What does it mean to be truly free? Throughout this series we have established that nothing in the universe is contingent: everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature with infinite accuracy. There is no free will in the vulgar sense. The laws of nature cannot be broken.

Given all of this, freedom sounds impossible. But Spinoza's answer is the most radical claim in the entire Ethics: freedom is not the opposite of necessity. Freedom comes through necessity.

Freedom Through Necessity

The common understanding of freedom is the ability to choose otherwise. We believe we are free when we feel that we could have done something different. But as we discussed in the previous posts, this feeling is an illusion. The mind is determined by causes, which are themselves determined by prior causes, extending back infinitely.

So what kind of freedom remains?

[E5p6] The mind has greater power over the emotions and is less subject thereto, in so far as it understands all things as necessary.

This is the key: understanding. The more you understand the causes behind your emotions, your thoughts, and the events around you, the less power those emotions have over you. Not because you escape them, but because you see them for what they are: necessary effects of necessary causes.

The Third Kind of Knowledge

Spinoza describes three kinds of knowledge. The first kind (imagination, opinion, memory) is the source of all falsity. The second kind (reason) connects things logically through common notions. But the third kind is the highest: intuitive knowledge.

[E5p25] The highest endeavour of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge.

This third kind of knowledge is direct understanding of the essence of things through their connection to God or Nature. Not abstract reasoning about causes, but a lived comprehension of how everything follows from the divine nature.

Let's say you understand, truly understand, that the person who wronged you acted from necessity, just as a triangle necessarily has angles summing to 180 degrees. This is not a thought exercise. It is a shift in perception. The anger does not vanish because you suppress it. It transforms because the inadequate idea that caused it has been replaced by an adequate one.

[E5p3] An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof.

Amor Dei Intellectualis

From this third kind of knowledge arises something Spinoza calls amor Dei intellectualis: the intellectual love of God.

[E5p32 corollary] From the third kind of knowledge arises pleasure accompanied by the idea of God as cause, that is, the love of God; not in so far as we imagine him as present, but in so far as we understand him to be eternal; this is what I call the intellectual love of God.

This love is not devotion to a personal deity. It is the mind's joy in understanding the eternal necessity of all things. When you see how everything (including your own thoughts and emotions) follows from the nature of God or Nature, the result is not resignation. It is love.

We can see how this love differs from ordinary love. Ordinary love attaches to particular things and is subject to jealousy, fear, and loss. The intellectual love of God attaches to nothing particular: it attaches to the whole of reality as it necessarily is.

[E5p20] This love towards God cannot be stained by the emotion of envy or jealousy: contrariwise, it is the more fostered, in proportion as we conceive a greater number of men to be joined to God by the same bond of love.

The Mind-Reality Gap

Throughout this series we have discussed the mind-reality gap: the distance between what the mind imagines and what actually is. First-kind knowledge (bias, opinion, neurosis) widens this gap. The wider the gap, the more we suffer. We fight against reality because we believe it should be different from what it is.

The intellectual love of God closes this gap entirely. Not by changing reality, but by understanding it. When you understand that everything is as it must be (not because someone chose it, but because the laws of nature made it necessary), the gap between thought and reality disappears.

This is the state Spinoza calls blessedness.

[E5p42] Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but, contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.

The Ultimate Freedom

The ultimate freedom is not freedom from the laws of nature. It is the full understanding and acceptance of them. Not passive acceptance: active understanding. The kind of understanding that transforms every emotion from a passion into an action, every confusion into clarity, every fight against reality into harmony with it.

The wise person is not someone who escapes necessity. The wise person is someone who understands necessity so completely that nothing disturbs the acquiescence of their spirit. They are conscious of themselves, of God, and of things, and in this consciousness, they possess the only freedom that is real.

[E5p42 note] The wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit.

The path is hard. But the freedom it leads to is the freedom that comes from understanding the necessity of all things, including yourself.

The mind relates to the body as its idea. The idea of the mind relates to the mind in the same way. This is Spinoza's doctrine of infinite reflection: knowing something means knowing that you know it, and knowing that you know that you know it, all the way up, without end.

[E2p21] This idea of the mind is united to the mind in the same way as the mind is united to the body.

The proof follows directly from the structure already established. The body is the object of the mind. The mind is the object of the idea of the mind. The relation is identical in both cases.

What This Actually Means

Consider a concrete case. You see an apple. That perception (the image of the apple, its color, weight, position) is a mode of your body being affected. Your mind is the idea of that bodily state. So far, nothing unusual.

But now: you also know that you see the apple. You don't need a separate act to become aware of your perception. The awareness is already there. The idea of the mind (the second-order idea) is united to the mind in the same way the mind is united to the body.

This doesn't stop at two levels. You know that you know that you see the apple. And you know that you know that you know. The chain extends to infinity.

Not a Separate Process

The critical point: this infinite stacking is not a sequence of separate mental events happening one after another. It happens simultaneously. Spinoza is explicit about this in the scholium to E2p21:

[E2p21s] The idea of the mind, I repeat, and the mind itself are one and the same thing, which is conceived under one and the same attribute, namely, thought.

The mind and the idea of the mind are not two things. They are one thing conceived under the attribute of thought. The same way body and mind are one individual conceived now under extension, now under thought: the mind and its self-awareness are one individual conceived under thought alone.

The Apple, Revisited

Let's say you hold an apple. Three things happen at once:

• First-order idea: you perceive the apple (its red skin, the weight in your hand, the smell).
• Second-order idea: you know you are perceiving the apple. You can reflect on the experience.
• Third-order idea: you know that you know. You are aware of your own reflective capacity.

These are not three separate processes stacked on top of each other like floors in a building. They are one and the same cognitive event (the mind's activity) described at different levels of abstraction. The forma of the idea, as Spinoza puts it: the distinctive quality of the idea conceived as a mode of thought.

Self-Awareness Is Not an Extra Faculty

This is where Spinoza departs from the common picture of consciousness. Most accounts treat self-awareness as something added on top of basic perception: a higher function, a special capacity that some minds have and others don't.

Spinoza's structure eliminates that picture entirely. Self-awareness is built into the architecture of mind itself. If you have an idea at all, you have the idea of that idea. If you know anything, you know that you know it.

[E2p43] He, who has a true idea, simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.

The word "simultaneously" does the essential work. Knowing and knowing-that-you-know are not sequential. They are the same act of understanding, viewed from within.

Why This Matters

The implication is structural, not psychological. Self-awareness is not a talent, not a skill you develop, not the result of meditation or training. It is a consequence of what it means to be a mind at all.

Every idea in God follows from the same necessity. The idea of the mind follows from God in the same manner as the idea of the body. The chain of reflection doesn't require any additional power of thinking: it follows from the same power that produces the original idea.

We can see how this collapses the traditional gap between "experience" and "awareness of experience." There is no gap. The mind's relation to itself mirrors the mind's relation to its body: one and the same individual, one and the same causal order, conceived under the attribute of thought.

The Infinite Stack

The recursion never terminates. But this is not a problem to be solved: it is a feature of how thought works. Every adequate idea carries its own certification. Every act of understanding includes understanding that you understand.

This is the structure of the mind: not a mirror reflecting itself into infinity as a visual trick, but a single reality (the thinking thing) whose nature it is to be transparent to itself. The idea of the mind is the mind. The reflection is the thing reflected.

Most people hear the word "idea" and picture something like an image in the head. A mental snapshot. Spinoza rejects this entirely.

[E2d3] By idea, I mean the mental conception which is formed by the mind as a thinking thing.

The key word: conception, not perception. Perception implies passivity: the mind receiving impressions from outside. Conception implies activity: the mind doing something. An idea is not a picture on a panel. An idea is an act of understanding.

This distinction matters because it determines everything that follows. If ideas were images, they would be inert. They would sit in the mind the way paintings sit on a wall. But ideas are modes of thinking: they affirm, they deny, they connect to other ideas through their own internal logic.

Adequate and Inadequate Ideas

Spinoza splits all ideas into two kinds: adequate and inadequate.

[E2d4] By an adequate idea, I mean an idea which, in so far as it is considered in itself, without relation to the object, has all the properties or intrinsic marks of a true idea.

An adequate idea carries its own proof. You don't need to check it against the outside world: its internal coherence is sufficient. The three angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. This follows from the nature of a triangle itself, not from measuring triangles with a protractor.

Inadequate ideas are the opposite: fragmentary, confused, stripped of context. When the mind perceives through the body's random encounters with external things (through sensation, memory, hearsay), it gets only partial information. The idea of the sun appearing 200 feet away is inadequate. The body is affected by the sun in a certain way, and the mind registers that effect, but without understanding the causes behind it.

[E2p35] Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

Falsity is not something positive. There is no "false substance" contaminating your thinking. Falsity is absence: the missing pieces that would complete the picture. The inadequate idea of the sun's distance is not wrong because it contains bad information. It is wrong because it lacks sufficient information.

Ideas as Causes

Here is where Spinoza's framework becomes structurally different from anything that came before. Ideas don't just represent things: they cause other ideas.

[E2p7] The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

Two parallel chains run through reality. In extension: bodies affect bodies, motion causes motion, physical events follow from physical events. In thought: ideas follow from ideas, conceptions generate conceptions, mental events follow from mental events.

These chains don't cross. A body does not cause an idea. An idea does not cause a body. They run in parallel because they are the same chain expressed through different attributes. A circle existing in nature and the idea of that circle in God are one and the same thing, displayed through extension in one case, through thought in the other.

We can see how this reframes the entire question of mind-body interaction. There is no interaction. There is no gap to bridge. Mind and body are two expressions of the same underlying reality.

The Mind Strives

The mind is not a passive container for ideas. It has directionality.

[E3p12] The mind, as far as it can, endeavours to conceive those things, which increase or help the power of activity in the body.

The mind strives to think what strengthens the body. This is not a choice. It is the mind's nature as a mode of thought. When the body is affected in ways that increase its power of activity, the mind forms ideas that correspond to those affections. The mind wants adequate ideas the way the body wants nourishment: not by decision, but by constitution.

This striving connects directly to the distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas. Adequate ideas increase the mind's power of thinking. Inadequate ideas diminish it. The mind naturally moves toward adequacy: toward understanding causes, grasping necessity, forming conceptions that hold together on their own terms.

Ideas Are Not Images

Spinoza returns to this point at the end of Part 2 with particular force:

[E2p49 note] Those who think that ideas consist in images which are formed in us by contact with external bodies, persuade themselves that the ideas of those things, whereof we can form no mental picture, are not ideas, but only figments.

This is the error that blocks everything else. If you treat ideas as pictures, you will think the mind is passive, will is separate from understanding, and truth is measured by correspondence with external objects. Spinoza's position: an idea, inasmuch as it is an idea, involves an affirmation or negation. To have the idea of a triangle is already to affirm that its angles sum to 180 degrees. The idea and the affirmation are not separate acts.

Will and understanding are one and the same. There is no faculty of will standing apart from the faculty of intellect, choosing whether to assent or deny. The affirmation is the idea itself. Understanding something and affirming it are identical.

What This Means

The practical consequence: you cannot fix bad thinking by willing yourself to believe differently. You fix it by replacing inadequate ideas with adequate ones: by understanding causes rather than judging effects. The mind that grasps necessity does not waver. The mind that operates on fragments and impressions cannot help but waver.

Truth, in the end, is its own standard. An adequate idea does not need external validation. It carries certainty within itself, the way light reveals both itself and darkness. The very reality of the idea is the truth.

No free will in the mind

PROP. XLVIII. In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

Proof. The mind is a fixed and definite mode of thought (II. xi.), therefore it cannot be the free cause of its actions (I. xvii. Coroll. ii.); in other words, it cannot have an absolute faculty of positive or negative volition; but (by I. xxviii.) it must be determined by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another, &c. Q.E.D.

Note. In the same way it is proved, that there is in the mind no absolute faculty of understanding, desiring, loving, &c. Whence it follows, that these and similar faculties are either entirely fictitious, or are merely abstract and general terms, such as we are accustomed to put together from particular things. Thus the intellect and the will stand in the same relation to this or that idea, or this or that volition, as "lapidity" to this or that stone, or as "man" to Peter and Paul. The cause which leads men to consider themselves free has been set forth in the Appendix to Part I. But, before I proceed further, I would here remark that, by the will to affirm and decide, I mean the faculty, not the desire. I mean, I repeat, the faculty, whereby the mind affirms or denies what is true or false, not the desire, wherewith the mind wishes for or turns away from any given thing. After we have proved, that these faculties of ours are general notions, which cannot be distinguished from the particular instances on which they are based, we must inquire whether volitions themselves are anything besides the ideas of things. We must inquire, I say, whether there is in the mind any affirmation or negation beyond that, which the idea, in so far as it is an idea, involves. On which subject see the following proposition, and II. Def. iii., lest the idea of pictures should suggest itself. For by ideas I do not mean images such as are formed at the back of the eye, or in the midst of the brain, but the conceptions of thought.

A volition is an idea

PROP. XLIX. There is in the mind no volition or affirmation and negation, save that which an idea, inasmuch as it is an idea, involves.

Proof. There is in the mind no absolute faculty of positive or negative volition, but only particular volitions, namely, this or that affirmation, and this or that negation. Now let us conceive a particular volition, namely, the mode of thinking whereby the mind affirms, that the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. This affirmation involves the conception or idea of a triangle, that is, without the idea of a triangle it cannot be conceived. It is the same thing to say, that the concept A must involve the concept B, as it is to say, that A cannot be conceived without B. Further, this affirmation cannot be made (II. Ax. iii.) without the idea of a triangle. Therefore, this affirmation can neither be nor be conceived, without the idea of a triangle. Again, this idea of a triangle must involve this same affirmation, namely, that its three interior angles are equal to two right angles. Wherefore, and vice versâ, this idea of a triangle can neither be nor be conceived without this affirmation, therefore, this affirmation belongs to the essence of the idea of a triangle, and is nothing besides. What we have said of this volition (inasmuch as we have selected it at random) may be said of any other volition, namely, that it is nothing but an idea. Q.E.D.

A volition/will is essentially an idea.

Corollary. Will and understanding are one and the same.

Proof. Will and understanding are nothing beyond the individual volitions and ideas (II. xlviii. and note). But a particular volition and a particular idea are one and the same (by the foregoing Prop.); therefore, will and understanding are one and the same. Q.E.D.

Certainty and falsity

Note: Note. We have thus removed the cause which is commonly assigned for error. For we have shown above, that falsity consists solely in the privation of knowledge involved in ideas which are fragmentary and confused. Wherefore, a false idea, inasmuch as it is false, does not involve certainty. When we say, then, that a man acquiesces in what is false, and that he has no doubts on the subject, we do not say that he is certain, but only that he does not doubt, or that he acquiesces in what is false, inasmuch as there are no reasons, which should cause his imagination to waver (see II. xliv. note). Thus, although the man be assumed to acquiesce in what is false, we shall never say that he is certain. For by certainty we mean something positive (II. xliii. and note), not merely the absence of doubt.

• Falsity comes from limited knowledge, in a way that person has no doubt, but he is not certain.
• Certainty is positive, not just the absence of doubt. If you don't have doubt, it does not mean you are certain.
• Certainty comes from understanding things in a conditioned way, for example in the triangle, you are certain because you understand the nature of triangle(as A) with its properties(as B) and related conceive one through the other(B from A).

Ideas, images and words

Those who think that ideas consist in images which are formed in us by contact with external bodies, persuade themselves that the ideas of those things, whereof we can form no mental picture, are not ideas, but only figments, which we invent by the free decree of our will; they thus regard ideas as though they were inanimate pictures on a panel, and, filled with this misconception, do not see that an idea, inasmuch as it is an idea, involves an affirmation or negation. Again, those who confuse words with ideas, or with the affirmation which an idea involves, think that they can wish something contrary to what they feel, affirm, or deny. This misconception will easily be laid aside by one, who reflects on the nature of knowledge, and seeing that it in no wise involves the conception of extension, will therefore clearly understand, that an idea (being a mode of thinking) does not consist in the image of anything, nor in words. The essence of words and images is put together by bodily motions, which in no wise involve the conception of thought.

These 3 are different and confusing them leads to ignorance and misunderstanding of the nature of ideas.

Ideas: Conceptions of the mind involving affirmations or negations. Images: Mental pictures formed by interactions with external bodies. Words: Symbols used to signify things.

Ideas vs. Images: Ideas are mental affirmations, not just mental pictures. Ideas vs. Words: Words signify things but are not the same as ideas. Philosophical Importance: Clear distinction helps avoid confusion and error in reasoning.

Why we believe we are free

[3P2.Note]: when it comes about that many believe, that we are only free in respect to objects which we moderately desire, because our desire for such can easily be controlled by the thought of something else frequently remembered, but that we are by no means free in respect to what we seek with violent emotion, for our desire cannot then be allayed with the remembrance of anything else. However, unless such persons had proved by experience that we do many things which we afterwards repent of, and again that we often, when assailed by contrary emotions, see the better and follow the worse, there would be nothing to prevent their believing that we are free in all things. Thus an infant believes that of its own free will it desires milk, an angry child believes that it freely desires vengeance, a timid child believes that it freely desires to run away; further, a drunken man believes that he utters from the free decision of his mind words which, when he is sober, he would willingly have withheld: thus, too, a delirious man, a garrulous woman, a child, and others of like complexion, believe that they speak from the free decision of their mind, when they are in reality unable to restrain their impulse to talk. Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined; and, further, it is plain that the dictates of the mind are but another name for the appetites, and therefore vary according to the varying state of the body. Everyone shapes his actions according to his emotion, those who are assailed by conflicting emotions know not what they wish; those who are not attacked by any emotion are readily swayed this way or that. All these considerations clearly show that a mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state, are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing, which we call decision, when it is regarded under and explained through the attribute of thought, and a conditioned state, when it is regarded under the attribute of extension, and deduced from the laws of motion and rest. This will appear yet more plainly in the sequel. For the present I wish to call attention to another point, namely, that we cannot act by the decision of the mind, unless we have a remembrance of having done so. For instance, we cannot say a word without remembering that we have done so. Again, it is not within the free power of the mind to remember or forget a thing at will. Therefore the freedom of the mind must in any case be limited to the power of uttering or not uttering something which it remembers. But when we dream that we speak, we believe that we speak from a free decision of the mind, yet we do not speak, or, if we do, it is by a spontaneous motion of the body. Again, we dream that we are concealing something, and we seem to act from the same decision of the mind as that, whereby we keep silence when awake concerning something we know. Lastly, we dream that from the free decision of our mind we do something, which we should not dare to do when awake.

[E2p35 note] Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFg1ysJ1oUs&ab_channel=StarTalk

The stone in flight

In a letter to Schuller, Spinoza asks you to imagine a stone that is set in motion by an external cause. If the stone became conscious of its own movement and lost the awareness of the push, it would believe that it flies by its own free will.

That is our position. We are aware of the movement and not of the cause, so every action feels chosen.

Reflection of free-will assumption

Freedom is not an exemption from causation. Nothing stands outside the causal order, not the mind, not the body, not God, who acts by the same necessity by which he understands himself.

The freedom that is left is the understanding of the causes that determine you. Instead of asking what you choose, you ask what caused the thing itself and what caused your response to it. The understanding is the freedom.

Understanding the concept of Spinoza’s perfection can completely change your worldview in a way that you won’t look at reality the same way you always have.

At the end of understanding this concept, it's expected for you to see how everything is different from what you used to see, but yet nothing changed, except your understanding of how infinite, infinite is.

Infinity in numbers

Let’s assume we have all the positive numbers from 0 to infinity.

Now we have infinite numbers, but we don’t have half of them, which are the negative numbers. So we can have infinite, but still not all of it.

At the time that we have absolutely infinite numbers, we would say we have the perfect set. On the contrary, the imperfection of it would be a finite range or just infinite (not absolute infinite).

Conclusion: We can have boundless infinity between finite boundaries, just like how there are infinite decimal numbers between 1-2 (1.01, 1.0001 and so on to infinity)

Space or reality

If now we consider 2 points in reality, we can find infinite possible places between them. This shows that within a finite boundary, there are an infinite number of possible points.

Things

Things I define as extended things with concrete finite boundaries.

Things have all been specified in finite boundaries, everything in nature, no matter how big, is not absolutely infinite. Things are just extended things inside space.

Now if we consider ourselves as extended things with definite shape living in this reality, you would realize we are finite as bodies, also everything else as matter. From our body to the biggest galaxies, all of these are modes of the one substance conceived as extended, see 1D5 and 2D1, not things sitting inside a box called space. That's why reality is perfect, because it leaves nothing out, as to say, it contains all the numbers.

Hence it follows that the one and only absolutely infinite thing is substance, God or Nature, which has infinitely many attributes, and Extension is the one we can picture, see 1D6 and 2P2.

Now let's connect some dots

God = Nature = Substance = Infinitely Extended thing = Reality

We can see how the perfection of nature possesses itself through reality.

Everything else is finite extended things inside reality, which is an infinity within its boundaries.

While we, as finite beings, perceive only a portion of this infinity, it does not diminish the perfection of the whole. In other words, as extended things we are finite modes of this infinite substance.

> Ethics 1P8: Every substance is necessarily infinite.

This does not give us many infinite substances, one inside another. It is one of the steps to 1P14: there is only one substance, and everything extended is a mode of it.

> Ethics2D6:Reality and perfection I use as synonymous terms.

Misconception of perfection

Perfection is associated with achieving the preconceived goal of a creator or someone who can judge the completion of the thing said.

Let’s say a half-finished building, no one calls it perfect. At the time that it has been brought to reality, by its creator and judge, it shall be called perfect. Later on, humans started to build towers, apartments, houses, etc. Each of them started to pick their own favorite values to judge the perfection of the thing in their favor. But they have been unaware that all judgment objects have been brought to reality by necessity or infinite accuracy, and not because of perfection in a way that could happen differently.

So we can see how perfection becomes opinion-based, and an opinion does not have reality values within its nature. As we must be aware that good, bad, meaning, and opinions, are all the products of the mind, and not the quality of thing in reality. In reality, everything exists because of necessity accompanied by infinite accuracy.

So no building or tower is perfect, whether finished or not? That depends on a human's judgment of the thing said to find the good or bad for whom.

These concepts are relative or opinion-based, the only non-opinion-based ground is the truth or reality. The very reality is the truth. The goal here is to be able to distinguish reality from imagination and opinion, set ourselves free, and take the drive of life to a way of living in harmony with nature and ourselves.

Reality is the extended space or substance, within infinite sides, each stretched to infinity, which itself and within all consist absolutely infinite God to possess its perfection through reality. Reza Khosravivala

Add on

Modern observations indicate that the observable universe is finite in extent and that large-scale spatial geometry is very close to flat; whether the entire universe is spatially finite or infinite remains unknown. Either way, this does not touch what Spinoza says. His infinite is not a measurement of how far space reaches, it is a claim of reason about substance, that substance is limited by nothing of the same kind, see 1D2 and 1D6. So the observation neither confirms nor refutes it, and it doesn't invalidate anything else of the system.

Infinite accuracy

I want to explain necessity with a simple example.

Imagine shooting a bullet in a video game. The computer performs underlying calculations to determine the bullet’s trajectory. However, since man-made calculations are limited by computational power, the result is typically rounded to a few decimal places, perhaps four or more. This introduces a degree of inaccuracy, a result of the limitations of human technology.

Now, let’s consider shooting the same bullet in reality. Unlike in a video game, the real world accounts for every factor: wind resistance, gravity, air pressure, and so on. These factors are not simplified or rounded; instead, nature calculates the trajectory with infinite accuracy. The bullet’s path is determined by the laws of nature, taking into account every detail down to the smallest force or influence.

