Spinoza's "Ethics". It was one of the first efforts to apply mathematical logic to philosophy (Wittgenstein borrowed a lot from it), and to provide an axiomatic model of emotion. Very roughly, it took a two pronged approach to illustrate there is no objective logical foundation for differentiating between "me" and "not me": firstly, by showing that, given determinism, everyone/thing is part of a single unalterable process, and secondly, by showing that there is no single objective standard for drawing the line between a thing and the things around it. (He doesn't deal with nondeterminism, but most of the conclusions could be mapped directly to a system containing a mix of nondeterminism and determinism, as adding nondeterminism cannot "increase" moral responsibility or "self-causation").
In that sense it gave a (comparatively) rigorous argument for the nebulous eastern concept of "oneness". Using this foundation he then makes a logical argument (given his axiomatisation of emotion) for why we should be happy.
It's also the book that made me realise that, even if the jealous Abrahamic God exists, He is not moral. Because due to determinism every action can be traced back to the initial cause, so it doesn't make sense for Him who created the universe to punish or reward people for actions that were ultimately predictable consequences of the universe's creation, which if omniscient he should have foreseen. (And if some things are nondeterministic, this still applies, because somebody cannot gain moral responsibility through decreased determinism).
> there is no objective logical foundation for differentiating between "me" and "not me": firstly, by showing that, given determinism, everyone/thing is part of a single unalterable process, and secondly, by showing that there is no single objective standard for drawing the line between a thing and the things around it.
I don’t see it. Does he address the fact that dozens of other philosophers over the years have argued the opposite?
> ultimately predictable consequences of the universe's creation, which if omniscient he should have foreseen.
Isn’t this just free will? Is that the nondeterminism that the author is ignoring?
>I don’t see it. Does he address the fact that dozens of other philosophers over the years have argued the opposite?
He creates an axiomatic foundation out of definitions that most philosophers of the time would have found reasonable (nowadays they're also reasonable, just takes a bit of work to get past the language choices he made, as mathematical logic didn't exist then so it's phrased in terms of geometric and theological language). He then uses this foundation to show that there's no objective measure for dividing individualness (what is me, what is not me) and responsibility (what was caused by me, what was not caused by me), essentially a proof that given the axioms no such measure can exist. Similar to how one might give a proof that e.g. there is no way to assign a Lebesgue measure to every subset of the real number line. Note this is just a very rough summary; his actual proof is long and dense.
>Isn’t this just free will?
Spinoza essentially shows that if free will is defined as "being 100% the cause of some action", then free will does not exist. Because any action we take, is determined by who we are at that moment, and who we are at that moment depends on actions we took in the past, and this causal chain can be traced backwards to who we were as a baby, when we could not make decisions.
Another way to look at it. If the universe was deterministic, and I had unlimited computing power and storage for simulation, then I could exactly predict someone's actions in life (assuming consistent laws of physics). If it was nondeterministic, then there are some things I couldn't predict, but these things would all be the product of chance, so how could they increase the degree to which any particularly individual is the cause of some action? They would just increase the degree to which randomness was the cause of some actions.
Assume non-determinism - this is just pure pragmatism because if the universe is conpletely deterministic, what is the point of even this conversation? It would be immoral for god to create us without free will. If we have free will, we must be able to act immorally, else it's not really free will. So god is in a bind - he has to imbue us with the power to go against his wishes, morally speaking. Immorality in humans is a direct consequence of a moral creator.
What Spinoza shows is that, given a set of noncontroversial axioms, free will is essentially undefined. E.g., if you take an action, it is either caused by you, someone/something else, or chance, reasonable assumption? For free will, we would say the action is caused by you. Okay, then why did you take that action? Because of the person you are at that time. Why are you that person? Something at time t-1 made you that person. Either that thing was you, something else, or chance. For the original action at time t to be caused by you, who you are at time t also has to be caused by you, meaning the action at time t-1 that made you who you are also has to be caused by you.
If we follow this recursion far backwards enough, we eventually get to the point where you were a baby, incapable of making your own decisions. This shows that any causal chain can ultimately be traced backwards to something outside "your" control. In which case, how can one sensibly assign responsibility to yourself?
Perhaps another abstract way to put it: Spinoza shows that God creating some kind of free will that made actions unpredictable to him is equivalent to the idea of God creating a rock so heavy that he himself cannot lift; it's incompatible with the idea of omnipotence. Undefined in the sense that the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is undefined.
In that sense it gave a (comparatively) rigorous argument for the nebulous eastern concept of "oneness". Using this foundation he then makes a logical argument (given his axiomatisation of emotion) for why we should be happy.
It's also the book that made me realise that, even if the jealous Abrahamic God exists, He is not moral. Because due to determinism every action can be traced back to the initial cause, so it doesn't make sense for Him who created the universe to punish or reward people for actions that were ultimately predictable consequences of the universe's creation, which if omniscient he should have foreseen. (And if some things are nondeterministic, this still applies, because somebody cannot gain moral responsibility through decreased determinism).