Just click on ‘Roses Documents’ on the Graphic Synapses of Spinoza etc (go to where it says, ’Roses Documents,’ double click, then wait patiently (as much as 3-5 minutes) and the entire 309 page book will upload into your waiting arms. All For FREE!

Thank you for your offer to contribute to Scientific American.  The Board of Editors has considered your proposal and I regret to say that the piece you propose is not suited to our somewhat limited editorial needs.

We appreciate your interest in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.

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I would like to thank the board of editors for considering my article, ‘Spinoza in Drag.’ While I was aware that my article might not meet your…”limited editorial needs,” I fulfilled a desire to send you an article once in my lifetime.
    While I believe mathematics and science are the highest endeavors of human reason, I was not given the skill set to speak their abstract language, so they have become my ‘Beatrice.’ (Dante).  Since late adolescence, Scientific American has brought me their vision. I am now 74.
    My wife said, as she inked, edited and formatted Graphic Synapses of Spinoza and Science, the 309 page book I just put on my blog for downloading, “Your book is a love letter to Scientific American.”  The article I sent, ‘Spinoza in Drag,’ was a spillover from my book, in which I paid homage to that vision.
    I also want to thank Scientific American editors for the gift of Max Tegmark’s Parallel Universes which clearly pointed out to me that, like Baruch Spinoza, I am a ‘frog’ in a conceptual universe of ‘birds.’ (p. 11). I have been meditating on Parallel Universes daily since receiving it. Now I have begun to formulate a response, titled: ‘The Frog Jumps Out Into Zift: Why Anthropoic, Anthropomorphism and Post Trauma Stress Disorder Are Unnecessary Scientific Explanations.”
    ‘Zift’ is the Bulgarian word for 1) asphalt 2) chewing gum 3) urban slang for shit. My response is a frog’s retelling of Erwin Schrodinger’s Cat In The Box thought experiment that addresses the issue of Parallel Universes.
    As has been the case since I was young, Scientific American continues to enrich my thought life.

                                         ROSE-DOCUMENTS

                          SPINOZA IN DRAG: (Dressed In Modern Science)

     Scientists and philosophers clothe themselves in the foundations of knowledge. Historically, however, they have dressed up their ideas differently. Scientists tend to put on empiricism and study the things that exist in our universe.
     Until recently, philosophers chose the ancient fabric of metaphysics but lately have been choosing either the underwear of logical analysis or the fashion design of language and its concepts.  Bertrand Russell, a pioneer in logical analysis said most theorists start in the middle of theories because that is the easiest place but it is very difficult to start at the foundation of the theory.
   Russell had this problem as he sought the foundations of knowledge in mathematics and logic rather than things we experience in the world. However a 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who, Russell said, was “the noblest and most loveable of the great philosophers,” began with: “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.”
   You cannot really make sense of Spinoza without relating his ideas to concepts of modern science, such as quantum theory, information theory, neuroscience and cosmology. Unfortunately Spinoza clothed his ideas in the fabric of metaphysics and his discussion of things was much misunderstood.
   However, some scientists are not especially good philosophers as the absurd idea of TOE-hold (Theory Of Everything), indicates. So scientists need Spinoza’s ideas as much as he needs theirs. These ideas led me to the 5 E’s of existence.
The 5 E’s of Existence are: 1) Energy 2) Entropy 3) Entanglement 4) Eternity 5) Equality.
   Here is a cursory outline of Spinozian meditations on the foundations of things:
Definition:
 1) Things are an expression of the energy that generates the  universe                                                 
  2) Energy is a singularity inside all things that gives them work to do (’work to do’ is the definition of expression’)  Energy is the Alpha & Omega. A point that has no part, eternity and NOW (pages of unpacking needed).
  3) Only things and their actions are in time & space.
  4) Things inform animal brains that they: a) are b) are a certain kind of thing (essence)  c) are in relation with other things (equal/not equal, part/whole). This information is generated in the mapmaking and dispositional processes of the brain and body.
  5) The evolved human brain turned relations into mathematics/logic. It also turned relations into language from which the reflective self emerged, distinguished by reason, feeling and understanding. Emotions are a reaction of the animal relations of the brain.
  6) Since things in the universe are entangled (i.e. both yes & no), energy is always accompanied by entropy. This is the whole of information. Energy is conserved, i.e. always present while entropy is the dark matter that will cause all things to return to the singularity of energy. All human ignorance is caused by entropy. (pages of unpacking needed).
  7) Things began to be seen as objects to use and not just objects to react to in order to survive. This is the blessing (energy) and curse (entropy) of human behaviour and can make us the only unnatural things in creation.
  Human culture began. (So social scientists could have jobs).
   *NOTE – Thomas Heath in his commentary for the Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements says:
“…A definition asserts nothing as to the existence or nonexistence of the thing defined. It is an answer to the question what a thing is…and does not say that it is…”  What exists has to be unpacked by demonstration.
 Aristotle describes a demonstration as:
     “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 do to with reasoning from outside but with the reason dwelling in the soul, just as is the case with the syllogism. It is always possible to raise objection to reasoning from outside but to contradict the reason within us is not always possible. “ 
*   *   *
SPINOZA: First Philosopher of Modern Science
 Spinoza says our common language of means and ends (and its gods) 
 ”…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.”

