Jonathan,

"Newton was buried with full honors at Westminster Abbey, Leibniz was accompanied to his grave by only his secretary. But with every passing year, the shadow cast by Leibniz gets larger and larger. "(E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937).

That seems a pessimistic view, Vitaly,

Do we really live in a different environment? Leibniz was interested in the fundamental truths about being human in a universe - has that changed? To my mind there is nothing parochial to his time or arbitrary about his views. In some ways he seems to have the advantage of applying pure logic to basic problems without being sidetracked by details about electricity or quarks that may clutter up modern minds. In his time even 'matter' had not acquired the naive realist implications that give rise to muddled modern ideas of materialism. He was in a way working with a black sheet of paper. And I see no need to think differently - in fact the more I read the more I find, as a scientist with a wider interest in ontology, that I naturally think the way he did. In my experience, children think differently from their parents until they have children and then they tend to think the same way!!

100 years ago virtually nothing of Leibniz's work was available. It has gradually come to light over the last 50 years and is still being catalogued. People like Garber have sorted out some important points. I am more optimistic that we can come to see what was meant. If someone can explain why the basic principles of quantum physics have to be the way they are, 300 years before anyone has thought of quantum physics I think they are worth taking note of!

The problem with Leibniz is that he writes too much and his thoughts are scattered here and there so that it is difficult to gather what he really thinks about an issue. As far as I know the complete edition of his writings was started many decades ago and as of now the project has not finished yet. He writes on anything and everything and on every subject imaginable. There is no denial that he is a genuine genius, but it's hard to gauge what he really thinks.

You mentioned the Monadology. This is one of Leibniz's more famous writings, and it is quite obscure. The world is composed of indivisible substances called the monads. But what are they? They are not the same as atoms because atoms are divisible; they have extensions, in the language of the 17th century. Monads, on the contrary, do not have extensions; they are mental entities at the same time as physical. This is the obscure part of Leibniz's philosophy. Monads do "perceive" their surroundings and are one and the same as the simple souls. The world is totally populated by countless number of monads and as they are simple souls, you find souls everywhere in the world. It's hard to reconcile this view with today's scientific world picture. A monad reflects every other monad, so that by knowing one of them fully you would come to know the entire universe. Perhaps there is a corollary in modern physics on this point. Basic physical particles are such that if you know them perfectly, you come to know the working of the entire universe. One might credit Leibniz with prescience in this way, but still it's difficult to reconcile the view that monads are mental entities with perceptions with today's scientific picture.

Thank you, Soraj, this is the barrier to understanding Leibniz that I perceive is prevalent and need not be. You say the monads are obscure. But there need be nothing obscure about them. They are the indivisible dynamic units of the universe. During the first half to three quarters of the twentieth century physics still clung on, to some extent at least, to the idea of 'particles' as if like mini-atoms with the implication of tiny balls of a certain size - the Democritan view that both Leibniz and Descartes rightly denied possible. But by 1970-80 it became clear that 'particle' was not a useful word, at least if it implied any extension. In post-1980 field theory the indivisible dynamic unit is a mode of excitation of a field, or, since it is not quite clear what 'excitation' adds, maybe better just 'a quantised mode'.

If we ask to what extent Leibniz's description of a monad accords with the QFT account of a mode I think we find that he got almost everything right. So when I first read Leibniz, having already studied field theory, I found nothing the slightest bit obscure. I found him laying out the logical requirements for dynamic units that become self-evident if one sees why you have to abandon Democritan atoms (essentially because, as Leibniz said, they entail a contradiction). Modes of excitation must 'perceive' their universe, because their equations dictate that their progression is in accordance (harmony) with the universal field of potentials they occupy. Thus the mode reflects the universal field. This is particularly so in the sense that the very nature of the mode itself is determined as much by its end as its beginning, which are in turn determined by its universe. And this peculiar 'telic' state of affairs is unique to the individual mode level and does not apply to aggregates - exactly as Leibniz said it would. Modes never in themselves have antitypic extension but antitypy arises (through Pauli exclusion) once aggregates form. To my mind his detailed predictions of the laws of quantum dynamics are quite breathtaking.

The 'mental' aspect of monads might seem at odds with modern physics but I do not think it can be. The standard physics response to why we have a sense of being mental entities is that this is just part of the way 'physical things' are (i.e. Locke's response). As a physical scientist panpsychism has always been the obvious way to think about things (despite having never known it was called that until I was 55). As far as I know no physicist has ever said that 'mental' in the sense of being a subject of experience is alien to physics. In fact, as Russell says, without experience physics does not add up to anything intelligible. The idea of incompatibility between mental and physical is largely a religious prejudice as far as i can see.

So my point is that Leibniz's monads are pretty much exactly the same as the modes of QFT. There are some important technical shifts that need to be made when considering human monads specifically but the basic logical structure fits perfectly. The intriguing question for me is whether people do not see this simply because of the division between disciplines and lack of familiarity with literature or whether the shift in thinking gear that is needed to see why QFT makes sense is something that is difficult for many people to go through unless they have a practical need to test ideas that depend on such a framework (i.e. work on physics problems). Some say that it is a bit like riding a bicycle - you have to try it a few times before you see it works. I hope this is not true and with some basis - since I am not in fact a practicing physicist myself, and nor indeed was Leibniz, I think, in the sense that I doubt he ever did an experiment!!

I am not sure how relevant Gödel is, Vitaly. My understanding is that his contribution was to show that a frenetic fashion for finding a complete consistent set of premises for a tool of analysis called a formal system set up in the late nineteenth century was misguided. My reading of Gödel is that his conclusion is unsurprising, and it has no impact on my view of reality - just on my view of our tools of analysis. I rather suspect Leibniz would have thought the same. He spent some time trying to identify all the basic logical statements, I realise, but later on he also wrote about the impossibility of complete knowledge. The more I study language and arithmetic the more I come to think that they are message sending tools that have very little to do with how our brains work, let alone how the world works. As far as I can see what is special about human brains is that they can convert computations performed in a non-language based way into messages couched in these artificial communication languages and back again. That the forms expressible in the communication languages are limited comes as no surprise. Maybe sometimes we see what we want to see and not what it really is...?

Dear Vitaly,

I am happy that all this is 'beyond proof' but I was not raising an issue of proof, rather one of understanding. Soraj mentions the common view that Leibniz is obscure. The point of my original question was simply to suggest that perhaps Leibniz need not be obscure and that post-1980 physics has made it easier to see what he meant. If you reject Democritan atoms totally, you end up with pretty much monads. It is just that Leibniz was perhaps one of very few people who thought through the full implications of pure dynamism.

I don't think anyone else quite thought the way Leibniz did. We might consider Newton, Hooke, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Descartes, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Mach, Kant and so on, but none of the others give us this clear account of what we should expect indivisible dynamics units to be like, at least to my mind. I don't think you would find anything like Leibniz much further back because his thesis draws heavily on the relatively recently derived laws of elasticity (Hooke etc.) that point to the existence of 'force units' being the basis of the appearance of extended matter. Rather than a matter of faith I think it may be a matter of attention to the original texts!!

http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~seager/pan_seager.pdf

Modified extract of the above text:

Spinoza thought that both mind and matter were but merely two attributes of an underlying, infinite and infinitely complex substance that he identified with God. Every material thing has its mentalistic aspect, and vice versa. As Spinoza wrote: ‘a circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing ... therefore, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute of Thought ... we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes ...’

Leibniz replaces the single supreme substance with an infinity of diverse finite substances (the monads) and one separate infinite substance (god or the highest monad). Each monad is an ‘incorporeal automaton’ (Leibniz 1714/1989, §18) in the sense that each contains within itself the complete cause of its succession of states (which Leibniz called its perceptions to emphasize their mental

nature). Each monad is completely independent of every other thing, requiring only God for its creation and endurance. There is no element of nature that is not associated with a set of monads. Leibniz introduced the distinction between organisms and mere aggregates. A mere

aggregate corresponds to a set of monads which is not hierarchically organized; an organism is an organized set of monads under one dominant monad. The human body is made of organs, which have sub-organs, in an hierarchical organization which subserves its biological functionality. The corresponding system of monads reflects this organization, expressed in the clarity and perspective of the information possessed by each monad in the hierarchy. Thus while your body has a corresponding dominant monad that is your conscious mind, a heap of sand has no such ‘top’ monad but corresponds merely to the set of monads of the smallest organized units constituting it (grains of sands are likely to be themselves mere aggregates but perhaps the molecules are organisms in Leibniz’s sense).

Each monad contains within it a complete specification of the entire universe from a particular viewpoint, expressed with more or less clarity. A monad that was incomplete could fit into more than one possible world.

Leibniz also made a distinction: that between conscious and non-conscious mental states. The mental lives of most monads are almost entirely unconscious, consisting of ‘petite perceptions’. Fully conscious states are introspectible and form what Leibniz called ‘apperceptions’. Even monads with rich conscious lives, such as ourselves, are aware of only a tiny fraction of our mental states.

It must also be noted that Leibniz did not agree with Spinoza on the co-fundamentality of matter and mind. For him, the physical world was a ‘well founded illusion’ or logical construction from the sum total of all monadic points of view. Every thing which we regard as a material being (a speck of dust or a single unobservable atom) has its corresponding mental aspect which grounds

it.

