You Spinoza Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round

I took a class called Reason, Passion, & Social Cognition my junior year in college. Although it was still a survey class held in a large auditorium, I have unexpectedly fond memories of it, almost as if I may have learned a lot in it or something. It was taught by a junior faculty member in his first year who had done his PhD under Dan Gilbert, and was the last ever post-doc of Daniel Kahneman before his retirement. There is a reason why certain courses are usually given to the young guns; I remember not finding any of the readings boring, and achieving a sense of “I know what’s happening in the intellectosphere these days” in the field I was trying to get a degree in. But out of an entire semester’s worth of ostensibly positive memories, one thing stands out like gangbusters and that is Spinoza’s description of how the brain sorts ‘true’ versus ‘false’ statements.

Baruch Spinoza is a 17th century Jew from Amsterdam of Portuguese origin, who seems to have had this absurdly clear mind capable of seeing so much in the macro that he couldn’t help but run his mouth about religion, God, the natural world and much else that was mostly parochially protected dogma at the time. As a consequence, he was excommunicated from his community at a very early age (which it appears he not only didn’t mind, but also comfortably instigated as a life of pretense was beyond unacceptable for him and he, instead, chose to rip the band aid as early in life as possible).

Freed from the religious nonsense and the shackles of his devout community at an early age, he luckily had enough time to puke out the contents of his lovely mind within two major works before his death at the age of 45. He was a monist (all-is-one), a naturalist (i.e. purpose of life is to understand nature), and attempted to recreate humans’ conception of God while being constantly branded as an atheist. His work wasn’t even regarded for about a hundred years at first, only to become the single most relevant work (to today’s world) from the 17th century. And in a ~thousand page tome that was his ‘Ethics’, which was his comprehensive understanding of the world, he, of course, talked a bit about the philosophy of the mind.

So what we learned in that class (and was asked about it in an exam exactly as such) was whether the human brain flags information as True versus False as it comes in, or if it does something else. So in Spinoza’s thinking, making a T vs F value judgment for the bombardment of information that a human is subjected to on an ongoing basis is not feasible. Doing critical thinking leading to a (mostly) permanent T or F stamp on a discrete piece of information before we even let it inside the fence apparently sounded “energy inefficient” to him. So he argued that we always initially believe everything, essentially marking everything as True from the get go. But then we pull some doubtful items aside to reconsider later on as potentially False. Given that most communication is meant for conveying material information, leaning on the side of True and making resource intensive exceptions later on appeared to him the most parsimonious path––for the human brain to evolve towards. And apparently social and cognitive scientists were like “yeah, that’s the one. Straight up, like, no need for any other theories––boom headshot”.

Why did this one stand so tall in my head? I have degrees of recollections of other things from that class too: the Kitty Genovese shenanigans, how the professor apparently snagged a hottie who kept attending the same lab meetings as him (evidencing propinquity in dating/coupling), the nature of $700 T-shirts somehow actually selling (a proper dude who never ever cursed had said “so here now this is a fucking T-shirt” and we were all like “did he just say that?”), a guest lecturer sharing with us that men are apparently are aroused by visuals only consistent with their own sexual orientation while women are aroused by any orientation of any gender and any species doing anything sexual at all (supposedly justifying the merits of beastiality to some degree), prospect theory in extra detail (since he was hanging with its creator like literally 6 months ago). So there were some cool stuff. But Spinoza’s model of the mind is like etched with laser in my head.

There is one possibility that we may have learned that during the very day (or at least close to it) to me shaving my extremely long hair and professors (including this one) not recognizing me when I would enter the class fashionably late with that shiny head and large police sunglasses in the week following “The Shave”. Ok, it has to be that day we learned it because I can remember exactly what I was wearing that day of being fashionably late to Reason, Passion, & Social Cognition: light colored Guess jeans, long white sleeve on top, but a white t-shirt on it that said “Paris Loves My Oui Oui” from FCUK, and, of course, the police sunglasses. And a blank face of a lack of recognition and “some kid walked into the wrong class” on his face, and me lowering my glasses like David Caruso and saying “wassup” to the class erupting.