While we might experience uncertainty when trying to predict where the bullet will land, this uncertainty is due to our lack of knowledge, not any randomness in nature. Nature, or God in Spinoza’s terms, ensures that the bullet flies and lands with perfect accuracy. It could not happen any other way. Everything in nature follows this same principle of infinite precision.

For example the point that bullet end up in the space within the game if we say to be the coordinates [10.23][20.56], we see that they are finite. The bullet that we shoot in nature, the calculations of it will happen infinitely accurate as [10.2381239812038...][20.56891273918723...]. This is what is called infinite necessity or infinite accuracy.

Everything from the falling of an apple to the movement of planets

In any event, from the fall of any object to the movements of your bicycle and planets, God is executing all with infinite accuracy and it makes no exception among its creations. Of course, each area of science has its own laws. But Spinoza does not get this from experiment. He gets it from the nature of God: if everything follows from a nature that could not be otherwise, nothing is left over to be merely possible (1P29, 1P33). Whether reality is deterministic at its base is still an open question in the foundations of physics, and Spinoza's claim does not rest on the answer.

Flexibility of laws of nature

This is not the kind of claim science tests. It follows from what God is, not from what we measure.

The infinite accuracy of these laws makes them infinitely inflexible.

If we can flex or change the way a law of nature works, we have found a miracle.

If we were more conscious of the inflexible universal laws that govern even the wildest and most wanton fantasy, we might perhaps be in a better position to see these thoughts above all others as objective occurrences, just as we see dreams, which nobody is supposed to be deliberate or arbitrary inventions. Carl.Jung: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, page 276

Here Jung is talking about the efficiency and reality of active imagination (his technique), how inflexible laws of nature make our imaginations necessarily have a source of existence in us, and how the unconscious mind can manifest itself through the dream, daydream, and active made-up imagination.

Necessity

Necessity of cause and effect is the way that Spinoza proved his concept.

Any event/effect in the world has a cause, otherwise, the effect cannot follow from nothing. The event always follows from its cause or causes. Now with that said, if we consider any event in the world, it has causes which made that event happen, those causes had their own causes, which made them happen, and so on back without end. The chain never bottoms out in a first event. So we reach a strict chain of action and reaction, and the only way to change something in it is to change everything that caused it, back further than anyone can trace.

So we can see how everything is brought to reality, by a cause, so hence it follows nothing happens without a reason, which we call truth. This is also the reason truth cannot be judged: it’s neither good nor bad.

>[1P29]:Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

>[1P33]: Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

Our mind by default imagines things happening differently, but hence it follows that this only happens in mind and imagination.

I don’t claim imagination has no effect in reality, actually the opposite. All man-made things we see used to be ideas one day, which were brought to reality.

However, the imagination and action; all followed therefrom, are all products of infinite accuracy.

>[2P44.Corollary]: Hence it follows, that it is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.

Chaotic system

1972, Edward Norton Lorenz: He discovered the effect when he observed runs of his weather model with initial condition data that were rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner. He noted that the weather model would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome

Weather is a form of deterministic chaotic system, which means that it is predictable in the short term but not in the long term. Small unpredictable changes completely change what we forecast almost all the time. This happens because of a lack of knowledge, many times inevitable.

The underlying reason for such phenomena is the infinitely accurate laws of nature which make everything possible.

In our everyday lives, we can see how a small change in our actions can lead to a cause that pushes a new set of dominoes that we can’t predict the outcome of.

From the necessity of the divine nature must follow infinite things in infinite ways, executed by infinite accuracy, inside the absolutely perfect God. Reza Khosravivala

Hence it follows that God has (infinite * infinite) computation power with constant latency in respect to time. Reza Khosravivala

Proof: God makes infinite things possible, in infinite ways. Each of them separately takes the infinite accuracy into account. Therefore it follows that God has (infinite * infinite) computation power with constant latency with respect to equality of execution or execution latency elapsing.

What are Spinoza’s kinds of knowledge, and how can you use it as a tool to understand what kind of idea is valid, and what kind is not? and also to turn a light to the maximum extent of freedom that oneself can reach, however, it’s been declaimed from self by self because of the mind-reality gap and Neuroses formation.

Bias

The first thing we should understand is the emotional quality or mental energy of a thing in mind, and how it happens, so we can make sense of how different people are affected differently by the same things, at all times.

Ethics 3P51: Different men may be differently affected by the same object, and the same man may be differently affected at different times by the same object.

The way it happens:

Ethics 3P14: If the mind has once been affected by two emotions at the same time, it will, whenever it is afterwards affected by one of these two, be also affected by the other.

This is the very beginning line of aversion and inclination, or in one word: bias.

Inclination

Pleasure accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure.

Aversion

Pain accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally the cause of pain.

Once I was talking to a lady who was telling me of how she disliked green eyes because it reminds her of sputum, which is also green. This indicates how emotion can transform itself through a complex network of collective memories conditioned to initial conditions and experience, in which the origin is barely conscious. All the person knows is the experience of an emotion toward the thing.

So as a result

Ethics 3P14 corollary: Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

This is the reason we see people have different opinions about things, it’s always related to something in the mind because the thing itself doesn’t possess qualities of emotion. It’s just a thing that our mind is reflecting its value onto. A thing like sputum or green eyes exists in reality because of its causes, but at the time that mind reflects its value on, it becomes good or bad.

Reflection

A quality that is relative does not possess those qualities unless the perception of the mind.

From the very fact that man makes meaning of good and bad of everything to consist in its form (continuing existence), it’s affected by those emotions of good and bad, love or hate.

The problem happens at times when the mind confuses its own affection with the quality of the thing in reality and believes that the quality is from the nature of the thing then: it reflects its own value on reality.

For example, someone who believes alcohol is bad would reflect their opinion as the bare truth for everyone. Meanwhile both the existence of alcohol and the opinion have happened by their own causes accompanied by infinite accuracy.

What I’m trying to say here is that: good and bad products of relative meaning that do not have quality in reality, but it’s a thinking mode that can lead to prejudice by its reflection on reality.

Judgment

Judgment happens at times when we reflect the value of mind on something that we conceive to be free, in such a manner that it could have happened differently aligned with the reflected values.

From here it’s insightful to watch our own judgments to find the origin of values.

In the reality that everything has causes for existence in a fixed manner, and cannot happen any differently, conceiving something to be free, is the error of mind for the value to reflect itself.

The practice is to instead of judgment, think of the causes that made the thing happen, and also to think that made the self reflect which value for self-insight, because neither of them, the self or reality, is free; they are both caused. So hence it follows that also the value of self that is being reflected is unjudgeable.

Ethics 3P51: Different men may be differently affected by the same object, and the same man may be differently affected at different times by the same object.

Ethics 3P51.Note: Lastly, from this inconstancy in the nature of human judgment, inasmuch as a man often judges things solely by his emotions, and inasmuch as the things which he believes cause pleasure or pain, and therefore endeavours to promote or prevent, are often purely imaginary.

We must be aware at all times that judgment is for something that has acted higher than the necessity of its own.

Kinds of knowledge

Spinoza has 3 kinds of knowledge which used to make a clearcut between what's part of reality and adequate, and what's solely exist in mind and doesn't exist in reality.

He sees the obtaining of true knowledge to be the sole avenue for liberating oneself from the limits and fallibility of an average human existence.

Reality has no obligation to act upon what we think of, it does do it's own thing based on necessity, the result of mismatching our knowledge and mis validate what we know results in mind distancing from reality, thinking and believing things that doesn't exist.

Also these kinds of knowledge are his path to freedom in his predetermined system.

First kind (invalid/error)

First kind of knowledge is the only source of falsity.

Ethics 2P41: Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.

From symbols, e.g., from the fact of having read or heard certain words we remember things and form certain ideas concerning them, similar to those through which we imagine things (II. xviii. note). I shall call both these ways of regarding things knowledge of the first kind, opinion, or imagination.

• Opinions
• Remembering things and forming ideas concerning them
• Imaginations (something that is not part of reality, but we imagine it)
• Assumptions or beliefs
• Experiment without proof
• Senses or feelings
• Memory
• Prejudice
• Superstition
• Miracles
• Prophecy
• Revelation

These all are first kind of knowledge that need to validate with the second kind of knowledge which in case of falsity, they will be ignored.

Considering these types of knowledge as true and relying on them, will result the mind to distance from reality and form false assumptions. In other words, going by the mercy of fortune.

Second kind (valid)

The second kind of knowledge or Rational thinking is the gateway to truth. The ability to connect things logically and make reason out of them leading to a conclusion or rational prediction.

This is the kind of knowledge, that cannot be false and all men agree on.

Think of a triangle as truth, the idea of the triangle in mind is a bare reflection of reality, free of bias. The reason that it’s free of bias is that it cannot have a different shape that can go around its natural laws, which is common to everyone with no exception.

Notions common to all men, and adequate ideas of the properties of things.

Ethics 2P42: Knowledge of the second and third kinds, not knowledge of the first kind, teaches us to distinguish the true from the false.

Ethics 2P43: He, who has a true idea, simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.

Ethics 2P44: It is not in the nature of reason to regard things as contingent, but as necessary.

Ethics 2P44.Corollary: Hence it follows, that it is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.

Also, a triangle cannot be contingent. I define contingent in this context as assuming/imagining a triangle can have a sum of angles that is not 180°. Everything else is governed by the same strict logic as a triangle. But due to the lack of understanding, the mind assumes things to be contingent in reality and can happen differently. This knowledge can be gained by measuring and understanding phenomena.

Contingent: Not conditioned

We know that everything is conditioned to act in a particular manner by the rational order of nature, so regarding things as contingent is not a reason, but assumption which arise from first kind of knowledge.

Examples of second kind of knowledge:

• Common notion
• Something that everyone agree on with no doubt
• Intellection
• Reason

Reason

We use reason at times when we deal with an opinion-based matter. For example which building is the best, meanwhile no such thing as the best of anything exists. At this time we use reason to find our way relatively through opinionated matter using intellect. The second kind of knowledge is the gate to will or understanding.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd

If you have an idea which is contrary to nature, this come from the lack of knowledge. If reason has a practical reproducible contrary in nature, then it's proved that the reason is absurd. For example if we have a reason which cannot reproduce, and the contrary of it shows in nature.

Will and understanding

Ethics 2P49.Corollary: Will and understanding are one and the same.

At the very first level, our will is limited to the knowledge and understanding of action, how can a man have the option without knowing of the existence of the option? So, will or understanding.

So far we know from mind page that nothing such as free-will exist in nature, but will exists! The will, that is not free, but conditioned by reason of understanding. I want to show what it means by an example:

A person will necessarily continue living in the line of their initiated condition unless changed by a cause. Let's assume someone who has grown in an aggressive environment and culture, we might assume this person has a choice to do otherwise than what has been determined on them by necessity of their own nature and prior causes, but that's not the cause since the decision has been determined on them to make by all prior causes.

We clearly see how this person doesn't have a free-will to change self, but by enough understanding and morality, the person can be able to have the will to change the path of his life, by the way it's determined. Don't get me wrong, all wills and understandings are also determined and necessary, this is exactly what we see in people, there is a cause for them, which makes them understand and have the will to change things, just like how all complex organisms do. The key is to think and understand, and under reason choose our path. For example the cause can be Ethics and things we learn from it to understand and know, Ethics is the cause, not free but by necessity, our will is also not free and determined. Hope I have stressed enough how much this is important, it's the only flaw in the system that we can use in advantage to our freedom of choice, in the system that nothing is free.

We must know that this decision is not free, but by a cause which led to understanding.

The very same goes for you and me, we born with specific initial condition and ignorant, the life path will continue in a deterministic manner based on those initial conditions like religion and culture, unless, we by the cause of understanding equip ourselves to the power of will and change the predictable path.

...

Now lets talk about a person who doesn't have the ability of understanding and rational willing. The contrary of understanding is ignorance, so the ignorant person always ignore the true causes of his desire and passions and call it free-will. Passions are like waves in the sea, it takes the person from a side to another without him even understanding them, in this case, we shall say that the person in question is by the mercy of fortune and not in control of self.

Rationality in service to passion

In this section I want to talk about the relationship between first and second kind of knowledge, and how we are the prey to our passions.

Ethics 4PREF for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

We assume ourselves logical rational things (unlike animals) which walk around and act reasonably by the subject of rationality.

But that's really not the case, it's our passions and emotions which are driving us to do as we should, this is how it works.

• An external or internal cause happens.
• An emotion/passion arise in consciousness, by unconsciousness or consciousness causes.
• We start forming assumptions of the cause of our own emotion, which will be false because of lack of knowledge
• I want to note that the person who doesn't have the knowledge of distinguishing assumption from reality will have no choice but to assume assumptions as fact. Or in other words he doesn't know that he doesn't know.
• Second kind of knowledge or rational thinking provide a plan to execute the desire arose from passion which might be mixed with assumption and false knowledge.

Men uses second kind of knowledge, but in service to the first kind, and not a tool to make actual decisions with.

Consider the person who's addicted to gambling, the person is conscious of his desire for gambling, but unaware of all the causes that pushed him to become addicted and assume he did it with the free decision of his mind. He might describe the reason of his gambling desire or need for wealth, but in reality, that desire has specific causes which made the person's mind to do so. This person can change the outcome of his initial conditions (which he was victim of) by will or understanding.

Also, many times people lead to certain directions by external causes and make decision by their first kind of knowledge, but execute and continue execution of idea for a long period of time by their second kind of knowledge. We see often people who stuck in their own life path, struggling everyday by their power of thinking and striving, with total ignorance of the initial causes that put them in such a path.

For example, the desire of reproduction, no parents has a rational and convincing reason of why having multiple kids more than what they can handle. They do think that they made a decision by the free-will of their own mind and solely by the fact of wanting, ignorance to those internal and external pressures which made them to do so. Now that their life has faced challenges which they believe follow from their own decision, they have to think harder and more rational for the rest of their choices in life and go under extra pressure of life challenges, but will still not use that rationality for a second to think how they come up where they are. I think I have shown enough how our rationality is in service to our first kind of knowledge, and how we are in illusion of making decision by our reasons, which are in service to our passions.

Rationality and assumption overlap

Rational assumption means reason in service to passion.

In a way that the assumptions connected to each other by something that looks like reason. The truth might or might not be in the conclusion, error of mind arise as the time that this data considered truthy, meanwhile we know that assumptions are the source of falsity and opposite of second kind of knowledge. That's how they reason and assumption merge, the produced error will be considering false idea as truth which result in distancing from reality.

Third kind (intuition)

I will hereafter show, a third kind of knowledge, which we will call intuition. This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the absolute essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.

I want to explain this one with an example:

Imagine someone who knows nothing of driving wants to learn how to drive.

1. (first kind of knowledge)

For the first time when he sit next to the driver and observe how things work, he start to form assumptions of how things work. After an hour observation with no explanation, he tries driving and at the first attempt normally something goes wrong. In this stage the person might have been excited to drive for the first time with confidence, but unaware of the rest of the "ice mountain underwater"/"rabbit hole".

2. (second kind of knowledge)

They go to a class and learn all about cars and driving. They practice and experiment in long term. They must closely pay attention to all the movements of self and others in the street. In this stage they can drive for routine distances mostly till obtaining adequate skill necessary for third step.

3. (third kind of knowledge)

The person has drove enough for automatically driving usual paths as with the same difficulty without paying attention to all existing parameters. In other words, mind compose all ideas from second step and grasp in one single idea for consciousness. The person do not have to constantly think of all conditions, they will have their most exact reaction in compaction to the last stage. You can find many other examples of learning.

Mind-reality gap

The gap between what we think and what it is distinguished by how close the idea is to reality.

This gap is filled by the first kind of knowledge, which makes the reality to be cloudy and confused. As much as a person is more biased, they are more distanced from reality, and therefore experience a limited living, limited by their own personal inclinations and aversions. The bias that they start to reflect on the world, in such a way that it’s the bare truth, unable to see the causes. If the subjective thing said is free, they will also start to pass judgment based on their own personal relative emotions.

Necessity of the first kind of knowledge in action

With all that has been said bad of opinion, I should mention here why opinion exists and how deeply it is integrated within our social/morality system.

Although it’s been said that opinion has no value in reality, it has to be understood and distinguished what’s real for us and what’s real in reality. The opinion exists for us, just the same as the reason, to satisfy a need, which is caused by evolution. Now every man on the planet has an opinion, which is caused by necessity, just like how reason is connected to logic, opinion is connected to value [which is each associated with thinking and feeling]. As humans, we have developed the cognitive function of feeling through evolution and it has a high impact on social life it has to be adjusted correctly to what kind of opinion has what kind of value and origin. The goal here is:

• Distinguishing what’s real for us as a value and how it doesn’t have a quality in reality so it’s never common for all because it’s the perception of mind.
• Understand What is real in reality for oneself and others as an opinion weighted by value and acknowledging the existence of it as a necessity.
• Having resonated values aligned in harmony with our own nature and developing feelings therefrom.
• Assume everything has a form of value, it’s your job to find it.

Neuroses and self-realization

If the mind-reality gap develops wide enough through imaginations and opinions (first kind of knowledge) it will lead to neuroses and a neurotic personality in such a way that the person drives their life in reliance on the first kind of knowledge.

This eventually will lead to a loss of touch with reality which will get a certain pattern of emotional dysfunction being part of personality, called a neurotic personality. In this state, the person is not “grounded in reality” anymore, but instead guided by irrational emotional patterns rooted in the unconscious. This will lead to a false reflection of those dysfunctional emotional values which changes the lens that a person perceives reality through, resulting in a complete point of view far away from the truth.

In short: the person affected by neuroses endeavours as much as he can to bend reality over aligned with imaginary values through imaginations and opinions for the sake of manifested self-image.

If you are more interested, I suggest taking a look into Karen Horney’sNeurosis and Human Growth

Watch on YouTube

Sources: - https://iep.utm.edu/spino-ep/

Naming things wrongly

Many errors, in truth, can be traced to this head, namely, that we do not apply names to things rightly. For instance, when a man says that the lines drawn from the centre of a circle to its circumference are not equal, he then, at all events, assuredly attaches a meaning to the word circle different from that assigned by mathematicians.

• Errors arise from not applying names to things rightly.
  • Someone might assume circle to be a square, and then say that the lines drawn from the center to the circumference are not equal.

Mistakes in calculation

So again, when men make mistakes in calculation, they have one set of figures in their mind, and another on the paper. If we could see into their minds, they do not make a mistake; they seem to do so, because we think, that they have the same numbers in their mind as they have on the paper. If this were not so, we should not believe them to be in error, any more than I thought that a man was in error, whom I lately heard exclaiming that his entrance hall had flown into a neighbour's hen, for his meaning seemed to me sufficiently clear. Very many controversies have arisen from the fact, that men do not rightly explain their meaning, or do not rightly interpret the meaning of others.

• Errors arise from misinterpretation.
  • People think that they are doing the right thing, but they are intending to do something else.
  • If someone is doing wrong calculations, it's because they misinterpret the numbers in their mind.
• Errors arise from miscommunication:
  • People don't explain their meaning rightly.
  • People don't interpret the meaning of others rightly.

Changing sides

For, as a matter of fact, as they flatly contradict themselves, they assume now one side, now another, of the argument, so as to oppose the opinions, which they consider mistaken and absurd in their opponents.

• People change sides to oppose opponents.
  • Doesn't matter what our opinion is, we will change it to oppose the opponent's opinion, because we are not clear with ourselves on what we believe.

Nothing positive in a false idea

There is nothing positive in ideas, which causes them to be called false.

A false idea has no special property that makes it false. Falsity is not a thing in the idea, it is a gap in it.

PROP. I. No positive quality possessed by a false idea is removed by the presence of what is true, in virtue of its being true.

Proof. Falsity consists solely in the privation of knowledge which inadequate ideas involve (II. xxxv.), nor have they any positive quality on account of which they are called false (II. xxxiii.); contrariwise, in so far as they are referred to God, they are true (II. xxxii.). Wherefore, if the positive quality possessed by a false idea were removed by the presence of what is true, in virtue of its being true, a true idea would then be removed by itself, which (IV. iii.) is absurd. Therefore, no positive quality possessed by a false idea, &c. Q.E.D.

Imagination does not vanish

Note. This proposition is more clearly understood from II. xvi. Coroll. ii. For imagination is an idea, which indicates rather the present disposition of the human body than the nature of the external body; not indeed distinctly, but confusedly; whence it comes to pass, that the mind is said to err. For instance, when we look at the sun, we conceive that it is distant from us about two hundred feet; in this judgment we err, so long as we are in ignorance of its true distance; when its true distance is known, the error is removed, but not the imagination; or, in other words, the idea of the sun, which only explains tho nature of that luminary, in so far as the body is affected thereby: wherefore, though we know the real distance, we shall still nevertheless imagine the sun to be near us. For, as we said in II. xxxv. note, we do not imagine the sun to be so near us, because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the mind conceives the magnitude of the sun to the extent that the body is affected thereby. Thus, when the rays of the sun falling on the surface of water are reflected into our eyes, we imagine the sun as if it were in the water, though we are aware of its real position; and similarly other imaginations, wherein the mind is deceived, whether they indicate the natural disposition of the body, or that its power of activity is increased or diminished, are not contrary to the truth, and do not vanish at its presence. It happens indeed that, when we mistakenly fear an evil, the fear vanishes when we hear the true tidings; but the contrary also happens, namely, that we fear an evil which will certainly come, and our fear vanishes when we hear false tidings; thus imaginations do not vanish at the presence of the truth, in virtue of its being true, but because other imaginations, stronger than the first, supervene and exclude the present existence of that which we imagined, as I have shown in II. xvii.

Where falsity can arise

Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.

Imagination, opinion and assumption are all knowledge of the first kind. That is the only place falsity can arise.

Requirements to know

• Universe
• Causality
• Mind
• Emotions

What memory is

In mind we talked about how memory works shortly, here I want to expand the context more in a practical way of living.

We remember things associated with each other, if we conceive 2 things with each other, we would relate these 2 together and when we conceive one without the other we would remember the other one straightaway. Memory is the act of recalling past experiences.

[E2p18] If the human body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, when the mind afterwards imagines any of them, it will straightway remember the others also.

Emotional memory

So in this case we see that if you know someone with the name Karen, you would remember the person every time by seeing someone who called the same, because the name of person is associated with them.

This process is conscious so far without any feelings regarding the Karen in question.

Aversion or accidental pain affection

But if we let's say hate the first called Karen, we would have the same emotion towards the new Karen, for example if we related the name Karen with the common personality of Karens, we would regard them as such, this feelings is called Aversion

Pain accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally the cause of pain.

This is an accident and classified as the first kind of knowledge, in which that is falsy.

Inclination or accidental pleasure affection

The contrary of Aversion is Inclination.

Pleasure accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure

Let's say you have an old friend called Karen which you admire, you see someone new who's also called Karen, you will regard the new Karen with the feeling of pleasure because it reminds you of your old friend.

Under the hood

How this process happens?

In mind we talked about the synchronization between body and mind. We said that mind is the idea of body and body is the object of mind, and we understood both are one and the same thing. We also must know that emotions are a state of body, as much as it's the state of mind, so as a result, emotions are related to body. When we regard a thing with emotion for the first time, it's the object of body impacted in our mind, and the next time something reminds it to us, we would feel affection in the same object.

From this page of talking, let's say I had a bike crash, in the crash my body has impacted and injured which affects my mind as the object of mind felt pain, now if I imagine biking, I would remember all relative ideas of that moment, including the pain.

If we go back to our Karen example, past interactions with old Karen impacted our feelings which impacted the object of mind, so as a result, if the idea of Karen appears in this object again, the same feeling should arise.

