it should be turned outward, towards existence and every unique thing in it. Respect for existence.

When we take away Spinoza’s cautious sop to the Inquisition this is what he mean meant by the word, ‘God.’ It doesn’t matter whether this emotional attitude is called, ‘love of God,’ ‘ belief in a higher power,’ ‘respect for existence,’ as long as it guides us into ethical action and we find satisfaction or well being in this pursuit. This is the essence of true religion and reason.

This is how we profit in our lives.

Here is an example of the five steps in practice. I tend to leave practical affairs to

my wife; paying bills and scheduling appointments. Last Monday she was volunteering down the street. I stayed home to write. While I love research, writing is more like walking the prison ranges, where you never know what will happen. While there may be exciting moments of discovery, you can also get a shank in the back. I get the same adrenaline rush from writing that I sometimes did as a guard. Much of the time, both are a fairly straightforward, slightly boring routine. Then once in awhile, all hell breaks loose.

Last Monday was like that, similar to the emotion I felt when I found contraband hidden on the range, a still in a broom closet, a shiv inside a magazine. The high when the common becomes the uncommon and a singular experience, a source of discovery.

In the middle of this high my wife came home. As I ran feverishly along the ranges in my head, expressing my ideas, she took off her coat and pottered around; waiting for me to finish and begin the schedule for the rest of the day which included a dinner we’d both agreed to attend.

About an hour later, I hit the wall. My adrenaline dropped from high to irritable fatigue. “What time is that damn dinner?” I said.

She checked our schedule. “It was actually lunch,” she said apologetically. “They kept referring to it as dinner, but it turns out, it was at noon. I got it wrong and now I guess we’ve missed it.”

My wife was raised believing that dinner was the meal at the end of the day where I had it at noon. Because by choice she does the cooking, I go by her definition. But now I had a focus for my irritation, even though I had not wanted to go.

Our social faux pas was her fault. I began to add it to a list of her other mistakes in the past. The fuse was lit. I was ticking and my stress disease was ready to blow. But then understanding stepped up. As it should have, since I had spent the morning explaining how to be cured.

“Are you treating your wife ‘equal?’ it said. ‘Are you being loving towards her?’ Well, no, I wasn’t. I began reluctantly running down the five steps. It was obvious that adrenaline was controlling my body and emotions. While you cannot turn it off, acknowledging its presence can mute its effects somewhat.

I pirouetted in my mind “Honey, I’m so sorry,” I said. “It could happen to anyone.”

Not all emotional outbursts are so quickly capped but I have been applying Spinoza’s five steps for several years so it has become easier to bring emotions and imagination under the control of adequate thinking.

Why is the world so f***ed up? Inadequate thinking. The word, ‘f***’ is our common scream.

It is not easy to think adequately. Spinoza explored why.

It works for me. The victories are occurring more often.

Ask my wife.

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.

Stress disease in soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, was recently addressed in a two-part CBS television series called, ‘Mind Battles.’ . While well-intentioned, the program suffered from the two fallacies that usually occur in discussions on stress disease; 1) that it is a mental health issue and 2) that only a percentage of front-line workers have it. Every single individual who works for any time in a front line occupation has this physical affliction that changes their physiological functioning, whether or not the usual symptoms are present (ie: anger, anxiety, depression, out of control emotions). The disease may not be overtly manifest in some individuals who serve as carriers. Only their families and close associates may suspect something is amiss.

In this respect, stress disease may be the predominant condition of our present century, a concern, not just for soldiers returning from battle, but for us all. The difference is one of degree and not of kind.

When the atom was split, it was discovered that a disruption of the smallest bit of the universe may have far-reaching consequences for humanity. This is true for the small adrenal gland that sits in the body on top of the kidneys. Hormones secreted by this gland, have three purposes in survival of the fittest; maintenance of the heart, stress control and the adrenaline reaction of flight or fight.

Researchers have discovered that when an individual is in a prolonged stress situation, the hormone that controls stress wears out. Then the adrenaline that causes fight or flight flows unhindered throughout the body. Those who have lived in fight situations can testify that adrenaline can take you very high. You can actually come to live for those highs, becoming an adrenaline junkie.

As a correctional officer, I did.

Any junkie who lives for the high knows the down is horrendous. CBS television reported in November, 2007, that almost 120 Iraq veterans a week commit suicide, (over 6000 a year, twice the national average). Before I left my job in prison and even after, I wanted to die.

But what about the mental? Baruch Spinoza said,”…most errors result solely from the incorrect applications of words to things.” “Mind,’ and its accompanist, ‘mental,’ is that kind of misapplication. There is a metaphysical carryover from Plato, incorporated into the Christian religion and instilled into Western Philosophy through Descartes, the separation of the body from thought.

Because of this separation, most of us think emotions are mental. The seventeenth century philosopher, Spinoza and the twenty-first century neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, have taught me otherwise. It is through these two writers that I am on the way to recovery from stress disease and the misleading label of Post Trauma Stress Disorder that was applied to me.

Like all other labels ascribed to stress disease, PTSD describes its symptoms, rather than its cause. It is like thinking of chicken pox as spots rather than an infection. Both Spinoza and Damasio deny that the mind is a separate entity from the body. Mind and body are two expressions of the same thing that have different functions in its unity.

