
Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind (2013) - MichaelAO
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/
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tiatia
"A complex equation describing complex data isn't a law since it does not
possess simplicity" \- Leibnitz

I liked this so much when I once read it, I wrote it down to keep it.

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tehchromic
odd to me that philosophers ideas which can seem to be so obviously and
uselessly conflicted from where we stand now, also form the building blocks of
modern thinking, even in spite of them, ie Leibniz acrobatic attempts to
discount materialism yielding a prototype idea of AI, which would also seem to
be the ultimate vindication of materialism.

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p1esk
You're kidding right? The majority of people, and many modern philosophers
still have essentially the same beliefs regarding consciousness/perceptions as
what Leibniz wrote here:

"One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is
inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In
imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think,
to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while
retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like
into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find
only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a
perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in
the machine, that one must look for perception."

For example, look up "Chinese room argument", written in 1980. Leibniz would
be proud!

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Udo
That's why philosophy is in a crisis right now, because it's in fundamental
dissonance with scientific observation. You may disagree that this is a
problem, but at that point you're implicitly arguing that the intents of
philosophy no longer contain a desire to describe and reflect the actual
world.

For most of human history, philosophy was expressly designed to perform
discovery - albeit speculatively - on universal principles without the
invocation of religion. It was understood that any concrete scientific
knowledge of an area would supersede whatever philosophical construct had
covered the same subject before. Now we are at a point where this is
apparently no longer the case, and philosophers who refuse to consider current
scientific understanding are no longer in a position to claim a strong barrier
between religion and philosophy.

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_xander
Luckily, some philosophy doesn't compete with the formal sciences because it
operates outside of their remit; e.g. moral philosophy, political philosophy
and epistemology. It is here that some meaningful work can still be done
without fear of being empirically outgunned.

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tim333
For better or worse science is encroaching there too, in to the study of
morality at any rate. See [http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Animal-
Evolutionary-Psycholo...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Animal-Evolutionary-
Psychology/dp/0679763996) for example.

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djloche
Leibniz dug into so many areas, but I wish people had found and published his
writings on quantum theory far earlier.

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tim333
Quantum theory? He would have been quite ahead of his time given he died in
1716.

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noblethrasher
“Quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started
from probability theory, and then said, let's try to generalize it so that the
numbers we used to call "probabilities" can be negative numbers. As such, the
theory could have been invented by mathematicians in the 19th century without
any input from experiment. It wasn't, but it could have been.”[1]

Still a bit too late for Leibniz by that argument, but within the ballpark.

[1]:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html)

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tim333
I looked up the history of complex numbers and probability theory and both
predate Leibniz. Even so I don't think he cracked that one.