 We report our observations of things in one of two languages; either with words (signs) that picture the relations of things or the language of mathematics.  Euclid said of the latter: “The laws of nature are the mathematical thoughts of God.” The language of words, (propositions) can be made clear and more precise through logic but at its best, language can only be artistic expressions of our beliefs about things.
 Ludwig 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 into another.” There is a gap between what we know and what we can express in words.
 George Boole in his Laws Of Thought said we first fix variables to things, operate with things, mathematically by adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing them into parts or combine them into a whole. Then we observe these relations among things and turn them into propositions. Incipient mathematics is probably the first language of the brain.
 Words are ways we picture the means and ends of what we want from things in nature whereas mathematics studies the very form of things in nature. Mathematicians are the priests of nature. This is why mathematics is the language of science.
 However there is a problem with mathematics; formal truths must be turned into concepts to create actions. That is why we need words. The discovery of great ideas in the history of humanity is like the ‘once upon a time’ of fairy tales.
 For instance; Once upon a time, a young mathematician worked as a clerk in a patent office surrounded by new technical devices for measuring time and he discovered space/time.
 Or; Once upon a time a young physicist saw an equation on a chalk board by the mathematician, Leonard Euler. He went home, studied the equation and co-discovered string theory.
 Some scientists have said these ‘once upon a time’ discoveries are the result of synchronicity. But that is a notion that is too mystical to rely upon. As we will soon discover, Spinoza gave a much better explanation.  So let’s tell another ‘once upon a time,’ story.
 In 17th century Amsterdam a wealthy Portuguese Jewish merchant had a young son, Baruch Spinoza, who was studying the Torah to become a rabbi. Inquisitive, in addition to his religious studies, Spinoza read works of Jewish philosophers such as Ibn Ezra, Moses Ben Maimon (Maimonides) as well as books of wisdom brought by the Jews to Holland.
 Spinoza discovered Euclid and Aristotle. The former became his mentor while he had a love/hate relationship with the latter. Wanting to learn Latin, which the Jews demeaned, calling it ‘the priest’s language,’ Spinoza went to study Latin under Francis van den Enden, a free thinker who introduced him to physical science and Descartes.’ Because of his thinking, Spinoza was excommunicated and forbidden from having contact with other Jews.
 Consequently, Spinoza was thrown into the intellectual community of free thinkers who existed in Amsterdam. They became his friends and sometimes followers.
 The philosopher, Giles Deleuze, called Spinoza the ‘prince’ and ‘Christ’ of philosophers. We can give Spinoza one more title: ‘The First Philosopher of Modern Science.’ In his lifetime Spinoza had only one book published under his name: Descartes’: Principles of Philosophy.  This book was notes made on Descartes’ Philosophy for a young scholar. Spinoza’s friends encouraged him to publish these notes.
 In his book, Spinoza pointed out a major error in Descartes’ thinking as well as that of the thinkers who preceded him. In fact this flaw still persists in many thinkers today. Correcting this error made Spinoza the first modern philosopher of science.
 While exalting Descartes’ methodology of science, Spinoza actually found two flaws in Descartes’ thinking. The first was comical.  Descartes’ located the seat of thinking in the pineal gland instead of the brain. His other error still reverberates in our time and is the source of the notion of the Theory of Everything.
 Spinoza turned Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum (‘I think, I exist’) on its head: ‘Things exist, therefore I think.’ Because we are things like everything else in existence, what we call true and real is immanent in us as in every other thing and not transcendent. Energy produces this work or what Spinoza called ‘true ideas’, in us.
 True ideas are what Leonard Susskind describes as holograms. [See: Black Holes and the Information Paradox by Leonard Susskind; Scientific American, April 1997]. While Susskind may not go this far, Spinoza can be understood as saying true ideas are holograms, that things in energy’s symmetry produce in us.
 This is symmetry that exists immanent in us but beyond time and space like Garret Lisi’s E8. [See: A Geometric Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherall; Scientific American, December 2010].
 Spinoza says things are actual in two ways for us: either as relations in time and place or as contained in God. The latter is the source of what is true and real in our thinking. Since, for Spinoza, ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ are two equivalent words for the same thing, he was not speaking of some transcendent deity that Descartes’ rescued from a deceiver status but rather the energy that lives in all things.
 Listen to Spinoza:
 “Intellect, by its inborn powers makes intellectual tools for itself and we have a true idea different from its object. In order to know that I know, it is necessary that I first know. Certainty equals objective essence. No other sign is needed but to have a true idea.
 A true method is the path where truth itself or the objective essence of things or ideas (all these mean the same), is to be sought in proper order. Method must necessarily be discourse about reasoning or intellection. Method is nothing but reflexive knowledge or the idea of an idea. There will be no method unless there is first an idea.
 Moreover, an idea is situated in the context of thought exactly as its object in the context of reality.”