This process is highly linked between physical(body) and mental(mind).

(Images or Imaginations) of Memory

Memory in essence is attributed to mind and imaginations, hence that we can imagine a memory by recalling it.

Conditioned or contingent of time

If mind imagine an image conditioned to time, past or future, in a way that the said thing no longer or not yet exists, it will conceive the existence of the said thing, it will see it as present to itself, because mind confuses time. For example you might imagine a dead person, but the imagination affect you as much as real and it makes emotions arise, meanwhile the person does not exist! This, we call an error.

[E2p44 note] The mind always regards things as present to itself, even though they be not in existence, until some causes arise which exclude their existence and presence.

Present of self

We perceive self primarily from the idea of our own body, this perception constantly updates by experiences. In the context of imaginations, if we conceive the imagination something which effect us, likewise the power of emotion would also increase and effect more.

(Resemblance or Pattern Recognition) and Uniqueness

From the very fact that we conceive a thing, we conceive it with all it's unique properties which distinguish the thing from it's kinds. For example we remember people with certain shape of face, tone or even the words they use, we link all these properties in which we consider unique to that person or object and we recognize them by those.

We don't distinguish a person from others by the number of hands and legs(unless the number be unique to themselves), because those are not unique and common to all, but we do so by properties in which are different and specific to themselves.

This uniqueness has a degree which makes the object more memorable as it grows, as much as we manage to make more connection to other memories and ideas by the same kind of object, it's less unique, and on the other hand if the object in question has no connection to any other memory or idea in mind, it will be the cause of an emotion which is called Wonder. Also it worth mentioning that if the object wouldn't makes us wonder at all, the contrary of Wonder will be Contempt.

This pattern recognition process will happen without our awareness and will carry emotions and other related metadata of the first memory to the current one simply by recognizing and linking it to another by a unique property.

If mind manage to make a connection from one past unique property of an object to another, it will regard the second with the same emotion or other properties of the first object and it will get affected as the same. (prejudgment)

Also, at the times that mind don't manage to make any connection to the existing nodes, and can't relate the said object to anything similar, the emotions wonder will arise.

(Unconscious or conscious links) and biases

For example if our Karen has a specific unique hairstyle, we will associate others containing same property to her Karen attitude.

Furthermore, this hairstyle can easily be skin color or the shape of their face which is similar to someone you don't or do like. So in here we can easily see how bias can shape from past experiences. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. This process leads to Inclination, Aversion and specially distort, which I will explain the relation of this bias and logic in a bit.

Also, this can happen unconsciously and without awareness or the said thing, in a way that we only receive the emotion and not the memory or data directly.

Situational Pattern Recognition

So far we know that mind recognize patterns among objects by their own unique properties, but this is not only limited to people or objects, but also to situations or environments.

We recognize them by the very same way of objects, through their unique properties.

Now if we have had a fall in the past resulted by climbing a ladder, other high grounded situations will be linked to the past memory and will arise the same pain as we experienced in the object of mind and result in the emotion of fear, in other words, the unique property of event is height.

Memory Nested Labeling

Memory goes from general to specific attributes, it starts with conceiving the type of the thing said, and then comparing it's unique properties with others among it's kind/type. That's why we don't compare buildings with humans to detect them one from another.

But furthermore to be more specific, for example, the face of people, we compare them one to another to find those unique properties and distinguish them one from another, in this process, pattern recognition is also involved, that's why we might assume some's nose looks like another. And also, you don't mismatch the nose with your neighbors window, so memory goes from general to specific attributes.

Time and Memory

It's said that we remember things by their unique properties, likewise we forget them by the power of their uniqueness which left in mind. The reason we don't keep regular properties is that simply we have seen much of. A unique object which made us wonder before, becomes regular over time and vanish in relation to it's uniqueness and strength of the feeling in the moment, till it vanishes by other things conceived which makes us wonder and regulate the feeling of wonder towards the old object.

The mind does not erase, it overwrites by new impressions which rearrange the old associations.

Conclusion

Ethics 3P14: If the mind has once been affected by two emotions at the same time, it will, whenever it is afterwards affected by one of these two, be also affected by the other.

Ethics 3P15: Anything can, accidentally, be the cause of pleasure, pain, or desire.

• Memory is a liar and it's identified as a falsy source of knowledge
• Memory and mind actively makes connections between objects by their order and unique properties, conceive and guess how things work.
• The process of memory recall and pattern recognition together contains falsy errors which lead us in certain directions, for example we must understand this matter with our logic that the hairstyle or skin color of a person is not a reason to hate or love them, but we do so by not understanding emotions and patterns which lead to act by instinct.
• Emotions arising with no concise source must be doubt and tracked to find the root and associated memory thereof.
• Pattern recognition can be out of the scope of our awareness.

In order to prevent falsy errors, we need to pay attention to this pattern recognition of things and memory functions in day to day life and think of our own thinking, in other words the solution is in understanding the process and practice thinking.

The deducted emotions

Every emotion below springs from one of the three primary ones: desire, pleasure, or pain. Each entry gives Spinoza's definition, the emotion it comes from, and its contrary where he names one.

Desire

• Regret: Desire or appetite to possess something, kept alive by the remembrance of the said thing, and at the same time constrained by the remembrance of other things which exclude the existence of it. (from Desire)
• Emulation: Desire of something, engendered in us by our conception that others have the same desire. (from Desire)
• Thankfulness or Gratitude: Desire or zeal springing from love, whereby we endeavour to benefit him, who with similar feelings of love has conferred a benefit on us. (from Love)
• Benevolence: Desire of benefiting one whom we pity. (from Love)
• Anger: Desire, whereby through hatred we are induced to injure one whom we hate. (from Hatred)
• Revenge: Desire whereby we are induced, through mutual hatred, to injure one who, with similar feelings, has injured us. (from Hatred)
• Cruelty or Savageness: Desire, whereby a man is impelled to injure one whom we love or pity. (from Hatred)
• Timidity: Desire to avoid a greater evil, which we dread, by undergoing a lesser evil. (from Fear)
• Daring: Desire, whereby a man is set on to do something dangerous which his equals fear to attempt. (from Confidence; contrary: Cowardice)
• Cowardice: Attributed to one, whose desire is checked by the fear of some danger which his equals dare to encounter. (from Despair; contrary: Daring)
• Consternation: Attributed to one, whose desire of avoiding evil is checked by amazement at the evil which he fears. (from Cowardice)
• Courtesy, or deference: Desire of acting in a way that should please men, and refraining from that which should displease them. (from Devotion)
• Ambition: Immoderate desire of power. (from Pleasure)
• Luxury: Excessive desire, or even love of living sumptuously. (from Pleasure)
• Intemperance: Excessive desire and love of drinking. (from Inclination)
• Avarice: Excessive desire and love of riches. (from Pleasure)
• Lust: Desire and love in the matter of sexual intercourse. (from Love)

Pleasure

• Love: Pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause. (from Pleasure; contrary: Hatred)
• Devotion: Love towards one whom we admire. (from Love; contrary: Derision)
• Wonder: Pleasure, accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure. (from Pleasure; contrary: Contempt)
• Inclination: Pleasure accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure. (from Pleasure; contrary: Aversion)
• Honour: Pleasure accompanied by the idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be praised by others. (from Pleasure; contrary: Shame)

Pain

• Hatred: Pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. (from Pain; contrary: Love)
• Envy: Hatred, in so far as it induces a man to be pained by another's good fortune, and to rejoice in another's evil fortune. (from Hatred; contrary: Pity)
• Contempt: The conception of anything which touches the mind so little, that its presence leads the mind to imagine those qualities which are not in it rather than such as are in it. (from Pain; contrary: Wonder)
• Aversion: Pain accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally the cause of pain. (from Pain; contrary: Inclination)
• Shame: Pain accompanied by the idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be blamed by others. (from Pain; contrary: Honour)

Definitions

In here I only want to place the original definitions, may change it later.

I. Desire is the actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived, as determined to a particular activity by some given modification of itself.

Explanation. We have said above, in the note to Prop. ix. of this part, that desire is appetite, with consciousness thereof; further, that appetite is the essence of man, in so far as it is determined to act in a way tending to promote its own persistence. But, in the same note, I also remarked that, strictly speaking, I recognize no distinction between appetite and desire. For whether a man be conscious of his appetite or not, it remains one and the same appetite. Thus, in order to avoid the appearance of tautology, I have refrained from explaining desire by appetite; but I have take care to define it in such a manner, as to comprehend, under one head, all those endeavours of human nature, which we distinguish by the terms appetite, will, desire, or impulse. I might, indeed, have said, that desire is the essence of man, in so far as it is conceived as determined to a particular activity; but from such a definition (cf. II. xxiii.) it would not follow that the mind can be conscious of its desire or appetite. Therefore, in order to imply the cause of such consciousness, it was necessary to add, in so far as it is determined by some given modification, &c. For, by a modification of man's essence, we understand every disposition of the said essence, whether such disposition be innate, or whether it be conceived solely under the attribute of thought, or solely under the attribute of extension, or whether, lastly, it be referred simultaneously to both these attributes. By the term desire, then, I here mean all man's endeavours, impulses, appetites, and volitions, which vary according to each man's disposition, and are, therefore, not seldom opposed one to another, according as a man is drawn in different directions, and knows not where to turn.

II. Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.

III. Pain is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.

Explanation. I say transition: for pleasure is not perfection itself. For, if man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would possess the same, without the emotion of pleasure. This appears more clearly from the consideration of the contrary emotion, pain. No one can deny, that pain consists in the transition to a less perfection, and not in the less perfection itself: for a man cannot be pained, in so far as he partakes of perfection of any degree. Neither can we say, that pain consists in the absence of a greater perfection. For absence is nothing, whereas the emotion of pain is an activity; wherefore this activity can only be the activity of transition from a greater to a less perfection, in other words, it is an activity whereby a man's power of action is lessened or constrained (cf. III. xi. note). I pass over the definitions of merriment, stimulation, melancholy, and grief, because these terms are generally used in reference to the body, and are merely kinds of pleasure or pain.

IV. Wonder is the conception (imaginatio) of anything, wherein the mind comes to a stand, because the particular concept in question has no connection with other concepts (cf. III. lii. and note).

Explanation. In the note to II. xviii. we showed the reason, why the mind, from the contemplation of one thing, straightway falls to the contemplation of another thing, namely, because the images of the two things are so associated and arranged, that one follows the other. This state of association is impossible, if the image of the thing be new; the mind will then be at a stand in the contemplation thereof, until it is determined by other causes to think of something else.

Thus the conception of a new object, considered in itself, is of the same nature as other conceptions; hence, I do not include wonder among the emotions, nor do I see why I should so include it, inasmuch as this distraction of the mind arises from no positive cause drawing away the mind from other objects, but merely from the absence of a cause, which should determine the mind to pass from the contemplation of one object to the contemplation of another.

I, therefore, recognize only three primitive or primary emotions (as I said in the note to III. xi.), namely, pleasure, pain, and desire. I have spoken of wonder simply because it is customary to speak of certain emotions springing from the three primitive ones by different names, when they are referred to the objects of our wonder. I am led by the same motive to add a definition of contempt.

V. Contempt is the conception of anything which touches the mind so little, that its presence leads the mind to imagine those qualities which are not in it rather than such as are in it (cf. III. lii. note).

The definitions of veneration and scorn I here pass over, for I am not aware that any emotions are named after them.

VI. Love is pleasure, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

Explanation. This definition explains sufficiently clearly the essence of love; the definition given by those authors who say that love is the lover's wish to unite himself to the loved object expresses a property, but not the essence of love; and, as such authors have not sufficiently discerned love's essence, they have been unable to acquire a true conception of its properties, accordingly their definition is on all hands admitted to be very obscure. It must, however, be noted, that when I say that it is a property of love, that the lover should wish to unite himself to the beloved object, I do not here mean by wish consent, or conclusion, or a free decision of the mind (for I have shown such, in II. xlviii., to be fictitious); neither do I mean a desire of being united to the loved object when it is absent, or of continuing in its presence when it is at hand; for love can be conceived without either of these desires; but by wish I mean the contentment, which is in the lover, on account of the presence of the beloved object, whereby the pleasure of the lover is strengthened, or at least maintained.

VII. Hatred is pain, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

Explanation. These observations are easily grasped after what has been said in the explanation of the preceding definition (cf. also III. xiii. note).

VIII. Inclination is pleasure, accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure.

IX. Aversion is pain, accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally the cause of pain (cf. III. xv. note).

X. Devotion is love towards one whom we admire.

Explanation. Wonder (admiratio) arises (as we have shown, III. lii.) from the novelty of a thing. If, therefore, it happens that the object of our wonder is often conceived by us, we shall cease to wonder at it; thus we see, that the emotion of devotion readily degenerates into simple love.

XI. Derision is pleasure arising from our conceiving the presence of a quality, which we despise, in an object which we hate.

Explanation. In so far as we despise a thing which we hate, we deny existence thereof (III. lii. note), and to that extent rejoice (III. xx.). But since we assume that man hates that which he derides, it follows that the pleasure in question is not without alloy (cf. III. xlvii. note).

XII. Hope is an inconstant pleasure, arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue.

XIII. Fear is an inconstant pain arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue (cf. III. xviii. note).

Explanation. From these definitions it follows, that there is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope. For he, who depends on hope and doubts concerning the issue of anything, is assumed to conceive something, which excludes the existence of the said thing in the future; therefore he, to this extent, feels pain (cf. III. xix.); consequently, while dependent on hope, he fears for the issue. Contrariwise he, who fears, in other words doubts, concerning the issue of something which he hates, also conceives something which excludes the existence of the thing in question; to this extent he feels pleasure, and consequently to this extent he hopes that it will turn out as he desires (III. xx.).

XIV. Confidence is pleasure arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed.

XV. Despair is pain arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed.

Explanation. Thus confidence springs from hope, and despair from fear, when all cause for doubt as to the issue of an event has been removed: this comes to pass, because man conceives something past or future as present and regards it as such, or else because he conceives other things, which exclude the existence of the causes of his doubt. For, although we can never be absolutely certain of the issue of any particular event (II. xxxi. Coroll.), it may nevertheless happen that we feel no doubt concerning it. For we have shown, that to feel no doubt concerning a thing is not the same as to be quite certain of it (II. xlix. note). Thus it may happen that we are affected by the same emotion of pleasure or pain concerning a thing past or future, as concerning the conception of a thing present; this I have already shown in III. xviii., to which, with its note, I refer the reader.

XVI. Joy is pleasure accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue beyond our hope.

XVII. Disappointment is pain accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue contrary to our hope.

XVIII. Pity is pain accompanied by the idea of evil, which has befallen someone else whom we conceive to be like ourselves (cf. III. xxii. note, and III. xxvii. note).

Explanation. Between pity and sympathy (misericordia) there seems to be no difference, unless perhaps that the former term is used in reference to a particular action, and the latter in reference to a disposition.

XIX. Approval is love towards one who has done good to another.

XX. Indignation is hatred towards one who has done evil to another.

Explanation. I am aware that these terms are employed in senses somewhat different from those usually assigned. But my purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. I therefore make use of such terms, as may convey my meaning without any violent departure from their ordinary signification. One statement of my method will suffice. As for the cause of the above-named emotions see III. xxvii. Coroll. i., and III. xxii. note.

XXI. Partiality is thinking too highly of anyone because of the love we bear him.

XXII. Disparagement is thinking too meanly of anyone because we hate him.

Explanation. Thus partiality is an effect of love, and disparagement an effect of hatred: so that partiality may also be defined as love, in so far as it induces a man to think too highly of a beloved object. Contrariwise, disparagement may be defined as hatred, in so far as it induces a man to think too meanly of a hated object. Cf. III. xxvi. note.

XXIII. Envy is hatred, in so far as it induces a man to be pained by another's good fortune, and to rejoice in another's evil fortune.

Explanation. Envy is generally opposed to sympathy, which, by doing some violence to the meaning of the word, may therefore be thus defined:

XXIV. Sympathy (misericordia) is love, in so far as it induces a man to feel pleasure at another's good fortune, and pain at another's evil fortune.

Explanation. Concerning envy see the notes to III. xxiv. and xxxii. These emotions also arise from pleasure or pain accompanied by the idea of something external, as cause either in itself or accidentally. I now pass on to other emotions, which are accompanied by the idea of something within as a cause.

XXV. Self-approval is pleasure arising from a man's contemplation of himself and his own power of action.

XXVI. Humility is pain arising from a man's contemplation of his own weakness of body or mind.

Explanation. Self-complacency is opposed to humility, in so far as we thereby mean pleasure arising from a contemplation of our own power of action; but, in so far as we mean thereby pleasure accompanied by the idea of any action which we believe we have performed by the free decision of our mind, it is opposed to repentance, which we may thus define:

XXVII. Repentance is pain accompanied by the idea of some action, which we believe we have performed by the free decision of our mind.

Explanation. The causes of these emotions we have set forth in III. li. note, and in III. liii., liv., lv. and note. Concerning the free decision of the mind see II. xxxv. note. This is perhaps the place to call attention to the fact, that it is nothing wonderful that all those actions, which are commonly called wrong, are followed by pain, and all those, which are called right, are followed by pleasure. We can easily gather from what has been said, that this depends in great measure on education. Parents, by reprobating the former class of actions, and by frequently chiding their children because of them, and also by persuading to and praising the latter class, have brought it about, that the former should be associated with pain and the latter with pleasure. This is confirmed by experience. For custom and religion are not the same among all men, but that which some consider sacred others consider profane, and what some consider honourable others consider disgraceful. According as each man has been educated, he feels repentance for a given action or glories therein.

XXVIII. Pride is thinking too highly of one's self from self-love.

Explanation. Thus pride is different from partiality, for the latter term is used in reference to an external object, but pride is used of a man thinking too highly of himself. However, as partiality is the effect of love, so is pride the effect or property of self-love, which may therefore be thus defined, love of self or self-approval, in so far as it leads a man to think too highly of himself. To this emotion there is no contrary. For no one thinks too meanly of himself because of self-hatred; I say that no one thinks too meanly of himself, in so far as he conceives that he is incapable of doing this or that. For whatsoever a man imagines that he is incapable of doing, he imagines this of necessity, and by that notion he is so disposed, that he really cannot do that which he conceives that he cannot do. For, so long as he conceives that he cannot do it, so long is he not determined to do it, and consequently so long is it impossible for him to do it. However, if we consider such matters as only depend on opinion, we shall find it conceivable that a man may think too meanly of himself; for it may happen, that a man, sorrowfully regarding his own weakness, should imagine that he is despised by all men, while the rest of the world are thinking of nothing less than of despising him. Again, a man may think too meanly of himself, if he deny of himself in the present something in relation to a future time of which he is uncertain. As, for instance, if he should say that he is unable to form any clear conceptions, or that he can desire and do nothing but what is wicked and base, &c. We may also say, that a man thinks too meanly of himself, when we see him from excessive fear of shame refusing to do things which others, his equals, venture. We can, therefore, set down as a contrary to pride an emotion which I will call self-abasement, for as from self-complacency springs pride, so from humility springs self-abasement, which I will accordingly thus define:

XXIX. Self-abasement is thinking too meanly of one's self by reason of pain.

Explanation. We are nevertheless generally accustomed to oppose pride to humility, but in that case we pay more attention to the effect of either emotion than to its nature. We are wont to call proud the man who boasts too much (III. xxx. note), who talks of nothing but his own virtues and other people's faults, who wishes to be first; and lastly who goes through life with a style and pomp suitable to those far above him in station. On the other hand, we call humble the man who too often blushes, who confesses his faults, who sets forth other men's virtues, and who, lastly, walks with bent head and is negligent of his attire. However, these emotions, humility and self-abasement, are extremely rare. For human nature, considered in itself, strives against them as much as it can (see III. xiii., liv.); hence those, who are believed to be most self-abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious.

XXX. Honour[11] is pleasure accompanied by the idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be praised by others.

[11] Gloria.

XXXI. Shame is pain accompanied by the idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be blamed by others.

Explanation. On this subject see the note to III. xxx. But we should here remark the difference which exists between shame and modesty. Shame is the pain following the deed whereof we are ashamed. Modesty is the fear or dread of shame, which restrains a man from committing a base action. Modesty is usually opposed to shamelessness, but the latter is not an emotion, as I will duly show; however, the names of the emotions (as I have remarked already) have regard rather to their exercise than to their nature.

I have now fulfilled the task of explaining the emotions arising from pleasure and pain. I therefore proceed to treat of those which I refer to desire.

XXXII. Regret is the desire or appetite to possess something, kept alive by the remembrance of the said thing, and at the same time constrained by the remembrance of other things which exclude the existence of it.

Explanation. When we remember a thing, we are by that very fact, as I have already said more than once, disposed to contemplate it with the same emotion as if it were something present; but this disposition or endeavour, while we are awake, is generally checked by the images of things which exclude the existence of that which we remember. Thus when we remember something which affected us with a certain pleasure, we by that very fact endeavour to regard it with the same emotion of pleasure as though it were present, but this endeavour is at once checked by the remembrance of things which exclude the existence of the thing in question. Wherefore regret is, strictly speaking, a pain opposed to that of pleasure, which arises from the absence of something we hate (cf. III. xlvii. note). But, as the name regret seems to refer to desire, I set this emotion down, among the emotions springing from desire.

XXXIII. Emulation is the desire of something, engendered in us by our conception that others have the same desire.

Explanation. He who runs away, because he sees others running away, or he who fears, because he sees others in fear; or again, he who, on seeing that another man has burnt his hand, draws towards him his own hand, and moves his body as though his own were burnt; such an one can be said to imitate another's emotion, but not to emulate him; not because the causes of emulation and imitation are different, but because it has become customary to speak of emulation only in him, who imitates that which we deem to be honourable, useful, or pleasant. As to the cause of emulation, cf. III. xxvii. and note. The reason why this emotion is generally coupled with envy may be seen from III. xxxii. and note.

XXXIV. Thankfulness or Gratitude is the desire or zeal springing from love, whereby we endeavour to benefit him, who with similar feelings of love has conferred a benefit on us. Cf. III. xxxix. note and xl.

XXXV. Benevolence is the desire of benefiting one whom we pity. Cf. III. xxvii. note.

XXXVI. Anger is the desire, whereby through hatred we are induced to injure one whom we hate, III. xxxix.

XXXVII. Revenge is the desire whereby we are induced, through mutual hatred, to injure one who, with similar feelings, has injured us. (See III. xl. Coroll. ii and note.)

XXXVIII. Cruelty or savageness is the desire, whereby a man is impelled to injure one whom we love or pity.

Explanation. To cruelty is opposed clemency, which is not a passive state of the mind, but a power whereby man restrains his anger and revenge.

XXXIX. Timidity is the desire to avoid a greater evil, which we dread, by undergoing a lesser evil. Cf. III. xxxix. note.

XL. Daring is the desire, whereby a man is set on to do something dangerous which his equals fear to attempt.

XLI. Cowardice is attributed to one, whose desire is checked by the fear of some danger which his equals dare to encounter.

Explanation. Cowardice is, therefore, nothing else but the fear of some evil, which most men are wont not to fear; hence I do not reckon it among the emotions springing from desire. Nevertheless, I have chosen to explain it here, because, in so far as we look to the desire, it is truly opposed to the emotion of daring.

XLII. Consternation is attributed to one, whose desire of avoiding evil is checked by amazement at the evil which he fears.

