Transcription
Welcome back to the deep dive, where we tear apart your reading list, distill the complex arguments, and uh hopefully find that one singular nugget of insight that just fundamentally shifts how you see the world.
And today we are staring down the barrel of what is I mean, it's got to be philosophy's oldest, most nagging question, right? The existential itch that really underpins all of science, all of metaphysics. We are talking about the mindbody problem. It's that foundational tension, isn't it? How does physical stuff, I'm talking matter, extension, neurons, all those electrochemical signals. Yeah. How does that relate to or maybe even create these subjective qualitative experience of consciousness?
Yeah. How do you get from say measurable action potentials firing in your occipital lobe to the felt sensation of seeing the color blue? Exactly. And people have been tearing their hair out over this for for millennia.
For sure. And the most famous attempt and I guess we could call it our first historical villain in this story was cartisian dualism. Renee Deart back in the 17th century, right? He said the mind which he called thought and the body or extension are two separate fundamentally distinct interacting substances which of course immediately created the infamous interaction problem. I mean if the mind is nonextended if it has no spatial dimension how can it possibly exert force on extended physical matter? The pineal gland, right? That's where he thought it happened.
The pineal gland. Yeah. But it's like trying to explain how a ghost can push a rock. The mechanism just it never worked. The whole theory basically collapsed under its own weight.
So the pendulum swung hard the other way. And that gives us our modern villain reductionist materialism. This is the view that's pretty dominant in a lot of contemporary cognitive science. It basically claims that consciousness is just the brain. It's an emergent property or a complicated output or what do they call it? An epi phenomenon.
Yeah, like a kind of steam rising off the engine. And look, materialism is incredibly successful at explain mechanism. I mean, it's the foundation of neuroscience, but it absolutely fails the experience test.
What do you mean by that? Well, if I hook you up to the most sensitive fMRI scanner in the world and watch every single neuron fire as you eat a piece of dark chocolate, I will know everything there is to know about the physical process, the entire causal chain, the entire thing. But I still won't know the taste. I haven't captured the quality of that raw, subjective, felt quality of the experience itself.
And that failure, that gap is precisely why we're pivoting today. We're actually reaching back to Decart's contemporary. Yeah. The the really formidable and radical Baroo Spinosa and his solution which is a framework that just bypasses both dualism and reductionism entirely.
We are diving deep into what's known as dual aspect monism or dam for short. So dam is the proposition that mind and matter are not two separate things and crucially one doesn't cause the other.
So what are they? They're two different sides or two different expressions of a single fundamental underlying reality. And that reality is neither purely mental nor purely physical.
Okay, let's unpack that. It's monism. So one underlying thing, one thing, but it's dualistic in how it shows up in its expression.
Exactly. And historically, I mean, this ideas has popped up everywhere from Spinosa to Yung. And today, it's getting really serious attention from modern philosophers like David Chalmer's. What's so fascinating here is that we aren't just looking at the general concept today. We are going to dissect the most rigorous, the most systematic, and honestly probably the most audacious articulation of this idea ever put to paper.
Spinosa's ethics, specifically his substance monism and his theory of psychophysical parallelism. And if we can really get our heads around this system, the promise is something extraordinary. We're talking of a shocking new definition of identity, a total rejection of free will that somehow paradoxically leads to an even truer definition of human freedom. And at the end of the day, a path to a kind of mystical realization.
That's our mission today. A small task, just a small one.
So we have to start where Spinosa starts with the most foundational term of all substance. Right? In the very first part of his ethics, he defined substance as that which is in itself and is conceived through itself. It is the ultimate independent reality.
Okay. Conceived through itself. What does that really mean? It means it doesn't depend on anything else for its definition or its existence. And this definition, this one move immediately sets up this incredible logical domino effect.
How so? Well, if substance is conceived through itself, it has to be the cause of itself. Kazui. And if it's truly independent, there can't be two of them.
