Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There?

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, calling you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:19 Seth: This is Seth Paskin. I'm in Austin, Texas.

0:21 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:23 Mark: For episode six, we will be looking at Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology. And in celebration of the Monadology, I'm gonna post this in mono. So usually I hang out in your. The right part of your stereo field. I'm also trying to just reduce bandwidth. These are just huge files that this podcast takes up and we will eventually go broke if we get too many subscribers. So if you hear some deterioration in sound quality, it's all for the sake of economics. You'll find an online version of this reading and other exciting information@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com now may I present the ground rules for our discussion to be revised for future episodes, contingent upon our whims.

Number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. No philosophy, no reading of the monadology, no what a monad is. No anybody named Gottfried, any of that. Number two, we will not hopefully engage in any gratuitous name dropping. Why? We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. We have a point to make. We just make it. We cannot say, you know, you understand what I mean? If you go read the Holy Organon for the Establishment of Divine Metaphysical Ontology in Support of the Glory of the Highest God by Dr.

Phil. Number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case where not doing so seems like it would be more fun.

1:54 Wes: I love this reading. I love Leibniz, man.

1:57 Seth: Do you?

1:59 Wes: The passion. This reading is one of my favorite philosophy readings of all time.

2:05 Seth: Wow.

2:06 Wes: Yeah.

2:06 Seth: Well, I'm glad to hear that.

2:08 Wes: I'll give the summary. Leibniz was famously a genius and popular polymath and busybody, and he contributed to every conceivable field. He got a degree in law and he did all kinds of things after that, like inventing calculus, discovering kinetic energy, developing a mechanical calculator, corresponding with over a thousand people learning Chinese. Yeah, and he also did crazy things, like he would go out on engineering expeditions because he had ideas for how to get water out of mines and just any. Anything you can conceivable thing you can think of. Two years before he died, he wanted to sort of summarize his philosophical system. And that's what the monadology is. So this is written in about 1714, and then he died in 1716.

3:04 Mark: And was this a contributing factor to his death, writing this?

3:07 Wes: The contributing factor to his death was the fact that there was a dispute between him and Newton and Newton's followers over who invented calculus. And he was engaged in the last few years of his life in a bitter debate. A lot of nasty stuff. You know, them claiming that he had stolen from Newton and they basically invented calculus at the same time. And Leibniz got the publication before Newton, but Newton invented it, I think a year.

3:37 Mark: So it was just divinely ordained synchronicity. Yes, in keeping with Leibniz's philosophy.

3:45 Wes: And speaking of which, you know, the calculus has a lot of effect on that, a big effect on his philosophy. The he uses this concept of the infinitesimal in calculus, which corresponds to the monad. Two of the. Two of the big concerns that Leibniz had as a philosopher, or what he calls the two labyrinths. One is freedom, the problem of freedom, and the other is the problem of continuum, the continuum. Those two problems are sort of what lead to this crazy or crazy seeming system. I don't know. I remember when I first read this in undergrad, it just seemed like the oddest thing.

But when you realize what he's trying to do, he's trying to synthesize a lot of different things. The paradox of the continuum has to do with the idea that there's an infinite number of points on a line, for instance, geometrically. But if any of them have any extension, then the line would have to be infinitely long. And so therefore a line must be composed of an infinite number of points which effectively have no length. He's also thinking about the mind body problem and physics, the problem of kinetic energy. And all of these things enter into the formation of the monad.

All these things motivate this sort of unified theory, which is the monad.

5:05 Mark: Just to say, Descartes was about 50 years before him. And so Descartes, the primary thing that he was reacting to.

5:13 Wes: Yeah, he's reacting to Descartes. And in fact, this reading is a direct parallel to the Meditations. It's basically three sections. In the first section, he explicates the monad, which is basically correspondent in part to Descartes, cogito or his ego or consciousness, and the distinction between that and extension, although Leibniz has a much different approach to that extension or body. The second one, he goes from the monad and gets us God. So he gives us some arguments very similar to Descartes arguments and of course to the, the scholastic arguments. So you have the cosmological and ontological argument. And then in the last section he uses God to get us the world back. And that's also a very strange approach to getting the world back. It has a lot to do with this principle of harmony that you hinted

6:07 Mark: at, Mark, even though that's interesting that you see this parallel to the Descartes meditations, because that's not the apparent structure at all. That even if he comes up with these monads as sort of the parallel to the ego as Descartes discovers it, the way he presents it is talking about what's the smallest possible thing. Like he's reacting to the atomists, people who came up with there's these little tiny material particles. So I guess this is what motor seems to motivate the whole thing that.