 While the language is 17th century, the context is modern. Things jump out of symmetry as holograms (ideas) and inform the brain of their existence and essence.  It is these holograms which are the essence of the great jumps in the  thinking of humanity. Spinoza calls such jumps, ‘understanding.’
 “…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.”

 I jokingly tell friends I can show them the face of God. I have an old TV that needs a box to be digital. I turn on the TV but not the digital box. On the screen, random and chaotic particles are accompanied by a noise that hurts the eardrums. This is an apt metaphor for the symmetry of energy. Just as chaos jumps into the pictures for the digital box, so do things jump out of symmetry for my brain.
 However, as Spinoza says:
 “Some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work and they help us to understand things distinctly. Among these we include all relations which have reference to different things. These we call beings of reason.”
 
 Reason/intellect, Spinoza says, is not adequate to the attainment of our wellbeing “but…this kind of knowledge does not result from something else but from a direct revelation of the object itself to the understanding.”  Again, Spinoza is as modern as the last computer key that has just been hit by a scientist somewhere.
 For Spinoza, “beings of reason,” are always relative to the situation of the thinker in time and space. Spinoza was Einstein’s favorite philosopher and whether caught or taught, relativity may have germinated out of his readings of Spinoza.
 So we come to the difference between holograms (ideas) that jump out of the things of symmetry (what Spinoza called understanding) and what he called “beings of reason,” or knowledge relative to time and space. Wittgenstein said understanding is: ‘now I know how to go on,” but reason may also become: ‘This is my idea and it is mine! Here I stop and build my ostrich hole,’ as Charles Sanders Peirce parodied.
 Things jump out of the symmetry of energy to great thinkers as holograms (true ideas), but their followers build Towers of Babel out of these ideas, with reason. This is why Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions says each generation of scientists have to tear down the towers and rebuild.
 This is what happened to Descartes.’ His, ‘I think, I exist’ which he placed in the whole of a transcendent God became the rallying cry of humanists and is typified by Shakespeare’s: “Man is the measure of all things.”  These Cartesian, Tower of Babel followers, became enemies of Spinoza and along with religion and the shadow of the inquisition, stopped him from publishing his Ethics.
 Spinoza’s main enemies today are his Tower of Babel followers who label him a rationalist and dismiss as ‘immature,’ his main works where he laid his foundations of knowledge: Emendation Of The Intellect  and  Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being.
 After Spinoza laid his foundations, he expressed (as Gilles Deleuze understood), his ideas in ethics, religion and politics.  The Emendation and Treatise were not meant for public consumption but only for like-minded friends. Spinoza was a cautious man whose motto was, ‘caute,’ in a world where a dark cloud of religion spread its shadow over all attempts at reason and understanding.
 Spinoza was the first philosopher who understood that god or man is not the measure of all things but rather our measure of all things (mathematics) helps us to understand what is true and real. This is a measure made by finite beings in an infinite reality so we will never have a Theory of Everything and are only able to make the measure because things jump out at us as holograms or true ideas, (understanding).
 Scientists who seek a TOE HOLD (Theory of Everything) have mistaken this Tower of Babel for unification. Science has always proceeded by unification. The anthropomorphism from some string theorists today remind me of the dogmas of religion.
 Spinoza redefined science. He says science, “…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…”