Why not? Because if there were two, they would limit each other. And the moment they limit each other, you'd have to conceive of them through that limit, through something else. They wouldn't be truly independent anymore.
Ah, I see. So the moment you establish true absolute independence, you logically collapse all of reality into one single entity.
Precisely. That's Spinosa's substance monism. There is only one substance in the entire universe. And he calls it God or nature. Deos Nepta.
God or nature. So they're the same thing for him. The same thing. The substance is infinite. It's self-sufficient and it necessarily exists. It is the ground of being itself.
Okay, so the universe itself is one unified infinite substance. But I mean look around. How do we account for the incredible variety of the physical world? The stars, the trees, you, me, our minds. How do you explain difference if it's all just one thing?
That is the perfect question. And that's where he introduces the idea of attributes.
Attributes. An attribute is defined as what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence. So because the singular substance God or nature is absolutely infinite, it has to have infinite attributes.
Exactly. Infinite ways in which it can express its own essence.
Infinite attributes. That almost scrambles my mind just to think about. It does. But for us as finite human intellects, we only know two of these infinite ways. And those are extension which is the physical attribute matter bodies geometry anything that takes up space and thought the mental attribute mind ideas consciousness.
The key point here and this is crucial is that extension and thought are perceived as really distinct. I can think about the laws of physics without thinking about consciousness and vice versa.
Right? You can conceive of one without the other. But they are still attributes of one in the same single underlying substance. They are just different ways that the same essence expresses itself.
So they're unified. in the background, but they look totally different in the foreground and they never mix. This is vital for the rest of the system. You never have a thought that has weight. You never have a rock that has an opinion. The attributes stay in their own lanes.
Okay. So now we move from the infinite substance and its attributes down to the finite singular things we experience daily. You, me, this table, a fleeting thought. What are these? These are called modes. A mode is defined as an affection of a substance. It's basically a temporary finite modification of the infinite substance. So a human being for Spinosa is one mode expressed under two attributes.
Exactly. Your body is a mode of extension and your mind is a mode of thought.
And this brings us to what might be the most radical identity claim in all of philosophy. His mind body identity thesis.
That's a big one. If my body is a mode of extension and my mind is a mode of thought, Spinosa insists they are numerically one in the same thing but expressed in two ways.
Yes, numerically identical. My mind and my body are not two different things that are somehow mystically connected. They are one entity seen from two different points of view.
But wait a minute, that seems to violate a fundamental principle of logic. The iniccernability of identicals, right? which states that if two things are identical, they must share all of their properties.
Exactly. My body weighs, say, 150 lbs and it occupies three-dimensional space. My mind weighs nothing and occupies no space. How can they be numerically identical if they don't share those properties? It sounds like a contradiction.
This is the deep water and Spinosa knew it. He essentially rejects or or modifies the iniccernability of identicals when you're applying it across different attributes. Okay. So, the identity isn't based on sharing properties like weight or location. What is it based on? It's based on the underlying essence, the shared singular unifying pattern of activity.
Can you give us a way to conceptualize that that pattern of activity? Think about it this way. Your body is always in motion. It's always changing. Cells are turning over. Blood is flowing. But the pattern of those changes, the unique complex structure that defines you and separates you from say the table in front of you, that remains stable over time that striving to maintain itself.
That striving pattern is what Spinosa calls the kannatus. So Peter's mind and Peter's body are the same entity because they share the same kannatus, the same striving to persevere. Even though the body expresses that striving through physical movement and the mind expresses it through thinking and having ideas.
So if I change my job, my hair, my location, I'm still the same person because the essential pattern of my striving and my activity remains numerically unified. Whether I'm describing that pattern mentally through my beliefs or physically through my habits.
Exactly. The body and mind are unified because they follow the exact same trajectory through time and space. One simply tracks that trajectory in terms of extension. The other tracks it in terms of thought. The unity is established by definition, not by some mysterious causal link.
