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See also pantheism, Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela (esp his paper "Not One, Not Two")

2 kinds, don't understand the difference, but cites links to panpsychism, pantheism, vitalism, etc.

All determinism and fatalism—including naturalism and pantheism—places the responsibility somewhere beyond the moral human being: in Nature, in God, in the stars. . This is because all determinism or fatalism is a manifestation of the mentality and psychology of a passenger.

The point is to accentuate the multiplicity within the self. Deleuze and Guattari argue that if the self is broken up enough a “body-without-organs” emerges in its place. This “BwO,” as it is sometimes affectionately called, combines Carlos Castaneda’s pulp sorcery, Antonin Artaud’s peyote narratives, sadomasochistic ecstasy, psychedelic “micro-perceptions,” and Spinoza’s monistic concept of God, among other things. The BwO describes a global force, a pantheism without god. That Deleuze and Guattari’s own texts manifest this odd sense of connection and causality accounts in part for their difficulty and their strange vitality.

pantheism

22 Feb 2023 - 19 Jun 2023

Pantheism is basically a special case of nondualism so inherits all the problematic promise of that mode of [non]thought. As such you would expect it to be something both impossible to grasp and also glaringly obviously true, something we already know but lack the ability to talk about.

It denies what might be the first or foundational duality of western thought, prior even to mind/body split. Or maybe it's the same split. Declares it null and void. In the beginning, god created (record scratch) Nope. It's a trick of language, x did y to z, when x, y, z are all facets of the same thing. God, the universe, and the process of creation, just names of parts of something too large to grasp.

Another aspect of pantheism: it solves some of the problems of "atheism" as a concept. Whatever atheists like Dawkins or Dennett say, normal people think that the materialism implied by atheism is also a denial of mind, or that it trivializing it, or declares that it isn't real, just an epiphenomenon of something mindless. Sometimes this is explictly "eliminativist", other times it is implicit. In either case, eliminationism is dumb because minds are obviously real, whether or not god is. Pantheism by contrast postulates no magic entities outside the system, it just asserts that the "system" is fully material and mental at the same time, because it is all there is.

Pantheism thus should be acceptable to scientific naturalists. It denies the supernatural, because nature itself is rich enough to support mind. Gods and spirits are just as real in their way as electrons and planets, different aspects of some underlying whole.

I don't know Spinoza well but I have a hunch I might be naively reiinventing some of his ideas. Ah yeah see Materialism, Terry Eagleton

According to Pantheologies, pantheism is seen by the mainstream as monstrous. To me it's just sturdy common sense, or something close to it. The god/universe dualism is just another bad one, a pre- or post-echo of mind/body dualism. Away with it!

cybernetics as an attempt at a scientific pantheism, sort of? Esp the Bateson variety.

Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the desit God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism…. Einstein was using 'God' in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.