Canadian Mental Health Association: Sara Jordan
Horizon Housing Society: Martina Jileckova
Calgary Housing Company: Deborah Robb
AISH/CPP: Cameron Egler
TD Direct Investing: Paul Clark
Government of Canada: Justin Trudeau
Government of Alberta: Sonya Savage
City of Calgary: Naheed Nenshi
BMO Bank of Montreal: Rhonda Khamis
RBC Royal Bank: Brooke Ross
Mr Christopher Bek
602, 1133 Eighth Avenue SW
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Christopher.Bek@gmail.com
403 471-7440
The Theory of One
Existentialism Now
The Bernoulli Model
PhilosophyMagazine.com
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14 October 2020
Dear Philanthropists,
Subject—— Philosophy Magazine God and Metaphysics
Quotation———Restricting a body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a
people and leads to spiritual poverty. —Albert Einstein
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of existence and reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. Metaphysics means the beyond or behind the physical.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) is considered one of the most important and original thinkers of the seventeenth century. His philosophy covers virtually the full spectrum of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. Samuel Shirley, who translated Spinoza’s complete works into English, wrote that although Spinoza lived long before Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and the startling implications of quantum theory, he had a vision of truth beyond what is normally granted to human beings.
Spinoza’s Ethics is set out in the fashion of Euclid’s geometry, and its five parts deal with God, the mind, the emotions, and human bondage and freedom. Spinoza characterized his metaphysical system, as God or Nature, with the following eight definitions: 1) the cause of itself is that whose essence involves existence; or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing; 2) a thing is finite in its kind when it can be limited by a thing of the same nature; 3) substance is that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; 4) attribute is that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence; 5) mode is the modification of substance; that which is in something else, through which it is also conceived; 6) God is an absolutely infinite being; that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence; 7) a thing is said to be free if it exists solely through the necessity of its own nature, and is determined into action by itself alone; and 8) eternity means existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow from the definition alone of the eternal thing.
Spinoza wrote that mind and body are one and the same individual which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, and now under the attribute of extension. He believed he had solved the mind-body problem by asserting that thought and extension are attributes of the one substance. Spinoza’s mode denotes properties of the one substance. Properties describe the characteristics of an object, while attributes refer to additional information of an object. Most people use the two words synonymously, and I have lumped the two together for the sake of this letter. Therefore, the attributes or properties of God or Nature include light, space, time, life, consciousness, selfawareness, matter, mathematics and the laws of nature. The substance covers a sphere-shaped phenomenon that houses being as its primary function. The sphere’s radius is the speed of light (relativity theory), and is bounded from within at Planck’s constant (quantum theory).
The standard model of particle physics is the law of nature that describes three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe, and classifies the 17 known elementary particles. It so happens that the elementary particle properties and the laws of nature go hand in hand: mass with gravitation, charge with electromagnetism, and spin with quantum theory. Energy is directly proportional to force, and energy and force are just different ways of describing why objects seem to deviate from expectation. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that serves to catalogue properties like being and science. EF Schumacher defined the four ontological levels of being in his 1977 book A Guide for the Perplexed. The ontology of science is my estimation. Consider the following ontological matrix of fundamental properties or types or levels in the universe. I am trying to establish patterns among the phenomena of force, energy, being and science.
| Force | Energy | Being | Science |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gravity/Inertia | Mechanical | Matter | Mathematics |
| Nuclear-weak | Chemical | Life | Physics |
| Electromagnetic | Electrical | Consciousness | Chemistry |
| Nuclear-strong | Atomic | Self-awareness | Biology |
Spinoza described the intellectual love of God as a state of divinity for which humans may aspire. This deeply satisfying love arises from the intuitive and immediate comprehension of God. The intellectual love of God resonates with a long tradition of philosophical thinkers going back to Plato. Spinoza’s God is sometimes called the God of the philosophers and the atheists. In referring to Spinoza, Einstein said that God is the sum total of the laws of nature. Sir James Jeans said God is a mathematician, and Nietzsche said God is dead, we have killed him, you and I. Nietzsche was referring to the fact that God played a much larger part in the daily lives of people during previous times like the medieval period. I am proposing we bring God back to life by telling the truth.
As far as the business of Philosophy Magazine is concerned, I am looking for sponsors to contribute $500 per month for the next four years towards the fundamental project of producing knowledge for its own sake by writing 48 defining essays. I propose that each sponsor would receive 200 essays per month with a market value of five dollars per essay. Doctors and bankers, for example, could put essays in waiting rooms, or they could be mailed to underprivileged people I believe there is a case to be made for higher truth here. But I need your help. 👍
Sincerely,
Christopher Bek
Wisdom begins with the definition of terms. —Socrates
I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details. —Albert Einstein
Man has the power of life like the plants, the power of consciousness like the animals, and
something more—the power of consciousness recoiling upon itself—the power of self-awareness.
Man is not merely a conscious being, but a being capable of consciousness of his own
consciousness—not merely a thinker, but a thinker able to watch and study his own thinking. This
power of self-awareness opens up unlimited possibilities for purposeful learning, investigating,
exploring and of formulating and accumulating knowledge. —EF Schumacher