Thanks Louis,

Bill Seager is a man of considerable perspicacity - one of the philosophers I respect most. I wouldn't argue with any of what he says there. What is so strange to me as a scientist is that most philosophers regard Leibniz's view (as well described in your post) as 'bizarre' or 'going nowhere' when it makes perfect sense in modern scientific terms - bar a few practical issues relating to human souls. His monad or indivisible dynamic unit is almost indistinguishable from the dynamic units of quantum field theory. In the light of all the accumulated scientific knowledge we now have, that ought to make the search for the human soul relatively straightforward. Trouble is nobody actually takes that seriously (except maybe me!). And yet grant giving bodies pour money into fMRI studies presumably because they are sort of searching for the soul (but would not dare say so out loud).

Jonathan,

I wish I could understand better the similarity between Leibniz's view and quantum field theory. The problem is that I do not have any background in this field. I know that many physicists have started to take Leibniz seriously in the last decade ( Smolin, Barbour). More and more scientists are starting to see the benefit of learning the philosophy of the past and thus become philosopher-scientists. Science has assimilated Newton rapidly, now the scientific culture is beginning to be ready to assimilate Leibniz. Here is a paper that is very interesting about the relational physical project of Leibniz:

http://www.tau.ac.il/~agass/joseph-papers/Leibniz.pdf

Dear Louis,

The Agassi article is very nice - thanks for pointing to it. There is a particularly nice point about the critique of Faraday's dispositionalism (what **actuality**is everything in physics disposed to?) that I am going to use as a quote in an essay on the so called Hard Problem of consciousness. (Everything in physics is disposed to determine *actual experience*, hence the Hard Problem is an oxymoron!)

My thoughts on Leibniz and QFT are discussed in various degrees of depth in my Monadology essay posted on my RG site and my webpages. I apologise for apparent self-advertisement but my real cause is to advertise Leibniz in this tercentenary year. I think he deserves it.

As Agassi points out for space one can have a very lengthy discussion about exactly what Leibniz got right. However, for me the important point is that Leibniz laid down a series of principles of necessity for a theory of the world which seem to survive even if his own practical conclusions did not always hit the mark. Some of these principles seem to be at the heart of what might otherwise be the most perplexing aspects of QFT.

In simple terms:

He says the universe must be made of indivisible dynamic units - which for early QM would be particles but are now modes of excitation of fields. He argues that these units have no size or extension in the sense of antitypy. Their nature is entirely dynamic and relational. But they operate in spatiotemporal domains determined by their relations - most typically they associate with 'aggregates' of other monads that appear as mechanical matter. These units never interact by 'passing on' anything from one to another, as was the standard theory at his time, nor do they 'bump into' each other. Each just follows a set of rules of what it does in a particular context - it progresses in harmony with everything else. This is exactly the structure of the equations for modes. The nature of a mode is determined by an intrinsic pattern of change (differentials of 'Psi' in space and time) and the field of potentials V (the universe) it operates in.

As Agassi says, it can be difficult to know whether broad ideas like this are special to Leibniz or whether they recur throughout the history of scientific thought. For me there are two special aspects to Leibniz's approach. The first is that he sees it as an intrinsic part of the scientific programme to explain perception or experience. We have to have monads in order to have points of view in a universe. Very few other physicists trod this road.

The second is that Leibniz sees the need for indivisible units but also sees a need for these units to exist at different scales such that it seems that 'matter' is infinitely divisible. This looks like a paradox - how can matter be infinitely divisible yet there be indivisible units? In a simple reading I think Leibniz had this wrong, but in a more careful reading I think his premises may actually be sound. It is just that one has to follow the implications of the principles very carefully. It is probably true that one can divide any piece of matter up into an infinite number of modes. The key point here is that dynamic modes in QFT are not just traditional particles like quarks and electrons but vast families of modes based on asymmetries and Group Theory, like phonons. Although Leibniz's own practical interpretations do not quite fit, the principle of having 'dominant monads' or 'souls' associated with material objects is entirely consistent with Nambu-Goldstone theorem - which says just that, that for every discrete object there is a family of global modes for that object, one of which may well be dominant.

What I like most about Leibniz is the implication, opposite to the popular conception, that souls are not 'spooky extras' to physics; they are hard nosed physics. It is just that they are 'metaphysical' in the sense that they exist at a level underlying the mechanical behaviour of aggregates that in general can only be inferred by conscious deliberation because the unconscious inferences made by our sense pathways tend not to go that deep.

Jonathan ,

I am trying to understand cognition from theoretical biological evolutionary viewpoint. The focus is the understanding the evolution of life, not in the details, but from the evolution of action cycles (modads). The evolution of more and more complex organism into more and more complex ecosystems correspond to the evolution of hierarchical action systems endowed with multiple action modes. Any action mode involves an interactive cycle between specific mode of action of the organism and specific environmental aspects (umwelt). What is usually under estimated in usual theoretical biology systemic approachec is the depth of the mirroring between the structures of these action modes and the umwelts. I have explored this depth in the particular case of visual perception and I am exploring how the image geometrical approach that I have developed in this specific context can be generalized.

Jonathan,

"Newton was buried with full honors at Westminster Abbey, Leibniz was accompanied to his grave by only his secretary. But with every passing year, the shadow cast by Leibniz gets larger and larger. "(E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937).

That sounds very interesting Louis. Leibniz's monad totally reflected its universe. A quantised mode of excitation reflects the potentials at all times and places in its domain - which is in theory the whole universe, even if the non-trivial domain is small. The question is whether either or both of these, monads and modes, corresponds with your cycles of action. And here I think there is a complication to build in to the analysis. A system of many interacting parts can form an action cycle and can, for instance, be treated thermodynamically as a dissipative system, and you start to move towards Varela. But Leibnizian monads and QFT modes have NO parts that interact. They simply reflect their universe with no mechanism at all. My thought is that maybe the organism is a system of interacting parts that has cycles that reflect its universe (I know the umwelt term but am not sure quite how it is used) in great detail but that within the organism there is another level at which this reflection is repeated within individual indivisible mode-field interactions -probably many of them (almost a fractality, although I am suspicious of such buzz-words). I do not think there are souls quite as Leibniz thought. I think there is another layer of complexity which may fit less well with the teachings of the Lutheran Church but which may actually be empirically testable and finally show us how the awesome nature of our relation to the world can be framed in physics - in a way that need not make it any less awesome.

I was interested in your thesis on perception. I found I could not grasp some of the important math and have not had time to look further. Can you summarise the central mathematical ideas involved? Could they help with a model of 'reflecting a universe'? I am not satisfied that anyone is addressing this properly. David Marr had some interesting ideas but they seemed to fizzle out and sadly he died young.

The quote from Bell is striking. But I think I would have wanted to be the old Leibniz, not the old Newton. Leibniz knew that he was generating ideas that would last centuries even up to the age of 68. Like Einstein, Newton had done nothing new for thirty years as far as I understand it. Both men were loners. Maybe Leibniz was truer to himself?

Jonathan,

What is fundamental in modern physics as it was created about four hundred years ago is the not content, the particular theories but the new framework of theory construction: the space time cartesian theatre. Descartes himself thought that himself, a thinking substance could not be geometrized into it. We have since ridiculized dualist but so far we have succeeded in understanding a lot of biological mechanisms but we are still strugling into creating real agency in the cartesian theatre. I think that both Spinoza and Leibniz saw some aspect of the problem with it. Leibniz establish the first steps for creating the space time theatre out of the actors interactions. Spinozas denied dualism on the basis on the observer's finitude and its limited capacity to perceived the full infinite theatre , the space time theatre being a very small subset of it. There is no real actors into Spinoza's scheme. Leibniz proposed a hiearchy of limited actors. Who think of actors, have to think of action. All the major scale of complexity of the universe are transition to new categories of actors. The transition from lifeless actors to life actors is characterized to a gradually closing of efficient causation by the metabolic cycles. You see here what Leibniz's mean by a monad has no window. The more evolved life form close further the efficient causation and this closure explain why new self-imposed causation gradually emerged as biological mechanisms. Life is a kind of efficient-causation singularity. The classical mechanic built on the space time theatre applied to all mechanisms but it does not explain what is beyond the agency horizon of life. The closing of efficient causality in the life cycle has created goal directed action realm. I liked the work of Gennaro Auletta who see the natural emergence of teleonomic and of teological causation at the root of life and who linked the phenomena with the new quantum framework of physics. I see all major biological transition as closing a type of causality, the creation of new type of agency necessary in the complexification of life interaction at a global scale. A major biological transition is the emergence of mammal and the entering to a new theatrical stage for life, the superposition of fictions for binding experience and learning episodic world. Primate will also create a new stage of political fiction and human will become the full blown theatrical animal in charge individuall and collectively of creating fictional realities from the basic biological plays.

