Spinoza on Science and Stress

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.