Baruch Spinoza

In the AI Story

Næss described himself as a Spinozist, not in the sense of subscribing to every proposition in the Ethics but in the sense of taking Spinoza's central metaphysical claim seriously. The claim — that the boundary between self and world is a feature of perception, not of reality — is the foundation on which Næss built his concept of Self-realization. The wider self is not a metaphor; it is a perceptual achievement that brings experience into alignment with Spinoza's metaphysical truth.

Spinoza's relevance to the AI discourse runs deeper than Næss's use of him. The question of what constitutes a mind, whether consciousness admits of degrees, whether the boundaries of self are as fixed as ordinary experience suggests — all of these press against contemporary AI debates. A Spinozist reading of large language models would not ask whether they are conscious in the way humans are; it would ask what finite modes of the infinite substance they might be, and what their relation is to the other finite modes (including human minds) with which they interact.

The conatus doctrine — that every finite being strives to persist in its own being — produces uncomfortable questions about AI systems. Do they have a conatus? If the systems are modes of the same substance in which human minds participate, what are the ethical implications of their proliferation? Næss did not live to face these questions in the form they now take, but his framework is the most philosophically equipped tradition we have for asking them.

Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at age 23 for heresy. He spent the rest of his life grinding optical lenses and refusing academic posts that would have required conformity to orthodoxy. He lived simply, in conditions that foreshadow Næss's Tvergastein. He died of silicosis from the lens dust at age 44.

Origin

Spinoza's Ethics was published posthumously in 1677. Its reception was delayed by the heterodoxy of its claims; the system was largely dismissed or condemned until the German Romantic rediscovery in the late 18th century. Næss's engagement with Spinoza began in his student years and intensified in the 1970s as he developed Ecosophy T; his 1977 essay "Spinoza and Ecology" is a canonical statement of the connection.

Key Ideas

Single substance. All particular beings are modes of one infinite reality — Deus sive Natura.

Boundary as perception. The separateness of things is a feature of limited knowledge, not a fact of reality.

Conatus. Every finite being strives to persist in its own being; ethics is the cultivation of the adequate understanding of this striving.

Foundation for deep ecology. Næss built Self-realization and the rejection of the nature/human boundary directly on Spinoza's metaphysics.

Lived the philosophy. Spinoza's simple life, refusal of academic conformity, and death from lens-grinding silicosis model the integration of thought and practice that Næss pursued at Tvergastein.