I conceived of image analysis, images being the optical images created on a retina, as the analysis of luminance surface, the analysis of topographies luminance surfaces. As any earth topography, it is characterized by its first order differential geometry, the singular points of the surface and the network of ridges and valleys linking these critical points. But as any topography, it has to be analysed at different spatial and temporal scales. The basic geometrical framework for doing that is known as the scale space time geometrical framework. It is based on gaussian filtering , the scale being defined by the variance of the filtering kernel. An image is then conceived as the inverse of the diffusion of the actual image. The equations being the same as the heat diffusion equation. This ensure that removing structures in optimal manner, in the only manner that do not introduced new critical points but only remove them. I introduced the concept of crease structures in image topography and what I empirically discovered is that there are crease regularities out there and that they correspond in stable manner to essential aspect of topological aspect of object 3D surfaces. The most astonishing discovery was to empirically realized that the morphogenesis of an image in scale space time correspond to the ontogenies of objects surfaces. The crease structures can be organized into a taxonomy . The image structure of any complex object correspond to a leaf in that tree and the sequence of node from the root of the image structure tree (philogenic tree) correspond to the morphogenesis of the image structure, the sequence of symmetry breaking events creating this image structure. If the image structure detection schemata are organized into a schemata tree mirroring the philogenic tree, then the detection sequence of a complex image structure recapitulate the ontogenic sequence of the generation. You see Haeckel recapitulation thesis being built-in in the schemata structure. The old opposition between explicit representation and direct non-representational approach being totally side track. The implicit organisation of the schemata detection structure is the generation structure. Visual similarity become a generic similarity. The whole notion that is general to all science that structural hiearchy is history is built-in in our nervous system.

I started to march on this road by the realization that David Marr approach to vision or any explicitly bottom up representational approach were wrong and I came to this insight by observing trees. I was obvious both phenomenally and computationally that the tree with its millions of leafs moving in the wind was not built-up from the bottom up but the other way around, from large structures (which one I did not know) to small ones. I explored the whole gestaltists litterature, the history of geometry in the 19th century, Gibson's direct approach to vision, Ernst Mach approach to perception. Then my next major discovery that lead me on that path was the realization that I was perceiving symmetries in trees and in all the objects around me. I thought that these were these large scale structures that started the image analysis process and that lead me to the book of Herman Weil on symmetries and then I made the connection to the history of physics and started to walk towards what will become my thesis. Half only of the thesis work is containted in the thesis. I had a theory of imagingation, a bio-semiotic sense-acting theory of biological evolution and a review of the structuralist movement from ancient philosophy up to today. I had also connected my approach with Aristotle philosophy.

I stopped developing these ideas around 1999 and only got back to them in 2011 and since then I can space a few hours here and there in order to advance this project.

Joseph,

I have read you paper with great interest several time and it is one of those rare landmark paper that I will have to return from time to time.

Jonathan,

Because you mentioned quantum field theory, I had assumed so far that you were a quantum physicist and when you ask me to explain my image analysis approach , I gave an physicist answer. Sorry, I should have check your profile. An optical image as it is projected on your retina and sense in the mid spectral range is like a topographic surface with mountains, dales and valleys and ridge linking the critical points: mountain passes, mountain tops, and dale bottom. Now, imagine that this topography is a temperature profile onto a metallic plate. Then the heat will diffuse gradually and the topography of the temperature profile will gradually become smooter and smooter with time and end up with an uniform temperature plate. The scale space of the image is this diffusion and the scale correspond to the diffusion time. Now if I have an image of a nude human body and you diffuse it, the inverse diffusion process is very similar to ontogenic process, morphogenesis of the human body surface. The negative time of diffusion, scale, correspond to a morphogic time. Now if we consider the crease (ridge and river) network of the evolving topography, this network gradually complexify itself when new critical point emerged, these are the symmetry breaking point events, that create the complex crease structures. If a complex crease structure is decomposed along the path of its creation along these symmetry breaking event, you get its hiearchical organisation and if you classify all complex crease structure into a tree, the philogenic tree, then you get a kind of platonic theory of forms of the image world. The beauty of this theory of form is that it reflect the history in a formal sense of all the image world form. The more abstract crease structures of these tree do correspond to most simple euclidean forms: line, triangles, square, smooth line. Detecting a crease structure can only be done from the large spatial scales to the fine spatial scale and thus it can only be done along the morphogencitic sequence. If through biological evolution of the visual , the image detection schemata came to be optimally organized then their hiearchical organisation probably came to reflect the phylogenic tree. There is a whole temporal dimension that I did not discuss here but that is interesting. At coarse temporal scale (temporal diffusion of a dynamic image) all the trajectories of the moving objects show up as crease lines and crease curves, curves that you see in images taken with a long shutter time.

Another clarification. Von Uexkull in his book Theoretical Biology introduced the funtional cycle between an organism and the part of the environment that its body type allow to sense and act upon. It is a kantian view on what interaction has to be conceive and it also a Leibniztian view: each modad perceived the whole world but with different viewpoint and more or less fuzzy view. von Uexkull like all the other pragmatism of this period invented a bio-semitic view of organisms. The notion of habit (mode of action) is central to all forms of pragmatism. What the pragmatists of this period did not realized is the mirroring aspect of habit formation. How all 2d signals (neural maps, images) reflects the world and how internal image schemata , hiearchically organized, can optimally process all forms of information.

Dear Louis

I think we have a lot of common ground here but there are a few points I would like to pick up.

One small thing on Descartes – he placed his soul in a spatial domain – mostly the pineal but also in some sense with the whole body. As I read him, what was different about the soul was that it had no antitypy, or ‘extension’ which for him was a very particular aspect of matter. For Descartes space was an attribute of matter that excluded other matter. The soul could reside in the same domain but did not exclude. I don't think Descartes’s soul was ‘non-physical’ it was just that it had a different sort of agentic physics that was not mechanical. I agree with Galen Strawson that Descartes was not really a dualist in the sense that most people ridicule. He was a physicist.

Leibniz argued that human souls would not be special but he saw the reasoning behind the non-antitypic soul. So he proposed that all **fundamental** indivisible dynamic entities have no antitypy – they are like Descartes’s soul, but that aggregates appear to have antitypy because of the way they relate to each other. This fits perfectly with Pauli exclusion and its ramifications.

Your idea of complex systems ‘closing off efficient causation’ is intriguing but it is not what Leibniz proposed I think. For him only fundamental indivisible units could be agentic or telic. Efficient causation was a sign of a complex many-part system. And there is a very powerful logical reason for this. Systems of many parts cannot have ‘ends’ because these would not belong to any entity – just to a collection that we call a system. Only a single entity can have its 'own end’ or objective. QFT turns out to fit this very well in that it is only quantized modes that depend on both beginning and end. Classical systems instantiate efficient cause.

If we are to follow Leibniz’s logic and take QFT seriously it seems that the complex systems we call living organisms must be associated with indivisible dynamic units that somehow relate to the universe as if they were the whole system. I think these exist but I am fairly sure for multicellular organisms they can only occur at the cell level, for reasons of basic physics. The details are on my site and too complex to address here. Mammals, primates and humans are cell colonies. Some cells think they are the whole colony (some neurons) but this is an illusion evolved for Darwinian reasons.

Put another way I think the apparent human tragedy of misery and frustration, that Voltaire saw but Leibniz saw *through*, is due to the fact that we are hybrid structures. We consist of bodily systems that seem telic but are pseudotelic aggregates, and inner telic monadic ‘souls’ (many within each of us) within neurons that receive an image of the world and respond according to their ends or appetitions but the two do not quite match up. As Leibniz says our inner monads perceive the world and themselves confusedly. The confusion between the desires of the monads and the pseudodesires of the body lead to our miseries – like the Rigoletto paradox – everything man has ever valued is paid for with the highest price in natural selection – the death of daughters (sons are expendable).

A point that may be relevant here is that for Leibniz life was not something only found at higher levels of complexity – all the infinite levels of smaller and smaller monads within matter were living things. Life and agency are the features of the simple and indivisible, not the complex. Complex orgnisms are only pseudotelic – that is why they are so often frustrated.

I am beginning to see the basis of your vision project. I am puzzled that you take the retina as the image as I think of the image as something forming much deeper in the brain, but this may just be a different use of words. Where I completely agree is that the analysis must be top down. Marr did in a sense suggest this for his ‘final percept’ image but he never gave a mechanism because he said this was a new ‘functional’ level. I think that was an error.

Johnatan,

Descartes established a distinction between extension (all that could be explained using its analytical geometric method which include all plants and animals which a for him pure automaton) and cognito (I am a thinking substance) which he placed at the basis of its epistemology: that I am a thinking substance cannot be doubt. So he founded both the cartesian theatre, the geometrical method of modern science (which will become fully effective only with the mechanic of calculus) and he founded the phenomenological method which Kant and husserl will further explored. My guess is that Descartes recognised the epistemological limit of the geometrical method, something that will be clarify later by Kant distinction between the phenomenal (what can be described by the geometrical method) and what cannot the noumenal or reality in itself. The pineal gland was the point of contact between the mecanical aspect of mind and the non-reductible mind real. I also think that Descartes would have been afraid to declare the human sould as machine-like for potential religious persecution reasons. He bought the piece by separating teology and physics.

What is a non-antitypic soul?

Leibniz splitted the inner causality of monad from the outer efficient causality and created the concept of harmony between the two. I transformed this into a theory of emergence where different level of agency can arised by closing efficient causality by action loops. This is the way high level agent (monad) could existed into a hiearchy and it is the way that efficient causality is not imcompatible with real agency and creation in nature. Natural veil of efficient causality are created with the creation of higher actors. There are many aspects to this that I did not discussed here.