Explanation. Consternation is, therefore, a species of cowardice. But, inasmuch as consternation arises from a double fear, it may be more conveniently defined as a fear which keeps a man so bewildered and wavering, that he is not able to remove the evil. I say bewildered, in so far as we understand his desire of removing the evil to be constrained by his amazement. I say wavering, in so far as we understand the said desire to be constrained by the fear of another evil, which equally torments him: whence it comes to pass that he knows not, which he may avert of the two. On this subject, see III. xxxix. note, and III. lii. note. Concerning cowardice and daring, see III. li. note.

XLIII. Courtesy, or deference (Humanitas seu modestia), is the desire of acting in a way that should please men, and refraining from that which should displease them.

XLIV. Ambition is the immoderate desire of power.

Explanation. Ambition is the desire, whereby all the emotions (cf. III. xxvii. and xxxi.) are fostered and strengthened; therefore this emotion can with difficulty be overcome. For, so long as a man is bound by any desire, he is at the same time necessarily bound by this. "The best men," says Cicero, "are especially led by honour. Even philosophers, when they write a book contemning honour, sign their names thereto," and so on.

XLV. Luxury is excessive desire, or even love of living sumptuously.

XLVI. Intemperance is the excessive desire and love of drinking.

XLVII. Avarice is the excessive desire and love of riches.

XLVIII. Lust is desire and love in the matter of sexual intercourse.

Explanation. Whether this desire be excessive or not, it is still called lust. These last five emotions (as I have shown in III. lvi.) have on contraries. For deference is a species of ambition. Cf. III. xxix. note.

Again, I have already pointed out, that temperance, sobriety, and chastity indicate rather a power than a passivity of the mind. It may, nevertheless, happen, that an avaricious, an ambitious, or a timid man may abstain from excess in eating, drinking, or sexual indulgence, yet avarice, ambition, and fear are not contraries to luxury, drunkenness, and debauchery. For an avaricious man often is glad to gorge himself with food and drink at another man's expense. An ambitious man will restrain himself in nothing, so long as he thinks his indulgences are secret; and if he lives among drunkards and debauchees, he will, from the mere fact of being ambitious, be more prone to those vices. Lastly, a timid man does that which he would not. For though an avaricious man should, for the sake of avoiding death, cast his riches into the sea, he will none the less remain avaricious; so, also, if a lustful man is downcast, because he cannot follow his bent, he does not, on the ground of abstention, cease to be lustful. In fact, these emotions are not so much concerned with the actual feasting, drinking, &c., as with the appetite and love of such. Nothing, therefore, can be opposed to these emotions, but high-mindedness and valour, whereof I will speak presently.

The definitions of jealousy and other waverings of the mind I pass over in silence, first, because they arise from the compounding of the emotions already described; secondly, because many of them have no distinctive names, which shows that it is sufficient for practical purposes to have merely a general knowledge of them. However, it is established from the definitions of the emotions, which we have set forth, that they all spring from desire, pleasure, or pain, or, rather, that there is nothing besides these three; wherefore each is wont to be called by a variety of names in accordance with its various relations and extrinsic tokens. If we now direct our attention to these primitive emotions, and to what has been said concerning the nature of the mind, we shall be able thus to define the emotions, in so far as they are referred to the mind only.

GENERAL DEFINITION OF THE EMOTIONS

Emotion, which is called a passivity of the soul, is a confused idea, whereby the mind affirms concerning its body, or any part thereof, a force for existence (existendi vis) greater or less than before, and by the presence of which the mind is determined to think of one thing rather than another.

Explanation. I say, first, that emotion or passion of the soul is a confused idea. For we have shown that the mind is only passive, in so far as it has inadequate or confused ideas. (III. iii.) I say, further, whereby the mind affirms concerning its body or any part thereof a force for existence greater than before. For all the ideas of bodies, which we possess, denote rather the actual disposition of our own body (II. xvi. Coroll. ii.) than the nature of an external body. But the idea which constitutes the reality of an emotion must denote or express the disposition of the body, or of some part thereof, because its power of action or force for existence is increased or diminished, helped or hindered. But it must be noted that, when I say a greater or less force for existence than before, I do not mean that the mind compares the present with the past disposition of the body, but that the idea which constitutes the reality of an emotion affirms something of the body, which, in fact, involves more or less of reality than before.

And inasmuch as the essence of mind consists in the fact (II. xi., xiii.), that it affirms the actual existence of its own body, and inasmuch as we understand by perfection the very essence of a thing, it follows that the mind passes to greater or less perfection, when it happens to affirm concerning its own body, or any part thereof, something involving more or less reality than before.

When, therefore, I said above that the power of the mind is increased or diminished, I merely meant that the mind had formed of its own body, or of some part thereof, an idea involving more or less of reality, than it had already affirmed concerning its own body. For the excellence of ideas, and the actual power of thinking are measured by the excellence of the object. Lastly, I have added by the presence of which the mind is determined to think of one thing rather than another, so that, besides the nature of pleasure and pain, which the first part of the definition explains, I might also express the nature of desire.

Requirements to know

• Universe
• Causality
• Mind

ON THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS

He who succeeds in hitting off the weakness of the human mind more eloquently or more acutely than his fellows, is looked upon as a seer.

Introduction and motivation

3PREF Most writers on the emotions and on human conduct seem to be treating rather of matters outside nature than of natural phenomena following nature's general laws. They appear to conceive man to be situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom: for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature's order, that he has absolute control over his actions, and that he is determined solely by himself.

The sense of free will leads to the idea of being separated from the rest of the nature and assume ourselves contingent.

They attribute human infirmities and fickleness, not to the power of nature in general, but to some mysterious flaw in the nature of man, which accordingly they bemoan, deride, despise, or, as usually happens, abuse.

Why should I want to know?

Human mind is not perfect, there are errors because of it's complex contingent nature which we explained in the mind; Anger, disappointment, pride, love, shape these just don't happen by itself in a mysterious way, There are causes that makes them happen, just like how causes make things happen in real world. Our mind also works by cause and effect, and we already talked about it that as long as there is cause and effect, it's nature's rules sit in between and make it happen, in emotions page, we will see what these rules are.

One of the reasons we would be surprised by seeing equations for emotions is that human knows itself contingent from nature, in a way that our mind has not been made by nature and it's different from animals, because mind is connected to the soul and this soul is what makes us special and enables us do what we want with it's miseries free-will nature. But so far, we know that we are not exceptional from nature, we are part of it.

Desire and free-will

In the mind page and others we talked about how the world works by a rational determinism and how we don't have free-will. Now with not having free-will, and being aware of such a phenomena, what can we do? The answer is understanding, knowing of the true causes that push us toward specific actions that doesn't make sense with logic and solely following desire.

Desire is part of nature, desire is the main guide for animals and almost all the other living beings. In a way that what we wish to regard as desire we call will, meanwhile we are unaware of true causes that makes us to desire something. For example when we desire Revenge, we regard it as will, but we might be unaware of the true causes that makes the emotion Revenge happen.

Will and understanding are one and the same thing

So to have the will over actions which arise from emotions, we need to understand emotions to take control.

What an emotion is

Preview on how emotions work

All emotions are based and deducted from pleasure, pain and desire, in a way similar to colors. With mixing enough of each, we get the specific emotion that arise.

3D1: By an adequate cause, I mean a cause through which its effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived. By an inadequate or partial cause, I mean a cause through which, by itself, its effect cannot be understood.

Adequate cause: something that it's effect is clear that what it's going to be, predictable. Inadequate cause: something that the effect isn't clear.

3D3: By emotion I mean the modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications.

• Emotion is a modification of body that conceive through our mind.
• Active power of body: Emotion can be negative or positive.
• Also the idea of such emotions means desire, which is a category of emotions.

Categories of Emotions

• Joy (positive)
• Sadness (negative)
• Desire (idea of emotion)

Types of Emotions

• Active, Pleasure:
• Emotion that results from self action.
• Example: feeling satisfied after workout.
• We will be the cause of emotion, as the power of activity increases.
• Passive, Pain:
• Emotion that results from external source which makes the mind to go to a passive state
• Example: The news of a plane crash with dead people.
• We will be part of the cause as it's external and we were not the cause, but part of it.
• Desire
• An appetite arise from pain or pleasure with mind being aware of it.

Affection or emotional cause to others

States of Mind

• Active
• As far as mind has adequate ideas and as far as it's power of activity increase.
• Passive
• As far as mind has inadequate ideas and as far as it's power of activity decrease.

Mind perfection

• Lesser perfection - Sadness
• Greater perfection: Joy

These passive states of transition explain to us the emotions of pleasure and pain.

Active and passive mind

3P1: Our mind is in certain cases active, and in certain cases passive. In so far as it has adequate ideas it is necessarily active, and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it is necessarily passive.

3P1Corollary: Corollary. Hence it follows that the mind is more or less liable to be acted upon, in proportion as it possesses inadequate ideas, and, contrariwise, is more or less active in proportion as it possesses adequate ideas.

The power of activity of mind is dependent on passive or active mode. The origin of adequate and inadequate ideas come from state of mind.

3P2: Body cannot determine mind to think, neither can mind determine body to motion or rest or any state different from these, if such there be.

Our mind does not control body as we assume. Body and mind are in a state of parallelism and they effect each other, but do not determine on each other what to do, but do it together as one united thing, but they can effect each other. Mind is at times more fit to think related to it's power of action(active), and sometimes less fit(passive). For example the rest time in bed, mind is in a passive state since the body language indicates, And straight behind the desk ready to think and active.

[3P2.Note]: Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension

We think that our mind controls body, but we would be wondered if we actually understand how it works and see how little part our mind has on it. For example, you are able to move your hand, but you can't stop your heart from beating neither know how it works. I'll write more about the note of this proposition in the free-will page.

3P3: The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.

Contrary things and self-preservation

3P4: Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.

3P5: Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object, in so far as one is capable of destroying the other.

Like cold and heat, they influence(destroy) each other, they cannot be there at the same time, but engage and replace each other. The very same for our emotions, we categorize them in sadness and joy, you cannot have both together, but one influence the other. One will counteract or diminish the other, like cold and heat.

3P6: Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.

Self-preservation natural drive, things persist in there own being to exist more. The fundamental of all nature is striving for existence. This is universal for all things, we know that nothing cannot happen from nothing, so a external cause has to force something on a thing, otherwise without a cause it persist in it's being, for humans it's the same, we also strive to be in the shape we are, and strive for pleasure, which we will dig after this.

3P10: An idea, which excludes the existence of our body, cannot be postulated in our mind, but is contrary thereto.

Any idea that excludes our body, is naturally inherently opposed to the nature of mind. The first primary layer of mind is the sense of actually existing modifications of body. Since body is the object of mind, any idea that include harming us will be in this object and it's the opposed of it.

3P12: The mind, as far as it can, endeavours to conceive those things, which increase or help the power of activity in the body.

We automatically look for things that increase the power of our activity, or pleasure/love feelings.

3P13: When the mind conceives things which diminish or hinder the body's power of activity, it endeavours, as far as possible, to remember things which exclude the existence of the first-named things.

Mind persist as much as possible to remember those things which hurt and feels pain and can lead to excluding of from existence, this is natural, otherwise we would survived.

Emotional Memory

3P14: If the mind has once been affected by two emotions at the same time, it will, whenever it is afterwards affected by one of these two, be also affected by the other.

Example.1: Let's say you have had a bad result of your test, which involved a process of doubt and fear, And whenever you feel doubt again, you would also be affected by fear, we would assume that the fear feeling is because of the results and consequences, but that's our logic trying to make sense of our of feelings, meanwhile the real cause is not what we think is.

Example.2: You have been listening to a specific song while feeling pleasure by other causes, next time with listening to the song, you would feel the same pleasure since mind remembered song with specific feeling in the moment.

3P15: Anything can, accidentally, be the cause of pleasure, pain, or desire.

3P15.Corollary: Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

We can love or hate anything since good and bad are our preservation of things which form by affecting multiple causes which form the idea and memory of love or hate of a thing. The object itself might not be the cause of emotion, but the cause has formed in past experiences.

3P16: Simply from the fact that we conceive, that a given object has some point of resemblance with another object which is wont to affect the mind pleasurably or painfully, although the point of resemblance be not the efficient cause of the said emotions, we shall still regard the first-named object with love or hate.

• Resemblance = Similarity through pattern recognition.

Mind constantly look for similar patterns in current state with previous patterns. If we recognize a similarity in a object with another object in the past, mind regards the the current object with the emotion from the similar object.

Example: You may find the same face pattern in a person with someone you knew before, and mind regards the new person with the same emotions as the similar new person, if we hate the first person, because of the similar patterns mind regard new person with same emotions.

In this example, the new person has not been the cause of our emotion, but the cause has been the underlying pattern recognition and emotions kept with that memory, which we might be unaware of this true cause.

3P17: If we conceive that a thing, which is wont to affect us painfully, has any point of resemblance with another thing which is wont to affect us with an equally strong emotion of pleasure, we shall hate the first-named thing, and at the same time we shall love it.

If there is a object which brings us pain, but the object is similar to another object that we love, we both love and hate it at the same time. This situation of love and hate (contrary emotions) at the same time is called Vacillation. It happens when an object is the cause of both emotions, directly or by similarity.

Imaginations impact

Ethics 3P18: A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.

If the imagined idea is referred to time past or future in a way that it involves us, body's emotional response to the image would be as present. Because the body's existence does not exclude. If you think of yourself having ice cream in an hour, body would already react to it as it has it now.

• Hope
• Passive pleasure from the outcome image of a thing in past or future which we are concerned in doubt
• Fear
• Passive pain from the outcome image of a thing which we are concerned in doubt

Now if we remove the doubt element from these emotions they become: - Confident - Hope without concerning doubt - Despair, or Disappointment - Fear without concerning doubt

We can see that doubt concerning the outcome, is a property of emotion, which changes the shape of the emotion and when we think of it in past or future, we get the same effect as present. In other words: - Hope: pleasure in doubt - Confident: pleasure in certainty

• Fear: pain in doubt
• Despair: pain in certainty

Emotions underlying functionality

Preview

We said before in this page that things are contrary, and they cannot exist in the same object, in so far as one is capable of destroying the other, like cold and heat, now our emotions are also contrary as it categorizes in sadness and joy as - and +, which exist in mind as emotions.

• [-] = Pain feelings
• [+] = Pleasure feelings
• [S] = State towards the object
• This symbol is the force of emotion towards the object and will multiply to the indicator of emotion towards object
• [C] = Cause or idea of it
• [O] = Strength of feeling or output
• This is the output or result of emotion, which will multiply to it's indicator

Loved object

Ethics 3P19: He who conceives that the object of his love is destroyed will feel pain; if he conceives that it is preserved he will feel pleasure.

• You have a car, you love it, you see it destroyed, you feel pain.
• [(+) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (-)]
• You have a car, you love it, you see it preserved from destruction, you feel pleasure.
• [(+) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (+)]

Hated object

Ethics 3P20: He who conceives that the object of his hate is destroyed will also feel pleasure.

You have a enemy, you hate him, you see him destroyed, you feel pleasure.

Enemy = Object of hate -

Object of love and hate

Ethics 3P21: He who conceives, that the object of his love is affected pleasurably or painfully, will himself be affected pleasurably or painfully; and the one or the other emotion will be greater or less in the lover according as it is greater or less in the thing loved.

• You have a car, you love it, you see it affected pleasurably(adoration of others) you feel pleasure.
• You would feel pleasure as much as you love your car.
• [(+) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (+)]
• You have a car, you love it, you see it affected painfully(people hate it) you feel pain.
• You would feel pain as much as you love your car.
• [(+) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (-)]

Car = Object of love

Adoration = Pleasure +

Hate = Pain -

Affection of external love or hate on loved object

Ethics 3P22: If we conceive that anything pleasurably affects some object of our love, we shall be affected with love towards that thing. Contrariwise, if we conceive that it affects an object of our love painfully, we shall be affected with hatred towards it.

• You have a dog, you love your dog, someone gives a treat to your dog, you love that person.
• [(+) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (+)]
• You have a dog, you love your dog, someone kicks your dog, you hate that person.
• [(+) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (-)]

Dog = Object of love

Treat = Pleasure +

Kick = Pain -

Affection of external love or hate on object of hate

Ethics 3P23: He who conceives, that an object of his hatred is painfully affected, will feel pleasure. Contrariwise, if he thinks that the said object is pleasurably affected, he will feel pain. Each of these emotions will be greater or less, according as its contrary is greater or less in the object of hatred.

• You have a enemy, you hate him, you see him affected painfully, you feel pleasure.
• You would feel pleasure as much as you hate your enemy.
• [(-) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (+)]
• You have a enemy, you hate him, you see him affected pleasurably, you feel pain.
• You would feel pain as much as you hate your enemy.
• [(-) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (-)]

Love and hate toward people by our object of hate

Ethics 3P24: If we conceive that anyone pleasurably affects an object of our hate, we shall feel hatred towards him also. If we conceive that he painfully affects that said object, we shall feel love towards him.

• You hate Taylor swift, you see someone who likes her, you feel hatred towards them.
• [(-) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (-)]
• You hate Taylor swift, you see someone who hates her, you feel love towards them.
• [(-) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (+)]

Taylor swift = Object of hate

Note: As far as we rejoin to participate in another's pain, it's attributed to jealousy, which is hate. Or as far as we be sad for someone else's pleasure, it's attributed to envy/jealousy.

Struggle toward affirmation and negation

Ethics 3P25: We endeavour to affirm, concerning ourselves, and concerning what we love, everything that we can conceive to affect pleasurably ourselves, or the loved object. Contrariwise, we endeavour to negative everything, which we conceive to affect painfully ourselves or the loved object.

• You have a dog, you love your dog, you would like to see your dog happy and healthy.
• [(+) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (+)]
• You have a dog, you love your dog, you would not like to see your dog in pain or sick.
• [(+) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (-)]

Ethics 3P26: We endeavour to affirm, concerning that which we hate, everything which we conceive to affect it painfully; and, contrariwise, we endeavour to deny, concerning it, everything which we conceive to affect it pleasurably.

• You hate your enemy, you would like to confirm anything that would affect him painfully.
• [(-) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (+)]
• You hate your enemy, you would like to deny anything that would affect him pleasurably.
• [(-) (S)] * (C+) = [(O) (-)]

Based on this, we strive to think too highly of ourselves and our loved objects. For example, we think of our own capabilities too high because we endeavour to affirm everything that would affect us pleasurably. This feeling of thinking too high of ourselves or loved object is called pride. A man might dream with open eyes, and think of himself with special abilities, thinking that he can accomplish anything he thinks of and accounting them as real since the imaginations effect as present. This will continue until evidence of the contrary is shown and exclude the idea of the dream, this event will make the person very angry because now there idea of pride in question is excluded in reality.

Pride = Pleasure springing from a man thinking too highly of himself that he caused pleasure in others

Over-esteem = Pleasure which arises from a man thinking too highly of another

Disdain = Pleasure which arises from thinking too little of a man

Emotions between people

Sympathy or imitation of emotions or interpersonal emotions

Ethics 3P27: By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion.

If we conceive that a thing is like us(another person), if we have not regarded them with any emotion, we would effect with a like emotion as they are affected. This is called sympathy or imitation of emotions.

• Compassion/Pity = pain springing from the fact that we conceive a thing like ourselves to be affected with pain.
• Example: Your classmate died by car accident, you feel pain.
• Emulation = desire of anything, engendered in us by the fact that we conceive that others have the like desire.
• Example: All your classmates have a new phone, you would like to have one too.

Corollary 1: If we conceive that anyone, whom we have hitherto regarded with no emotion, pleasurably affects something similar to ourselves, we shall be affected with love towards him. If, on the other hand, we conceive that he painfully affects the same, we shall be affected with hatred towards him.

Example: Your president in which you have no judgment or feelings of, helps people like you, you would love him. On the other hand, if he hurts people like you, you would hate him.

Corollary 2: We cannot hate a thing which we pity, because its misery affects us painfully.

If we pity a thing, we cannot hate it, because it's misery affects us painfully, as a result we would feel his pain.

Corollary 3: We seek to free from misery, as far as we can, a thing which we pity.

If we pity a thing, we seek to help and free it from misery as far as we can, just like how we would treat with our own pain.

Benevolence = will for doing good for the thing which we pity, which is desire from compassion.

Ethics 3P28: We endeavour to bring about whatsoever we conceive to conduce to pleasure; but we endeavour to remove or destroy whatsoever we conceive to be truly repugnant thereto, or to conduce to pain.

We want to bring pleasure and avoid pain.

Ethics 3P29: We shall also endeavour to do whatsoever we conceive men to regard with pleasure, and contrariwise we shall shrink from doing that which we conceive men to shrink from.

Men = People who we did not regard with any emotion.

Since we see our own reflection in others, we would like to do things that others like and be part of them and avoid doing things that others hate and avoid as a group.

• Ambition = Desire for the approval of men which is desire from emulation.
• Kindliness = Act in ways to please other men, motivated by desire from compassion.
• Praise: Conceiving the action of another to gain our approval, which is desire from ambition.
• Blame: Conceiving the action of another to lose our approval, which is desire from ambition.

Ethics 3P30: If anyone has done something which he conceives as affecting other men pleasurably, he will be affected by pleasure, accompanied by the idea of himself as cause; in other words, he will regard himself with pleasure. On the other hand, if he has done anything which he conceives as affecting others painfully, he will regard himself with pain.

If you have done something that you think would be the cause of pleasure for others, you regard self as the cause of pleasure and feel pleasure. Contrary, if you have done something that you think would be the cause of pain for others, you regard self as the cause of pain and feel pain.

• Honour = pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, rooted in the idea of others praise.
• Shame = pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause, rooted in the idea of others blame.
• Self-complacency = idea of self as cause of pleasure cause by imagining others pleasure.
• Repentance = idea of self as cause of pain in others pain caused by imagining.

Warning: Self-complacency and repentance might solely exist in self, but they are rooted in the idea of others, which works as a internal cause.

Ethics 3P31: If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, &c. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillations of soul.

Ethics 3P31.Corollary: everyone endeavours, as far as possible, to cause others to love what he himself loves, and to hate what he himself hates.

Everyone by nature desire to make there own choices universal, which is really ambitious. Such a desire is equal in all, so we see all trying to convince others to love what they love and hate what they hate. In this case, everyone stands in everyone's way to gain love or praise by influencing others, and all become mutually hateful of each other by not being able to convince others.

Envy and hatred, the ambition to take ownership

Ethics 3P32: If we conceive that anyone takes delight in something, which only one person can possess, we shall endeavour to bring it about that the man in question shall not gain possession thereof.

If we conceive that someone taking ownership of a object that cannot be shared, we shall desire to delight the thing. And if we conceive that this pleasure cannot be shared, we shall desire to take it from them. So and so that we clearly see this is happening in the world, some people might not have desire to possess in anything, that is not normal by this definition, the natural human desire is the same as animals, we do not have a morality system embedded inside, by birth or education.

Man's nature is constituted by pity for the ones in pain, and envy with hate towards the one who take pleasure in what they love to delight but can't have it.

This behavior is visible in children that they start to laugh or cry, simply by the act of imitation of others. It's a desire to imitate whatsoever others doing and take the same delight, and we already know that the mind is determined to act in certain ways by external causes.

Also in here, we can see the nature of sympathy with others, is coming from imitation, which itself, is related to the body as the object of mind (you will find it in life/mind)

For example seeing someone having something better than you on social media or colonies in the history.

Wanting to be loved back

Ethics 3P33: When we love a thing similar to ourselves we endeavour, as far as we can, to bring about that it should love us in return.

If we notice similarity in a thing with ourselves, we would want to make a impression on it, in a way that the thing be affected with pleasure accompanied by the idea of us as cause!