And this numerical identity then becomes the foundation for the most famous part of his system, psychophysical parallelism. Right? If they are the same thing expressed differently, how do their events line up so perfectly?
That's the question. And parallelism is his brilliant answer to the interaction problem. Mental events and bodily events are perfectly coordinated. They run alongside each other like two parallel tracks with absolutely no causal interaction between them.
None. Zero. So, just to be crystal clear, the thought I want to drink water did not cause my hand to move toward the glass.
No, that is the core mindbending implication. Causal chains are closed within their own attribute. A physical event, a mode of extension, is only ever caused by a prior physical event. And a mental event, a mode of thought is only caused by a prior mental event, a previous idea.
Which leads him to his specific prohibition. The body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to motion. It's a complete causal firewall between the two.
So if you want to explain why your arm moved, you have to look only at the physical signals in the brain and the muscles. And if you want to explain the content of a thought, you have to look only at the sequence of prior ideas that led to it.
And this is all summarized in that incredible assertion, the mic drop quote we hinted at earlier. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
That line fundamentally resets the entire relationship between thought and reality. Let's try to use that cartisian grid analogy to make this airtight because it is so counterintuitive to our daily experience. Okay, imagine a line being drawn on a graph. The line itself, the ink on the paper, its physical position, its movement, that's the attribute of extension. It changes because say the hand drawing it or the computer rendering it changes its previous physical position. It's a closed physical causal change.
Okay? Physical line is extension. And the formula that describes that line, say yx + 5, the mathematical representation of it, that's the attribute of thought.
Got it? Now, when the line physically moves up two units on the graph, that's a physical change. At the exact same moment, the formula simultaneously changes to yx + 7. That's a conceptual or mental change.
But the change in the physical line didn't cause the formula to change. No, the change in the formula was necessitated by the internal logical structure of mathematics. But because the line and the formula are two different expressions of the very same geometric state of affairs, they have to perfectly mirror each other's changes.
I see. So the coordination isn't some miracle. It's a definitional necessity. They are the same event just viewed differently. The physical reality of the line and the conceptual reality of the formula are parallel expressions of the same underlying truth. That is that's powerful.
It solves the interaction problem by eliminating interaction entirely.
Okay. So now let's take the 17th century system and really apply it to modern challenges. If parallelism is true, it fundamentally alters how we should approach neuroscience. especially the search for the neural coralates of consciousness, the NCC's.
Well, it completely changes the game. Modern science for the most part proceeds by finding the neuronal activity that correlates with an experience. And then, you know, the next step is to assume it causes the experience.
But Spinosa says that's the wrong move. It's the wrong move. He's saying the neural activity isn't causing the experience. The neural activity is the experience when you view it from the outside under the attribute of extension. So when a neuroscientist observes a cascade in say the default mode network and they associate it with me remembering a specific childhood event, what they're looking at is the external physical manifestation of the reality that is at the exact same time manifesting internally as the conscious recollection of that event. They're not cause and effect. They're the same thing.
This gets right to the heart of what you call the crisis of neural coralates. Cognitive scientists like Donald Hoffman point this out. Even if you successfully link network A to the taste of chocolate, you still can't specify why network A is the taste of chocolate and not say the sound of a train or the taste of vanilla. There's this deep unanswerable why that science just keeps slamming into.
And the spinosist response, the dual aspect monism response is that science is just asking the wrong question. Exactly. There is no deeper why that's discoverable by external observation. Network A isn't the experience of vanilla because it just isn't the network that correlates with the experience of vanilla. The reason for the difference is simply that they are two different networks, two different patterns of activity.
So by limiting itself to objective third person measurement, which is the attribute of extension, science can only ever see the physical structure of the experience. Right? It will never ever capture the subjective content of the experience which exists only in the attribute of thought. That suggests that the limitations of objective measurement are not just a temporary problem that we'll overcome with better technology. They're foundational.
They're built into the system. We can endlessly refine our ability to measure the physical neurons firing, blood oxygen levels, whatever. But we will never know the internal qualitative side of that experience unless we just ask the person.
