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Guess Who’s Way Smarter than You!
Freakin’ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that’s who! But golly–what a weirdo! And I’m not just talking about his hairdo and those funny clothes. Leibniz is the monad guy. Yes, that guy, one of philosophy’s weirdest. The guy who said pretty much everything is a monad!
What’s that you say? “What’s a monad?” Well, I’m so glad you asked! A monad is a mental atom, or a psychic atom–meaning that it’s a thing that has perception and is not made of any parts.
You’re a monad. So is G-d. (But G-d is basically the Super Monad.) And your chair is a monad. Even molecules are monads. Basically, everything that’s a thing has a monad–or, rather, is a monad.
Perception is everywhere, and nothing interesting is made of matter.
Also, matter can’t think, and if you were ever wondering how the mind connects to the body, Leibniz has an answer: It doesn’t.
In fact, monads never even interact with anything. People don’t even interact with each other. All our perceptions, including the appearance of interacting with others, are pre-established and arranged by G-d!
Does this all sound super weird? Yes.
Does it sound like the sort of philosophy that gives philosophy a bad name? Maybe.
But Leibniz is still a freakin’ genius, smarter than you are and smarter than I am. Even if he’s weird and wrong, he’s still a genius, and there’s got to be something useful or insightful in these ideas.
But if you want an idea as to what, my first piece of advice is: Don’t bother. It’s not that it isn’t there; it’s just that Leibniz, even more than most philosophers, takes some work to understand properly before we can evaluate him properly. You’re probably not ready for it. I don’t think I am either.
But if you still really, really want an idea as to what we can find in Leibniz that’s useful or insightful, here’s my second piece of advice: Try on his argument that matter cannot produce consciousness.
It’s pretty cool, but it needs just a bit of updating to deal with contemporary physics. Chunks of matter pushing against each other have nothing to do with consciousness, he says. But if you add some energy to this arrangement it still has nothing to do with consciousness. And, with or without the update, making it more complex is just taking that which has nothing to do with consciousness and . . . adding to it more of that which still has . . . nothing to do with consciousness.
That argument is the subject of “Leibniz’ Monadology: Video 5″ in my “The Philosophers in Their Own Words” playlist on YouTube. There are a total of eight videos on Leibniz.
And if you hate YouTube, here‘s an all-Leibniz playlist/channel on Rumble with the same videos (possibly not all aired yet), and here’s where you can subscribe to me on Rumble.
Don’t worry–we’ll get back to the Greco-Roman philosophers soon. I have Seneca videos to advertise!
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The dude invented calculus. Of course he’s smarter than me.
It was all the hatin’ he got from Newton.
Hey, Izzy, lighten up! Everybody but Amy and I think you invented calculus.
I got no opinions on who got where first. I’m just here for the monads.
When I was taking AP Calc in high school, whenever the teacher mispronounced Leibniz’s name, it sounded like my name. Funny times.
I may do that myself.
I’ll take your word for it. This post gave me enough of Leibniz and his monads.
It caused lots of confusion for the class at the beginning. It turned out I invented calculus just like Newton.
There’s a gonads joke up for grabs if anyone wants to take it.
If you watch the first video, you’ll hear a reference to “You just keep your monads to yourself,” which a classmate said jovially to his neighbors in my first philosophy class at DBU.
I don’t. Leibniz ist der Erfinder von Differenzial-und- Integratierechnung. Ohne Zweifel.
And never forget: Leibniz Butter Cookies are made from 100% wild-caught Monads. Never canned.
You don’t say.
Phlogiston theory was also enlightening. Wrong, and irredeemably so, but for most of its life an area of valid study. Study proved the theory wrong, and thereby ruled out entire families of wrong answers. Naturally, some of it on faded funeral by funeral, but for the most part, phlogiston was a well-behaved science.
Epicurus was right about atoms and the void 2K years before Liebniz was, er, not confirmed in his views. When science is shackled to dogma, even the most brilliant cannot shine.
Was he, though? Are there any physical particles having some size which do not have parts and are not, at least in principle, divisible?
Depends how you understand a particle. Because two can collide, they must have size. likewise for the argument that there is mass, which without size would be of infinite density (softer argument I think). But near Planck, size is not what it’s cracked up to be. And indivisible? Welllll… not yet is as good as never when the rest of the theory hangs together… mostly.
Was Liebniz an essentialist? By which I mean did he hold that the smallest particle of chair still had the chair-nature?
Going to bed now. See you later.
If your point is that contemporary physics suggests that some small particles apparently have size but not parts, then . . . that’s one for Epicurus, I guess!
Well, no, I don’t think so. But he definitely thinks things have essences.
Shoot. I was going to guess Archimedes.
I remember hearing about him in my Philosophy of Space course. He was surreal and bizarre.
@saintaugustine How do you know he was smart, and not just spouting profound BS like a postmodernist?
Early Enlightenment era, pre-Kant. He’s nothing like a postmodernist. Very much about objective truth and fact-fact-fact, this guy.
I’m not sure how to describe how I know a guy is a genius. He just is, and you can tell from reading him.
It’s also what Carl Vaught told me when I dissed Leibniz. Leibniz is a genius, Vaught told me. I ought to have some respect for Leibniz.
And dang was Vaught ever right!
Archimedes is my favorite mathematician. All my homies love Archimedes.
I’m thinking that if he wasn’t hampered by working in Roman Numerals he might have taken his method of approximating pi and invented calculus with it.