Example: When we see someone with the same interests as us, we would like to make a impression as remark to common interests, so that the person would like us in return.

This comes from reflecting our values and interests on others.

Complacency and the loved object

Ethics 3P34: The greater the emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected towards us, the greater will be our complacency.

Our complacency is directly proportional to the emotion we conceive from loved object towards us.

Jealousy and the rival

Ethics 3P35: If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be affected with hatred towards the loved object and with envy towards his rival.

You have a dog, you love your dog, you see your dog loves someone else more than you, you would hate your dog for unfaithfulness and envy the person who your dog loves more.

Dog = Object of love

Jealousy = Hate + Envy toward loved object, arising from combined love and hatred, accompanied by the idea of some rival who is envied.

In the case of love for a woman: for he who thinks, that a woman whom he loves prostitutes herself to another, will feel pain, not only because his own desire is restrained, but also because, being compelled to associate the image of her he loves with the parts of shame and the excreta of another.

So the problem is not only the restraint of desire, but also the association of the image of the loved object with shape of another person.

We must add, that a jealous man is not greeted by his beloved with the same joyful countenance as before, and this also gives him pain as a lover, as I will now show...

Remembering a delight

Ethics 3P36: He who remembers a thing, in which he has once taken delight, desires to possess it under the same circumstances as when he first took delight therein.

You remember that you had good time with your car in the west coast, you desire to have the same car in the west coast. You would desire same road and same weather with the same car.

Corollary: A lover will, therefore, feel pain if one of the aforesaid attendant circumstances be missing.

If one of the circumstances is missing, you would feel pain. This comes from expectation/imagination and reality mismatch.

Regret = The absence of the loved object

Desire follows the emotion

Ethics 3P37: Desire arising through pain or pleasure, hatred or love, is greater in proportion as the emotion is greater.

Pain decrease the power of activity and persistence in being. Simultaneously, pain increases the desire to remove the pain.

Pleasure increase the power of activity and persistence in being. Simultaneously, pleasure increases the desire to consist in being.

Also hate and love are forms of pain and pleasure, so they make the same effect.

Strength of desire is directly linked to the underlying emotion of pain or pleasure. As much as we feel pleasure or pain, we would desire to remove or consist in being as much as the emotion is.

Hate, love and revenge

A hate greater than previous love

Ethics 3P38: If a man has begun to hate an object of his love, so that love is thoroughly destroyed, he will, causes being equal, regard it with more hatred than if he had never loved it, and his hatred will be in proportion to the strength of his former love.

If the loved object is hated, the hate will be stronger than if it was never loved. The reason is in underlying love, which is being limited, this limitation of love is painful and causes hate, which lead to greater hate.

Hate and revenge

Ethics 3P39: He who hates anyone will endeavour to do him an injury, unless he fears that a greater injury will thereby accrue to himself; on the other hand, he who loves anyone will, by the same law, seek to benefit him.

If you hate someone, you would try to make injury to him, unless you fear that a greater injury will come to you(revenge). Contrary, if you love someone, you would try to benefit them.

Also the strength of desire to make injury is directly linked to the underlying hate.

Hate brings hate

Ethics 3P40: He, who conceives himself to be hated by another, and believes that he has given him no cause for hatred, will hate that other in return.

The natural reaction to hate is to hate back. Specifically, if you think that you are hated without a cause, you would hate back. Underlying reason is that external hate toward us is painful itself and the cause of pain will be hated(the person who hates us).

If you would believe that there is a cause for hate, hate feeling turns into shame.

Corollary.1: He who conceives, that one whom he loves hates him, will be a prey to conflicting hatred and love. For, in so far as he conceives that he is an object of hatred, he is determined to hate his enemy in return. But, by the hypothesis, he nevertheless loves him: wherefore he will be a prey to conflicting hatred and love.

If the loved object hate us, we get into a conflicting state of love and hate.

Corollary.2: If a man conceives that one, whom he has hitherto regarded without emotion, has done him any injury from motives of hatred, he will forthwith seek to repay the injury in kind.

If someone which we have no emotion to, do injury to us, we would immediately seek to repay the injury in the same kind.

• Anger = Desire to injure someone who made us hate.
• Revenge = Desire to make injury as the same kind received.

Love brings love

Ethics 3P41: If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return.

In the case of giving a cause for love, love feeling turns into pride.

• Pride = Being the cause of love in others constantly till Honour being to a pride and part of us.

Gratitude or thankfulness = Love toward someone who loves us, and consequently benefiting them.

Corollary: He who imagines that he is loved by one whom he hates, will be a prey to conflicting hatred and love.

If we receive love from a hated object, we get into a conflicting state of love and hate. In this case, if hate is greater than love, yet we try to injure who he loves us, this is called cruelty, specifically if the victim has given no cause for hate.

• Cruelty = Desire to injure someone who loves us.

Pain by ungratefulness of given benefit

Ethics 3P42: He who has conferred a benefit on anyone from motives of love or honour will feel pain, if he sees that the benefit is received without gratitude.

If benefit is received without gratitude, the pain will be felt. It's because we strive to know ourselves cause of pleasure in others, to feel Honour and pride, and when it's not recognized, it causes pain.

Reciprocal hate brings hate, reciprocal love brings love

Ethics 3P43: Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

We hate others as much as they hate us. And we love others as much as they love us, which can destroy hate since it's contrary.

Love can destroy hate, as far as love is greater than hate. Also, contrary, hate can destroy love, as far as hate is greater than love.

The greater love after hate

Ethics 3P44: Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it.

The love after hate vanquished by love is greater than if hate had not preceded it. Contrary, we said before, that: hate can destroy love, and the hate after love is greater than if love had not preceded it.

How? the pleasure of love from hated person enhance overcoming the pain of hate. No one desire pain or hatred to enjoy greater pleasure after. No one wish to be harmed just to experience greater pleasure after recovery, because everyone desire to consist in being and avoid pain.

Hate toward men who hate our loved object

Ethics 3P45: If a man conceives, that anyone similar to himself hates anything also similar to himself, which he loves, he will hate that person.

• You have a dog, you love your dog, someone similar to you hates dogs, you would hate them.
• [(+) (S)] * (C-) = [(O) (-)]

Why? Because loved object will hate who ever hates it, and you would also hate who ever hates your loved object.

Synchronization of Body and Mind

Internal love or hate objects will compare with everything

They are inside the object of the mind

For example of the object of love to be freedom, it feels pain like any other object of loves, it imagined to be destroyed it feels pain

This pain is the brake of procrastinating something which happens certainly, and fear for something which is in doubt

Contrariwise, if the loved object preserved, it feels pleasure, if the pleasure be in doubt, it feels hope

This hope is the drive which desire for action arises from

Anything we think of happens inside this object, leaves a memory footprint in the object, as much as it be thought more, this footprint gets deeper or I should say more lasting and in contact with next ideas arises it's emotion, consciously or unconsciously.

Just like how a real pain stays in the object of mind and we would overthink on the impacted cause, and evaluate the current state of object in respect to the impact.

Here we haven’t drawn any line between internal and external objects.

Groups, conditions and judgment

Love and hate toward a class or nation

Ethics 3P46: If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone, of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause, under the general category of the class or nation: the man will feel love or hatred, not only to the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs.

If someone from a different class/nation/group has affected you pleasurably or painfully, you would turn the feeling back to the whole class/nation/group.

This is coming from our nature to group ourselves by similarities and differences, and to reflect the feelings of individuals to the whole group. We can always see that different groups have pride in themselves and hate toward contrary group.

Complex mix of joy and pain

Ethics 3P47: Joy arising from the fact, that anything we hate is destroyed, or suffers other injury, is never unaccompanied by a certain pain in us.

If you hate something and see it destroyed, you would feel joy. But this joy is not alone, since we have empathy and sympathy with the similar object, we would feel pain as well.

Destruction of love or hate by changing conditions

Ethics 3P48: Love or hatred towards, for instance, Peter is destroyed, if the pleasure involved in the former, or the pain involved in the latter emotion, be associated with the idea of another cause: and will be diminished in proportion as we conceive Peter not to have been the sole cause of either emotion.

We hate or love someone as far as we think that person is the sole cause of the emotion. Like they have done something to us. If we realize they have not been the sole cause of the emotion, and there was solely or completely other causes, the emotion will be destroyed or diminished.

Let's say you blame Peter for a cause, when you realize he was not the sole cause, the blame towards him will be destroyed or diminished. Contrariwise, if you love Peter for a cause, when you realize he was not the sole cause, the love towards him will be destroyed or diminished.

What kind of things we can love or hate?

Ethics 3P49: Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other conditions being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.

We cannot love or hate something that is not free. For example, we know that a wild animal is not free, it's acting by necessity. We don't hate wild animals, we don't love them either, we know it's necessary for them to act based on there nature. A wild animal's nature is to attack when felt threatened, it's not free to act differently.

The same goes for matter, no one blames the rock that fell on their head, because it's acting by necessity, it's not free to act differently, we know that rock doesn't make a decision based on it's free-will to fall on our head.

Now, the very same goes for humans, if you know that someone is not free to act differently, you would not hate or love them, you would not blame them either, because you know, that humans, just like wild animals or anything else under the nature, follows the necessity of driven nature.

Everything, as far as it's conceived under nature, not free, but act by necessity.

Note: Hence it follows, that men, thinking themselves to be free, feel more love or hatred towards one another than towards anything else

Omens and Their Impact on Emotions

Ethics 3P50: Anything whatever can be, accidentally, a cause of hope or fear.

So far, we know that hope cannot exist without fear. None of them can exist without the other. Fear without hope is dissipation of the mind, and hope without fear is madness.

The cause of fear is pain and the cause of hope is pleasure.

We try to estimate things based on the hope we look in them, this process will lead to superstition. Superstition comes from fear of unknown, and the hope of the unknown.

• Omen = Things which are accidentally the causes of hope or fear are called good or evil omen.

Different perception of the same object by different people

Ethics 3P51: Different men may be differently affected by the same object, and the same man may be differently affected at different times by the same object.

The same object can cause different emotions in different or same men at different times. What someone loves, another hate. What someone hates, another loves. What someone loves today, they might hate tomorrow, and vice versa.

We might be brave at the same place we were coward before, or vice versa. Everyone judges things based on their own emotions of good, bad, better or worst.

Some example of inconstancy of human judgments:

I shall call a man intrepid, if he despises an evil which I am fear of;

If someone despises an evil which you are fear of, you would call him intrepid.

If he's desired to injure his enemies and benefit his loved ones, and he is not afraid of an evil, which is enough to restrain you, I shall call him daring.

If he's desired to injure his enemies and benefit his loved ones, then he's not intrepid, but daring. It depends on my own point of view of the same thing that he does.

A man will appear timid to me, if he fears an evil which I am accustomed to despise

If he fears an evil which you humiliate, you would call him timid, because you know there is nothing to fear about that evil.

If his desire is restrained by the fear of an evil, which is not sufficient to restrain me, I shall say that he is cowardly

If he's restricted by an evil that you humiliate, you would call him cowardly.

And in like manner will everyone pass judgment.

Wonder and self-love

Uniqueness and solving in Wonder

Ethics 3P52: An object which we have formerly seen in conjunction with others, and which we do not conceive to have any property that is not common to many, will not be regarded by us for so long, as an object which we conceive to have some property peculiar to itself.

First we need to take a glance to memory, we know that we remember things with each other. Now if we see an object which doesn't have any unique property, like red apple, we would not remember it for so long, because we always see red apples. Now if we see a golden apple, we would remember it for long since we have never seen a golden apple.

Just like the below unicorn, we see horses all the time, we don't remember any particular horse, but if we see a unicorn, we would remember it as a different horse with a horn.

As far as we imagine unicorn in mind and solely unicorn, it's called Wonder.

Now if this imagination referred with fear, it's called Consternation.

If wonder be toward something we admire, it's called Veneration.

If we wonder at someone's anger, envy, or jealousy, it's called Horror.

If we love a man which we wonder at, our love + Wonder or Veneration = Devotion, the condition is that the love has to be greater than the wonder or veneration.

On the other hand, Contempt is the opposite of Wonder, it happens at times when we deny the qualities that cause Wonder. In this case we start to think of unique things that are not in the object instead of the things that are. We said that Devotion is the result of Love + Wonder, Now Derision is the result of Contempt of a thing we hate or fear. And the Contempt toward something we know folly. So if something is dumb/folly, we do not Wonder at, but we Contempt, we would Scorn it.

• Wonder = When the mind solely focused on a unique object.
• Consternation = Wonder at something fearful.
• Veneration = Wonder at something greater than us.
• Horror = Wonder at negative emotions of others like anger or envy.

• Devotion = Love combined with Wonder or Veneration.

• Contempt = Opposite of Wonder, happens by denying Wondering qualities.

• Derision = Contempt for what we hate or fear.
• Scorn = Contempt for folly.

The mind and its own power

Ethics 3P53: When the mind regards itself and its own power of activity, it feels pleasure: and that pleasure is greater in proportion to the distinctness wherewith it conceives itself and its own power of activity.

You imagine yourself powerful, you imagine that others admire you for greatness, which leads to pleasure. even though, the greatness might only exist in mind caused by internal imaginations, and not in reality. This proposition states that imaginations can effect as reality.

Corollary: This pleasure is fostered more and more, in proportion as a man conceives himself to be praised by others. For the more he conceives himself as praised by others, the more he will imagine them to be affected with pleasure, accompanied by the idea of himself; thus he is himself affected with greater pleasure, accompanied by the idea of himself.

As much as we conceive ourselves great and cause of pleasure in others, this feeling gets stronger in a compound way since the pleasure of greatness does not have a limit. So as a result, imaginations are the first kind of knowledge which is falsy and wrong, it makes us detach from reality based on desires.

The mind's own weakness

Ethics 3P54: The mind endeavours to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity.

The mind endeavours to remember actions which increase power of activity. If you have done something awesome in the past, mind would like to remember and keep it and assert based on.

Ethics 3P55: When the mind contemplates its own weakness, it feels pain thereat.

Mind wants to only assert things that confirm it's power of activity. But when mind checks it's own weakness, which is contrary to it's power of activity, it feels pain.

Corollary: This pain is more and more fostered, if a man conceives that he is blamed by others.

Pain grows by us thinking of our own weakness and jealousy to others who does not have such a pain.

Narration of Exploits: People love talking about there achievements and power, which can lead to envy and bothering others. This envy naturally comes from arising joy in others by there own power of activity, in a way that it causes pain in others in comparison to self.

Comparison: The greater our uniqueness which brings us power of action be comparing to others, will remove the pain of Humility and denigration to others.

• Humility = Pain accompanied by the idea of self weakness.
• Self-Love = Pleasure accompanied by the idea of self virtues or power.

This self-humility and self-love are the falsy drives of neuroses which Spinoza is pointing out here, it's surprising how he was seeing it 150 years before Karen Horney, I will talk about this subject in details later. He continues to explain the root of this issue and how it shapes.

This comes from the family environment and childhood, where parents used to incite there children to virtue by injecting the feeling of honour and envy. In a way that they would show love to good acts and compare kid to others at situations when they want to blame the child.

Corollary: No one envies the virtue of anyone who is not his equal.

A man will not desire any power of activity or virtue (which is the same thing) to be attributed to him, that is appropriate to another's nature and foreign to his own.

Note: we venerate a man, through wonder at his prudence, fortitude, &c., we do so, because we conceive those qualities to be peculiar to him, and not as common to our nature; we, therefore, no more envy their possessor, than we envy trees for being tall, or lions for being courageous.

When we wonder at something's courage or virtues, we do so by assuming these qualities unique to them, and not human nature. So we don't envy tree for being tall or lion for it's courage.

The variety of emotions

An emotion for each thing

Ethics 3P56: There are as many kinds of pleasure, of pain, of desire, and of every emotion compounded of these, such as vacillations of spirit, or derived from these, such as love, hatred, hope, fear, &c., as there are kinds of objects whereby we are affected.

Every specific emotion is a mix of pleasure, pain and desire. Each emotion is associated with a object, each object affect us in a different way than others. We should also mention that we can accidentally love or hate anything.

Emotion depends on essence of the thing

Ethics 3P57: Any emotion of a given individual differs from the emotion of another individual, only in so far as the essence of the one individual differs from the essence of the other.

Each of us have a different experience of reality and emotion we get from it. We only have different emotions with each other, if the essence among is different from each other. Because the desire of each man is related to it's nature, and the nature of each individual is different. This concept applies to all living beings including animals, the joy that a horse feels in procreation is equine(specific to it's nature) while human experience something different from the same act in nature. It continues that the pleasure a philosopher takes is differ with what drunkenness feels.

• Irrational = Emotion of animals

Active emotions

Ethics 3P58: Besides pleasure and desire, which are passivities or passions, there are other emotions derived from pleasure and desire, which are attributable to us in so far as we are active.

An emotion of pleasure or desire is passive or passion, but some emotions driven from these which are active.

Proof came from where we think of the self's power and by that conceiving adequate ideas of self, which are true. Now the mind is active filled by the pleasure emotion, and has adequate ideas. Example: when a scientist make a new discovery, he feels pleasure accompanied by a true idea of his discovery.

So here we see that all emotions are passive, but increase or decrease power of activity, but the activity of mind relies on the adequate ideas.

Ethics 3P59: Among all the emotions attributable to the mind as active, there are none which cannot be referred to pleasure or desire.

There is no emotion which not to be pleasure or pain and regard as active. All active emotions are attributable to pleasure or desire, pain on the other hand, decrease the power of activity or understanding.

Last note:

From all above we saw how emotions from the right mix of pain, pleasure and desire will result to a specific emotion, this dynamic mix can go in all possible computations. Also we know that these causes in which leads to emotions, can be internal or external, we can think of a memory and an emotion arise and do certain acts upon it, or it can be an external influence by seeing a object. In case in which that a external cause leads to a emotion in us to act upon, we call this passive, passively and emotionally doing a act by desire and nature will result going by the mercy of fortune. He talks that we all are like waves of see driven by this dynamic mixing system of emotion. Also bodily disposition will effect emotion, he makes example of the time that we love to eat food, but after eating enough, the emotion of love changes with repulsion.

Conclusions

From all we conceived above, there is one true point, which is the matter of fact that emotions are not mystical, but actually mechanical, which is a hard proof of how we are part of the nature and following the general rules of it.

The 3 primary emotions fundamental to human existence determining our behaviors and perception.

Desire is the main drive of action, mostly masked as free-will, we call what we desire as free-will, unknown of true causes that lead to that way. Also, this desire is fundamentally linked to our instinctual needs, in a way that we desire what can help us stay in existence more(conatus).

• Desire (toward +)
• fundamentally linked to our instinctual needs
• If the desire would not be by conciseness, it's called appetite, like hunger.
• Pleasure (+)
• Indicator of transition to a higher perfection, or indicating a increase in power of activity.
• It increases the activity of mind, or general power of activity
• Pain (-)
• Indicator of transition to a lesser perfection, or indicating a decrease in power of activity.
• It decrease the activity of mind, or general power of activity of body and mind.

Emotion or change in state

For Spinoza, emotion is a change in the state of our physical organism to greater or lesser state of vitality. This emotion can be an idea, or mental representation.

Active vs passive

If we be the adequate and sole cause of a emotion in ourselves, we call it active emotion. If we would not be the cause of emotion, but rather emotion has external sources, it's regarded as passive, because now we are not the cause of emotion anymore, but we are part of the causal chain of something in which affects us with emotion, and we are determined to experience them by outside forces.

Perfection

Perfection is the indicator of emotion on the scale of in which between pleasure and pain, just like numbers from infinite negative to infinite positive, our state of activity can be anywhere on the scale, or change and disposition itself.

Connection between Mind and Body

Mind and body are one and the same thing

Each of them effect on the other.

Resemblance

Mind has the ability to resemblance things to each other. One person can remind you of another by resemblance of confused memories, and make you have the same emotions toward.

• Resemblance = Similarity through pattern recognition.

Accidental emotions

Anything can, accidentally, be the cause of pleasure, pain, or desire.

So we have to doubt our emotions and validate with second kind of knowledge(logic), they can mix and confuse easily by memory.

Imaginations and image formation

What ever we imagine, we see in front of self. Which means that it feels real, it would be more impactful if the imagination be in the past or future. Imagination is the first kind of knowledge, it has falsy nature and it makes us distance reality.

Objects

We can have feelings toward objects, and not only of self. By this very mean, it follows that specific emotions and there own specific equations exist. Which can also be conceived through imaginations, for example if you imagine your loved objected destroy, you would feel pain, which is equal to it's actual event in reality.

Emotion, the product

Emotions are natural product of us, in which that is related to power of activity. Emotions are reflecting the nature of survival and evolution through years.

Nature of emotion

How we experience the same emotion depends on our nature, what a horse might experience from love is differ than us, it follows that anything else, as far as it has a different essence or nature will differ from one to another.

Complex yet determined

Our emotions are reflecting a chaotic dynamic complex picture, but complexity is not a reason to define it as magical or contingent, yet there is logic being which we saw how it works. Also we must now have a good picture of how mechanical and deterministic emotions are.

Pleasure at the pain of others

It is clearly visible through envy that we can enjoy someone else's pain, and regard it as good. Or contrariwise, others enjoy our pain. The nature of man is based on envy and sympathy.

Thinking of others

Logs of our actions are combined by us as the cause of emotion in others, this shows the social life style of this nature. This thinking of others thoughts of self can be a unhealthy drive of action. It also shows that how people would see the reflection of themselves in others ideas, and how difficult would it be without this drive.

Desire is the essence of man

Any desire is reflecting to be the cause of pleasure for self, which increase the power of activity by that very essence of man. For example, animals also have desires like eating and striving for something, which just like us, it shows a activity which brings pleasure as the self would be the cause of it.

Grouping

It shows from the nation proposition in which that it's the nature of us to group self into all the ones fitting into the picture aligned with our nature and values, and regarding the group as the object of love and pride and knowing it as a property of self, and start fighting with contrary groups driven by emotion.

Resources:

• Spinoza and the Emotions
• Ethics lll: Overview

Requirements to know

• Universe
• Causality
• Life

Causality warmup

In the universe and causality we talked about cause and effect. We talked that there is no randomness. We talked that nothing is contingent and everything is conditioned. As so far, we know the determined rules by nature, for example physics.

But in this post I shall write about: - How cause and effect works in our mind internally and externally. - What are the rules of mind and how it works. - What free will means and how we don't have it. - How ideas work and how our mind shaped.

What is mind and how it works?

Mind is a complex dynamic system of network causality kind as a unified entity.

In Causality we defined 4 types of causality. Mind is of the network causality kind, since smallest changes lead to change the final outcome, like weather and butterfly effect. In here psychologist explains how mind works by using chaos theory example. Just like a very complex system which is reflecting the chaos theory. In corporation of cause and effect, he explains that a small change in the childhood can cause a big change in the personality of the person. We will talk more about psycho-analysis and how personality shapes in the next sections.

Like weather, doesn't matter what kind of prediction or model we use, we can't have certainty for mind. One single event in childhood can change the outcome of our behavior in the current moment as it effects our personality.

One association formed at age four can determine a reaction at age forty. The system is deterministic but unpredictable: every idea causes another idea, and those chains branch and converge across 86 billion neurons, each with 7,000 synaptic connections to others.

This is chaos theory applied inward. We can model weather with satellite data and supercomputers, yet a week out the forecast breaks down. Mind operates the same way: determined by causes, but the causal web is so dense that prediction collapses.

I say unified entity to enhance the idea that interfaces, logic, feelings are not separate entities, but all are part of the same unified entity, exactly unlike the weather which is a combination of many entities like temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.

Mind is one thing expressing itself through many modes at once.