Everything we think is conceived through the experiences we have in our body. These experiences occur because things in the universe force their existence upon our thinking, through our bodies. My thinking does not create things but rather things create my thinking.

We could get rid of the words, ‘mind’ and ‘mental,’ and use the word, ‘brain’ as the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle suggested, except that the two previous words convey a wealth of meaning that has been acquired through history. Substituting the word, ‘synapse’ does not carry the same weight.

Spinoza says it is the essence of human beings, in fact of everything that exists, to strive to preserve its own being. He calls this striving the ‘conatus.’ Damasio puts this word in a modern context: “What is Spinoza’s conatus in current biological terms? It is the aggregate of dispositions laid down in brain circuitry that, once engaged in internal or environmental conditions, seeks both survival and well-being.”

These dispositions, Damasio says, are ‘homeostatic regulations’ that range from ‘a nesting of the simple within the complex.’ He breaks them up into 5 groups.

On the bottom is metabolic regulation, basic reflexes and immune responses. Next comes pain and pleasure behaviors. Then drives and motivations. At the next level are what we think of as emotions, such as fear and anger. All four levels are body functions. It is only when all of these dispositions congregate into feelings does thinking enter the equation.

Damasio says emotions are not feelings. Emotions are from the body. Feelings are our thinking responses that try to make sense of what is happening in our body as it reacts to our environment. In modern society, this thinking response is often inadequate.

Emotions battle with our minds. Several days after a prisoner tried to kill me by sticking a shiv in my gut, a cement truck pulled out in front of me as I drove my small Japanese car. Immediately, with my wife screaming, I tried to run that huge vehicle off the road. My adrenalin had signaled, ‘fight’ and my thinking responded inadequately. Anger swept through my body, the emotion battling with my mind. As Spinoza says, reason will never win against a strong emotion. The only response that can win against a strong emotion is a stronger emotion.

Ultimately, it was this stronger emotion, love for my wife that won. I let the cement truck win, as he surely would have, anyway. My wife’s distress had penetrated my understanding, the place in our consciousness where strong emotion resides.

Our thinking or reason, Spinoza says, is only a staircase where we climb to what we know already exists: ‘the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.’ This is the knowledge which gives humans our strongest emotion; love for a truth which is greater than ourselves.

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, understood this in his twelve step program: 1) ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. 2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to understanding.’

These are the first two steps in recovery from alcoholism as they are for those who suffer from this adrenaline addiction of stress disease. We can call this higher power, God, nature or whatever, as long as we realize that there is a greater truth or reality than the prison of solipsism that locks up our age behind the barriers of misdirected emotions and inadequate thinking.

Having said this, let us return to our soldiers whom we send to fight. Stress disease begins when front line workers are trained in a ‘fight’ response. It is called ‘combat’ in the army and ‘security’ in corrections and police work.

You are trained to react, not to think, trained as a team member. Thinking and individualism can lead to the failure of the mission and the possible death of all concerned. How else could a perfectly intelligent and sane person be expected to advance and engage in a fire fight or walk down a prison range when prisoners are rioting, shouting and throwing fire bombs?

After training, the individual goes to work, only to find that 95% of their time is spent waiting for something to happen. Then something goes down and in the frenzied action, confusion and sheer excitement that follows, only his training and adrenaline carries him through the engagement. What a high!

If there are no causalities, the emotions remain high but if there are some after the conflict, adrenaline drops him down into the deep sadness that accompanies loss and the guilt and relief that a survivor experiences. The mind races over the incident, trying to make some sense of it, but it only spins its wheels on conflicting emotions.

The boring hours or days between the next engagement is like stagnant water full of mosquito larva. The mind spins and breeds inadequate thinking. The person turns to comradeship, war stories and humor, (usually black), for solace. The shared experiences of team members in dangerous jobs are seldom like those anywhere else in society. A special bond occurs.

In the days that follow between adrenalin highs of engagement and adrenaline downs of boredom, the body changes and the adrenal gland no longer controls stress but only lives for the highs and suffers the downs. You are an adrenaline junkie.

Somehow you survive and leave the theatre of engagement for the world. But you no longer fit there. Your fight skills are no longer needed. They begin to express themselves in inappropriate contexts. The world no longer seems exciting. Even things that once excited you have lost their gloss. Your loved ones do not understand you and you drift apart from your remaining comrades.

Your mind has lost the battle with the emotions. You lose the main drive of existence, to survive. This is the worse case scenario but every frontline survivor takes their wounds back into the world and limps along with them. If you are fortunate enough to receive counseling, when you come back to the world, you are told that your thinking is wrong. This is something you already know.

If your counselor is as practical as an A.A. counselor, you may get some help in learning what triggers your emotions and how to avoid them. The best help found for front-line troops has been, like for alcoholics, support groups of other adrenaline junkies who have been there.

However, much of what passes for counseling is only mind games played by advocates who believe in mind battles. The adrenaline junkie gets excuses but little support for recovery. Neuroscience has discovered, (as did Spinoza centuries ago), the connection between the emotions and the body.

Some fields in psychology are also leaning in this direction but not until we get rid of the idea of ‘Mind Battles,’ the psychoanalytic deluge will still mislead damaged individuals whether they suffer the stress in war or even at the office.