You have to consult the other attribute. You have to. And you see, neurons are just sending action potentials. That's all they do. To claim that the neuron creates consciousness is from this perspective a category error. It's like claiming the formula yx creates the line on the graph. They are two descriptions of the same event.
This becomes really acute when we think about individuality. We often talk about the brain generically as if my brain seeing red is the same physical process as your brain seeing red. But if the mind and body are unique modes, unique patterns of activity, then your subjective experience of red is tied to a cascade of neurons that is structurally unique to your brain.
Absolutely. The particular arrangement and sequence of electrochemical events that define seeing red in my unique neural wiring are almost certainly not the same as the ones in yours.
And this has profound practical consequences, especially when you think about future tech like brain computer interfaces. Okay, let's talk about that. The practical consequence for technology, specifically BCIs. If every subjective experience is mapped to a unique physical pattern, then you can't just build a universal BCI that reads joy or memory out of the box for everyone.
That's a huge challenge for anyone working in that field. It is. A spinosis would tell a BCI developer that any sophisticated technology that tries to read or decode consciousness must be customtrained for every single individual. Why? Because the machine can only detect patterns of extension, physical patterns. It requires the conscious internal participant, the mind, the attribute of thought to establish the correlation by saying, okay, this unique physical pattern that I am generating right now, that's my subjective experience of hunger.
The system has to learn each person's unique parallel dictionary. It can't generalize from one person to the next. Exactly. It might generalize the function like this general area is associated with object recognition but the specific physical cascade of neurons that realizes that function will be idiosyncratic to the mode to the person.
This also helps us understand learning and what you call the necessity of novelty. If the neuronal network is the experience then when I experience something truly new a completely new neuronal network must fire. It has to.
The physical reality has to mirror the mental novelty. Right? If you encounter a color you've never seen before, or you listen to a piece of music with harmonies you've never heard, your brain is forced to establish a brand new pattern of activity because the experience itself is to definition different from everything that came before. Your mind is mapping that novel sensation to a new physical pattern.
And what about the vast silent majority of our brain activity, the unconscious brain? Spinosa's system seems to imply that the entire body mind mode is always striving, always active. But only a tiny fraction of that surfaces into conscious awareness.
This is a matter of biological efficiency. I mean, consciousness is computationally very expensive. If every single neural firing in your body corresponded to a conscious idea, you'd be paralyzed.
A deluge of information, an absolute flood. the continuous processes of, you know, regulating your blood pressure or muscle tension or hormone levels. Those are all modes of extension and they have corresponding modes of thought, but they're typically unconscious thought.
So consciousness is reserved for what we might call the higher level 100,000 ft task. Exactly. It's focused on interaction with the outside world on rational assessment while all the underlying machinery just runs on autopilot. And this seems like the crucial bridge to our next section. Because if my most basic physiological processes and even many of my higher level actions are being run by this vast ocean of unconscious determined activity, activity that is still technically thought, but not thought I consciously own.
Then who is the eye that's in control? It makes the idea of arbitrary choice seem extremely shaky.
It's more than shaky for Spinosa. It's an illusion. Okay, so that pivot from the overwhelming power of the unconscious leads us right to the most unsettling part of Spinosza's philosophy for many people, the absolute denial of free will. Labbero Voluus.
Yeah, this is where a lot of people get off the bus. I can see why. If everything is just a necessary mode within this single infinite causally closed system of God or nature, where is there any space for human choice?
There is none. Spinosa is one of philosophy's most notorious most adamant causal determinists. Everything and that includes every human action and every human thought is determined to exist and act by a previous cause which was determined by a previous cause running back in an infinite chain of necessity.
To think otherwise is just to misunderstand the nature of nature itself. Precisely. And he explicitly rejects the idea of the will as some separate arbitrary choosing faculty which was so central to someone like Deart. So what is the will for him? For Spininoza, the will is the intellect. They are the same thing. The will isn't some faculty sitting above our desires and our ideas, you know, picking from a menu of options. The will is simply the sum total of all of our individual valitions.