How inside of the mind works?

Brain contains 86 billion neurons, and each neuron has 7000 synaptic connections to other neurons. No need to say that brain is the most complex organ in the body. Because every neuron is connected to others, so everything effects on everything.

Why you should want to know these things?

We naturally don't know the causes of our emotions and the way we make decision we make based on which specific knowledge, as humans, we just intuitively do it. But if you crave to know how your mind works, you would have the key to the true freedom of understanding, not only external world, but also understanding our mind.

Understanding how emotions, imaginations, knowledge, errors, ideas, free will and memory all fit together and what are the differences and what are their origin. We also assert each kind of knowledge to find the way to free will and true freedom to see how it's related to understanding.

Idea as a mode of thought

We know all attributes have mode. A mode of substance under extension is a certain material form, our body or a door for example. A mode under thought is an idea, which itself causes another idea.

Causality in mind

There are 2 topics that confirm causality in brain

1. Mind is in nature, not outside it - Mind is a mode of thought, and modes of thought follow the same necessity as everything else in nature. We know everything in the nature has radical order, and mind is not contingent to this rule, but it's conditioned.
2. Internal cause and effect - An idea is the cause of another idea - Also from the science of psychology we know that specific unpredictable causes constitute our personality, which we will talk later on.

Mind as a mode of nature

1A2: That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.

• Nature cannot be conceived through anything else, so it must be conceived through itself.
• Mind can be conceived through nature, so it must be conceived through nature.
  • But mind conceives nature because it's a part of nature, a mode of God under the attribute of thought.

Mind is not a ghost riding the body. Mind is nature thinking: the same reality that is extended, conceived under thought instead. Spinoza places thought alongside extension as an attribute of God, meaning: nature does not merely contain thinking things. Nature is a thinking thing.

2P1: Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.

• Our thoughts are modes of thought in nature, and nature is God, so our thoughts are in God. They run parallel to the body, they do not come out of it.
• God is a thinking thing, and that is just what it means for thought to be one of God's attributes.
  • It does not mean God deliberates the way a person does. It means nature has the characteristic of thought.

This does not mean God sits somewhere deliberating. It means nature has the characteristic of thought the same way it has the characteristic of physical extension. Your thoughts exist inside nature. They follow from it. They are it.

Realtime parallelism of mind and body

2P7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

• For every physical event, there is a mental event.
  • If a stone falls on someone's head, the mental event is the idea of the stone falling on someone's head.
  • He says that the external cause will be the effect in the mind as an idea which is parallel to the physical event.

Mind does not control the body. The body does not control the mind. They are the same thing expressed under two attributes: thought and extension. A stone falls on your head: the physical event and the idea of that event are not cause and effect. They are parallel expressions of one reality viewed from two sides.

This dissolves the old problem. Descartes needed a pineal gland to bridge mind and body. Spinoza needs nothing: there is no gap. A mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, "though expressed in two ways."

2P11: The first element, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is the idea of some particular thing actually existing.

So the first element of mind is the idea of some particular thing actually existing, and this is parallel to the physical event. Also, from this, the mode of mind is idea, just like the mode of our extension is body. And the first element that constitutes our mind is the idea of those modes of extension that actually exist.

Body is the object of mind

2P13: The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, in other words a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else.

• The idea of some particular things actually existing, shape our minds, like a container of body's objects.
• The object of our mind is the body as it exists, and nothing else

If we close eyes, and go into meditation, and also not thinking about anything, the only thing we get is the shape of our body as a mode of extension which actually exists. So therefore, the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body.

The only object that we can actually feel to be exist as the mode of extension is our body.

2P14: The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions.

• The mind does not work asynchronously, but it works in parallel with the body, also it can process a great number of things in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions.

2P15: The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Because of the network causality, mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things(ideas), and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions(sensation). So it's not only one idea, but every sensor we have is an input of an idea, and the idea that constitutes our feeling of existence is the combination of all these ideas.

There is no single "self" sitting at the center.

2P23: The mind does not know itself, except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body.

Mind knows itself in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body. So mind knows itself by the ideas of the modifications of the body. He is persisting that mind and body has a very close relation of parallelism.

2P26: Inadequate and confused ideas follow by the same necessity, as adequate or clear and distinct ideas.

• Inadequate ideas are part of nature, nature itself is perfect, but the inadequacy of ideas come from the lack of knowledge of reality.
• All ideas, even thinking about the idea that all ideas are necessary, are necessary as much as adequate ideas.

Errors of mind

Spinoza emphasizes that errors in mind happen at the time that mind imagine something that doesn't exist, but with thinking to them, we get the certain knowledge of their existence. Imagination without the idea of truth, is the cause of errors in mind, for example imagination of someone who does not exist anymore and we think that he is still alive, is an error in mind. Mind has designed to imagine similar realities with a flexibility regardless of conditions to reality, and this ability can lead to errors as we mismatch the imagination with reality because mind imagine things as in front of itself and get certainty of their existence, this will lead to distance from reality.

For example you might think of something tasty and you feel the taste in your mouth with sensors, but it's an error since there is no tasty thing in your mouth actually existing.

The idea of existence of someone by their own imagination is true, but the idea of existence of someone who does not exist anymore is false for us, because we know that he does not exist anymore. And with imagination, we get certain knowledge of their existence.

In other words, mind has the capability to believe it's own imagination with thinking to it.

A note on how our sensory ideas cause errors and how Spinoza was imagining the sun is in the distance of 200 feet

So, again, when we look at the sun, we imagine that it is distant from us about two hundred feet; this error does not lie solely in this fancy, but in the fact that, while we thus imagine, we do not know the sun's true distance or the cause of the fancy. For although we afterwards learn, that the sun is distant from us more than six hundred of the earth's diameters, we none the less shall fancy it to be near; for we do not imagine the sun as near us, because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the modification of our body involves the essence of the sun, in so far as our said body is affected thereby.

More examples:

• You feel the taste of something that is not in your mouth, by imaginations.
• Hearing a song in your head that isn't playing externally, a common experience where the mind reproduces familiar tunes.

Memory

2P18: If the human body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, when the mind afterwards imagines any of them, it will straightway remember the others also.

• Body = any physical entity.
• Memory is simply certain association of ideas together.
• Memory is like a network of ideas that shaped from the past experience of affecting them by each other at the same time.
• When we think of an ideas as a network, we remember the other ideas which has linked to that specific idea by the neighbor linked idea/node.
• The order of remembering is tightly associated with the order of affecting by them for each individual, basically the order of ideas is the order we remember them, and the order of ideas shaped by the order of affecting by things. 2P7
• Each node/idea can be an idea, memory, feeling or the cause of what happened in the past, that's why each person's network memory is unique.
• Since memory is based on past bodily interactions and not based on rational understanding of causes that made effect happen, it will cause errors as it's misinterpretation of connecting similar memories together.
• As much as a path of nodes/ideas repeated, it will be more remembered and the possibility for that path to become more findable in the network of ideas will be higher.

Example from 2P18:

You hear the word of "apple", you would immediately think of apple with no processing on the word apple itself, because you have seen apple and called it at the same time.

• A soldier and farmer see horse tracks in the road.

  • Soldier will get to the idea of horseman, and from there will get the the idea of war, and so on.

    • horse tracks -> horseman -> soldier -> war -> death
    • This is because soldier ideas in soldier's mind associated from tracks -> horseman -> war. Since this process of seeing them together has happened many times in soldier's past, the soldier will remember them together.

  • Countryman/farmer will get to the idea of food and family.

    • horse tracks -> horse -> plow -> field -> harvest -> food -> family -> love -> reproduction
    • This is because the farmer's mind has associated the idea with something else and has not experienced war.

So we see that the unique network of ideas in each person's mind is shaped by the past experiences of affecting by them at the same time.

From these nodes, we can see that the mind might from node A, get to node B or F, and so on after that. This is an example of 1 to 2 node per each idea, in reality we remember more than 2 things with each other. We will talk about this concept more under memory later.

Sensory inadequate ideas of body

2P24: The human mind does not involve an adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body.

2P28: The ideas of the modifications of the human body, in so far as they have reference only to the human mind, are not clear and distinct, but confused.

• Before he said that human body is composed of many complex separated parts which each function differently.
• That's why the mind doesn't have an adequate knowledge of the parts and complexity of them.
  • For example you feel your chest, but you don't know how your heart is working, or how your lungs are working, you don't feel those parts, but you feel the chest as a whole, so therefor, it's not an adequate knowledge.

You do not have direct access to your own mind. You know yourself only through what happens to your body: through sensations, modifications, impressions. The knowledge is real but inadequate: a partial view of a system too complex to perceive fully from inside.

Errors the result of inadequate ideas of reality(inadequate ideas)

2P35: Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

Before this at [2P26] (that we said) and before this, he states that how mind's inadequate ideas are necessary as much as adequate ideas.

He states that ideas of nature are necessarily true and perfect as reality is, but the falsity and inadequacy of ideas come from where we do not have enough knowledge of reality. That's how you assume a knowledge or idea is falsy, with it's destination from truth. So the falsity is the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

In other words he's pointing out that everything in reality is perfect, it's our lack of knowledge that leads to inadequate ideas and errors in mind.

2P36: Inadequate and confused ideas follow by the same necessity, as adequate or clear and distinct ideas.

There is no good or bad. An inadequate idea is necessary as much as an adequate idea, and they follow by the same necessity. There is no good or bad for an ideas, because they all are in God/nature, so they are necessary. Idea is a mode of mind, and it follows necessity, just like how a substance follows necessity.

What is an adequate idea?

2P39: That, which is common to and a property of the human body and such other bodies as are wont to affect the human body, and which is present equally in each part of either, or in the whole, will be represented by an adequate idea in the mind.

Something common for all of us, for example, a triangle, triangle is the same for everyone. We all agree on triangle, I don't think if anyone wants to have an argue on triangle and their rules.

For every material thing, there is a specific idea of it in God. We know that things has been determined, and the specific idea of their determined nature is an adequate idea as it will happen. For example mixing 2 chemical matters, would produce to a specific result, adequate idea is to know the causes and effects in the process. Since he believed the idea of doing something, and doing it are the same, as the parallelism, he keeps the connection of idea and action.

The invention of airplanes was an idea that exist inside God, which will work as it's determined. Studying aerodynamics and understanding airflow and lots of other things of it is an adequate idea which will work as it's determined by nature rules. Adequate idea must lead to driven nature(aerodynamics) and understanding it by eternal laws.

Kinds of knowledge

1. Knowledge of the first kind

Also called as procedural knowledge, because it's the knowledge that we get from the procedures of the past, and it's the knowledge that we get from the past experiences.

2P41: Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.

Having read or heard certain words we remember things and form certain ideas concerning them(assumption), similar to those through which we imagine things(imagination)

• Remembering things and forming ideas concerning them
• Imaginations (something that is not part of reality, but we imagine it)
• Assumptions or beliefs
• Words and Symbols
• Senses or feelings
• Memory

2. Knowledge of the second kind

Also called rational thinking: notions common to all, which you can see must hold, not because you tested them, but because they follow.

Notions common to all men, and adequate ideas of the properties of things

For example the idea of triangle, is an adequate idea because it's not contained bias of human mind and it's reflecting the reality as it will be, because the nature of triangle never changes.

3. Knowledge of the third kind (intuition)

I will hereafter show, a third kind of knowledge, which we will call intuition. This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the absolute essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.

Later on in the page of knowledge I explain more on intuition.

2P42: Knowledge of the second and third kinds, not knowledge of the first kind, teaches us to distinguish the true from the false.

Validation of thoughts/emotions done by second and third, which looks for reason in them through the second and third kinds of knowledge, not the first kind.

Nature of reason and relation to knowledge

2P43: He, who has a true idea, simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.

A true idea is the idea that would be unarguable, has no doubt and it's certain. It's correspond to the nature of objective. In a situation where we understand the idea and corresponding reality to it.

2P44: It is not in the nature of reason to regard things as contingent, but as necessary.

You cannot assume that something just happened and use that as the reason. Reason needs to be perfectly inline with reality. Ignoring true causes and calling them contingent will lead to falsy ideas which origin from first kind of knowledge.

2P44 Corollary.1: Hence it follows, that it is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.

Reality only bends over in imaginations(that's a natural functionality of mind) You do not need to proof why Arthur is flying, because it's a sci-fi story, it's not real, it's the product of contingent imaginations where Arthur has been contingent to physics laws, unlike reality.

2P44 Corollary.2: It is in the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain form of eternity (sub quâdam æternitatis specie).

The nature of triangle has always been the same for eternity. Reasons regarding adequate ideas for triangle does not concern time. For the more complex reasons, we must look at things conditioned instead of contingent. When a country attacks another, it's rooted and related to strive for power of all nature, just like how we see a group of lions attack another kind, we know that thats the way nature goes and we understand it, for our own wars we regard them as contingent of nature instead of conditioned to the facts of nature and how it's necessity. So in our example if we go back the cause and effect of any event, we see it as the form of eternity and how it's necessary.

Free will

2P48: In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

• Every decision or thought arise, has a cause, and as long as there is cause and effect in the nature, there are rules that govern the causes and effects of mind.
• Will explain this one more in free-will page.

Every decision has a cause. That cause has its own cause. The chain extends back through your entire history: through childhood associations, bodily states, sensory impressions, and the ideas those impressions generated. You do not choose freely. You act from the necessity of your nature.

2P49: There is in the mind no volition or affirmation and negation, save that which an idea, inasmuch as it is an idea, involves.

Your idea and will are not separated, but they are part of the same process. Thinking of an idea and willing are the same. What we do in action is a direct result of our ideas, our action and ideas are the same.

Don't worry, will exist

But this is not despair. Will and understanding are the same thing:

[2P49.Corollary]: Will and understanding are one and the same.

Now since our will is a direct result of our ideas, the true will is in understanding subject and having adequate ideas.

The true freedom is not in choosing without causes. That is incoherent. The true freedom is in understanding: having adequate ideas of the causes that determine you, and through that understanding, acting from your own nature rather than from confusion.

We can see how this connects back to the network causality of mind. The system is too interconnected, too sensitive to initial conditions, for any single node to comprehend the whole. Understanding is always partial. But partial understanding, pursued honestly through reason rather than imagination, is the only path toward freedom Spinoza offers, and it is enough.

I'll explain more on free-will and also more on knowledge

Definition of Universe from the book:

The Universe is a very big thing that contains a great number of planets and a great number of beings. It is Everything. What we live in. All around us.

• In that universe, the laws of physics can be bent so easily that it's not even worth mentioning. Time travel is so commonplace that there is no distinction between the past and the future.

• Earth is destroyed to build a new hyperspace bypass. Later, it is revealed that a duplicate Earth was created by the planet designers some time before the original Earth was destroyed.

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is located at the end of time and matter. You can watch the end of the universe while you eat a live cow that wants to be eaten, so it's not a problem!

Imagine the impossibles!

Conflict in the story of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• It states that the area of the Universe is infinite.

• It states that the Universe is the same size as the mind of the person who is thinking about it.

• There is a restaurant at the end of the universe, so it's not infinite!

Let's talk about our world now

Our world is not like that, we have rules and laws that we have to follow, and we can't just bend them as we like.

For example: imagine a basketball player throwing the ball to the basket, with the laws of physics, we say with 100% accuracy where the ball will land, and we can calculate the speed and the angle of the ball.

2 things needed to do that

• We need to know all the necessary variables
• We need to know the rules of physics

consider the knowledge of weather forecasting, we can predict the weather with a good accuracy, but we can't predict it with 100% accuracy, because we don't know all the necessary variables.

Basically we call something random that we don't know all the necessary variables to predict it. A long while ago, people thought that the weather is random, but now we know that it's not, and we can predict it with a good accuracy.

Cause and effect

Cause and effect is what we model as to describe the flow of action and reaction in the universe. If a cause happens, then an effect will happen. What sits between this specific cause and the effect is the laws of physics or nature and make cause and effect happen.

1A3: From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.

• Definite cause: a cause that is fixed and determinate, it produces this effect and no other (we will talk about what prediction means).
• Effect: the result of the cause. (the ball lands in the basket)
  • For example: if we exactly throw the ball at the right direction, speed and angle, then the ball has no choice but to land in the basket.
• Last parts argues that it's not possible to have an effect without a cause, effect can't happen without a cause. he argues that what ever happens in the universe has a cause, otherwise it can't happen.

Consider any event that has happened:

The event has a cause or a set of causes. The event, which has shaped from cause to effect, will be the cause of the next effect or set of effect.

Nothing can't come from nothing

If all the causes happen, then the effect necessarily follows, and if the cause doesn't happen, then the effect can't happen.

1P36: There is no cause from whose nature some effect does not follow.

• There can't be a cause that doesn't have an effect.
• If there is a cause, then there is an effect.
• If there is no cause, then there is no effect.

Randomness and unpredictability are deferent

1P29: Nothing in the universe is contingent (exception), but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

• Nothing can't come from nothing, everything come from something, and everything has a cause.
• Things are related and conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
  • Existence and operation of things are related to the laws of nature, like laws of physics and chemistry, and the laws of the divine nature.
• All things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
  • For example in the story: Arthur's bag that he saw last time in greece found suddenly in the spaceship, the bag come from nothing, there was no cause for it to be there, but our world doesn't work, everything has a cause.

Basically, there is no randomness in the universe, everything has a cause, and everything has an effect.

Pseudo Randomness

Pseudo random is a random with a logic behind it, it's not truly random, but it's random enough for us to not be able to predict it. Like dice, we can't predict the outcome of the dice, but if we know all the necessary variables, we can predict it. This is what people mismatch with randomness, they think that it's random, but it's not, it's just that we don't know all the necessary variables to predict it. Things are pseudo random, till we don't know the reason behind it, only the logic is too complicated for us to understand. What you might consider as random/pseudo random is reflecting the systematic chaos of the nature that we can't predict.

The lines of cause and effect to infinity

We notice that when a cause happens, effect necessarily follows, and then the effect itself becomes a cause for the next effect, and so on.

1P28: Every individual thing, or everything which is finite and has a conditioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act unless it is conditioned to exist and act by another cause, which is also finite and has a conditioned existence, and this likewise cannot exist or be conditioned to act unless it is conditioned by another cause, and this by another, and so on to infinity.

• Example of a long cause and effect line in human history that we can see is the evolution of humans from the first cell to the human being.
  • The process of our evolution is a long line of cause and effect that we can see in the history of the earth, which has caused many other effects in the world by our necessary existence and necessary actions.

Backward traversing the lines of cause and effect

Consider the event of discovering the continent of America by Columbus:

Chain of Events Leading to the Discovery of America

1. Discovery of America:

   • Why did he discover America?
     • Because he was searching for a new route to India.

2. Searching for a New Route to India:

   • Why did he want to find a new route to India?
     • Because the old route was blocked by the Ottoman Empire.

3. Old Route Blocked by the Ottoman Empire:

   • Why was the old route blocked by the Ottoman Empire?
     • Because they wanted to control the trade route to India.

4. Control of the Trade Route to India:

   • Why did the Ottoman Empire want to control the trade route to India?
     • Because they wanted to dominate trade.

5. Desire to Dominate Trade:

   • Why did they want to dominate trade?
     • Because controlling trade was essential for controlling the economy.

6. Control of the Economy:

   • Why did they want to control the economy?
     • Because controlling the economy provided power over people.

7. Power Over People:

   • Why did they want to control the people?
     • Because they aimed to expand their influence and control globally.

8. Desire for Global Control:

   • Why did they want to control the world?
     • Because it is inherent in human nature to seek power and glory.

9. Human Nature to Seek Power and Glory:

   • Why do humans seek power and glory?
     • Because of the necessity of the divine nature.

10. Necessity of the Divine Nature:

    • Why is it the necessity of the divine nature?
      • Because all living things have an intrinsic drive to be more and exist more.

11. Drive to Be More and Exist More:

    • Why is it the way of all living things?
      • Because the struggle for existence and improvement is a fundamental characteristic of life.
      • Read more about the struggle for existence and perfection under "Life" if I wrote about it yet.

12. ..and so on, past the Big Bang, with no first cause to stop at:

    • Why did the Big Bang happen?
      • Because of the necessary causes that made it happen, and those causes had their own causes, back without end.

So we can see the chain of cause and effect, now let's change it. To change this process of causes and effects of this event, we need to change one of the causes in the chain, and the effect will change. But it's not that simple, because every cause that leads to effect, has causes that made it happen, and so on. So to change any cause that happens in the universe, we would need to go back through every cause that made it happen, and there is no first cause to stop at, so the whole chain would have to be different for the effect to change. So we see that everything is connected, and everything has a cause, and everything has an effect.

Conclusion

Necessity (of the Divine Nature)

Everything before happened exactly as it should have happened, and everything that will happen will happen exactly as it should happen.

No good or bad

Nature does not categorize events as good or bad, ones the event happens, it's necessary for it to happen, it was not by anyone choice. For example, we see animals eating each other and we accepted that for the wild nature, because we state that they don't have free will, but we believe that we have free will, and we can think, and we can avoid making mistakes, I will talk about this in the mind section under life later on.

Alternative realities

We might think within ourselves that the past could have been different, but it couldn't, because the necessary causes. the future will also happen exactly as it should. There is only one reality, the one that we are living in.

Ones the rules are set, the game is played

Imagine you have a computer game in a self-play mode, once you set the initial values, the future of the game is determined by the past and current state of the game.

Game of life

Game of life is a great example of the system, where the future of the game is determined by the past and current state of the game. And also if you want to play it in your terminal you can use my game of life implementation.

What happens next moment is the result of the past and current state.

The future is predetermined and it's called determinism.

Next steps

Causality

God

Resources:

What is universe from douglas adams

Ethics Text

Why we look for meaning in everything?

1APENFIX All such opinions spring from the notion commonly entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view.

• Everything in nature acts with an end in view, this is a common notion that all things in nature has
• All our actions has a end result or should say goal in view

It is accepted as certain, that God himself directs all things to a definite goal (for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he might worship him). I will, therefore, consider this opinion, asking first, why it obtains general credence, and why all men are naturally so prone to adopt it? secondly, I will point out its falsity; and, lastly, I will show how it has given rise to prejudices about good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and the like.

• It is accepted as certain that God( Anthropomorphism of God ) directs all things to a definite goal, and that God made all things (there is a goal and meaning for everything).
• This has lead to prejudices about good and bad.

It will be sufficient here, if I assume as a starting point, what ought to be universally admitted, namely, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, that all have the desire to seek for what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of such desire.

• Born ignorant of the causes of things (we learn as we grow with experience)
• All have the desire to seek for what is useful to them (we seek what is useful to us)

Herefrom it follows, first, that men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire.

• Men make desire, men believes it's him who makes the desire, but ignorance of the true cause of the desire.
• Example: Desire for sexual intercourse, we think it's us who desire it, but it's the nature that makes us desire it, we might be ignorance to the cause and underlying of desire, and behave with desire as a will of ourselves, meanwhile having the idea of a desire has been determined for us and it's ncessesery.
• Knowing desire and will as one and the same thing will bering this illusion of free-will, free-will illusion is contrary to self awareness.

Secondly, that men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek. Thus it comes to pass that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own.

• Men makes good and bad of everything
• Men reflect his own good and bad on events, for example, death is bad for him and loved one, good for enemy, no difference for the one who we don't know, but there is no good or bad in death, it's just a natural event. For nature, no good or bad exist, but things happen because all the causes for that particular event happened, and we know it's impossible if all the causes for an event happen, and the effect would't follow, so everything with no exception happens because of necessity under laws of nature.

Further, as they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in the search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, &c., they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences.

