Hi Stephen P. King Ah so. I can point leibniz's critics to Godel.
And to the contingency of the world. What did you expect ? A rose garden ? Leibniz sort of sensed Godel's theorem by his recognition that while things must be perfect in Heaven, down here things were contingent, iffy, troublesome, imperfectly fitting and imperfect in the small, but optimal in the large. There were reaslons behind each event, but they needn't entirely jibe with one another. And even the reasons were mutually contingent. What a mess. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/20/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-18, 17:37:52 Subject: Re: Russell's possibly defective understanding of Leibniz. Or was itLeibniz's fault ? On 8/18/2012 2:56 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 18 Aug 2012, at 16:41, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal ? Admittedly, the more I dig into Leibniz, the more questions I have. But I won't abandon him yet, thinking I misunderstood one of his statements.? Or perhaps Russell misunderstood what Leibniz meant. ? According to Russell, "Complete set of predicates" means?"sufficient,?omplete?n a minimal sense". Like "sufficient reason" I suppose. Or Occam's razor. Or the truth should be simple. Thus "Socrates was a man"?s? proposition which is, as a proposition, thus a substance. This is tied into necessary reason, always either true or false. So I think the better definition is "Complete and unchanging set of predicates" ? So because "The horse was lame" may not always have been true, it is possibly contingent (is only a current fact), so?s a proposition it cannot be a substance as far as we know.? ? None of this can be true, however, since?ost things will change with time. The conclusion is that Russell may be wrong,?hat nothing?be a substance.? Yet Leibniz says the universe is made up entirely of monads, and monads are substances by definition. ? "For Leibniz, the universe is made up of an infinite number of simple substances ... " ? Perhaps Leibniz meant "the world I refer to in my philosophy..." He did not count time and space for excample as monads. Russell was still believing that the mathematical reality was axiomatizable.? G?el did not just destroyed Hilbert's program, but also a large part of the antic conception of platonism, including a large part of Russelm's conception. After G?el and Turing, after Post and Kleene, we know that the arithmetical Platonia is *full* of life, but also typhoons, black holes, and many things.? There is a "Skolem paradox", which needs model theory to be made precise: arithmetic is enumerable, nevertheless, when seen by machines from inside, it is not. It is *very* big. I respect a lot people like Leibniz and Russell. Leibniz, by many token, was closer to the discovery of the universal numbers/machines than Russell, despite Babbage. Comp is still close to Russell's philosophy of numbers but departs from his philosophy of sets. Leibniz needs just to be relativized, imo, by allowing accessibilty relations, or neighborhood relations between worlds/realities (shared dream/vido-game, somehow). Comp does not let much choice in the matter, anyway. We are confronted with a big problem, but we can, actually we have to, translate it in arithmetic, once we assume comp. Bruno Dear Bruno, ?? I think that Leibniz' Monads can be relativized by defining the equivalence relation in their mereology with a bisimulation function. -- Onward! Stephen "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