 Like Euclid, Spinoza believed the foundations of all thinking are in what Euclid called the Common Notions (axioms). Equal is the glue that holds all mathematics, logic and ethics together. The whole is greater than the part reminds us that what we call science today is only part of what jumps out of energy’s symmetry.
 Here is how Spinoza described energy’s symmetry:
 “This is what I had resolved to demonstrate concerning the mind insofar as it is considered without reference to the existence of the body. It is clear from this…that our mind insofar as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking which is determined by another mode of thinking and this again by another and so on ad infinitum with the result that they all together constitute the eternal and infinite intellect of God.” (Italics mine).
 
  Spinoza, like Wittgenstein, believed the meaning of words was their use in the language games we play. Consequently, he redefined words in common conceptual games. Let’s give his 17th century language its closest equivalent meaning in modern science:
 God (energy). Ideas (holograms). Thinking (physical information). Eternity (now/immediacy).  Mind/Soul (connection brain makes with things that press their existence and essence on it). True/Real (the whole of symmetry). Good & Evil (relations humans make which are not in nature). Creation (never happened, only generation or evolution did).  Human Existence (we existed before in a different form. 1st Law of Thermodynamics).  Sin (Entropy. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).
 Spinoza said: “Now in the first place we have said that to God (energy), no modes of thought can be ascribed except those which are in his (its) creatures…” (Anthropomorphisms of pronouns are in English but not in Latin).
 Notice he does not say in ‘humans’ but ‘creatures.’ Like modern information theorists, Spinoza believed everything that exists, sends and receives information. A rock thinks God. His discussions on symmetry and information are similar to what Seth Lloyd describes as “It from bits” (quibits) in Programming the Universe and his article on Black Hole Computers, [See: Black Hole Computers by Seth Lloyd; Scientific American, November 2004]. But  symmetry is not bounded by space and time. Spinoza’s idea of symmetry is more like Garret Lisi’s E8.
 Spinoza, as the first philosopher of modern science made contributions in other areas such as neuroscience (see Antonio Damasio’s, Looking for Spinoza). For Spinoza, the information we receive in our understanding is an eternal mode of thinking. Eternity, he says, is not a concept of time and duration or beginning and end but this information is things in symmetry that jump out of us right NOW.
 We use reason to make sense of what we have received but it is always relative to our time and place and must return to understanding to be true and real. We have a word for this return: ‘inspiration.’ The Greeks called it, ‘demonstration.’
 I suspect Spinoza’s idea of eternity will serve as future material for scientific theories. Roger Penrose already appears to be exploring that area in his Cycles of Time, although it would have been better titled, Cycles of Eternity.
 The meaning of life can be summarized in two words: ENERGY RECYCLES. 
 Note: This paper is a definition, not a demonstration. Definitions attempt to tell us what a thing is but not that it exists. The latter must be demonstrated. Philosophers define ideas of things and their expression in language. Scientists demonstrate the existence of things and their relations. The two disciplines should be complementary, not foes.
 Not, as the dissertation chairman for my PhD said, (a hermeneutic philosopher), “You have gone over to the enemy,” when at age 46 I began seriously studying mathematics and science.
More To Explore
 Collected Works of Spinoza, trans & ed by Edwin Curley, Princeton, 1985
 Spinoza, Complete Works, trans Samuel Shirley, ed Michael Morgan, Hacket Pub, 2002
 Ethic of Benedict De Spinoza, trans W. Hale White & Amelia Stirling, Oxford, 1910
 My Blog: Has Philosophy Ignored Spinoza’s Theory of Science?  ww.http://dickdeshaw/
 