And a valition is a valition is an idea. And every single idea inherently involves an affirmation or a negation.
So when I have the idea of this coffee cup in front of me, that very idea automatically affirms the cup's presence. I'm not choosing to believe it's there. The idea itself is the belief. Exactly. And that affirmation or negation is necessitated by the chain of prior ideas that led to it. You don't choose to believe that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180°. Once you grasp the idea, your mind necessarily affirms it. Choice in that arbitrary spooky sense is an illusion.
Okay. But then why do we feel so intensely that we have agency? Why is the illusion of choice so incredibly persistent and powerful? He calls it a created fiction and a universal notion. And the illusion arises, he says, because we are conscious of our valitions and their appetites. We know what we want and we know what we're doing, but we are ignorant of those causes which determined us to act and desire in that particular way.
So, it's like we're only seeing the very last gear turn in a massive clockwork mechanism. And we assume that single gear chose to move on its own rather than realizing it was pushed by a thousand gears that came before it. That's a perfect analogy. And Spinosa offers his own powerful one, comparing the illusion of free will to the illusion of the sun appearing close.
Y intellectually through reason, we achieve an adequate idea. We know the sun is millions of miles away. But regardless of that knowledge, when we step outside, we still experience it through our senses as being, you know, about 200 feet away. That's the inadequate idea, the imagination.
So that's the inevitable error. The intellectual knowledge doesn't cancel out the sensory experience. I can study Spinosa until I fully grasp the total causal necessity of the universe. That's the adequate idea. But you will still feel that you chose to put on your shoes this morning. That's the inadequate idea.
And that clash, that dualism of experience between the feeling of freedom and the knowledge of necessity is what makes the illusion of libro of lunes so difficult to shake. It's an imaginative error and it's rooted in the fact that our sensory perception is always incomplete.
Okay. Okay, so if arbitrary free will is gone, what do we build on? What becomes the bedrock of human striving immorality? Right? And this is where canotus comes back in, right? Canadus returns, but now defined in ethical terms, it's the striving to persevere in one's own being. It's the very essence of a thing. Think of it as this deep metaphysical self-preserving force. And for us humans, the conscious expression of that striving is desire. And this striving, this desire is measured by two fundamental effects.
Joy and sadness. Joy is defined as the transition to a greater perfection, a greater reality or a greater power of acting and thinking. And sadness is the opposite, a transition to a lesser perfection.
So we are fundamentally hardwired to seek out anything that leads to joy. Because joy means an increase in our power and our agency. Which means the canadus, the striving is the first and only foundation of virtue.
Virtue is simply acting in accordance with the necessity of your own nature. The striving to preserve and increase your own power. This just completely flips conventional, religious, or moral definitions of virtue on their head. Virtue isn't about obeying some external commandment. It's about internal power and maximizing your own nature. We're driven to imagine and to seek out ideas of things that increase our power and bring us joy.
Which finally, finally brings us to Spinoza's positive definition of freedom. True freedom or libertas human. If freedom is not arbitrary choice, then what on earth is it? Freedom is defined as activity versus passivity.
Okay, explain that. You are free when you are active. When you are acting from the necessity of your own nature, when you are the adequate cause of your actions. You are unfree when you are passive. when you are being acted upon by external forces, by passions.
So if I'm acting, I'm determined internally by my own nature, which he says is rational. But if I'm passive, I'm being determined externally by things I don't really understand, like a sudden fear or a craving. Precisely. Bondage for him is our lack of power to moderate and restrain the effects. It's what leads us to be controlled by passive emotions, grief, envy, aniction, excessive fear. This is the classic problem of Acrasia, the weakness of will.
