All of these problems really do come out of confoundment about being human and trying to find our place in the world really. I mean what are we vis-a-vis the world, and all these questions about objective reality and the nature of time and death, and even what is the status of the eternal truths, of mathematics, that somehow we have access to. ((La Passion De Simone, Speak Of India)) It always seems to be about to me, the relationship between the self and everything that isn’t the self, which covers a — another name for which is reality. ((Quantum Implication, What Is Reality)) That’s what reality is, everything which isn’t the self and that there is a — so there’s something really deeply human and existential about even the most technical philosophy, you can go with it — and this is again another Spinozistic point that the intellect and the passions are intertwined with each other completely, to change your view of things, to acquire greater understanding is joyful, is expansive.

And there are other — there are emotions that we can correct by — painful emotions that we can correct by seeing the false propositions that they commit us to, there is a propositional component of emotions, so that the — Spinoza is such a collapser of dualisms, God and nature, and logic and the ontological, and of mind and body, and the intellect and the passions, or intellect and the emotions are also — this is a dualism — it’s a false dualism, according to Spinoza. So, I do feel that just the passion that goes into an ambitious intellectual endeavor, the amount of love for the nature of truth is — it’s all emotional, it’s all emotional. ((Emotionally Charged, Life Of The Intellect, Predicable Responses)) It’s hot, it’s not cold, it’s hot.