sudly said:

I would have thought the burden of proof is on whom ever makes a claim, be it in scientific or mystic context.

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teknix said:

sudly said:

I would have thought the burden of proof is on whom ever makes a claim, be it in scientific or mystic context.

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In a mystical sense subjective evidence has to suffice, otherwise it's not mystical if it is in the realm of empirical objectability.

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teknix said:

At what point do you think mysticism stops being mystical?

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Mystical: Inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination.

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sudly said:

The view that nature just is, and that we are a part of, and not from it?

And in that same wiki page it says,

Quote:

He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism (This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things). During his time, this statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God – which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

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Here it seems to differ in saying Spinoza sees nature as god, and vice versa.

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sonamdrukpa said:

The burden of proof lies on whoever postulates more entities, a la Occam's Razor.

Was this a hard philosophic journal, or more like a law philosophy journal?  I thought they did a remarkably poor job of giving an actual argument as to why they think the burden of proof lies on everyone.

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He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism (This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things).

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Peyote Road said:  In other words our mind is not something that evolved from dead matter by chance through a process of random mutation, but is an attribute of nature itself.

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Since God is the same thing as Nature, in effect, the mind and the body are two aspects of the same thing. He believes that all that exists is one substance and the mental and the physical are different attributes of that substance.

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Peyote Road said: I have bolded several statements which I feel Spinoza would not make if he shared your views. Why is it, in your opinion, that the human mind is not destroyed along with the body as Spinoza states? Can you please explain that for me?

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Descartes believed he had discovered a proof of the natural immortality of the soul. Spinoza's philosophy has no room for immortality - less even than Hobbes's. The only sense in which the soul can be said to be immortal is that the idea of the body is eternal, as one component of the infinite system of ideas which constitutes God's attribute of thought. But this is an immortality without life or consciousness. For Spinoza, we have only one brief life (in his case, all too brief), in which to overcome demeaning, passive emotions, and to achieve as deep an intellectual vision as possible of all things in God (or Nature).

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(mind is succeeded by death, body returns to nature as fertiliser, continues into the cycle of nature)

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Part V is the final part of the Ethics and is also its most contested. It is split roughly in two. The first half (P1-20), in which Spinoza completes his discussions of ethics and freedom, is continuous with Parts III and IV and is unproblematic, though it poses some difficult ideas. But the second half (P21-42) is truly puzzling. On the one hand, it completes the Ethics by bringing us full circle, back to the ontology of Part I. But in doing so, it seems to call into question many of the naturalistic ideas that Spinoza argues for in other parts of the book. In Part V, Spinoza appears to argue for the immortality of the mind after death, God's infinite love for us and our potential for intuition, the mysterious 'third kind' of knowledge.

Critics have been sharply divided about how to interpret Part V and have even questioned whether we should take it seriously. Jonathan Bennett, for instance, calls it [in A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Indianapolis 1984] 'an unmitigated and seemingly unmotivated disaster'. I do not share this view. To be sure, Part V contains obscurities, problems and apparent contradictions, leaving the interpreter without a clear route through. But in reading it, one gets a sense of how Spinoza meant its propositions to follow from ideas advanced in the other parts of the Ethics (even if they fail to do so when subjected to critical scrutiny). I see no great mystery about Spinoza's motivation for discussing the eternal existence of the mind and the third kind of knowledge. Spinoza needs to say something about our eternal being in order to complete the metaphysical system of the Ethics. The impossibility of giving a coherent account of eternity - as evinced by the incoherence of EVP21-42 - is productive in that it reveals something interesting about what a finite mode can and cannot do. Perhaps the second half of Part V should be seen as an experiment [sic] in which Spinoza tests the capabilities of his own thinking.

http://www.advayavada.org/randomnotes.htm

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For example, sometimes you will hear atheists say God doesn't exist.

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Spinoza saw nature as god, and that's different from my view?

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I don't agree there is an eternal part of mind, as I don't agree that a rock or a stone is an eternal object.

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How can knowledge be eternal? If all humans were wiped out, how can you suggest the knowledge of how to make a carrot cake would remain?

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Of course the human mind is destroyed along with the body in my view, like wtf dude? Straw man much..

In my understanding Spinoza says that 'god' is nature, so fuck your christian mysticism, someone's got to say it.

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Spinoza has been described as a pantheist – God is nature – a view identified by many as atheism. But Spinoza denied that he was a pantheist. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg he wrote that "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken." The confusion is understandable given Spinoza's description of the god he believes in.

By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God.

http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/spinoza.htm

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Sudly said: As I understand the ideas behind the god of Spinoza, nature is eternal only in the same sense as the first law of thermodynamics that states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.

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Peyote Road said: Information can be transferred, in this case for instance the information of how to make a carrot cake would be transferred from the human brain into a part of God's mind and remain there eternally.

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Mate I never died on mushrooms but I did 'become' a spider once, and dance through the streets shirtless to Pink Floyd, and moan at the clouds near a pool in the Sun.

Do you even know what the active ingredients in magic mushrooms are?

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The fight or flight response was a well-needed response when we were faced with physical danger on a daily basis. But in today’s world, many of our dangers are more psychological and can’t always be addressed the moment they come up. The longer your fight or flight response remains active, the more draining, physically and emotionally.

In recent years, a view has arisen that provides a serious challenge to this notion. One of its pioneers and most influential proponents, George Lakoff (1999), has argued that reason is embodied, meaning it's not something independent of the sensory world, but derived from it:

'Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment…

Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals…Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them…
http://www.integralworld.net/smith47.html

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I like the idea behind Spinoza's god but that doesn't mean I agree whole heartedly with everything the man said, he's not my Jesus.

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The timeline of chemistry lists important works, discoveries, ideas, inventions, and experiments that significantly changed humanity's understanding of the modern science known as chemistry, defined as the scientific study of the composition of matter and of its interactions. The history of chemistry in its modern form arguably began with the Irish scientist Robert Boyle, though its roots can be traced back to the earliest recorded history.

Early ideas that later became incorporated into the modern science of chemistry come from two main sources. Natural philosophers (such as Aristotle and Democritus) used deductive reasoning in an attempt to explain the behavior of the world around them. Alchemists (such as Geber and Rhazes) were people who used experimental techniques in an attempt to extend the life or perform material conversions, such as turning base metals into gold.

In the 17th century, a synthesis of the ideas of these two disciplines, that is the deductive and the experimental, leads to the development of a process of thinking known as the scientific method. With the introduction of the scientific method, the modern science of chemistry was born.

Known as "the central science", the study of chemistry is strongly influenced by, and exerts a strong influence on, many other scientific and technological fields. Many events considered central to our modern understanding of chemistry are also considered key discoveries in such fields as physics, biology, astronomy, geology, and materials science to name a few.

http://www.chem.yorku.ca/hall_of_fame/whychem.htm

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