Exactly. I know I should save money for retirement, but the passion for immediate gratification just overwhelms me. I see the better path, but I'm forced by an external cause to follow the worst one. And in this spinosis sense, these passive effects, these passions are always bad for us because they're based on inadequate knowledge.
Always they're confused ideas that are rooted in how external bodies are affecting our body, which by definition reduces our power. Think about envy. Envy is sadness that's caused by another person's perfection or happiness. It's the effect of an external cause that literally decreases my own power to act.
So the criteria for freedom then is achieved when we possess adequate ideas, true knowledge about ourselves and about the causes that determine us. The more you understand the causal necessity of the universe and your place within it, the more you act from your own internal your own nature and the freer you become.
I find this so fascinating because it completely redefineses responsibility. You are responsible for choosing the good, but you are responsible for understanding the good. Right? If you act rationally, you are necessarily more joyous and more powerful. Joy and desire that arise from reason are always good and can never be excessive.
That's the payoff. The whole goal is to maximize your activity and minimize your passivity. Determinism is just the playing field. Ignorance is bondage. Knowledge is freedom. If you rationally understand why you're doing what you're doing and you understand that what you're doing is maximizing your power, you are truly free. Even though the action itself was always necessary, you're just living according to your deepest nature, which for Spinosa is reason.
Okay. So to achieve this state of freedom, this maximization of power and joy, we have to ascend what he calls his ladder of knowledge. He lays out three distinct kinds of cognition, moving from the most confused and passive to the most clear and active. Right? The bottom rung is imagination or the knowledge of the first kind. This is inadequate. It's confused and it's based purely on chance, sense, experience, and signs. This for him is the origin of all falsity.
So it only involves ideas of affections. How external bodies are affecting my own body which are by definition incomplete and partial. Exactly. This is the realm where we believe the sun is close. Where we suffer under passive effects like fear and envy and where the illusion of arbitrary free will lives. It's unavoidable but it's deeply limited.
So what's the next step up? The second kind is reason or the knowledge of the second kind. This is adequate. It's necessarily true. And it's built on solid ground. What he calls common notions.
Common notions. What are those? They're universal properties like extension or motion and rest. Properties that are equally in the part and in the whole.
Why are these common notions so crucial? And why are they automatically adequate ideas? Because they're essential to understanding anybody. When I think of any particular body, a rock or a person, I have to use the concept of extension. it occupies space and I have to use the concept of motion and rest. It's either changing position or it's staying still.
Okay, so they're universal, right? And since these concepts are necessary for understanding all bodies, our idea of extension can't be a confused or incomplete sensory snapshot. It must be clear and distinct by its very definition.
Ah, I see. So we transcend that idiosyncratic flawed sensory experience of the imagination by reasoning about necessary universal properties that have to be true for everything. That's the engine of rational adequate knowledge. And finally we get to the summit the third kind of knowledge intuition. Cientia intuitiva and this is this is the highest human perfection. It's an instantaneous kind of knowledge that proceeds from the adequate idea of God's attributes, extension, and thought directly to the adequate knowledge of the essence of individual things. It's the perfect self-evident grasp of how the finite mode you relates to the infinite substance, nature.
Wow. So, the goal is to live as much as possible according to reason and to strive for that state of intuition. To define this life, Spinosa introduces a model, an exemplar, the free man. The free man is the model, the person living entirely by the dictates of reason. And he uses this model to define what is truly good and useful, which is anything that increases our perfection and power. And this is where he makes a really vital distinction between good and joy.
Good is not just momentary pleasure. Not at all. Joy is a transition to a greater perfection. Yes. But a momentary pleasure or joy can actually be an evil if it hinders a greater long-term perfection.
Give me an example. The joy of drinking heavily tonight is an evil if it hinders the greater good of maximizing your health and your reason over the long term. Good is defined as what is certainly known to be useful to us based on the clear necessity of reason for persevering in our being. So how do we actually apply this philosophy to our chaotic emotional lives? He offers remedies for the passions. What's the crucial first step to achieving this rational freedom? The foundational remedy is to achieve self-nowledge by attempting to fully understand a passion and its cause. Since passions are caused by inadequate, confused ideas, the only way to tame them is to turn that inadequate idea into an adequate one.
