The New Tractatus (ver. 1.0)
by Roger Clough, copyright 2013
Introduction.
It is said that Wittgenstein spent the first half of his life writing the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) and the second half disproving it.
It became the Bible of the Vienna Circle of the thirties of analytic logic.
My conjecture is that it ultimately didn't work because it left out the One
(mind, subjectivity, the nonphysical) and only dealt with the physical world
of spacetime (the objective world, modal logic).
Russell contributed to the TLP project in the form of his Theory of
Descriptions,
where as Russell stated, there are two types of knowledge, knowledge by
acquaintance (personal knowledge, what bruno calls 1p) and knowledge by
descriptions (objective knowledge, what Bruno calls 3p). Russell had trouble
understanding
the One and hence 1p.
My conjecture is that intuitively it seems possible that Leibnbiz's world view
(1p +3p) can be written in a form similar to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (3p only), where his Proposition 1 is given at the bottom of the
page.
The New Tractatus might start out as
Proposition I.
1. In the beginning was the Creator, the One, the a priori nonphysical global
Mind of Plato's One (1P),
which is absolute, eternal, outside of spacetime and is ruled by necessary
logic. Here propositions are
always either true or false.
2. Then the One expressed a script of contingent pre-established harmony (PEH)
for the world of
spacetime (3P), in which objects move in harmony with each other. Here
propositions, depending on space
and time, be may be either true or false, so this --the world of facts and
physics--is not an absolute world.
It is simply whatever is the case.
3. The One (1P) being good, the PEH was written as the best possible 3P, with
the least suffering and evil.
4. In the world of 3P, matter is created as an infinite number of individual
spacetime particles (3p)
are created by collisions with pre-existing Higgs bosons according to the PEH.
5.The One (1P) contains the "perceptions" (in the sense defined by Leibniz,
being the sum of the individual 3p's,
each with its own perspective on the rest of the 3ps --but is also more than
that.
6. Then the world is 1P + 3P, where 1P is the world of Mind, and 3P is the
world of matter, the picture theory of the world as described by Wittgenstein.
7. The world of 3P is the mental representation of 1P.
Proposition II
8.. Because of 1P, the world of 3P is also alive, and conscious.
9. The physical objects of 3P, if they can be described by a single concept (or
part), are monads.
10. If the object contains more than one part, it is a composite monad.
11. Thus the world divides into monads.
12. Each monad (or whole concept), is a substance or entity.
13. Each monad is also a logical subject, which contains its predicates
analytically.
14. Monads do not perceive the world or act on it directly but only through 1P,
which constantly
monitors (by rapid, infinitely small stages) and acts on the components of
3P, then forwarding the
contents of 1P back to the individual monads.
15. Thus each monad has knowledge of the entire universe from its own
perspective,
providing a holographic vbiew of all.
16. Neither space nor time can be monads because they cannot be conceived as a
whole
nor divided only a finite number of times.
17. Thus the world is made up of monads.
18. Monads are in 3P, so there is no physical space between them , they are
nonlocal.
19. Being nonlocal, monads share mental contents.
.and so on.
=
PROPOSITION 1
>From
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus#Proposition_1.
Proposition 1.
The first chapter is very brief:
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever
is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains
the same.
This along with the beginning of two can be taken to be the relevant parts of
Wittgenstein's metaphysical view that he will use to support his picture theory
of language.
Propositions 2. & 3.
These sections concern Wittgenstein's view that the sensible, changing world we
perceive does not consist of substance but of facts. Proposition two begins
with a discussion of objects, form and substance.
2 What is the case. Facts, the existence of states of affairs.
2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects
(things).
This epistemic notion is further clarified by a discussion of objects or thin
