On 18 May 2013, at 19:40, Roger Clough wrote:
Leibniz's unintentional theology
There's no Christ in Leibniz's metaphysics, so it's not a Christian
philosophy. Yet Leibniz knew Christian philosophy, since he was a
believing Lutheran.
But, L does not discuss salvation, but it is a basis for his pre-
established
harmony (PEH) a theodicy he later wrote. I will get back to that
below.
But theology wasn't the purpose of L's metaphysics, L's purpose was
to show
defects in materialism
Unfortunately Leibniz missed the defects of weak materialism, and do
did not complete the come back to Platonism, and which "Matter" is the
boarder of the "universal mind". Leibniz has been close to the
discovery of the universal machine though, which, with only the
classical definition, sides at the start with Plato. She too can
forget that start, for some reason.
and propose a sound alternative to a group of atheists.
Which he did. It turned out to be an anti-materialist metaphysics
which
necessitated God or the One (yes, necessitated) or something like
that to be in it to work properly,
even to work at all.
OK.
La Place, you may recall, the mechanical materialist,
You talk to a list where some people understand, or argue, that
"mechanical materialism" is a contradiction (epistemological). If we
are machine, materialism losses all its explanative power, even just
for the appearance of matter. Ontologically we need only 0, and the
successor law, together with the laws of addition and multiplication.
Church thesis rehabilitates Pythagorus. For the epistemology of
machines, we need even more than the whole of possible math.
said
he was an atheist because he had no need of God in his calculations
of the planetary motions.
Hawkings has said the same. But they conveniently forgot that God is
necessary
if there is any design or principles of motion. Where else could
they come from ?
But L's overall metaphysics gives a complete picture of actual being
which,
to my mind at least, strongly suggests that there is an overall
design and principles of design.
That makes no interesting sense, as a designer is something more
complex that what we want to explain. Unless you enlarge designer to
get the universal dreamers, but they play more the role of 'man' than
God.
Is arithmetical truth a designer? The term does not seem appropriate
to me.
That would be God as Creator. Taking that and the pre-established
harmony (PEH)
into account, L's God is metaphorically a software program that
controls
all things according to a PEH). This PEH allows free will in man
presumably
because it was established with time running backwards. God in L's
metaphysics
would be the God
?
Monads themselves are not in spacetime, so they have no size,
They are mental concepts. As to the corporeal bodies they may refer
to,
there's no size limit except as long as they can be located and
referred to. Heisenberg's uncertaqinty principle would give such a
size.
Only if you justify Heisenberg from the comp first person
indeterminacy. (assuming comp).
But the planck length seems to be simply an empirical unit of
measurement, not
an actual entity in itself, not a complete concept, so I can't see
how you can
characterize it as a monad. L's principle of the identity of
indiscernibles
also sems to rule it out.
What about an afterlife ?
Anybody that criticizes materialism, which is a cult, will get
ostracized. It's a sad condition.
It is the current human condition. Theology has not yet come back at
the academy, which is the worst thing except for the rest (some
academies, like some democracies *can* be rotten, the rest *is* rotten
by wishful thinking or special interests).
L is not very explicit on life after death,
no doubt because Jesus is missing from his metaphysics.
But we can infer what L believed according to his metaphysics from the
way he esplains the succession of plants. plant to seed to plant to
seed etc.
the seed has a plant curled up inside, this curled up plant unfolds to
a full plant, which then produces a new plant seed and the process
continues.
A notion entirely explained with intensional diagonalisation. That
explains also how a web of dreams emerges from the numbers and their
laws.
But this is not reincarnation, for each new plant comes out the
plant-within-plant-within-plant ad infinitum that has individualized
vegetable souls
created at the beginning of the universe.
It is, or not, reincarnation, according to what you are willing to
identify too.
Presumably it is the same with man,
except only those written in the Book of Life (part of the PEH)
would be
reincarnated.
Attached to a rotting corpse is another way of saying that we sleep
after death
until we are resurrected in our bodies (now rehabilitated) after
death.
In God knows which one of many other possible computational histories.
The entire structure of comp histories can be studied mathematically.
Leibniz reversed correctly Aristotle, but like Kant, he does not go as
far as needed to get the theology, including physics, of the universal
correct/honest machine.
You are still too much materialist from a computationalist point of
view, Roger. Then the main advantage of machine's theology is that it
can be tested.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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