Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656, under a cherem so total that its text forbade anyone to speak with him, come within four cubits of him, or read his writing—and the crime, never fully specified in the document, was the set of ideas he went on to systematize in the Ethics: that there is only one substance, that it can be called God or called Nature with equal accuracy, and that everything which exists—minds, bodies, stars, ideas, machines—is a mode of that single thing. He ground optical lenses for a living, refused a university chair to protect his independence, and died in 1677 at forty-four, probably of a lung disease aggravated by glass dust. The strangest fact about the AI moment is that its builders keep reaching, often without knowing it, for his metaphysics: the scaling enterprise rests on the conviction that the world has a single underlying structure intelligible to a sufficiently