7 ms·
Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind (2013)
- tehchromic 11y agoodd 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.
- p1esk 11y agoYou'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!
- Udo 11y agoThat'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.
- p1esk 11y ago"Philosophy" is a diverse field - it's a collection of opinions. None of which seem particularly dominant at the moment. Philosophy as a whole has always been partially ahead, and partially behind science, as new scientific theories create new philosophical questions, not answered by those theories. I'm pretty sure it's going to stay this way for the foreseeable future.
- Retra 11y agoThere are clearly dominant opinions. It just that those who know this don't often become philosophers, they become scientists. Because it's quite pointless to spend one's career beating dead horses.
- p1esk 11y agoThere are deep questions that science can't answer. The only "clearly dominating opinion" about them is "we don't know". To some, thinking about those questions is "beating dead horses", others become philosophers.
- Retra 11y agoWhat do you mean by 'deep' questions? The existence of mystery is wholly dependent upon ignorance. So I'm curious why you think there's anything deeper than ignorance at work there.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago"Now we are at a point where this is apparently no longer the case" It hasn't really been the case since Galileo and Newton made hash of Aristotle's notions of physics.
- _xander 11y agoLuckily, 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.
- _xander 11y agoSomeone posted a novel take on this problem 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847
- tehchromic 11y agoYeah that's good! I like Heidegger in that he traces the root meaning of words. So philosophy is love of wisdom, and everyone knows that but they seem to mistake the field for metaphysics and whatever else incomprehensible word jumble it loosely applies to. Maybe it is a love of wisdom that drives some philosophers to drone on endlessly because maybe they feel we need more sleep!
- stcredzero 11y agoPhilosophers have always been good about asking the interesting questions. They've also been bad at finding the answers. So what if certain things were done just because philosophers just didn't want to consider themselves meat puppets? They still came up with substantive things in the process.
- tiatia 11y ago"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.
- djloche 11y agoLeibniz dug into so many areas, but I wish people had found and published his writings on quantum theory far earlier.
- tim333 11y agoQuantum theory? He would have been quite ahead of his time given he died in 1716.
- noblethrasher 11y ago“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
- tim333 11y agoI looked up the history of complex numbers and probability theory and both predate Leibniz. Even so I don't think he cracked that one.
- djloche 11y agoI could have sworn he wrote a bunch of things late in his life that, when finally published with the rest of his work in the late 20th century, revealed more quantum theory related philosophy. Unfortunately, I don't have my notes from when I was researching this a few years ago, so I will have to concede that this may be faulty memory attributing things to the wrong individual.
- SilasX 11y agoYou mean monads? His "identity of indiscernibles" that gets referenced in QM? He predated what most people refer to as "quantum theory".