              Dick DeShaw 370 Barrie St Kingston On Canada K7K3T3
                    (613) 546-7056 – rdeshaw570@gmail.com
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January 30, 2012 – Dear Professor Susskind:
 Several months ago I saw your lecture on the Big Idea’s program. You discussed holograms among other ideas. I bought the Black Hole War and completed my first of many readings of it. I am presently reading Cosmic Landscape.
 Enclosed is a paper for Scientific American.  It reflects how important to modern physics and cosmology are the ideas of the 17th century Jewish philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza, concerning the foundations of knowledge. Would you consider referring it?
 In 1983 I put my PhD dissertation in a shoebox and returned to my blue collar roots as a prison guard in a federal penitentiary. Consequently, the only peers I have are retired prison guards. Most of them are dead.
  I have a B.A. in philosophy/psychology, an abortive attempt at a PhD (1st time) where I worked nights at a gas station. Got good grades except for one C (which I deserved), lost my fellowship, went to work as a child abuse investigator. After 3 years, went back and got an M.A. in Sociology and began another PhD in Social & Political Thought. (See the note at the end of my paper for the result/ reason for the shoebox).
 Spinoza knew that all information is physical long before scientists discovered this truth. Consequently, the significant events in any thinker’s life can be placed in a Feynman diagram. Our bodies travel in a path until events result in the emission of photons, (understanding).
 While I will not draw the diagram, here is the procession of events that led to the writing of this paper: Left prison with PTSD??Spinoza??Euclid/Spinoza (Common Notions) ? George Boole/Euclid (Common Notions) ?Antonio Damasio (Neuroscience) ?Seth Lloyd (Information Theory) ?Leonard Susskind (Cosmic Landscape).
 I am at the beginning of the last event. Most modern scientists seem to be ersatz rationalists. Philosophy has labeled Spinoza a rationalist though he was anything but.  I suspect his use of ‘beings of reason,’ and placing symmetry beyond time and space but immanent in our lives, will be the main stumbling stones to acceptance of this paper. I still like the idea of Garrett Lisi’s E8 though I don’t know if his mathematics is sound.
 Thank you for considering referring this paper and for being an event in my life.

(Tune: They Call The Wind, Moriah)
1) Horror’s picked itself a name
Though it’s been around for ages
Post Trauma Stress Disorder is
Our label for the rages
But it’s normal
It’s normal
When you understand, it’s normal

2)A crisis situation calls
For you to start reacting
When trauma comes
Emotions get
All mixed up in the action
Adrenaline
Adrenaline
Its surge, the biggest faction

3) The body does what bodies do
When they’re in stress and combat
It shoots the energy through you
To give you strength to do it
The body
The body
PTSD’s the body

4) What happens when you’re under stress
You finally learn to figure
And what events you should avoid
Because they’ll be a trigger
You’ll see them
The stressors
Understanding will get bigger

5) There is no shame in readying
To fight a major battle
When all around you, no one else
Has even heard a rattle.
No guilty
Reactions
You learn to handle surges

6) Not just soldiers home from war
But mothers, drivers, family
The beast’s inside us all but we
Can learn to tame it readily
We’re in charge
We’re in charge
Taming the beast will happen

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.