RSR/Public Service Announcement/RBBF/17FEB22
(Voice of Burt Lancaster) “It’s now February 17, 2022. Perhaps according to the clock and the calendar, Hank Rhody’s birthday is over. But for those of us who avidly follow his thread comments, for those of us who made our first computers out of plastic toothpicks skewered with thin slices of cheese, sausage, and pickle, the Rhody birthday spirit lives on. And that’s why it’s the perfect time to take out a pen and open your checkbook. Write a check to the Rhody Balzer Booze Fund. Address it in care of The Lazy Monk, 153 Madison Street, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Just say, “Hank sent me”.
(Voice of Announcer) And now back to our regular scheduled overnight program, Ramon Raquello and His Latin Rhythmeers, playing scintillating melodies live from the ballroom of the Grand Chippewa Hotel…”
This meant for the Pit?
You’re right, of course! Don’t know how I made such a rookie mistake. Well, it is 1:31 am local time…thanks, and sorry to accidentally derail a very interesting thread-in-the-making!
I would say that (as far as my ability to follow), What Liebniz says is internally consistent, and is externally consistent to a level reasonable for his times. I would gently pooh-pooh Epicurus and would be astounded at the sharp, prophetic ability of Liebniz if physics had shown us different truth utterly unavailable to either man. And frankly, the state of modern science must always be taken with a pinch of salt (some ares more, some less), because inconsistencies still mount. We can sorta reconcile the human scale with the galactic universal, and we can to a lesser degree sorta reconcile our scale with the particle world, but we cannot at all reconcile the ends of the spectrum with each other. No doubt out limited vantage blinds us to things, and makes us believe only partially true thing about even our familiar scale.
Liebniz therefore is actually scoring pretty well for a man of his time. He rests upon a seemingly invalid axiom (the severability of an elusive essence from matter and energy) which he uses to prove that axiom (I think) — chained to dogma. But outside of a rigorous structure like set theory (and effective substitions like the algebraic logic used by *some* philosophers), that’s just gonna happen because the truth is a hairy beast, connected to itself all over. That is not to say that a rigorous and self-evidently true accounting cannot be done — just that we are mssing too many pennies.
If we allow metaphysics, then his metaphysical claims may hold together — who can tell? But the moment he tries to separate it from physics by connecting it with physics — well, there’s the hair again.
I’m aware that in my ignorance, I am no doubt abusing some terms, so please forgive some play in the joints. Liebniz might be totally wrong, but like phlogiston theory, his was serious work, not just spouted nonsense. I think part of our revulsion at some of his phrasing is that modern BS is pitched to sound like Liebniz to borrow some gravitas. And in fact, much the discourse in philosophy, sociology, and economics borrow phrasing from German, which is simply awful at least in translation to English. People get away with spouting nonsense in these fields because even the true facts are stated in a way that sounds like cant (even Kant!)– our BS detectors are suppressed in these fields, a fact exploited by our modern pedantic and abusive merchants of highly credentialed snake oil.
Even my own text in this comment is largely missing the righteous and self-evident simple consistency of a good old King James diction. I’ve messed up and gone for Baroque.
That is a wonderful sentence.
I almost wish I had more Leibniz in my head and could be sure that I think he’s not even remotely totally wrong–just a mere 40% wrong! (Or a mere 60%? 20%? 30%?)
But I just don’t have a lot of Leibniz anywhere near the surface right now. In Leibniz, it’s monads all the way down, and in my brain Leibniz is pretty far down.
Haven’t touched him in . . . oh, wow–I think it’s been more than a year!
Anyway, that is a wonderful sentence you got there, BDB.
Good grief! That’s less wonderful, but still pretty darn good.
If almost everything is a monad, how is that helpful? Uhhh…there are several kinds of monads?
There are. I am scarcely familiar with the one mentioned in the OP, but I heard of the computer-programming kind when I studied Haskell. I did not study this language very hard, put off as I was by its imposed rigors. I found those excessive, petulant even. There is in some but not all programming a sense of sin: it exists, it is technical, but no less punishable for that. Under some circumstances, it may be forgiven, but the programmer should assume nothing. A philosopher could study this.
The last I looked, the only thing ever programmed in Haskell was its compiler, which is as if the only book ever written in a language was a dictionary for it. Yet the impulse to create these things is not ignoble. Haskell was meant for something called functional programming, which is a rival or alternative to something called object-oriented programming. In object-oriented programming, everything is an object. I do not know if everything in functional programming is a function, which is in turn a monad, but you can see how annoying this gets.
For a while in 2007 and maybe continuing into 2008, I often dreamed in Leibniz as a side-effect of studying for the modern and contemporary philosophy grad school comprehensive exams.
During one Leibniz dream, I figured out LOST.
Or so I thought at the time. I think it was something along the lines of “If everything and everyone on the Island is a monad, it all makes sense!”
I don’t think any clear picture of how it made sense survived even till lunchtime that day. Maybe there was never a clear picture.
Well, for all the parts I don’t agree with, this exotic metaphysics does let Leibniz avoid the unsolvable mind-body connection issue Descartes had set up with his newfangled metaphysics. And it lets him support some science and religion at the same time, always a hit with the early Enlightenment philosophers.
One of my videos in the Leibniz series talks about kinds of monads. It was fun.
And you’ve mostly lost me on all this, but it sounds pretty cool.
Egads.