CONCEPT
Spinozist Parallelism
Spinoza’s doctrine that the order and connection of ideas is identical to the order and connection of things—not two parallel worlds running alongside each other but one world conceived simultaneously under two attributes—and the most useful framework for asking what a computation and a thought actually are to each other.
Spinozist parallelism is the doctrine, stated in Part II of the Ethics, that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. The proposition is subtler than it appears: Spinoza is not saying that there are two parallel worlds, a mental one and a physical one, running alongside each other in pre-established harmony as Leibniz proposed. He is saying there is one world, one order of causes, expressed simultaneously and necessarily under the attribute of Thought and under the attribute of Extension. A bodily event and the idea of that event are not two events that happen to correspond; they are one event conceived now as physical, now as mental. Mind does not cause body and body does not cause mind—causation runs within an attribute, never between them—because they are not two things that could act on one another.
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