Let's use a common example. Let's say anxiety. Yeah. Paralyzing fear about the future.
Okay. So, if you're simply suffering the anxiety, you are being passive. You are being determined externally by an inadequate idea, some future possibility that you haven't fully dissected.
So, the remedy is to dissect it rationally to understand the cause of the anxiety, to trace it back to a previous chain of events, and to understand the specific ways in which that emotion is affecting your body. You transform the passive affective idea. You're basically thinking about the ideas of the ideas of the affections of your body.
And by fully understanding the passion, the individual is already more active. He says that when we form a clear and distinct idea of an affect that is a passion, it ceases to be a passion and it transforms into an action.
So it moves from something you're just suffering to something you're actively processing. Right? And by processing it rationally, you increase your power to act and thus you move toward freedom. This entire rigorous deterministic framework where mind and body are one, where freedom is rational necessity, it seems to culminate in this profound almost mystical realization of ultimate unity.
This is the stunning payoff of the whole system. Dual aspect monism is the philosophical articulation of what mystics across all traditions have been describing for millennia. Spirit and body are one. Subject and object are one.
Cartisian dualism is just a fiction created by inadequate knowledge. Right? The material body and our mental experiences are one and the same. It's the entire universe manifesting itself, experiencing itself.
Our experiences are the world experiencing itself. So the human mind with its senses and its unique neuronal network is basically a sense organ of God or nature. We're providing a limited subjective relative frame of reference. We are the divine incarnated performing the determined dance of nature. But this limited perspective means we're trapped in what you call the paradox of duality. Subject versus object, inner versus outer.
And that duality is indispensably necessary for reality to manifest and perceive anything at all. You need the contrast to have knowledge. But to know reality in its true undifferiated essence, its non-dual oneness, that limited subjective frame of reference has to what? Let go.
It has to cease its clinging. Yes. For the highest form of knowledge, intuition to occur, the limited subjective mind must undergo a process of kinosis or emptiness. It has to drop the subject object distinction. The finite mode has to recognize its absolute identity with the infinite substance.
And this absence of dualistic perceptions, that's when the awakening occurs. It's the recognition that the self is the unified consciousness underlying all experience. It's the absolute, the ground of being. The entire human pursuit of freedom through rational activity is in the end the path to recognizing this total deterministic unity.
He talks about the intellectual love of God. Yes. And he says it's not our love of God but the very love with which God loves himself. Our greatest joy is God's joy in realizing itself through us. We find freedom by recognizing necessity.
This has been a monumental deep dive into the identity of existence itself. We've uh we've abandoned the concept of arbitrary free will and causal dualism for a deterministic universe where freedom is found only through rigorous rational activity, relentless self-nowledge, and ultimately a mystical realization of unity.
The intellectual shift is daunting. If every idea involves an affirmation, a belief, then to move toward freedom really just means cultivating adequate ideas. It's the striving to know the causes of our reality rather than just being passively driven by the effects we have. In a sense, by understanding the causal necessity of everything, we become active causes ourselves. We move from being passive slaves of fortune to empowered agents of our own reason.
And that profound shift leads us to our final provocative question for you, the learner, which ties directly back to our very first section. Mhm. We established that Spinosa defines your numerical identity by retaining the same core pattern of activity that can across time and attributes.
Right? So if achieving rational freedom requires the free man to radically change his patterns to shed his passive desires to embrace rational necessity and to transform his entire worldview, doesn't Spinosa's system suggest that the person who achieves that final blessedness is in a fundamental way a numerically different person from the slave to passion who began the journey?
Something to ponder as you reflect on the ultimate nature of your own mind and body and the continuous necessity of becoming. We hope you enjoyed this journey into the core of substance mindism. Until next time.