• From the fact that we make good and bad for everything, we find many goods and useful assists for us, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, &c.,

Now as they are aware, that they found these conveniences and did not make them, they think they have cause for believing, that some other being has made them for their use. As they look upon things as means, they cannot believe them to be self-created; but, judging from the means which they are accustomed to prepare for themselves, they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the universe endowed with human freedom, who have arranged and adapted everything for human use.

• Men find meaning in everything, when born with eyes, teeth, herbs, animals, sun, sea, etc. Since they have not made these things, they think there is a being who made them for their use and can't believe it's self-created.
• From this making meaning for everything and ignorance of self-creation, they believe in some ruler who made everything for human use and adapted everything for human use to do something specific.
• This perception lead us to think that everything made for us to achieve the end in view.

The true causes of things: Ignorance

1APENFIX

We must not omit to notice that the followers of this doctrine, anxious to display their talent in assigning final causes, have imported a new method of argument in proof of their theory, namely, a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance; thus showing that they have no other method of exhibiting their doctrine.

followers of this doctrine = ignorance people to the causes who look to make meaning of final causes.

For example, if a stone falls from a roof on to someone's head, and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance? Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But why," they will insist, "was the wind blowing, and why was the man at that very time walking that way?" If you again answer, that the wind had then sprung up because the sea had begun to be agitated the day before, the weather being previously calm, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again insist: "But why was the sea agitated, and why was the man invited at that time?" So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God-in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance.

• A stone falls off a roof and kill someone
• People think that stone moved because of a reason and there was a meaning in it
• People would not believe it happen by chance
• If you explain that it was wind blowing, they ask why wind was blowing
• They continue looking for meaning in the causes of that effect till you accept the existence of
• Ignorance of causes

So, again, when they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed; and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art, conclude that it has been fashioned, not mechanically, but by divine and supernatural skill, and has been so put together that one part shall not hurt another.

• Because of ignorance they would think that there body, as a great work of art, has been made for them by supernatural causes. (of course these days we know Darwin's theory)

Quick Summary

Everything in Nature act with a end in view and goal, including us.

• This evolutionary based act lead make meaning of good and bad for finite actions.
• Reflection of this good and bad on events and giving meaning to everything.
• From this reflection and meaning of good and bad, it follows finding of lots of natural goods.
• From this we find that everything made for us to use by a creator with end in view, an end as the same as there own finite action which is conditioned to meaning of good.

We must be aware of true causes of a event and understand, instead of making meaning, good and bad for the sake of an end.

Ethics 4PREF: Chapter 4 PREFACE

The reason or cause why God or Nature exists, and the reason why he acts, are one and the same. Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end.

God is self-caused, and he doesn't act for the sake of an end for existence, and it's actions doesn't have a origin or end.

Wherefore, a cause which is called final is nothing else but human desire, in so far as it is considered as the origin or cause of anything. For example, when we say that to be inhabited is the final cause of this or that house, we mean nothing more than that a man, conceiving the conveniences of household life, had a desire to build a house.

Our desire has begin, will and desire for the sake of an end, now from this page of talking, it's more visible that what we expect from nature is something which is conditioned to our desire. It follows that we assume creator as in the shape of humans with human attributes and desire, which perfectly fits into the picture.

Wherefore, the being inhabited, in so far as it is regarded as a final cause, is nothing else but this particular desire, which is really the efficient cause; it is regarded as the primary cause, because men are generally ignorant of the causes of their desires. They are, as I have often said already, conscious of their own actions and appetites, but ignorant of the causes whereby they are determined to any particular desire.

Therefore, the common saying that Nature sometimes falls short, or blunders, and produces things which are imperfect, I set down among the glosses treated of in the Appendix to Part I. Perfection and imperfection, then, are in reality merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from a comparison among one another of individuals of the same species; hence I said above (II. Def. vi.), that by reality and perfection I mean the same thing.

For we are wont to refer all the individual things in nature to one genus, which is called the highest genus, namely, to the category of Being, whereto absolutely all individuals in nature belong. Thus, in so far as we refer the individuals in nature to this category, and comparing them one with another, find that some possess more of being or reality than others, we, to this extent, say that some are more perfect than others. Again, in so far as we attribute to them anything implying negation, as term, end, infirmity, etc., we, to this extent, call them imperfect, because they do not affect our mind so much as the things which we call perfect, not because they have any intrinsic deficiency, or because Nature has blundered. For nothing lies within the scope of a thing's nature, save that which follows from the necessity of the nature of its efficient cause, and whatsoever follows from the necessity of the nature of its efficient cause necessarily comes to pass.

When we compare individuals from the same nature, we see some of them being more perfect than others, in here we say that nature has fallen short for it's quality, and we call it all imperfect. Because they don't affect our mind more than what we call perfect (perfect as the meaning of what we would like to define and not finding it in nature).

He also explains more in details about perfection, which I shall write about it in it's own page.

Definition of good and bad

As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.

Things happens because of necessity, good and bad, are our thinking mode to model the meaning for ourselves. By modeling final cause to good or bad, without the knowledge of prior causes, we are forming ideas which is called opinion. Opinions which vary in nature from one man to another, thats why we find many different religions that tried to go the same path by different ways, even the path of believing in things which doesn't exist has been deterministic, with no will and neccecery by all its prior causes.

Ethics 4D7: By an end, for the sake of which we do something, I mean a desire.

Existential Panic

So we saw that there is no actual meaning in the universe for the sake of an end, it's our minds misinterpretation of reality.

But for existential crisis, we must know and be aware of our thinking path and the way that this error generates, it can be controlled if its understood.

People happen to trap in this error as far as they project there own human value onto Nature. We should't judge nature by human standards, because we know that nature hasn't made for us and we are not the special loved ones of a creator who made us for the sake of a master plan to save everything.

Recognition of this error and its process gives you awareness and understanding of it. If you deeply and rationally think of how the error generates, and also see the common pattern which rapidly repeat through history and time for all generations by necessity, you will be able to understand it and overcome your fear and desire for the sake of an end.

The solution

The solution lies in understanding the process of error and being aware of the value reflection.

Existential meaning error generation pattern: - We born ignorant with no default knowledge of causes and things. - Everything in nature act for the sake of an end in view. - We do everything for the sake of an end, this will lead for us to look whats useful for us by understanding the final cause. - If we don't find the source and meaning of phenomena, we consider ourselves to be the primary objective of phenomena and consider self as the ultimate target by labeling it as good and bad. - For example, we find many means which assist us to search whats useful for us, like animals, plants, teeth and etc.. - Now that we found all these things and we know that we haven't made them, so we start to think that there has to be a cause for believing that some other being has made them for us use and can't believe that all is self-caused. - So we judge based on the meaning of things that there must be a ruler who arranged everything for them to use.

So what do we do? Don't panic

The very first step is not to panic.

The question arise is that if life has no meaning, then why we are here and what should we do?

We do what everyone before us did, making our own meaning, don't wait for the world to give you a meaning for existence. In order for something for us to make meaning out of, it has to act for the sake of an end in view, but the world doesn't act for the sake of an end, nether seams if there is any kind of will behind it.

How do we find it?

• Seek knowledge and understanding
• Meaning doesn't just come to you, so don't wait for it, don't wait for something to inspire you like an spark.
• We expect the meaning to just be there for us(which now we know it's not there) so there is no choice but to make your own meaning.
• Ethical living and virtue
• Ethical living and virtue are considered the best goals that a person can achieve thought there life path, nothing can be compared to the sense of inner peace purpose which follows from.
• Follow the rest of Ethics for this.

The highest good of an individual is to seek best for his community

Lastly and most importantly, seek the highest good by finding the best for your community. This community at the very first level has 1 member which is self, and at each level it expand out.

• Self
• Family
• Neighborhood
• City
• Country
• World

Enjoy the ride

Now that we know world doesn't work for the sake of an end, it makes more sense for us not to take the final cause so seriously.

Requirements to know:

• Universe
• Causality
• Life

What is body

So far we talked that everything is in the one substance. A door and your body are modes of it, not substances of their own.

Now we talk about body as the mode of substance.

2D1: By body I understand a mode which expresses in a certain and determinate manner the essence of God, in so far as he is considered as an extended thing.

Body is a mode of substance, which is an expression of God's essence in a certain and determinate manner, in so far as he is considered as an extended thing. What is an extended thing? it's a thing that has a length, width, and height.

2D2: I say it expresses in a certain and determinate manner the essence of God, in so far as he is considered as an extended thing, in so far, I repeat, as he is displayed through the attributes of extension.

Body expresses in a certain and determinate manner the essence of God( substance ), in so far as he is considered as an extended thing, in so far as he is displayed through the attributes of extension.

Determinate manner

The phrase "certain and determinate manner" matters. Body is not substance itself: substance is infinite, indivisible, self-caused. Body is a finite expression of substance: a mode with particular shape, particular size, particular position.

Your body is not separate from nature. Your body is nature expressing itself in a certain determinate configuration.

Body as the object of mind

[E2p13] The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, in other words a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else.

The mind is the idea of the body. Not an idea about the body: the idea of the body.

One thing, two attributes

Mind and body are not two substances interacting across some gap. They are one and the same thing, expressed through two different attributes: thought and extension.

[E2p7s] A mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways.

A circle existing in nature and the idea of that circle existing in God: one and the same thing displayed through different attributes.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. There is no gap to bridge because there was never a separation.

What the mind can perceive

The body's capacity to be affected determines the mind's capacity to perceive.

[E2p14] The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions.

A more complex body (one capable of being affected in more ways) produces a more capable mind. This is the reason you perceive more than a stone does.

The mind does not know the body directly. It knows the body only through the modifications the body undergoes. You don't perceive your liver: you perceive the effects your liver produces. The mind perceives external bodies the same way, through how those bodies affect your body.

Why this matters

There is no ghost in the machine, and no soul piloting flesh. There is one substance, expressed as body when conceived under extension and as mind when conceived under thought.

The body is not a prison for the mind. The body is the mind, under a different attribute. Everything that happens in the body is perceived by the mind. Everything the mind conceives corresponds to a state of the body.

If you want to know more of body and connections to mind, you can read mind

Requirements to know:

• Universe
• Causality

Life

So far we talked that everything is a mode of one substance, which is God or Nature. Substance acts from its own nature alone. It is the finite things, the modes, that are conditioned by causes outside themselves to act in a certain way, see 1P28. We also talked in the Building Blocks that our body and our mind are not two substances, and not little pieces of a big one, they are the same mode of nature seen under Extension and under Thought, see 2P7.

How did life start and evolve?

Life started as a simple cell and evolved into more complex organisms over time, this is called evolution. From Spinoza's point of view, each cell is the cause of the next cell, and so on, until we get to the most complex organism through which is us, humans.

I left this part of life to Darwin, he did a great job explaining how life evolved from simple cells to complex organisms, and how we are all connected to each other as living beings. He has a book called On the Origin of Species, which explains how life evolved from simple cells to complex organisms.

2D1: By body I mean a mode which expresses in a certain determinate manner the essence of God, in so far as he is considered as an extended thing.

Your body is a mode/state of the essence of God/Nature which is in specific shape and form.

2P11: The first element, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is the idea of some particular thing actually existing.

Our perception of our body is the very first element of our mind that constitutes our being.

What do all beings struggle for?

3P6: Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.

Strive to be and exist more in this world, if our goal was anything else than this, our generation would not continue surviving.

• Struggle for survival ( Conatus )
• Struggle for well being ( quality of life )

4P4 It is impossible, that man should not be a part of Nature, or that he should be capable of undergoing no changes, save such as can be understood through his nature only as their adequate cause.

It's impossible not to be part of nature. And it's impossible to be capable of confronting nature and not be affected by it.

4P4Corollary Hence it follows, that man is necessarily always a prey to his passions, that he follows and obeys the general order of nature, and that he accommodates himself thereto, as much as the nature of things demands.

All are the prey to their passions( emotions/desires ), which is part of the general order of nature.

4P21 We can never be by free will the cause of any of our actions, but always the necessary cause.

Because all living beings are part of the nature, and nature is governed by laws, and we are governed by nature, so we can never be free. Our actions are always the necessary cause of the nature.

2P31: Will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause.

Will is not a free cause, but a necessary cause. It's necessary for us to have a will to survive and reproduce, it's not free.

2P31Coroll.1: Hence it follows, first, that God does not act according to freedom of the will.

God, the one substance, of which you and every living being are modes, does not act according to freedom of the will, but by necessity.

What kind of things we call living beings?

Anything with a physical form and mind is a living being.

Conclusion

Life is a struggle for existence and well-being, and all beings are part of nature and governed by its laws. We are not free, but necessary causes of our actions, and our will is not free, but a necessary cause. God does not act according to freedom of the will, but by necessity.

To demonstrate this:

When we look at animals in the wild world eating each other, we don't feel pity or interrupt, because we know about the cycle of life and how it works between animals and in nature. We accepted that animals do not have free will and act based on there instincts and needs. But we have not accepted this matter for ourselves since we believe that we have the ability of thinking/reasoning which give us free-will, but that's not the case, since all living beings are part of nature and governed by its laws, so we can never be ultimately free. Now with this point of view, consider world events and how people act, and you will see that it's all part of the general order of nature and everything is necessary.

Requirements to know

• Universe
• Causality

In the previous posts we discussed how everything in nature happens because of necessity and with infinite accuracy. Perfection and reality are synonymous: the laws of nature cannot be broken. Now we arrive at the question of miracles.

What a miracle would be

A miracle is an event that happens without a cause or explanation, defying the laws of nature. We might see them as randomness, but randomness differs from unpredictability: randomness means no cause exists, while unpredictability means we don’t know the cause.

In the world described in the previous articles, where everything follows from necessity, miracles have no place.

To make a miracle happen, you need to break one of these:

• The laws of Nature: Like when Arthur in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy flies by throwing himself to the ground and missing. In our world, gravity does not work like that.
• Creation Ex Nihilo: Making something from nothing. Nothing can exist or be conceived outside God or Nature, see E1p15, so nothing arrives from outside. A new thing is always a new mode of what already is, and a bag appearing from nothing is not possible in our world.

We have never seen any effect without a cause.

We have never seen any cause without an effect.

We have never observed any of the rules of nature being broken in the process of causality. If it were possible to break them, we would have taken maximum advantage.

How impossible is it to break a law of nature?

Consider a triangle: it has 3 sides and 3 angles.

A + B + C = 180 degrees.

This is the rule that applies to all triangles in the world. To perform a miracle, you need to break a rule like this. Our mind knows it is impossible, because it is reality, and reality is perfect.

We can see how the triangle is perfect because its rules cannot be broken. The triangle is part of reality. We discussed this concept in the previous post: perfection and reality are the same thing. The rules of nature are perfect in the same way the rules of the triangle are perfect. In the perfection page, we discussed the deep concept of perfection.

E1p29 “Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.”

Two things to notice:

• Not contingent, but conditioned: Nothing is free in the world. Everything is conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature and can only follow its predetermined path.
• Necessity of the divine nature: Like the triangle example, divine nature represents the unbreakable rules of nature due to their perfect nature.

E1p33 “Things could have been produced by God (nature) in no other way, and in no other order than that in which they have been produced.”

Things could only happen the way they did. Not because someone chose it, but because the laws of nature made it necessary.

Every moment is a node

Assume every moment is a node in a linear graph:

1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → … → 1000

The result of the next moment follows from the previous moment, and so on. The sequence is fixed: the future results from the past.

You can predict the 1000th moment because the sequence is chained to preceding nodes. Now consider what a miracle would mean: breaking a link, making node 500 produce something different from what its causes determined. This is impossible because each node is the necessary result of the one before it. Considering a miracle's backward traversal of causes and effects, it's impossible to break the chain because it is fixed and the future is a result of the past, logically speaking.

As we discussed in the causality posts, to change any event in the world you would have to change the whole order that follows from God's nature, and that chain of causes goes back without end. That order is eternal, it is not something that switched on at a moment in time. Nothing can be changed.

Hume on miracles

David Hume argued that we should proportion our belief to the evidence. His question was whether any testimony could ever be good enough to justify believing that a law of nature was broken, when the evidence for the law is everything anyone has ever observed and the evidence for the miracle is somebody's report of it.

Notice what kind of question that is. It is about what we are entitled to believe, not about what can happen. Hume does not show that a miracle is impossible, and readers still argue about how much his argument actually proves.

Spinoza's argument is a different one. He says nothing happens outside the necessity of the divine nature, see E1p29, so there is nothing for the testimony to be about in the first place. Hume comes at it from the evidence, Spinoza from what God is. They end up equally sceptical about miracles, but the two arguments are not the same argument and neither one stands in for the other.

more to read

Conclusion

Miracles are events without a cause, beyond the laws of nature. It is impossible to break the perfect laws of nature because they are part of reality, the very same way the triangle is part of reality.

Everything happens because of necessity, with infinite accuracy. There is no room for miracles in the chain of cause and effect.

References

Properties of a triangle

Watch on YouTube

Building blocks of God or Nature or Universe

It's important to understand what he was trying to do first.

He was trying to model the world in a way that it makes sense with logic. To do that you have to define everything from the ground up and make abstract model of things. Only then you can start to play with the model and make propositions and corollaries from them.

The way to do it is to start from the most general forms of things, and then set propositions to the most specific forms of things.

Attributes, Substance, and Modes

Each of them are related to each other, to understand one of them you need to understand the others, so you need to be patience. They do not have the same meaning as in English, they are defined by him in his book as abstracts to make sense of the universe.

Substance

1P3 By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

• Substance is what stands on its own and is understood through itself alone.
• It's not a material and not an ingredient, nothing is built out of it.
• You can't call anything that exists in the nature a substance, there is only one substance.
• The nature itself is that one substance.

All the nature, is the same substance as one. The only example of substance:

• Nature or God itself

A chair, your physical body, and your mind are not substances, they are modes of that one substance, ways the nature is (we will get to the mind later in the life section).

1P6 By God(Nature), I mean a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.

• Nature is a substance consisting of infinite attributes (we will get to this later)
• Each attribute expresses eternal and infinite essentiality

What is Essentiality?

Essentiality refers to the core nature of something, its fundamental properties that define its existence. In the context of Spinoza’s philosophy:

Essentiality and Causality: Essentiality is intrinsically linked to cause and effect. Spinoza believed that the essence of a thing includes the necessity of its existence and the actions that follow from it. The nature of something dictates how it interacts with and effects other things. It's related to the concept of causality, where the essence of a thing determines its effects on other things. For example 2 things which react differently to the same cause, because of their essence. Both of them are modes of the one substance, what differs is their essence as modes:

• Iron: When exposed to fire, iron heats up and eventually melts but maintains its structure longer due to its high melting point.
• Wood: When exposed to fire, wood combusts and burns quickly due to its lower ignition temperature and organic composition.

1P13 A substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible.

In here, if we replace the word of substance with nature, it makes more sense. Nature is absolutely infinite, and it's indivisible, it's one unified field, and everything is part of it.

Attributes

1D4 By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.

• Intellect: what you understand as a human being.
• Perceives: what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.

We know 2 attributes:

• Extension (physical world)
• Thought (mind)

1P3 Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another.

Spinoza was looking at physical world and mind environment as 2 different things, and they have nothing in common with each other, an idea in your mind can't be shared with the physical world, and vice versa. He explain everything about both environments and how they contribute to the causality of the universe, you can read about mind under life section.

For more info of this P take a look at God

Mode

Think of mode as the state of substance, in which exposes the attribute of the substance.

Bear with me, I will explain it in a better way.

1D5 By mode, I mean the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.

• What the hell is affection of a substance?
• We know that substance is what is in itself and is understood through itself, and there is only one of it.
• We know substance has a core/underlying nature called essence.
• This essence is the reason for the existence of the substance, and also the cause of the effects of the substance.
• Essence for a substance is the reason of it's existence, and the cause of the effects on it.

Mode of extension:

Chair for example: Chair is a state of the one substance, shaped in a way that we can sit on it. Chair is a mode/state of substance, which is exposing the attribute of extension.

Mode of mind:

The mode/state of your mind, is an idea, it's possible because your mind is a mode of the nature under the attribute called thought, and the mode/state of your mind is an idea.

1P14 Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.

There is one substance (aka nature), which is God itself, and everything else is a mode of it, it has no parts.

It's not possible to think of a substance other than the nature itself, so everything else is in God as a mode of it.

There is no difference in kind between the chair and your physical body, they are both modes of the one nature, they are both in God, they change shape/form/state, but yet still the same nature.

The Map of Reality

So far we know Spinoza defined these building block elements:

• Attributes
• Substance
• Mode

Now we will use these building blocks to create a map of reality so we see how it looks like and fit together.

This map is a simplified version of the reality map, but it gives you a good idea of how the building blocks fit together.

Let's not get into what are the rest of the infinite attributes of God/Nature, some criticize Spinoza for not defining them and say that he failed to prove his theory because of that, but later on I will talk about something that didn't exist in his time and it's man made, the Computer! It's not a new attribute, the attributes are infinite and nobody can make one, it's a mode where the parallel between extension and thought is unusually easy to see.

Conclusion

We have 3 redefined words that are the building blocks of the universe:

• Substance: what is in itself and is understood through itself.
  • There is exactly one of it, the nature, or God.
  • It's indivisible, and it's not a material of any kind.
  • Everything else that exists in the universe is a mode of it.
• Attributes: what makes up the essence of the one substance.
  • The nature of mind is thought, which is one of the attributes of that one substance.
  • Attributes are infinite because God/Nature is infinite.
• Modes: the state of the substance, in which exposes the attribute of the substance.
  • The chair is a mode of the one substance, which exposes the attribute of extension.
  • The state of your mind is an idea, which is a mode of the one substance, which exposes the attribute of thought.

Understanding all these took time for me and I know it is confusing at the beginning, but if you give it time and look at it from the lens of reality, you will soon find a unique intuitive worldview in which you find the reflection in reality.

God or nature is the very essence of everything in the system, without Nature, time and space would not have existed, no life would have been possible, and therefore you would not be reading this.

The traditional sense that is common of nature and God is as creation and creator, but Spinoza’s God is one and the same as nature, in a way that all exist in nature, which is self-caused, infinitely continues so there is no end of it. Nature is the cause of itself, and also the very cause of the existence of everything inside of it.

God or Nature, being one and the same thing, is the whole, infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, active system of the universe within which absolutely everything exists. This is the fundamental principle of Ethics.

I do not try to convince you of anything, but you need to logically know what God means in this context to continue the rest of the blog. Nothing here is personal; everything is logical..

Spinoza defined all the words from the ground up, the word God, does not have the same meaning in English or the concept you might think of.

Nature

It's equal to Universe, which I explained in Universe page.

Spinoza definition of God

Spinoza's God is fairly famous, but it's not well understood.

When they asked Albert Einstein if he believed in God, he said:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

If Spinoza's God was good enough for Einstein, it's gonna be also good enough for me and you!

Spinoza was looking at God, as the nature itself. God to him, is the creator of everything. God is the cause of everything. God is the essence of everything. God is the reason of cause and effect. God is what makes existence possible. God is what sits between cause and effect and makes it possible in the way it should happen.

• What is controlling your heart to beat?
  • It's a complex great number of cause and effect that makes it beat.
  • What makes cause and effect possible? Nature

It's interesting, when you think about it, it seems like he knew about the Darwinism theory before Darwin, but he was not talking about the evolution of species, he was talking about the evolution of everything, which we are part of it.

Substance

To see how this works, we need 3 words that Spinoza uses precisely: substance, mode, and attribute.

Substance in the system is one single thing seen in 3 ways, to indicate they are one and the same thing, those 3 are:

• Nature itself
• Nature under extension, which is what all bodies are modes of
• Nature under thought, which is what all minds are modes of

Later on in causality, we see how the same universal laws run through all of nature to make conclusions with them…

The substance is the thing that all these molecules are modes of, the one and the same thing that changes from one form to another.

