I had a duuuude moment last night. What if the universe is God's brain? As in, everything in the universe is the equivalent of neurons, the movements and actions of the objects making up the universe correspond at the highest level to God's thoughts. Is that Spinozism?
Nah... kinda' close to it, but not quite. With the caveat that it's kinda' muddled in my head and I may be conflating or confusing 'im with someone else, what I remember of Spinoza is that God == Nature, plus a bit. Existence is kinda' like the flesh and body of God, and then there's some bits outside existence (and blazes if I remember the specifics of what th'dude said on that bit) that comprises the rest of the divine entity. The bits outside are arguably the higher aspect of the divine, but physical reality is still entirely intrinsic to the makeup of Spinoza's God.
The God == Reality, full stop, thing, is actually a bit more prevalent a message (If
hilariously confuddled by
violent language abuse) from some of the bigger name medieval theologians (though shoot me down to name any of the buggers. I've got a medieval philosophy book buried somewhere about the size of my head that's got the names and some representative texts in it). Basic message there was that God == Most Fundamental Good == Brute Existence (which prefaces all good things, and is
most fundamental to them.) (== Fundamental Particles, natch.). They were actually
hardcore materialists, which is something of a tremendously amusing thing, from a certain point of view.
Does anyone else get a bit irritated with all the philosophical jargon like "NextTuesdayism" and "True Scotsman" and all that stuff? A lack of clarity of terminology and dryness of sentence is making the philosophical discussion quite impenetrable.
It's technical language (well, those in particular aren't, but similar things, yes.) that saves a
tremendous amount of time once you're familiar with it. One of the problems with asking for clarity of terminology when you're dealing with philosophy is that if you're not referring to something like "Next Tuesdayism", it takes multiple paragraphs of text to describe what's essentially a basic stock argument in the field. Jargon -- technical language and short-hand stuff like the common fallacy names et al -- saves a lot of paper space when you're dealing with folks that are already aware of what it's referring to. Mind you, it's not exactly the most appropriate thing for conversation with those less familiar with the lingo, but that's what wikipedia links are for
E:It's worth noting that the problem is arguably even
worse for theology, because its established language has a somewhat nasty habit of co-opting common use terms to mean something
utterly unconnected from said common use. There's some interesting written pieces on how religious language does its thing, actually. Philosophers tend to brain each other when they try to pull shit like that