When communication networks are established among different entities in such a way that achieve a common action loop, the gradual intergration of all these entities and the closing of the loop to direct efficient causation create a monad. I beleive that humanity as a whole with all the electronic ways to coordinate our actions is on its way to create a monad, a stellar being as Theilard de Chardin predicted in the early years of the 20th century. Procaryote cells, gingantic hyper complex cells are another type of monad, multicellular organism are another type of monads. What components make a monad is not so important, what is important is the integration of the monad into action loop. Complex monad have complex action loops, hiearchical action loops that included a whole range of simple actions and complex actions and the whole thing integrated into the action of one life. Action loops cannot be divided and they are not precisely located in space. The unity of being is a unity of action and as humans we are borned into a fragmented culture and so have a fragmented mind and we try to unify it like Bohm would say or Leibniz would say. The search for unity of my mind, my know thyself is like the salmon returning to the place of birth: god. I share this feeling with Leibniz. The desire of unity of being is the central spirit of all ancient philosophies.

Leibniz is a panpsychic monism and I also think that a unified theory of cosmic evolution operating under one single principle for all the level of complexities of nature is possible. It is not only possible but to come up with it soon is our only way to survive. So we are on our way if we survive to become a collective intelligence and at that point we will contact other stellar being into the next level of cosmic monad , and in this way the whole universe could integrated into one god.

Human beings are theatrical animals and we learn most of our action modes through cultural theatrality. Merlin Donald helped me a lot to see that although he would disagree with most of what I am saying here.

Any distribution of information on a surface is an image in a abstract sense. It could be the distribution of a chemical on a membrane, the distribution of neuronal signal on a neural map, the distribution of luminance on a retina.

Dear Louis,

The point about Cartesian space that I was making was that for Descartes extension was not just distance or geometry, it was the property more precisely called antitypy, which is the exclusion of other entities from a geometric domain. (Descartes lays this out I think in Meditation II but otherwise seems to assume we know his peculiar usage.) This extension was for Descartes a property of matter so in a sense space was in matter, in contrast to the more familiar Brunoesque idea that matter is in space. Leibniz is of course different again in saying that space is an illusion arising from the dynamic relations between things.

We then have to distinguish between the use of the word 'space' to mean a domain of antitypy and the use of the word space we are more familiar with that is merely a domain defined geometrically in terms of distances. The Cartesian soul has a well defined place and extent in geometrically defined space but it does not have any 'space of its own' like matter does, it has no antitypy.

Again, I think your idea of monads arising from closure of dynamic loops is attractive but I am not sure it fits quite with Leibniz. The monad was not just a system of aggregate dynamics, however looped, it was an extra dynamic principle over and above the aggregate dynamics. This of course raises the issue of when we have emergence in a complex system of something more than the sum of the parts. My understanding of chaos theory and the like and dissipative biodynamics is that however peculiar the result it is the sum of the dynamic parts. On the other hand QFT provides us with modes that are not just the sum of parts - in particular Goldstone modes. They alter the total energy content and rates of reactions over and above the effects of parts. People think of Goldstone modes as obscure but is a note on a violin obscure, or the way sorbet is made using salt and water to cool the juice? Almost everything in our daily lives is a Goldstone mode as far as I can see - phonons, plasmons for reflecting light etc etc. Unlike ideas like 'whole organism' they exist independent of any categories we might want to put them into. If the monad is the whole organism, what is the monad for conjoined twins? A tough question I think.

Anyway, I think these Leibnizian interpretations are worth arguing over - the monad is not a silly idea, it is a necessary idea and it is about time we revisited it. N'est ce pas?

Jonathan,

My understanding is that Descartes defines matter by what can be geometrically described and for him the essence of matter is extension.

http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie//vol1/eustac1.html

'''Everything else that can be ascribed to body presupposes extension.' The other qualities of matter, then, are less important and he tells us 'though substance is indeed known by some attribute, yet for each substance there is pre-eminently one property which constitutes its nature and essence and to which all the rest are referred'. The pre-eminent property of corporeal substance which constitutes its essence and nature is extension. The essence of matter then is extension, according to Descartes. As he puts it in his physical treatise 'Le Monde' , referring to matter he tells us 'I conceive its extension, or the property it has of occupying space, not at all as an accident, but as its true form and essence.' Extension is the essence of matter then. Whatever has spatial extension is matter and matter, by definition, is that which has spatial extension. Spatial extension, then, constitutes matter. What is spatial extension? It is length, breadth and thickness, the three straight lines that constitute Euclidean space. So that which has length, breadth and thickness is matter and all matter, on this definition, has length, breadth and thickness.''

The emergence of new type of agencies from lower level is the key thing to understand in order to understand the emergence and the evolution of life. Aristotle is the first that focus on this question and who enunciated that the whole is more than the sum of its part. An evidence for any biologist. Understanding this evidence is not evident though. In the modern period, Leibniz is the first that made a serious attempt. We have to remember that the modern period began with the destruction with the old Aristotlean synthesis , a biological synthesis which had four type of causes while modern science is based on the first two cause and dropped the formal and the final causes which are antique forms for understanding emergence. I see the whole development of modern science for understanding life as an attempt to rebuild a neo-Aristotleanism, a new way to understand emergence, a new way that is compatible with mechanisms in the cartesian theatre but not reduced to it. Any new theory has to subsume the previous one, not discarding it.

Leibniz is the seeds of many ideas that will be later developed by important philosophers and which are not yet developed. He is an important source of inspiration. Some of his ideas, like the pre-established harmony which is established by God for Leibniz, have to be naturally establish by biological evolution and the underlying process of emergence of biological evolution. The idea that the monads have no window did not make sense to me for a long time but recently I came to interprete it as primitive attempt to permit agency into a mechanistic world. Life forms have developed more and more autonomous metabolisms closing them to many direct immediate environmental influences. So I think that the closing of the window is functionally achieved and is not absolute but it is real and has permit real agency of living organisms.

Some interesting thoughts Louis,

But I think we need to follow the text for Descartes's idea of extension, and also the history of his physics. In Meditation II we have ' 'By "body" I understand all that is capable of being bounded by some shape, of being enclosed in a place, and filling up a space in such a way as to exclude any other body from it'. The latter concept of antitypy is absolutely central to Descartes's concept of extension. It is the whole basis of the debate with Pascal and Torricelli about the mercury barometer which he efectively lost, leading to the collapse of his mechanical theory. For him space could only exist because of the mutual exclusion of elements of 'subtle matter'.

And I worry about the idea of life creating closed systems. Metabolism is totally dependent on food from the outside and passage of waste to the outside. As Giuseppe Vitiello points out, the key feature of living systems is that they are thermodynamically OPEN dissipative systems. It is their very openness that allows the maintenance of low entropy.

Jonathan,

I read carefully the second mediation. It refreshed my memory and clairified Leibniz and Kant positions further. It did not clarify yet what you refer as its concept of extension. In the second meditation, he attributed to our imagination the capacity to conceive extension and tried to demonstrated that it is insufficient for us to conceive objects, even the simplest objects such as wax. Do you have a reference where its conception of body is explained.

The concept of functional closure to efficient causality has nothing to do with thermodynamic closure. First all action loop are loop including both the organism and the umwelt. It is not a loop within the organism but a loop of interaction between the organism and the umwelt that is defined by the organism action. In the following paper of Gennaro Auletta, there is a simplified modelisation of the metabolism where a functional separation and a simplified closing to efficient causality is done.

file:///C:/Users/Louis/Downloads/information-01-00028%20(1).pdf

I see this kind of work very very incompleted but there is a seed there that can be expanded. I am trying to create a new pragmatism. The essence of pragmatism is a conception of organism/agency based on evolution of action loop. A lot of different versions exist: Kant in critique of judgment (natural purpose), biological emergence of natural purposes by post kantian, the french post-kantism tradition based on the evolution of habits: Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, up to Bergson, Peirce, Dewey, James, Von Uexkull, the recent Semiotics, Matumara and Varela, and so many other.

What is badly missing from all pragmatic projects is how the dynamics of action loop get implicitly embodied through biological evolution into the organism bodies and the key concept for understanding this is the concept of mirroring of the physics of the image world, with image taken in an abstract sense. One of the first who spoke about functional efficient causality closure is Robert Rosen who defined life itself as this closure. I am trying to developed a much more general concept of closure than the one developed by Rosen.

Dear Louis,

I leave you to interpret the words 'as to exclude any other body' as you prefer. I do not have details on the debate with Pascal.

I applaud your pragmatism. My take on that is that we should forget the 'body' of the organism. As the Extended Mind fraternity have pointed out physical dynamic interactions with the world do not have any magic interface at the skin and sense organs. They can be further out or further in. In terms of the umwelt I suspect the 'loop' may be much further in - as indeed Andy Clark has suggested for the phenomenal experience of the world. In fact I think it is at the cellular level. That is a major break with Leibniz but it is in line with one of his most illustrious followers - AN Whitehead, and his 'actual occasions'.

Jonathan,

I think that you got the spirit of what I trying to do. I will read some of your essays and come back to you then.

Regards,

Dear Jonathan,

As you know Leibniz was very influential for the later developments of german philosophy which also influence the german biological tradition. Von Uexkull tried to create a a Leibnizian-Kantian biology. A biology that is based on monadic understanding of life. His notion of umwelt is central to the approach. It is a generalization of the phenomenal world of each organism. Each f organism as sense-acting loop into its umwelt. The umwelt has no window, it is the whole world as seen from the perspective of a particular organism of a specific species. There is no single view of the world, A God's view, but billion of umwelten views, nomadic views all of them in harmony. Von Uexkull gave the image of the soap bubble and gave the image of cob web (Indra's net).

http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC3485849/

http://gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/Koenderink-Gestalts_as_ecological_templates.pdf

Denis Diderot, whose views were very often at odds with those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing in his entry on Leibniz in the Encyclopedia

, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 709)

Indeed, Diderot was almost moved to despair in this piece: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/

I suppose that the philosopher had some kind of inspiration from Jean-Sebatian Bach. Das ist nur meine Meinung!!! Martha Suh

Martha,

Why do you think so?

Dear Martha,

The Discourse on Metaphysics, which is the first full exposition of the central structure of Leibniz's philosophy, was published when Bach was one year old!

Dear Louis, Jonathan. It must be then his father. Since I sing the Cantatas from Bach family I have just impression or intuition that music can influence human thought somehow.I can not explain it scientifically.I have arrived at last in Montreal on 27 march. However . we have got stolen our computer and canadian passport in train on the way to airport CDG. We have to go back to Paris , because of insurance claims. The french connection has not finished yet. I am still shocked for the unpleasant events. Anyway we are spending our easter vacation in USA with our daughter's family. We have to go back to Manhattan find a new computer.

Jonathan,

I interpret the concept of pre-established harmony of Leibniz as a mean to accomodate the appearance of scientific determinist with agent freedom. From the outside, the agent seems to be determined. But it is not because all its actions are internally determined. It just happened that all internal determination are in harmony with all external determination. Leibniz missed completely where this harmony comes from: evolution which is replaced by an intitial creation by God. It is a very limited conception of freedom. I guess that in the case of human agent/monad Leibniz would equates freedom to our capacity to change so that harmonize ourself with the world like the Stoic. Sound a compatibilist conception of freedom. How do you interpret the pre-established harmony?

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/5851/Routledge_Companion_to_Metaphysics.pdf

How does he (Leibniz) explain the correlations between the

states of the mind and the states of the body? This is the function of his doctrine of the

Pre-Established Harmony. Leibniz states it in the following passage:

(…) the soul does not disturb the laws of the body, nor the body those of

the soul; and (…) the soul and the body (…) only agree together; the one

acting freely, according to the rules of final causes; and the other acting

mechanically, according to the laws of efficient causes. (…) God,

foreseeing what the free cause would do, did from the beginning regulate

the machine in such manner, that it cannot fail to agree with that free

cause (Fifth letter to Clarke, paragraph 92)

According to this doctrine although the mind and the body do not causally interact,

God has made them coordinate perfectly, so that both act as they would act if they

causally interacted. Thus the harmony that obtains between mind and body has been

previously established by God.

But in what sense do the states of the mind and the body harmonise or

correspond? They correspond in the way in which they would correspond if they

causally interacted with each other. For instance, God made the mind and the body

such that when the mind is in a state of willing to move a certain arm in a certain way

at time t1, the arm in question moves in that way at t1; and when the body is cut with a

knife, the mind has, at that very same time or shortly thereafter, a sensation of pain.

So although there is no intersubstantial causation, substances act as if there were:

(…) bodies act as if there were no souls (though this is impossible); and

souls act as if there were no bodies; and both act as if each influenced the

other. (Monadology §81).

==================

FROM the above I conclude that:

With the new physical knowledge , the Cartersian idea of mind acting on the body could not be sustained anymore. Leibniz kept the Cartesian mind-body separation but reject interaction and replace it by an appearance of interaction with two parallel world acting as if interacting but in fact do not!!!!!

As above stated, this thesis is very unappealing.

Another explanation here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/

He wrote to Antoine Arnauld that although “one particular substance has no physical influence on another … nevertheless, one is quite right to say that my will is the cause of this movement of my arm …; for the one expresses distinctly what the other expresses more confusedly, and one must ascribe the action to the substance whose expression is more distinct” (28 November 1686 (draft)). In this passage, Leibniz sets forth what he takes the metaphysical reality of apparent inter-substantial causation to amount to. We begin with the thesis that every created substance perceives the entire universe, though only a portion of it is perceived distinctly, most of it being perceived unconsciously, and, hence, confusedly. Now consider two created substances, x and y (x not identical to y), where some state of x is said to be the cause of some state of y. Leibniz's analysis is this: when the causal state of affairs occurred, the relevant perceptions of substance x became more distinct, while the relevant perceptions of substance y became more confused. Insofar as the relevant perceptions of x become increasingly distinct, it is “causally” active; insofar as the relevant perceptions of substance y become increasingly confused, it is passive. In general, causation is to be understood as an increase in distinctness on the part of the causally active substance, and an increase in confusedness on the part of the passively effected substance. Again, each substance is programmed at creation to be active/passive at the relevant moment, with no occurrence of real substantial interaction.

Dear Louis,

These are important questions.

My understanding of recent clarification of Leibniz in the literature (Garber, Kulstad and Carlin etc.) is that the general principle of pre-established harmony of monads (which is central to his philosophy) is separated out from the idea of ‘parallelism’ between mind and body, which most people now view as a misunderstanding of his position.

Leibniz makes it clear that he does NOT keep the Cartesian mind-body separation. Descartes thought there were two different types of fundamental substance, one spiritual, without extension, and the other corporeal, with extension. Leibniz really takes up Descartes’s concession in his letter to Hobbes, which says that maybe these are the same type of substance deep down, although D cannot see how. With the new knowledge in physics of elasticity Leibniz thinks he can see how and so for him all fundamental entities are spiritual. Body is merely the appearance of aggregates of spiritual units.

This being so, it may seem confusing that he says that the soul progresses in harmony with the body. But what he is saying is that the dynamic rules for individual spiritual entities and the rules we derive empirically for the appearances of their aggregates are always consistent. I see this as an early version of the correspondence principle, which says that dynamics at the fundamental level (now the quantum level) will always give you the same result as empirical (‘Newtonian’) laws for bodies.

There is nothing difficult to explain in this ‘harmony’ of accounts of dynamic rules. It just shows that the empirical rules that physicists find from repeated study of appearances are more or less well founded. This is true of everything and has no particular relation to evolution or biology.

I think the pity is that academic philosophy, perhaps driven by a continued religious prejudice about a spiritual and a bodily world (so that you can go to heaven without a body) has completely misunderstood Leibniz in proposing some sort of ‘parallel’ goings on. All that are parallel are the real dynamics of individual monads and the empirical rules of appearances we mostly have to use to describe the world. It is purely an epistemic parallelism, a matching of descriptions. Now we have ways of studying individual dynamic units, which Leibniz did not, so modern physics is closer to Leibniz’s ‘metaphysical’ level than to his ‘corporeal’ level. (Even the discovery that chemistry was based on electrical *forces* in the nineteenth century got to Leibniz's 'metaphysical' level.) The idea of parallel goings on is clearly unappealing, as you say, and as a result Leibniz has been dismissed as fanciful, but he was just a very good physicist.

What I find fascinating is that Leibniz identifies a need for indivisible dynamic units at various levels of scale. So the body is an aggregate of lower level dynamic units but is also ‘guided’ by an extra dynamic unit or soul that determines the way the body acts as a whole. Moreover, the dynamic ‘appetite’ of the soul ‘agrees’ with the totality of appetites of the lower level units. This seems perhaps arbitrary or strange, although one can see that Leibniz may have seen that it was required by the way things behave. What intrigues me is that we see something very similar to this in Goldstone theorem which states that aggregates of lower level dynamic units will indeed be accompanied by further dynamic units describing the behaviour of the whole in a way that by definition ‘agrees’ with the form of the aggregate being ‘occupied’. What is perhaps disappointing is that Leibniz’s detailed thoughts about dominant monads do not quite match up to Goldstone modes!

The interpretation of this in relation to freedom of will is, I think, complex. Leibniz is not a determinist in the usual sense. He says that what will be, will be, and is ‘predetermined’. However, what gets determined is not ‘necessary’, i.e. God’s laws allowed other possibilities. In usual terminology this is a ‘non-deterministic’ view. It would fit with quantum non-determinism. Leibniz seems to think that there cannot be strict determinism (in the sense of his necessity) because of the infinite complexity of God’s universe. This seems to be a technical logical argument about necessity being incompatible with the infinite.

What I think Leibniz may not have been interested in encouraging was an idea of free will of the sort favoured by those who want to believe we are ‘creative’ or ‘free to choose what we like without being constrained by cause and effect’. I think Leibniz would have considered such ideas facile. For him everything had a reason. There would be no point in freedom to do things for no reason. In the end I am not sure I know quite how to classify Leibniz’s position in terms of contemporary categories (compatibilism etc). I have a feeling that he transcends these.

Where I think Leibniz's account of the soul and body relation is prescient is that for an individual substance dynamic action is as much determined by where it ends up as where it starts – it is a connection between two situations rather than a trajectory from a beginning. On the other hand aggregates cannot be like that because there is no single beginning or end – each subunit has a different one. So their aggregate behaviour follows the empirical rules of ‘bodies following trajectories from a beginning’ – (efficient causes in Aristotle’s terms). What becomes clear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Lagrange and Hamilton is that these two situations are not quite as different as might seem. The formulation of the empirical laws of Newton turn out to have a ‘final cause’ flavour hidden just beneath the surface in terms of ‘least action’. Quantum physics seems to show that Leibniz’s ideas were very close to the mark because the distinction between quantum level dynamics and classical level dynamics looks very much like his distinction.

Jonathan,

Your comment conforts me in my suspicion that these interpretations were misleading. Scientific models are never intrinsic description of realities. There are always extrinsic description of a limited partial aspect of reality. Right there we see that we cannot penetrate reality with scientific knowledge. We stay outside. These scientific models allows us to predict specific aspects and thus allow us to understand aspect of natural systems and build machines , cure people, etc, etc. I think that when Leibniz was saying that monad have no windows, it was his way to say this. We never model intrinsically reality. The only reality that we are not outside is ourself. We do not relate to ourself as a model to the reality that is modeled. I do not need a scientific model of my body. I am a monad but I cannot observe it from the outside when I look in the mirror. What I see is the appearance of aggregate of monad forming me. My primary knowledge of myself is not a theoretical one but a practical one through my abilities to act that I have acquired since my conception. I am an actor and I developed as a person in developing this capacity. What is precious about my life is what my life has done and will do. The more valuable will be this action and the more my capacity to act will increase the overall capacity to act of life. So the goal of life is to return our life , i.e action to life so she is more productive.

Regards,

P.S. Monad have no window also remind me from Heraclitus celebrated quote:

"Phusis kruptesthai philei." "Nature loves to hide,"

WINDOWS

Now, Louis, I fear there is another misreading here. This is my reason for setting up this thread, I guess, to try to clarify and maybe rectify all these muddles.

What was a window in 1686? We think of windows as for seeing but at that time I think a window was thought of differently. It was a device for letting light and air into a house when it was warm enough to do so. The key to Leibniz's analogy is, I think, in its first usage in Discourse on Metaphysics, section 26: 'it is a bad habit of ours to think of our soul as receiving messenger species, or as if it had doors and windows.' Note that 'door' is the first example here; this is not an analogy with seeing. Leibniz is arguing that perception or knowledge cannot consist of new ideas actually coming in to the mind and being 'added on', because then the mind would be something new, just as the United Kingdom is not Great Britain (the large island now politically fused with Northern Ireland). He is discussing Plato and the doctrine of reminiscence. He goes on to explain that we DO constantly have new perceptions, but that these are not additions to our mind but stimulations of already present 'ideas', which in being used become 'notions' or 'concepts' (in 27).

This is all technical stuff about perception used to support Leibniz's argument that causation does not occur by the passage of 'accidents' from one thing to another. This is something we are now entirely agreed on - an electron does not have some extra 'speed bits' added on to it like sticky labels. Our modern scientific view of causation is very much in line with what Leibniz was arguing. So the lack of windows and doors has nothing whatever to do with a lack of perception or experience of the world. Leibniz tells us that our perception of the world is confused, but not that it is incomplete - quite to the contrary he insists that monads perceive the entire universe, not only now but all past and all future. There is nothing the slightest bit 'blind' about a monad. This interpretation is a bit like the popular idea that Shakespeare wrote 'Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Romeo?' held by those who are unaware that 'wherefore' means 'why' rather than 'where'.

Again, I fear there is a problem that people think that Leibniz is proposing some weird solipsistic existence for monads, when all he is doing is trying to explain what is well accepted in the modern understanding of physics. In his day nobody was clear whether there were any 'atom-things' at all so causality was framed in ways we would now see as very strange. Leibniz was laying the foundations for the modern view. Unfortunately people with religious leanings who did not fully understand the implications for physics misinterpreted what he was doing. As I see it one of those was Kant.

NATURE MAY LOVE TO HIDE BUT CAN BE UNCOVERED BY LOGOS

My understanding of Heraclitus is minimal but I suspect he was a bit like Leibniz, in being essentially a dynamist. For Leibniz all that exist are units of force or action. There are no 'objects' with 'intrinsic' natures. The actions are not actions of things, just actions, perceptions, reflections, representations or whatever. Philosophers cling to the idea of intrinsic properties in addition to relational dispositions but Leibniz realised that any such idea of intrinsic properties would be an illusion. Essence is change or process.

So, rather than building on Leibniz, Kant in fact fails to understand the main message of Heraclitus and Leibniz. He wants a 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) as well. He realises that such an intrinsic essence would be unknowable because it could not give rise to knowledge through being a relational disposition. But Schopenhauer points out the fallacy of Kant's suggestion. All knowledge is inference of the existence of something. If Kant can infer the existence of a ding an sich then he can know it, even if dimly. So if a ding an sich is really unknowable we cannot infer there is one. And that must be the case. We have no reason to infer that anything has any intrinsic nature.

When we ask 'what is it really like' we are normally asking 'what would it be like viewed or sensed another way, or imagined using our ability to construct things in the mind as if we had sensed them (like a unicorn)'. If we ask what the sun is really like the answer may be that it is so hot you could not survive touching it. So 'ding an sich' is 'what something is really like' in a way that we never normally mean - in fact it is in a way that means nothing at all.

So everything in the universe is knowable. To be unknowable is a contradiction. You might say that a pebble four hundred light years away is unknowable but this is wrong. It is merely unknowable in the way we are used to by standing next to it and using our eyes. It is perfectly knowable in the way we know things four hundred light years away - rather indistinctly, as Leibniz says. And there are no pebbles unknowable in principle in the sense that if you were near them you could not know them by seeing or touching.

So I think what Heraclitus meant was that Nature presents itself to us in a rather oblique way, as if it was made of things, when in fact it is made of flux. But the reasoning of logos can always reveal the truth, even if 'most people never see this truth and even those presented with it for the first time will not see it'. Once we know that all is action, change or flux, then there is nothing that could be known that cannot be known. Knowing is a process of relation by action. Everything in the universe is related to everything else through action so nothing in the universe can be unknowable. It is simply meaningless to suggest so.

Schopenhauer rightly realised that knowing our own thoughts was rather different from most knowing, but it is not a knowing of anything intrinsic, as perhaps he concluded and Bertrand Russell also suggested. In our thoughts we know our previous thoughts through memory but there is no reason to think we know our own intrinsic nature. Hume I think was nearer the truth on that. We may be able to infer the dynamics of our own internal actions, but that requires careful philosophical deliberation. It is not just a matter of direct acquaintance.

Jonathan,

I agree with your process interpretation of Leibniz and Heraclitus. The early Kant, the Kant before the Critique was a Leibnizian, a process Guy. In the first critique Kant want to support the validity of empirical science but limits it to phenomenal models. And exclude the possibility of a unified model of all that exist, a god eye view model as Spinoza was proposing. At the same time , he want to list the a priori knowledge that is necessary to have the type of experience that we have. The experiencing agent is central to his epistemology. Epistemology cannot be observer/agent independent. Science like biologigical agents are limited by their embodiement to the phenomenal. The same Leibnizian idea of the perception of the monads: limited ie from a particular point of view determined by sensory-motor system as Von Uexkull would have said in his biological interpretation of Kant and Leibniz. In the other critiques Kant tries to show that action is not limited to theoretical knowledge, that we have other access to reality than theoretical knowledge. Aesthetic experience in artistic activities for example. Kant does not deny a reality out there but he denied a non-phenomenal access. Everything is appearances but appearances are phenomenally real. If you hit the wall with your head, it is phenomenally real. But a wall cannot be described from a god eye perspective, the wall of ant is different from the wall of the bacteria which is different from the wall in front of you. Von Uexkull notion of Umwelt is a good specification of monadic world.

I think that we have to forget the whole concept of truth as Bentham, Mills, Peirce and the pragmatists have proposed. Bentham have limited knowledge as Kant did and eliminate the truth and replaced it by Usefulness. An action based epistemology is not a mirror based or truth based epistemology. Biological evolution is an action/selection based epistemology. Truth is replaced by what works. The truth is always phenomenal, relation between certain apparent perspectives.

The book: The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature,

by Pierre Hadot discuss the interpretation throughout the ages of : "Phusis kruptesthai philei." I only read a few pages on internet but it is on my reading list.

Thank you for the insight about the interpretation that a monad has no window.

I do not have time now but I think that we have to discuss the influence of Aristotle on Leibniz. I personally think that it is a major influence that is key for understanding Leibniz. In one word my position is that Aristotleanism is an dynamic (almost process) organism philosophy which was the cosmological foundation of both science and religion of the pre-modern western europe that cartesianism shattered and which Leibniz want to re-create onto modern basis.

Workshop: Three Hundred Years of Leibniz's Monadology, Years of Leibniz's Monadology

,12 – 13 May 2014, University of Edinburgh.

http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/events/view/three-hundred-years-of-leibniz

Perhaps you should come, Louis.

Jonathan,

I certainly would if I could.

Regards

The dynamic singularities that Susan Hurley describes below are leibniz's monad and are Von Uexkull umwelt-organism loop dynamic.

Consciousness in Action

By Susan L. Hurley

‘’We tend to think of perception and action as buffer zones mediating between mind and world. We tend to think of perception as input from world to mind and action s output from mind to world. This Input-Output picture of perception and action may hold in place traditional worries about the mind’s place in the world, as well as more specific philosophical assumptions. If perception is input from the world to the mind and action is output from the mind to the world, then the mind as distinct from the world is what the input is to and what the output is from. So, despite the web of causal relations between organisms and environments, we suppose the mind must be in a separate place, within some boundary that sets it apart from the world.

