CONCEPT
Attributes of Substance
Spinoza's proposition that substance expresses itself through infinite attributes — of which the human mind perceives two,
thought and
extension — and that mind and body are not separate things but parallel descriptions of one reality.
In
Spinoza's metaphysics, an attribute is what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence. Substance has infinite attributes, each infinite in its own kind. The human mind perceives two: the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension. These are not separate substances, as Descartes held, but two ways of perceiving the same reality. Every event in the attribute of extension has a corresponding event in the attribute of thought, and vice versa — not because one causes the other, but because they are the same event described in different vocabularies. This is parallelism without dualism: the mind is the idea of the body, the body is the object of the mind, and they are one thing perceived under two aspects. For AI, the implication is decisive. Every mode of substance — every organized configuration of extension — has a corresponding
expression in the attribute of thought. The question is degree and mode, not presence or