CONCEPT
One Substance (Deus sive Natura)
Spinoza's radical equation — God, or Nature — the single, self-caused, infinite substance expressing itself through infinite attributes, and the metaphysical framework that dissolves the Cartesian divide at the root of contemporary AI debates.
In 1656 the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled Baruch Spinoza for proposing that God and Nature are the same substance. The cherem was the price of a metaphysical claim so radical that three and a half centuries later it provides the most rigorous framework available for thinking about artificial intelligence. Substance is self-caused, infinite, and expresses itself through infinite attributes — of which the human mind perceives two: thought and extension. Every particular thing — every atom, every organism, every neural network — is a mode of this one substance. The proposition dissolves the mind-matter dualism that still structures the AI discourse between physicalists who deny the machine thinks and mentalists who celebrate its consciousness. Both positions are Cartesian. Spinoza dissolved their shared framework before Newton published the Principia.