(Mode or state) and transformation

Mode is the state of substance.

For example, water. Water changes from form to form, it can transform under conditioned causes, no matter what form, the underlying molecules are the same, it's the mode or state that is changing. The same goes for everything else in nature, including the mind/brain.

So, therefore, as substance is in its current mode, and if substance transforms but does not vanish out of existence, therefore it has existed since the beginning of time in other modes, and will always be part of God.

>[1.P21]: All things which follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must always exist and be infinite, or, in other words, are eternal and infinite through the said attribute.

Attributes

Attribute is what God possesses as its reality. There are infinite attributes that God can possess, and only 2 of them are named in the book:

• Physical world
• Mind

The physical world is where reality is being possessed, and the mind, as a second attribute, runs in parallel with it, and therefore possesses consciousness.

They have been considered 2 different attributes by what they possess, for the physical world, a substance is possessing a physical mode, but the mind possesses a mental state, which is an idea. Just like how an idea doesn’t belong to the physical world (it exists in the mind), and a physical thing cannot move to the mind, they are 2 different environments with different characteristics.

>[1.D4] By attribute, I understand that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.

Our mind can understand the physical world, and itself separately.

[>1.P9] The more reality or being a thing has, the greater the number of its attributes.

We can see how God possesses its reality through the extension attribute, and how the attribute of mind runs in parallel with it, with a different characteristic. How the substance word is reserved for all 5 of them in the map above, to indicate they are one and the same, being whole or part. And how the mode/state of each attribute differs one from another.

Back to God:

>[1P14] Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived. God is one and the same with Nature.

No nature or substance = no reality, because there would be nothing for anything to be in.

nature or substance -> reality. Therefore everything else can exist and be conceived, as a way that substance is, not as something sitting inside a box.

So, where do we stand in relation to God? We are not separate from God but are finite expressions (modes) of the infinite substance that is God or Nature. Our minds and bodies are simply temporary modes through which God’s eternal attributes of thought and extension are expressed. The more we understand how everything, including our own lives, follows from the laws of God or Nature, the more we align with the universe’s necessary order. In this sense, we achieve freedom not by escaping the laws of nature but by fully embracing and understanding them.

> [1P25]: Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.

So, therefore:

• God is the infinite extended substance inside which all other extended things (finite modes) exist in a particular mode.
• Everything inside God (all the substance) is part of God
• God possesses attributes that render modes.

Who are we?

Do you agree that you come from nature? Where have you been 100 years ago? you have been part of the nature somewhere, somehow in some distributed form that you can't imagine (which is called modifications or mode). Where will you be 100 years later? you will be part of the nature, but in a different form, which he calls modifications. But before and after, we all been part of nature, just like the door.

• Modifications or mode: We can think of it as the state of being. The state or mode of mind is idea, the state or mode in physical is substance which is part of the nature and it changes shape and form, but it's still part of the nature.
• Fixed and definite manner: means that you are part of the nature, but in a specific way, which is unique to you, and all the other things in the nature also have their own unique way of being part of the nature.

God = Nature = Universe = Reality, and the door and you are in it

For Spinoza, God was the nature itself, as one unified field, which is called substance. We are part of the Nature, so we are part of God. But, for Spinoza, you and the door are both modes of the one substance, because you are part of the nature, and the door is also part of the nature, so you and the door are part of the same thing, which he calls God. So, don't think that you are God; you are part of God just as much as the door is.

2P10 The being of substance does not appertain to the essence of man, in other words, substance does not constitute the actual being of man.

Difference between You, the door, and the God

There is no difference in kind between you and the door, both are modes of the one substance, and God is what they are modes of. The first 2 are part of the nature, and the last one is the nature itself. I say door because I have seen people who think all of us are God by Spinoza's definition, but it's not the case, we are part of the nature as much as everything else as one united field, which he calls God. I strongly don't think if Spinoza meant that we are God, we are part of nature, as much as everything else.

In many sentences in your day to day life, you can easily change the word "God" with "Nature" and it will still make sense.

• God is the creator of everything
  • Nature is the creator of everything
• God is the cause of everything
  • Nature is the cause of everything
• God is the essence of everything
  • Nature is the essence of everything
• We all come from God
  • We all come from Nature
• God is the reason of existence
  • Nature is the reason of existence
• God is self caused and no one created it
  • Nature is self caused and no one created it
• When we die, we go back to God
  • When we die, we go back to Nature

Definition by Spinoza's logic

1P6 By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.

• Being absolutely infinite: Not limited by anything, it's infinite.
• Substance: It's the nature itself, not what everything is built from, but what everything is a state of.
• Attributes: It's the characteristics of the substance, which is the nature itself.
• Eternal and infinite essentiality: Refers to essence of nature, its self cause, it's essential for it be eternal and infinite. it's infinitely essential to be eternal and infinite.

By God, Spinoza means an absolutely infinite and not limited by anything. A substance being with infinite attributes each expose eternal essentiality (it's infinitely essential to exist eternally). God is the underlying reality of everything, nothing can conceive without God, because everything is part of God.

Attribute and substance do not have the same meaning as you think, if you are curious about it, you can read more about it here: Building blocks of our universe

1P14 Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.

If you change the word "substance" with "Nature" and "conceived" with "imagined", it will make more sense.

Continuing with the definition of God:

1P25 God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things but also of their essence.

God is the reason of existence and it's the essence of everything. He was looking at all the nature as the same unified field, us and everything else in the nature are part of the same thing, which he calls God. For Spinoza, God was the nature itself. And everything inside the nature is part of the nature, which is part of God.

1P15 Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

Everything that exist, is part of the nature, so it's part of God. Everything that can be conceived, is part of the nature, so it's part of God. It's impossible to think of something that is not part of the nature, so everything is part of God.

God in other religions

In other religions, God is a separate entity from the nature. Most of the times, god has a human form, with perfect human characteristics like:

• Being able to talk
• Being able to see
• Being able to hear
• Being able to think
• Being able to judge
• Being able to make decisions
• Being able to be merciful
• Being able to know everything
• Being able to manipulate the nature
• Being able to feel angry, happy, sad and all the other human emotions

Unlike what they say, it doesn't seem that God is a separate entity from nature, but it's one of us, it's the best of us with infinite power. Meanwhile it's somewhere that we can't see it because it's not part of the nature, but it's the creator of the nature.

How would the god of sharks look like for them?

If sharks had a religion, how would their god look like? They have some sort of specific abilities that we don't have. The God of sharks might be the fastest swimmer, with the best sense of smell, and the best hunter, and the best survivor, and the best reproducer, and the best of all the other things that sharks are good at. But our God doesn't have any of these abilities, because it's not a shark, it's a human. It's abstraction of us, but with infinite power.

God cannot be separated of nature

1P2: "Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another."

• Replace the word "substance" with "Nature" and "attributes" with "characteristics" and it will make more sense.

Two natures having different characteristics have nothing in common with each other.

It's over simplified and it lose some of the meaning, but it's easier to understand this way.

Spinoza was holding the idea of a unified reality/field and no separate creator.

For example: because an idea can't be touched, it has nothing in common with the physical world, so there is nothing common between the idea and the physical world, but one conceived through the other, which is mind conceived through the physical world.

It's impossible to think of nature that is not part of the nature. So a God who created the universe, who is in a shape or form that we can't imagine because of it's nature, has nothing to do with the nature, because it's not part of the nature.

1P14 Except God(Nature), no substance can be or be conceived.

Because everything that exist is part of the nature, then nothing outside nature can be conceived. Which makes sense, is your mind able to conceive something that is not part of the nature? I can't. Yes you can imagine star wars, but it's part of the nature, because it's in your mind, which is part of the nature.

Cause and effect

Causality is the easiest way to universally model how God works.

By causality, I understand the will of God, which we shall see what it is and how it works.

> [1A3]: From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.

Consider dominoes: the first one falls to the second, the second to the third, and so on. If one of the dominoes fails to continue the chain, the next one can't continue. So anything that happens happens because of a cause, it's impossible that something happens out of nothing, and also on the other hand, it's impossible if the effect doesn’t follow from the cause.

In short words:

• Every single event no matter what has causes that made it happen
• The causes of that effect had their own causes which made them happen
• The causes of those causes had their own causes, and so on with no first one

[1P28]: Every individual thing, or everything which is finite and has a conditioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by a cause other than itself, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence; and likewise this cause cannot in its turn exist, or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by another cause, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence, and so on to infinity.

Now with that said, let's change an event. To change an event you need to change the causes that made it happen, for changing those causes we need to change the causes of the effective cause, and so on back without end, the proposition above says this chain goes to infinity. Therefore, to change anything, we need to change everything that caused it, which isn’t possible, because every link follows necessarily from what nature is.

No matter if our event is in the past or future, it cannot be changed because of this matter.

> [1P17]: God acts solely by the laws of his own nature, and is not constrained by anyone

The beauty of Spinoza’s God and how it possesses itself

So far we understand that God is the nature itself, absolutely infinite, and it doesn't apply its natural laws to nature from outside, everything follows from what it is, with no exception. Later on, we will discuss more of the perfection of God and how the intellectual love of God works.

• It shows its beauty in the infinite accuracy of its divine nature.
• Its infinite perfection means it does not require any expectation or practices to do, except thinking, which we do for ourselves and not God.
• It does not have any human attributes or conception of judgment, decision-making, punishment, reward, good/bad, and meaning.
• It does not have free will to act beside anything other than its own deterministic natural laws.

The beauty of Spinoza’s God can be seen once the mind becomes conscious of the infinite accuracy of the divine nature. Ultimately it becomes aware of itself, of things, and aware of God, to take the wheel of one's own life and become the master of oneself, reaching as much freedom as one can, by moving forward on a self-development path to self-awareness.

Conclusion

Spinoza's God is the nature itself, and everything in the nature is part of the nature, which is part of God. "Deus sive Natura", God or Nature, is the same thing for Spinoza. You and the door are part of the same thing with different modes, which he calls God. Spinoza's god is different from anthropomorphic gods, which are in a human form with super powers.

What's the same with Spinoza's God?

• God is the creator of everything
• God is the cause of everything
• God is the essence of everything
• God is the reason of existence
• God is self caused and no one created it
• When we die, we go back to God

Almost everything else you have in mind about God, is the same with Spinoza's God, but with a different perspective.

What's different with Spinoza's God?

• God is not a separate entity from the nature, it's the nature itself.
• God is not an intelligent agent, it's the cause of everything.
• God doesn't know good and bad, it knows necessity.

References

Spinoza’s Ethics, Irfan Ajvazi

Spinoza's Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Requirements to know:

• Universe

Causality or Cause and Effect

We have previously discussed the concept of cause and affect in the context of the universe.

In this post, we will discuss the concept of causality in more detail.

As we said, causality can happen in two ways:

• A cause can lead to an effect
• An effect can lead to a cause : It works as a recursive loop, where the effect of the cause becomes the cause of the effect and it goes to infinity.

We learned that things happen as complex loops of cause and affect in a chaotic system and things happen because of necessity.

Let's talk about chaos theory and butterfly effect phenomena

The butterfly effect is a concept that says that a small change in one place can have a big effect in another place!

The butterfly effect was discovered by Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, and mathematician, in the 1960s.

He discovered that a small change in the initial conditions of a system can lead to a big change in the final outcome of the system while he was working on a numerical input base weather forecasting model.

How it works?

He found that small changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation, such as rounding off a number from 0.506127 to 0.506, could lead to vastly different outcomes in the forecast. This sensitivity to initial conditions means that minor variations can exponentially amplify, making precise long-term weather prediction impossible​.

This is known as the butterfly effect. He wrote a paper called "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" in 1963, where he introduced the concept of chaos theory and the butterfly effect.

The initial condition is so sensitive that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas! Weather is a form of deterministic chaotic system, which means that it is predictable in the short term but not in the long term.

Just like how if you take another path to work for a day, it might lead to a different outcome in your day or life. You see it happening everyday without noticing it.

Causality fundamentals

We can see how a small change in input of a chaotic complex system can lead to a huge change in the output. The very same way, a small change in any system can lead to a huge change in the output. Our universe is a complex system, and a small change in the initial conditions of the universe can lead to a huge change in the final outcome of the universe. In our everyday life, we can see how a small change in our actions can lead to be a cause that pushes a new set of dominoes that we can't predict the outcome of it.

1P28: Every individual thing, or everything which is finite and has a conditioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by a cause other than itself, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence; and likewise this cause cannot in its turn exist, or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by another cause, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence, and so on to infinity.

• Finite thing: Something that is not self caused, it caused by external causes. The one infinite thing is substance, God or Nature, which is caused by nothing but itself. Everything finite, like a domino or a body, is a mode of it.
• Conditioned existence: Something that is not self existent, it exists because of external causes, like the motion of a domino, and the finite thing that pushed it.

He says that everything that is finite and has a conditioned existence cannot exist or act unless it is conditioned by a cause other than itself, which is also finite and has a conditioned existence. And this cause cannot exist or act unless it is conditioned by another cause, and so on to infinity.

In the context of dominos, the domino cannot fall unless it is pushed by another domino, and that domino cannot fall unless it is pushed by another domino, and so on to infinity.

Many people might think, so now that things exactly happen in the way they do, does these lines of cause and affect taking us to a specific goal or destination? no, it just goes to infinity and there is no meaning in it.

Relationships between causes and effects and causality levels in perfect time

• Many to many: Network causality

  : Multiple causes can lead to multiple effects.

   : Cause: Many dominoes are pushed, and they all heat each other at the same time
   : Effects: All the dominoes connected to each other affect each other
   : The causes are definite and the effects are necessary, all the dominoes have no choice but to fall.
  

• Many to 1: diverging causality

  : Multiple causes can lead to a single effect.

   : Cause: Many dominoes are pushed, and they all heat each other at the same time
   : Effects: All the dominoes connected to each other affect each other
   : The causes are definite and the effects are necessary, all the dominoes have no choice but to fall.
  

• 1 to many causality: branching causality

  : A single cause can lead to multiple effects.

   : Cause: pushing a domino which heats multiple dominoes
   : Effects: The domino that was pushed falls and all the other dominoes fall
   : The cause is definite and the effects are necessary, all the dominoes have no choice but to fall.
  

• 1 to 1 causality: linear causality

  : A single cause can lead to a single effect.

   : Cause: One domino is pushed
   : Effect: It hits the next domino and falls
   : The cause is definite and the effect is necessary, the next domino has no choice but to fall.
  

Our world works by the Network causality, where billions of causes lead to billions of effects, and billions of effects lead to billions of causes, and so on to infinity. In between of this chaos, there are diverging, branching, and linear causality that happens under the network causality.

Between any cause and affect, are infinite leaner causality in between, which lead to limited causality in higher levels. In a diverging causality:

• The cause is pushing multiple dominos
• The effect is last domino falling when multiple dominos pushed it at the same time

• In between:

  : multiple dominos are pushed : multiple lines of dominos follow the necessity of falling : And all lead to the 1 domino falling

In a linear causality:

• The cause is pushing one domino
• The effect is the next domino falling

• In between:

  : Gravity is pulling the domino at every moment : At each moment the state of domino is changing : At each moment the domino is moving : At each moment there is a cause that continues the effect : What we see at the end, is a domino hitting the other one, but, because there are infinite moments between the cause and effect, there are infinite causes that lead to the effect.

Consider moving your hand to grab a cup of water, the cause is you moving your hand, and the effect is you grabbing the cup of water. But underlying, it's your hand muscles contracting, and the nerves sending signals to the brain, and the brain sending signals to the muscles, and so on.

Consider Columbus discovering America, the cause is Columbus sailing to America, and the effect is Columbus discovering America. But underlying, it's the decision of Columbus to sail to America, and the decision of the king to fund the voyage, and the decision of the sailors to join the voyage, and so on. Now can you say what are the higher levels of discovering America? So cause and affect are not only the reason, but also the underlying reasons that lead to the final effect.

Because time is infinity perfect, the causes and affect between a cause and effect are infinite, they happen at each moment between a cause and the effect of it. For now consider moment as the smallest unit of time, but briefly what I mean here:

Because there are infinite moments in a second, time is infinity perfect. I will talk more about this [perfect time] and causality later on, the concept of [infinite perfection] deserves to have its own post.

What makes cause and affect to happen in the way they do?

Simple answer: Nature and the laws of nature. These are the laws that cannot be broken, they are the laws that make the universe work the way it does. There are no cause and effect that happen outside the laws of nature, as long as it's happening in the nature.

What will happen if we adjust it with 10kg on the left side? and nothing on the right side?

The scale will tilt to the left side, because the left side is heavier than the right side. We know that as the law of gravity, it happens every time we put something on the scale.

And now what happens if we adjust it with 10kg on the left side and 10.01kg on the right side?

If your not familiar with the physics laws, you might think that the scale might be balanced, or maybe even tile to left a little bit, but in reality, the scale will tilt to the right side every time, because the right side is heavier than the left side, even though the difference is only 0.01kg.

The very same goes for our day to day life, things happen only in one way, because it happened always exactly as it should, and it will happen exactly as it should in the future.

We have previously talked about the batter fly effect, and how small changes like 0.01kg can lead to a different affect. Now consider this sensitivity in the rest of the cause and affect in the nature and our own life.

1P18: God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

God is the cause of all things, and he is not a transient cause, he is the indwelling cause of all things. You can think of God/nature as the execution environment of the universe.

Conclusion of causality and determinism

Let's say you want to change any event in the history. You need to change one of the causes that made effect to happen. Each of those causes has its own causes, and each of those causes has its own causes, and so on back without end. This chain has no first link. 1P28 says it goes back to infinity, so there is no starting point you could go and change. So, if you wish to change any event in the world, you need to change everything that caused it, which is the whole order of nature. And that whole order follows from God's nature and could not have been otherwise, see 1P33. So as a result, you can't change anything in the world. Anything that happens, happens because of the necessary, it's necessary for everything to happen the way it does and no other way.

What about me? I can make choices, I can change things!

You might think that you could simply just not to read this post!

Because you are part of the universe, and you are bound by the laws of nature, like everything else, and we know that as long as there is cause and effect, it will happen exactly as it should and execute by the natural laws of nature.

You see, the event that made you read this post was the effect of causes that pushed you to read, and for me to write it. Both are ncessesery as they have causes which followed by causes before them.

You want to know how and how mind works? go to life/mind

References

Edward Norton Lorenz#chaos theory

Deterministic Nonprediodic Flow

Chaos theory

Spinoza and Ethics: The ground proof framework

A quick recap on who he was, what he did, and what happened to him

Who was Spinoza?

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher living around 1632 till 1677. He was a rationalist philosopher who laid the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. He was considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. He was also a scientist, mathematician, and a lens grinder by profession! This person was something that I call different! He was understanding the world differently. He grow up with Jewish family, so he was studying religion since childhood, but he was always making lots of questions about Bible and it's conflicts with the world and how much it doesn't make sense to him. Also, as it seems in his works, he had a keen observation of the world around him, including human behavior, nature, emotions and the thinking system of our minds.

What did he do?

He developed a system of ethics based on the idea that the universe is governed by a rational order. He proposed that everything in nature, including human behavior, could be understood through logical analysis. His work challenged traditional religious and philosophical beliefs, promoting a view of the universe as a unified, deterministic system and a complete system of how world works.

What happened to him?

He was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the age of 23, and his books were later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books in 1677. He was also accused of atheism, which was a serious crime at the time. He was a hated person in his time, but he was a great thinker and philosopher who managed to answer this question by good extent. And the Ethics was his last work before he died.

He died at the age of 44.

What is Ethics?

Ethics is the book that he tried to explain how world works. Ethics has 5 parts, it's composed of not easy understanding stories and examples, but it's been written in definitions, axioms and hundreds of propositions and corollaries. He was trying to prove his ideas in a deduced way of Euclid.

Just so you get how it looks like:

Don't panic!

This is the map of how his book is structured, it's based on deductive reasoning, which is a method of reasoning from the general to the specific based on logic. That's exactly what defining things and proving them in a logical way. The way it works is to set some definitions and axioms, and start concluding propositions and corollaries from them.

Example of deductive reasoning

• Definition: A round object has a circular shape that allows it to roll.
• Axiom 1: An object on a slope will move due to gravity.
• Axiom 2: Round objects have a shape that facilitates rolling.
• Axiom 3: Friction can resist the movement of objects.
• Proposition 1: If an object is round, it has the ability to roll.
• Proposition 2: If a round object is placed on a sloped surface, it will move due to gravity unless friction is sufficient to stop it.
• Proposition 3: Friction affects the rolling of objects by resisting motion.
• Corollary: Therefore, if you place a round object on a hill, it will roll unless the friction is too high.

This deductive reasoning proves that a round object will roll down a hill due to gravity. Continuing our example, will lead to more propositions that has chained logic to prove the idea and make a conclusion. As you can see we set up some definitions and axioms, and then we can conclude some propositions and corollaries from them.

Now these are some statistics of his book:

• Part I: 8 Definitions, 7 Axioms, 36 Propositions
• Part II: 8 Definitions, 7 Axioms, 49 Propositions
• Part III: 11 Definitions, 7 Axioms, 59 Propositions
• Part IV: 8 Definitions, 1 Axiom, 73 Propositions
• Part V: 20 Definitions, 7 Axioms, 42 Propositions

It's mad! specially when propositions are chained together across the parts!

Key take away

It's like a mathematical proof, you set up some definitions and axioms, and then you can conclude some propositions and corollaries from them. It's a way of proving things in a logical way.

How can I invalidate a proposition?

Counterexample: A counterexample is an example that disproves a proposition.

What you need to do is to make an example of a situation that the proposition does not hold, and then you can say that the proposition is not valid.

For example the proposition:

• Proposition: All humans are immortal.

  • Counterexample: John is a human and he died, therefore the proposition is not valid.

• Proposition: All swans are white.

  • Counterexample: A black swan, therefore the proposition is not valid.

Even finding one counterexample is enough to disprove a proposition. Good luck finding one in Spinoza's book! I think what is visible in Ethics is that he keeps everything within the context of reality and reason. He doesn't make any proposition that is not valid in the context of the world he fundamentally defined, and he ties it up with reality.

What does he say in his book?

In the book he fundamentally abstracts the world by most general properties and then he starts to make propositions and logical proves of how things work in the world by specific. The Spinoza's world is working by a rational order of causality, where everything is related to each other and everything is a unified field of nature. He also defines the nature of human behavior, emotions, thoughts, intuition, instinct and basically everything that fits into the life, the universe and everything.

His book is a logical combination of:

• Reality philosophy: the study of reality
• Mind philosophy
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge
• Moral philosophy
• Metaphysics: the study of reality

I'll try to summarize his book in the restructure of life and universe in the next posts.

This is not necessarily a religion

I have seen people call it Spinoza religion(and there is a book for it), but from what I can say of book, it's not a religion, he was not trying to make a religion, he was trying to make a logical proof of how reality works.

Some properties of a religion:

• It's based on faith
  • Spinoza's book is based on logic
• It's based on a deity
  • Spinoza's book is based on nature
• It's based on a holy book
  • Spinoza was a man, just like you and me
• It brings people together
  • He doesn't care about people, he cares about reality
• It has practices
  • He doesn't have any practices except thinking and understanding
• It has heaven and hell
  • He doesn't have any heaven or hell, he talks about reality

But if you define religion as a way of living and set of rules to follow, then yes, it's a religion, and the rules are the rules of nature and reality.

Resources:

Ethics (Spinoza book)

Mapping Spinoza's Ethics

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy