Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Spinoza held that God and Nature are the same thing.

His reasoning in a nutshell: an infinite being would need to have everything else as a part of it, so God has to just be the entire universe. It's not clear whether he really thought of God as a conscious agent, although he did think that there were "ideas" in God's mind (read: the Universe) and that these perfectly coincided with the existance of real objects in the world. As an example, he seems to reject the notion of God as picking from among possible worlds and "choosing" the best one, opting instead to say that God just is the actual world and that there is no difference between them.

So basically, studying nature for Spinoza is "knowing the mind of God."

He may also have been reacting to his excommunication, in fact, that's pretty likely. So the quote may have some sour grapes hidden inside of it.

Thanks.

My understanding was basically correct then. I just didn't understand why he'd go from that overall position to talk about why we need to investigate nature, when his whole approach really seemed more like laid back speculation than any form of science, or advocacy of science. The excommunication detail clarifies a lot though, as Spinoza's approach seems much more active and investigative when compared to the approach of the church.

Excellent, thanks again.

5kilobug14y

That doesn't hold in maths at least. N, Z, Q have the same size, but clearly Q isn't part of N. And there are as many rational numbers between 0 and 1 (or between 0 and 0.0000000000000000000001) than in Q as a whole, and yet, we can have an infinity of such different subsets. And it goes even worse with bigger sets. It saddens me how much philosopher/theologists speak about "infinity" as if we had no set theory, no Peano arithmetic, no calculus, nothing. Intuition is usually wrong on "infinity".