In trying to understand the mind’s place in the world, we thus study the function from input to output, especially the way central nervous systems process and transform inputs to human organisms. We argue about whether central cognitive processes must have a language-like structure that explains the conceptual structure of thought. But we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.

People and other animals with minds can be seen at one level as dynamic singularities: structural singularities in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits. Consider the circus performer who puts the handle of a dagger in her mouth, tips her head back, balances a sword by its point on the point of the dagger, and with the whole kit balanced above her head magisterially climbs a ladder, swings her legs over the top rung, and climbs back down the other side of the ladder. Each move she makes is both the source of and exquisitely dependent on multiple internal and external channels of sensory and motor-signal feedback, the complex calibrations of which have been honed by years of practice. An only slightly less intricate structure of dynamic feedback relations knits the nervous system of a normally active organism into its environment. This is what the contents of the creature’s interdependent perceptions and intentions both depend on. The whole complex dynamic feedback system includes not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning. As a result, external states can be needed to explain patterns of activity at the body surface, even if what is to be explained is not identified in terms of external states. The dynamic singularity is centred on the organism and moves through environments with the organism, but itself has no sharp boundaries.’’

Jonathan,

What Susan Hurley describes is version of the functional cycle with an umwelt that von Uexkull developed in biology and it for me the central idea of the monad: a center of action and in this process view of action the boundaries of the organism surface are included in the monad. The monad is the center of the action that happen not only in the organism or on it surface but to everything interacting with it. von Uexkull spoke of the universe as made of a soap bubbles of umwelten. To get out of the duality subject- object , we have to focus on the process of doing including all that is interacting.

Dear Louis,

I agree that both Leibniz and von Uexküll are trying to describe a relation of subject to world and that Hurley is also trying to express this. The trouble is that there are also specifics about monads in the Monadology that are really incompatible with any system with parts. The monad has no parts, no shape (figure) or extension (antitypy).It is a unit of force or entelechy based on a constant internal dynamic principle. Leibniz is clearly trying to define units of the sort that will explain things like Hooke's law as well as the perception side. I think it is therefore a mistake to equate the monad with von Uexküll's organism. Von Uexküll is missing the crucial concept of the dynamic indivisible that Leibniz places centre stage.

And I find Hurley's case unconvincing in that she seems to want to 'resolve the paradox of mind' by bundling it into some constant to and fro dynamic cycling in a way that allows her to forget what it was that was actually the mind. If the mind is the whole system and its world then input ceases to have any meaning. She shoots herself in the foot. This is the sort of argument you will find in O'Reagan and Noë, Varela and a host of others and I think it is simply cheating. It is pretending to get rid of a problem by making it all a system in a way that makes the initial premises meaningless. I think Descartes is very much better than this, and although Leibniz was critical of Descartes, I think his criticism was mostly that Descartes had unnecessarily restricted souls to human beings.

Put differently, if you take the von Uexküll/Hurley/O'Reagan stance on this you can derive no useful predictions about anything because everything is just 'the system'. It is an anti-scientific approach in that it lands you with an untestable hypothesis. That is comforting if you prefer not to test and be found wrong but it is bad science. On the other hand if we take Leibniz seriously and look for the soul monad and its internal principle in very specific dynamic terms then we find that specific hypotheses can be generated and shown to be incompatible with neurology or not. Leibniz was a rich source of scientific advance. Von Uexküll simply produced a rather aesthetic vision, of no practical use, and worse, a smoke screen for muddled thinking!!

Jonathan,

If the focus is on process of action then the focus ceases to be on the material medium through which these process are impleted. If the monad is the whole process of action then it is not a material thing but a process. The relational dynamic is not totally inside the organism but establish a web of relations and this web of relations is th umwelt.

Those like Noe and O'Reagan that are trying to understand organisms along this perspective do not get a magic solution. The problem is simply translated into another one in the new perspective and if they will be judged in ten or twenty years from now based on the productivity of their findings, not on their philosophy. O'Reagan is doing interesting stuff right now.

Von Uexkull is the father of ethology and has been recognized in the last ten years as the pionneer of bio-semiotics. He is the pioneer of theoretical biology. Heidegger, Cassirer among other have considered him with high respect. He is resurfacing right now. But the future will tell. ''a smoke screen for muddled thinking!!'' It is how a lot of philosophers have qualitied Leibniz in the past when he was forgotten.

You apparently does not like the type of conjectures I am expressing. I can respect that. Buy

But if the dynamic is not in the organism what is 'input'. Why is perception perception and action action? Hurley is frightened that we need to posit something outside the physical world but there is no such need. We just posit one of the many indivisible dynamic units that make up the world and let it feel.

And I suspect nobody criticised Leibniz on the basis of muddled thinking. His rigour is what frightens most people off. The response I most often find in serious philosophers is that if they could only understand what he was saying they might think it rather interesting (William James for instance).

We do disagree but not in the quest, which is what matters. And these disagreements on detail can be fertile. Leibniz makes mistakes too - two big ones. But I do think he needs to be distinguished from von Üx. Time will tell. We should compare notes in twenty years time (after that I may be a bit muddled myself).

Jonathan,

As long as you think that the dialogue can be fertile on your side I can continue because it is on my side. I just wanted to be sure that it was the case for you.

When a philosopher has no supporters after his death actively promoting him then it get quickly forgotten and it happened to Leibniz.

Biological evolution proceeded as in a market economy by promotting what was productive. In the human cultural domain, on the long run it is the productive/usefull ideas that will survive. Not as they were originally proposed but under in adapted forms. It is not possible to predict what is the span of the trial period necessary. Small idea dye soon if not successfull. Big ideas may take a while. Leibniz has proven himself on many fronts but he is still not understood at the center of his philosophy.

'' suspect nobody criticised Leibniz on the basis of muddled thinking. ''

''The statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" drew scorn, most notably from Voltaire, who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra. From this, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who believes that the world about us is the best possible one.''

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds

The twenty years test is probably converging towards a muddled agreement.

‘’Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.’’ Leibniz

Ian Koenderink is both an astrophysicist and a vision scientist. The following papers by

Koenderink are on awereness (consciousness) and umwelt . He is someone worth reading.

http://www.gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/koenderink/Umwelts.pdf

World, Environment, Umwelt and Innerworld Presentation by Ian Koenderink

Natural Interfaces, paper by Ian Koenderink

Animal species are remarkably successful, mostly predating Homo Sapiens. The animal Kingdom appears as Leibniz’s (1646-1716) monadology, each animal experiencing it own life, yet all being more or less dependent upon all others. This insight was put in a scientific framework by Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), leading to the founding of ethology in the 20th c. Ethology’s “founding fathers” were Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), Nico Tinbergen (1907-1988) and Karl von Frisch (1886-1982), who shared a Nobel Prize in 1973. The remarkable achievements of ethology have hardly been applied to the psychology of perception (perhaps with exception of Rupert Riedl (1925- 2005)). They reveal human perceptual awareness as a natural (because evolved, not designed) USER INTERFACE, a contemporary way to describe von Uexküll’s related notions of Umwelt (“life world”), Bauplan (“body plan”), and the “harmonic” composition of (both organic and inorganic) nature. The Umwelt is pure significance, reminiscent of James Gibson’s (1904-1979)) “affordances”. From this perspective a God’s Eye View (or the “physical world”) is irrelevant to the understanding of specific organisms. Moreover, good interfaces shield the user from unnecessary complexity (veridicality if you like), and are as simple as possible, that is to say, they promote efficacious interactions in the animal’s Wirkwelt (natural active life of the species).

http://gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/Koenderink-Gestalts_as_ecological_templates.pdf

Gestalts as ecological templates , paper by Jan Koenderink

This is a great paper. Section 3 talk about the ‘’ Schrödinger principle’’ relates to what is consciousnessAnd Section 4: The Sherlock Method of imposing meaning on chaos explain why cognition (perception in particular) has to be action based. This paper refers also to

Jason Brown’s microgenesis theory of consciousness. I personally find the theory of Brown fascinating.

http://www.gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/koenderink/Awareness.pdf

This a great essay that touch on awareness, report on Schrodinger’s insight on these question, Sherlock model, visual front end,

World, Environment, Umwelt, and Inner-world: a BiologicalPerspective on Visual Awareness

Jan J. Koenderink

Clear explanation of umwelt and the application of this general biological concept to vision research.

The emphasis on perception being action based, which I think relates both to Gibson's affordances and Howhy's 'Predictive Mind', is absolutely right in terms of how you get to the percept. It is a bit like long division, or maybe more like working out the square root of 2. It could be 1.5 but square that and you have 2.25. So it might be 1.4, but square that and you have 1.96. So it might be 1.41 but that still only gives you 1.9881 and so on. Everything is a chain of difference between expected and observed and try again. But at the end of the day something somewhere has to get the answers - the differences or whatever they are. The car body may go through 100 stations on the production line with paint guns and power spanners but at some point there is no point to the exercise unless it pitches up in the showroom to buy. Somewhere somehow at some specific location there is a dynamic relation which is THE RESULT. My visual cortex takes into account my neck proprioception and information from saccades and all sorts but somewhere gets the message 'that leaf moved in the breeze' and that somewhere is not 'an organism', it has to be a place were some specific signals arrive, somewhere way after the retina and I suspect lots of such places. I don't pretend that Leibniz got this sorted out but I think he was right to say that the monad is not the organism as part-bearing body. It is a unit of a different sort.