 The 5 E’s of Existence are: 1) Energy 2) Entropy 3) Entanglement 4) Eternity and 5) Equality.
   Here is a rough and very cursory outline of Spinozian meditations on the foundations of things:
1) Things are an expression of the energy that generates the universe
                                                               
 2) Energy is a singularity inside all things that gives them work to do (’work to do’ is the definition of expression’)  Energy is the Alpha & Omega. A point that has no part, eternity and NOW (pages of unpacking needed).
 
3) Only things and their actions exist. (ie are in time & space).
 
4) Things inform animal brains that they  a) exist  b) are a certain kind of thing (essence) and c) are in relation with other things (equal/not equal, part/whole). This information is generated in the synapses of and stored in, the dendrites of brain neurons (memory).
 
5) The evolved human brain turned relations into mathematics/logic and language and the reflective self emerged that is distinguished by reason and feeling. Emotions are a reaction of the animal relations of the brain.
 
6) Since things in the universe are entangled (i.e. both yes & no), energy is always accompanied by entropy. This is the whole of information. Energy is conserved, i.e. always present while entropy is the dark matter that will cause all things to return to the singularity of energy. All human ignorance is caused by entropy. (pages of unpacking needed).
 
7) Things began to be seen as objects to use and not just objects to react to in order to survive. This is the blessing (energy) and curse (entropy) of human behaviour and can make us the only unnatural things in creation.
 
Human culture began. (So social scientists could have jobs).

Dick DeShaw, Kingston *Published in online edition of Toronto Star

I met him way before he was stabbed, teaching Sunday school in a rundown church in a poor rural neighbourhood. There were a lot of kids around whose futures didn’t include reform school because of him. Big ears, skinny but sincere and always learning. I married him as soon as I was old enough and we immigrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. The Mennonites had set up a teenage hostel through Children’s Aid. During the early seventies, if you ran away, underage from anywhere in Canada and came to Toronto, we got you until your parents or somebody anted up the fare to bring you home.

  Counselling kids in trouble with the law, prowling the back lanes behind Rochdale for runaways, learning how to handle social workers, we worked as a team.  Meanwhile, he was studying at York [University] – an M.A. doctoral studies, a disseration. After the hostel, I joined McGraw-Hill Ryerson who were bringing out Roger Caron’s award-winning book ‘ Go-Boy’[about being a con]. But Roger was still in prison, in the hole and the company needed someone to go tell him they wanted to publish only the first half of the book he’d written. [Second half later published as 'Bingo.' since first half won award but nobody knew that would happen then] My husband went down, looking like one of Jason’s Argoauts listening to the Sirens singing on the rocks. The same sort of seduction.

  That was behind our move to Kingston [Ontario] with its eight federal penitentiaries, although he went back to Children’s Aid and I opened a bookstore. “Visiting our graduates,” he called it whenever CAS sent him behind bars to see a father or mother. He taught a course for guards at the community college and he began to lean in the direction of the prisons when the wind was right. But he was still working on the dissertation. One day he came out of his study. “I quit,” he said and handed the dissertation to me, neatly wrapped up ina shoe box. “Think I’ll go down and knock on the gate. Maybe they can use another guard.”

  “Sadistic guard,” I said. “You hardly ever see the career mentioned without an adjective like that. Everybody knows what guards do. All the prison biographies say so.”

  “Not much different than being a parent,” he said, and he went off to fill out an application. Three months later he was sitting in a limestone tower with a gun, watching the sun come up over the harbour. Two guards had recently been murdered in the kitchen of his institution. Drugs poured in as though this was a pharmacy wholesaler. Brew made of fermented oranges, ketchup and sometimes potatoes was being cooked in bags all over his range. This combination of pills and stills is lethal inside.