And I swear to Spinoza’s Monist God that I was not late on purpose, and the sunglasses were a bit because I was actually self-conscious about being bald after having an entire identity revolving around being long-haired (even sometimes getting corn-rows), and all the pagan deities being my witness, I am good at navigating awkward situations with clever quips, so, a resounding NO to any curated behavior or utterances––even at age 20.

So likely, we learned it that day, and it got carved into my gray matter with diamonds. And the exams for that class were multiple choice + choose 1 out of 3 essay questions, and I damn sure remember getting full marks from choosing the Spinoza option for that essay section. Is that all it takes to really learn, comprehend, and internalize a scientific concept?

Well, actually something similar happened the next day for Empirical Research Methods class and I don’t remember shit about what we learned in that class––neither that day, nor the entire semester. But a good friend of mine from that class, who, at the time, were neck deep into the pick-up artistry literature, told me that after accidentally (I swear) being late and involuntarily soliciting the same reaction from this professor as well, he apparently thought “hmm, Paris is currently the highest value male in the class; he can probably sleep with any woman in the room”, which is a sentence I could only write while navigating a shaky giggle.

So given this little controlled experiment, I’d say it has to be Spinoza himself that truly deserves the lion’s share of infiltrating my brain and permafrosting his philosophy in me. Well, he also shared his first name with my academic advisor at the time, and there is no way that didn’t engender affinity in me. But this past month I’ve been researching monism at a higher resolution to develop some research hypotheses on how to improve panpsychism’s compatibility issues with some physicalist/micropsychist approaches and by golly homeboy Spinoza’s voice is the voice in my own head.

It’s a version of what I felt when I binged on every word David Foster Wallace ever published over a period of 11 months around 2010. The thought process, patterns, and shapes resemble my inner voice so much that it gets intimately intoxicating and I can’t freaking stop because as I keep reading I keep feeling heard, and seen, and understood. A feeling of kinship, likely stemming from sharing a certain amount of genes that at least determine the way you look at the world. With Wallace, his words led me to become absurdly self-conscious for a while that took a debilitating amount of time to get out of.

Could there be a similar risk with Spinoza? Well, I am a lot older, less impressionable, and definitely better equipped to deal with nauseating and dizzyingly large concepts that zoom you out of life as you know it. And I’m only 150 pages into the Ethics so far (and nothing bad happened). It was more the entries in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Spinoza that put an end to end smile on my face as I read it.

Homeboy’s stance in life from the get go was “I see something ya’ll mofos don’t, and I’m gonna say it out loud and then pull a “screw you guys, I’m going home” and slowly write it without any distractions and stupid religious and cultural peer pressure in some peace and quiet. And I don’t even see time linearly so I don’t mind not getting recognition. I just need to get the words out. Whew, I was able to finish at least one of the things I started––I can die in peace, at 45, a mere 8 years older than Paris was when he wrote that hazy blog post about being my fan or spiritual successor or whatever the fuck he was implying”.

I’ve always liked reading biographies. As a matter of fact, when I find myself scraping the bottom of the motivation barrel, I almost always resort to biographies of some bid dawg ballers which fill my juices right up. A life of aspiring is a life that can be well-lived. And it obviously requires aspirational lives to exist in reference to. The degree to which Spinoza seems to have been cold and stoic in a robot like quality while talking about the big ideas (implying a dizzying skill in zooming out to see as much of the large patterns from a macro POV as possible), while maintaining maximum creativity as an intellectual aerialist gymnast contortionist juggler––that is SO hot.

My chest feels full. I’m glad I wrote this. I really wanna do more work on contemporary consciousness shenanigans but fate will probably make me go full nerd on 400 year old continental stuff in the end.

Sounds like a fun life. Now let’s see if we can do it past age 45, and preferably not alone.