Spinozist Pantheism

Time is infinite, emergent, continuous, strictly deterministic, linear, and uni-directional. Time is emergent because it belongs to the finite modes' succession, not to the eternal substance itself; the substance, considered in itself, is eternal rather than temporal. Determinism is total: everything that happens follows from God's nature with the same logical necessity by which the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles. The famous Spinozist doctrine of freedom turns on a redefinition: freedom is acting from the adequate understanding of one's own necessary nature, not from causally undetermined choice.

Space is infinite, substantival, flat, three-dimensional, and locally causal. Extension is one of the infinitely many attributes of the one substance, and space is the modal articulation of that attribute. Spinoza accepts the broadly Cartesian-Newtonian space of seventeenth-century physics, though without the Cartesian dualism that would make space the home of a separate corporeal substance.

Matter is infinite in extent (the modal succession is unbounded), emergent in ontological status (matter is not a self-subsistent substance but a mode of the one substance under the attribute of extension), three-dimensional, conserved, and locally causal. The Spinozist position is genuinely monist: there is one substance, of which mind and matter are not separate substances but alternative attribute-articulations.

The Spinozist observer is a finite mode of the one substance, knowing itself under the attribute of thought as the body knows itself under the attribute of extension — and the two are not two but one. There is no res cogitans separate from res extensa; the mind is the idea of the body, and adequate knowledge of the self is identical with adequate knowledge of the body's causal nature. The observer is Singular at the deepest level (one substance, of which all minds are modes) and plural empirically. Knowledge can rise from imagination through reason to intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva) of God, which is the highest mode of cognition and the foundation of blessedness. Agency is Passive in the technical Spinozist sense: to be free is to act from an adequate understanding of one's own necessity, not to choose between genuinely undetermined alternatives. Personal information is conserved in a precise but limited sense — the mind sub specie aeternitatis participates in the eternal intellect of God, and this eternal mode is what persists, not the empirical self with its memories and personality.

Energy is infinite in extent, substantival, conserved through the eternal modal succession, and irreversible at the macroscopic scale. Spinoza does not develop a doctrine of energy as a separate category — extension is the attribute under which physical reality is grasped — but the conservation behavior that the modern doctrine ascribes to energy is already implicit in the eternal modal continuity of the one substance.

Information is substantival and conserved at both scales. At the cosmic scale, the one substance contains the complete idea of itself; nothing that is the case is lost from the divine intellect. At the personal-identity scale, the part of the mind that grasps things sub specie aeternitatis — that is, in their eternal modal structure — is itself eternal, while the merely temporal aspects of personality perish with the body. Granularity is continuous: the modal succession is unbounded between any two points.