  He was right about the CAS graduates. Two former clients and a boy we’d once had in our hostel turned up, as though the universe were offering a second crack at them. Meanwhile, staff positions were being cut back while con privileges increased. (’Con’ or ‘con game’ is what most prefer to be called). Knives were allowed in calls for crafts. Security was decreased when the prison decided to have guards do case work on computers while watching inmates, rather than hire more staff.

  He had urine thrown on him from a cell. He was Maced and regularly threatened. He found so many brews when he searched that the cons began calling him, ‘the Nose.’ One night, a spaced-out con threatened a group of guards with a knife. My husband stepped between them and deflected a blow meant for his belly with his left hand. Later that same evening, the alarm bell rang for a cell fire. With adrenalin still popping from the stabbing, he ran down the range through thick smoke and carried out the dead weight of a con, half again his size.

  He was off three months. X-rays couldn’t show the worst damage from the incident. During that time a fellow guard had half his finger bitten off. Cons phoned another guard’s home to say that their father had been killed inside. Effigies of guards were made and left hanging on the range.

  And then one day, when a concrete truck cut in front of us and he tried to run it off the raod in our little tin can of a car, I found he wasn’t reading any more, hadn’t in quite a while. There’s a technical name for it, a stress trauma discovered in Vietnam, and, as those soldiers found, the problem is in the same place.

  We run into cons all over our samll prison town. Sitting with him at an outdoor cafe, I see two men walk by who say, “Hi, boss. Buy us a coffee?” and sit down. A third comes up who has left his teeth inside, not expecting to be away from the institution very long. Others come by the bookstore sometimes, talking about trying to stay out, to stay clean.

  He’d been in great shape when he joined up. But now, even with daily workouts, his spine is permanently injured. Sometimes it paralyzes him and he falls. He’s been diagnosed with sleep apnea and sleeps on a machine. His toes are broken and rigid, requiring special shoes. His glands don’t work right anymore from all the Mace.

  The recent trouble at Prison for Women [Now closed}, spawned a group for offiers who had a need to talk about their situation. When it finished, they offered his prison the same opportunity. Eventually a group that included him, met ina basement to talk, smoke, tell war stories and at some point, things that were even more personal. There were tears. Those officers murdered in the prison kitchen looked over their shoulders. There was a video camera at the last session. Perhaps a tape might help someone else.

  Afterward, they let the wives come in. One of the questions that came up then is how it feels to wonder whether each day will be your husband's last, without the consolations of society's approval that cops get. Sometimes I think guards have inherited the contempt that used to surround the occupation of hangman, with no real understanding of what it is they do.

    "Write a summary of what came out of the group," someone [asked] him. “What did it accomplish?” – “It demonstrated that post-traumatic stress is the norm for prison guards, not the exception,” he wrote. “All of us are quite wary of  ‘therapeutic professionals.’

  [His] article [was returned] yesterday. “No, not so,” they had pencilled over ‘post-trauma.’ “Not true’ over the line about being wary. Granted the piece wouldn’t do much for recruitment of new officers. “Since the group, I have been able to step back and look at management policies with a sense of detached, quixotic bemusement instead of personal betrayal,” [his] piece concludes.

  Quixote, eh? Which makes me Sancho Panza, something I’ve suspected since we started this journey way back in the U.S. With the wisdom of that fat little sidekick, I can point out that sadistic prison guards are a Hollywood invention, necessary for filming inmate memoirs perhaps, those doctored stories from individuals we were once anxious to see behind bars.

  Guards are men and women who don’t expect good news from administration or the press. They go into prison in the dark on a daily basis, hoping to provide a little light. And the windmills are bigger now than when we started this journey. Unlike Cervante’s story, however, they are not the wrong target.

This was written by my wife, Rose DeShaw, when I still worked in prison.