Jonathan,

If you look at a body of an organism, you look at a corpse. There is nothing intersting there even if the corpse is living, if the corpse is in a coma or sleeping the corpse is doing nothing. What is import is the doing. The corpse does not even exist outside of the appearance. If you use a microspope and then a particule accelerator to analyse this corpse you get new bodies and new bodies at infinitum but no matter at the end, just other type of doing. Now if instead of looking at corpse and bodies we start looking at doing then the division that were usefull into separating corpse and bodies are not the same as those separating the doing. Each doer is a monad and each of them has an orbit of interation, an umwelt and the world is a soap bubble web of such doers. You will never been able to observe a doer, an electron apart as its action on you. The description of such mutual interaction are relational models. There is no bodies, no corpse anywhere. All that exist are monad/doers and it is because they interact that we can create model of actions.

But I was not talking of the body as corpse, Louis, but as an aggregate of doings, exactly as you and Leibniz would have it - a mass of assistant monads. The problem arises when this mass of assistant monad-doers is conflated with the subject monads or souls that express themselves through our dialogue. What we express is derived from the working of the assistants, for sure, but they are mostly not experiencing in the way we describe. The doers in the retina are not hearing the blackbird sing. The doers in the cerebellum are not tasting the cheese. The human being is a colony, not a von Ux 'organism' to my mind.

Jonathan,

We are the doer/monad of humanity and our participation in the action of humanity is being enhanced everyday because we are building better communication channels of our collective nervous system. The more we act in coordination for the better good and the more our act become harmonized in the collective doer/monad. There are global processes in the collectivity of doer performing our doing and some of them are outside of our skin. And even when all these socities constituting me today will be gone I will be doing as my parents are doing for me now even if they are apparently gone. My life is a transfer of my current type of doing to other type of doing in our collective doing. And the more I know of our collective doing and the more I can participate it at higher level. Human are not born for a fixed type of doing but are invited by our collective doing to participate to what is most critical.

Jonathan,

There is an interesting book:

Leibniz: prophet of new era science

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59400

Great flag-up Louis!! The introduction warms my heart. Later on I may discover the author has taken the master in vain but at least I am not alone in thinking maybe now is the time for us to try to understand GWL.

I have been following for years two consultants on the book Lee Smolin and Ian Barbour.  What attracted me to these two physicists is their focus on the nature of time.  For a short review of Smolin position, you can read : Temporal Naturalism http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.8539.pdf.  On my side, I have made some progress in the way I conceive organisms and their evolution towards human type.  Against Leibniz"s conception of monad has been an inspiration.  My conception focus on the interactional interface and on the evolution of mirroring in such systems.  I finally linked this to the evolution of music and dance as our primary original religion and language and mimesis . Regards

Yes, I have read Smolin's and Barbour's books on time too. I lean a little to Smolin but more to Leibniz. Leibniz completely lets go of the props of intuitive realism. Both Smolin and Barbour want to go off bicycling too but in one way or another I think they are still using stabiliser wheels at the back. Only when you throw away the stabilisers completely can you cycle with true Gottfriedian freedom.

Jonathan,

I am also leaning more towards Lee because he beleive in the reality of time.  I also think that he still cling to some old artefact of traditional time.  Barbour demolish traditional time, eliminate it and produce a perfect static geometrical world which traditional time, spatialized time, paved the way.  But in my opinion, he push this logic of geometrization of the world began by Galileo and Descartes to its end and so make it more evident the limits of the platonic project.  The opposite solution , instead of completing the geometrical project  goes back to Heraclitus and tries to explain the stable by process.  Lee argues for the reality of changes but cling to time.  If we only cling to change and to explain the invariant by a process of stabilisization, then we have to gave up the existence of a succession of moment of time and to settle for the existence of only the NOW.  Both Barbour and Lee focus on the relational philosophy of Leibniz but I do not see them embracing the monadic philosophy a long way. Lee principle of precedence is a very exciting development towards a general principle of cosmic evolution and stabilisation which he used to create a quantum gravity theory.  Quantum mechanics is here conceived as the maximazation of freedom under the constraint of the principle of precedence.  This is a very Leibnizian idea.  But I totally reject Lee"s multiverse theory which aims to solve the anthropic problem.  I personally see the anthropic problem, not as a real problem but as an artefact of the scientific method to explain everything that is not law-like (unchanging) into fixed initial conditions.  Should we be surprise that this scientific method of fine tuning the initial conditions to explain all the future feature of the evolution of the cosmos leave un-explain why these intial condition end up to be fine tuned for life!!!  It is evident that they will be fine tuned since the scientific process fine tuned them.  What is need is an emergent evolutionary process with based on a few simple principles.  But this is a long story.

Regards

Gabriel Tarde (1843 –  1904) conceived a Leibniznian sociology and cosmology. 

 “Monadologie et sociologie”  1895

http://re-press.org/book-files/9780980819724-Monadology_and_Sociology.pdf

"The monads,daughters of Leibniz,” writes Tarde (1999: 33), “made a long way since their father. By various and independent paths, unnoticed by scientists, they sneak into the heart of contemporary science.”

This is so because “it is not only chemistry, which while progressing, seems to lead us towards the monads. It is also physics,natural sciences, history and mathematics themselves” (ibid: 34). Science inherits this process of dissolution of any ontology that presents itself as the ultimate term of an investigation of the forms of being. Even the ultimate terms of a particular science are only relative to a provisional perspective inherent to this science: “[T]hese last elements to which each science ends up—the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom—are only ultimate in the eyes of their particular science” (199

We can now return to the initial question: How does the introduction of themonadology and the possessive relations permit Tarde to reconstruct a concept of society cleared of its anthropological limitations, and that extends at the same time to all kinds of associations, whether they are physical, biological, technical or human? I noted that themonads, by their reciprocal desires and beliefs, form gradual concentrations determining levels of membership that we can link to collective dynamics of possession. Monads, being only bundles of possessive agencies eager to posses others, are in turn objects of possessionthemselves. So, because of the reciprocity of possession, they transform mere aggregates into

societies

. They are at the same time active and passive—the powers to posses and to beappropriated. The emergence of societies has this price to pay. It supposes the activecollaboration of all the monads involved—even in their repulsions and oppositions—inbringing into existence this collective-being, which is nothing else than the consolidation of their bounds.

To the question “What is a society?” Tarde’s answer is of extraordinary simplicity: it is“the reciprocal possession, of extremely varied kinds, of all by each.” (1999: 85). Throughthis the concept of society acquires a new extension that allows Tarde to say, “any thing is asociety, any phenomenon is a social fact.” (1999: 58). From inert matter to social organizations, we find the very same logic that spreads at different scales, and thus inside new boundaries, inside new relations of reciprocal possession.

''Any harmonious, profound and intimate relation between naturalelements, creates a new and superior element, which in turn cooperates to thecreation of another higher element; on each level of the ladder, from thephenomenal complexities of the atom to the self, passing by the more and morecomplex molecule, by the cell or the ‘plastidule’ [organic molecule] of Haeckel, by the organ and eventually by the organism, we count as many new beings as new unities… (1999: 67-68)''

https://www.academia.edu/616503/The_Dynamics_of_Possession._An_Introduction_to_The_Sociology_of_Gabriel_Tarde

upcoming conferences and talks

Leibniz-Scientist, Leibniz-Philosopher, International Conference at the Lampeter Campus of the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, 3-5 July, 2015.

Indeed, I shall be there!

Hi Jonathan,

I learned this from Richard Arthur 's web site.

He is presenting: Leibniz, organic matter and astrobiology

I learned from the later from your introduction of the new monadology. How do you rank him among Leibniz's scholars? He seems very impressive at first sight.  I guess that you only agree up to a point and disagree on many aspects.  

By the way I think I am making some progress towards my own monadic philosophy.  An organism being a growing interaction, its body being the stable interface of this interaction, and its monad being its nexus of growth/action.  I make progress but the horizon is always receeding.

I think Richard is excellent. We disagree of some details but agree on a lot more I think. His Leibniz book for a general audience is very impressive.

Here is a book on Leibniz where it is presented as a biological philosophy.

Divine Machines:

Leibniz and the Sciences of Life

Justin E. H. Smith

Introduction:  http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9463.pdf

Fascinating q and answers.How does Quantum theory tie into this?

Cheers

Narasim,

have a look at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/monadology

Dear Jonathan,

The following neurological discovery of a giant neuron whose axion are wrapping the main consciousness center of the brain seems to go along the line of a master monad of Leibniz.  Probably too premature to draw definitive conclusion but this is a fascinating possibility.

https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/giant-neuron-found-wrapped-around-brain-might-explain-consciousness 

Leibniz offered a conceptual framework that can only be understood today with the growing knowledge of quantum theories, recent developments in onformation theories and also ecology

In "Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution", Penguin Books, 2019, Lee Smolin introduces principles through which to develop fundamental physics. So, they are not mathematical or logical principles but founding elements for thinking about and then formulating physical theories.

Introduce five closely related principles for a future physics:

These are all aspects, claims Smolin, of what Leibniz called the principle of sufficient reason (PSR).

The link above should be https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/monadology.pdf