Monday 21 June 2021

Spinoza's Quantum disclaimer


Spinoza was accused of atheism for solving the God puzzle. And for giving an answer that is so simple it is a tragedy that he wasn't understood more far and wide. But maybe there was something in his answer that is counter to expectation, and thus the world wasn't ready for it. I find that Quantum physics makes Spinoza's answer more palpaple, although Quantum physics, much like Spinoza, presents us with something like Schrodinger's cat, that both is there and isn't there. Spinoza gave us the Absolute that he calls God, but defined this absolute in a way that doesn't give this Absolute being any entity or subjectivity as if it wasn't anywhere to be found, although it, according to Spinoza, is everywhere and in everything.

For me this Absolute brings to mind singularity, which is not just something that awaits to be explained away, like classical physics first thought of it in the case of black holes, but something that is constant but never reaches an absolute superposition, like in the case of a white hole. In short: Beginning from a superposition, the perfection, that is at zero, God, if you will, became everything by sacrificing perfection. Everything is possible because the absolute singularity isn't constant. The zero emanates the quanta. Something does come out of nothing. And here is the cognitive problem. How can nothing be God? Well, that nothing isn't nothing, because Spinoza's zero is originally everything, much like the sum total of energy in the Universe according to some theoretical physicists. (Go look it up, I didn't make this shit up, you know.)

Spinoza's absolute, from the perspective of conscious entities, is like the Quantum void, not nothing, not just something, but everything. It just took Quantum Physics to prove him right, or maybe take it a bit further. Absolute nothing isn't anything, it is the abstract nothing, which is, indeed, nothing. Spinoza's Absolute, his God is Pan, everything, but something that as such has no single subject. It is plural to infinity. People, like God, have and haven't got a self, because they are equally infinite, except that people are limited to subjectivity. God is also people, but people aren't everything, hence people have subjectivity, and God doesn't. People have entity. To Spinoza God has no other entity, except that of everything, thus plural as the zero state singularity was broken by entropy. Without entropy everything would be the same and constant like the singularity that remains a potential superposition, but one that cancels everything that is quanta. Like ownership of everything would cancel the sense of owning.

This might run counter to logic in the classical sense, but not counter to the logic of Quantum Physics, the intricacies of which I don't pretend to understand. What I am talking about here is merely the difference of quantum physics and classical physics, the difference of classical metaphysics and that of Spinoza. Spinoza's words to me are soothing like a mantra, because they remind me that the God puzzle is already broken, or, rather, cracked. Nothing is wrong here. The world appears perfect even with entropy, because without it, there is no life, no motion, no sense, no other meaning than the constant singularity that erases all difference.

I suggest you go and search what is a white hole, if these words seem somehow too bleak and physicists act as if militant atheism is the only way. Go read Spinoza, if you need a philosophical mantra. Or think for yourself, if you want to find your own way.