6:38 Wes: So not just, not just the smallest things, but the most explanatorily simple. In other words, the things that you can no longer divide. And in this case it has to be.

6:48 Mark: That's exactly what's right. It's, it's, you know, you can no longer divide that, that if you're an atomist, you believe that there are little tiny pieces of matter that are the smallest possible pieces of matter. But the way that they defined matter back then was as extension. That is, it's something that has length. It could be a very small length, but anything that is extension you could divide in half. So the smallest piece of matter can't be a piece of matter at all because then you could divide in half again. So just like you were saying, right, like the smallest point on a line can't have any width.

The smallest point in the universe can't be a piece of matter. It has to be something that's not matter. Which resonates pretty well from the little I understand of like super string theory in modern physics, which is to say, oh well, they're the smallest material particles. We've got electrons, we've got neutrons and protons, but then you can, you can break them into quarks. Well, can you break the quarks into something? Well, either if they're regular matter, then it seems like you could break them. Maybe as a practical matter you can't. But at least theoretically you could break them and somebody eventually will, who knows.

But the superstring theory, if I understand it, is to say that these different subatomic particles or these different quark level particles are kind of the strings of the universe vibrating in certain ways or something. And you can then explain why, you know, you could, you could have action at a distance, for instance, if there's a string that somehow connects two places, so that when something happens in one place, it happens in another place. So once you, you're entering the realm of this sort of mystical. That is very much like the, the same move that Leibniz was making here.

I'm sure that's butchering modern physics. We'll have a future episode on modern physics to talk with, with a real physicist on here. That's already.

8:34 Wes: Yeah. And ironically, I think it's much less mystical in Leibniz than it is in modern physics.

8:41 Seth: One of the things that I thought was interesting was that as a modern reader, the kind of initial reaction to reading this is it's like, oh, he's talking about atoms. That there's. In my mind anyway, it's easy to make that initial connection and say, oh, he must be talking about atoms. But. But as I read through the first section, it seemed to me that I had to piece together a few different things to kind of say this is what seems to be the kind of motivation for this text. Because coming to it, as Wes said, there's obviously a lot of background behind this.

And when he starts talking about the Cartesians, you can see that he's clearly responding to a lot of different things. But the point is, things, what he calls, I think, compounds, right, can. Can be broken into other things. But at first I thought he was saying that it's not ad infinitum, and then I think realized later that he actually says it is. But the key piece is that there is no empty space. So if you keep breaking things down, like points in a line or objects, and there's no empty space, at some point you have to get to some kind of last thing, and every, every bit of space, everything is filled up.

And that there's a huge problem with this idea that the last thing could be something that you in turn would then have to break apart into something else. So how do you get to a last thing that isn't divisible? And that's essentially what a monad is, right? It's a concept that describes something that indivisible.

10:22 Wes: The other problem is once you get to this indivisible thing, which doesn't have any, that's simple. You have to describe how that's going to give us this macroscopic experience of changing and varied reality. And the way he does that is to say that despite its simplicity, these monads have variety of affections or qualities in the form of perceptions. So monad, instead of having all these fundamental, let's say properties of physics, get these properties that are subjective in nature, these perceptions.

11:01 Mark: Yeah, well I found that really weird when he introduced the word perceptions initially because he's saying how are these monads going to change? Well, he wants them to all be independent in some strong way, which means that they, they are only changed by themselves. They are not, they don't push each other around. And this would seem to be the most bizarre part of the whole thing when you're trying to, to explain why things interact, seem to interact. And he is in favor, you know, of the natural sciences and talking about causality and things pushing each other around in the rough sense, in the practical sense.

But he thinks strictly none of these monads influences each other. We're all just influenced directly by God, well, through a self propelling force within each of the monads. And that was what was bizarre. So he says each of these monads still changes constantly. And that's very hard to explain how a simple individual substance, indivisible substance, could have changes at all. Because usually when something changes, that means because part of it drops off or part of it is altered in some way that it looks different to us or it's rearranged. I mean, just if you talk about the destruction of physical objects or making a pot out of something out of a piece of clay or whatever, those are obvious changes.

But if a simple thing has to change, he says, well, they just have multiple properties and some of the properties themselves change. And this all has to be motivated by this internal force. And he calls that perception. So he says the passing state which involves and represents a multitude in unity or in the simple substance is nothing else than what is called perception. So I thought that was bizarre because perception we normally think of, oh, as I see an object in front of me. And so some of the people he was reacting to in fact had these physical theories about parts of the object that I'm looking at are jumping up and hitting me in the eyes.

And of course we have now the idea that light is bouncing off them and so we're physically interacting with the thing in some ways. But he's saying what a perception is. And I just thought he was using the word in a completely bizarre new technical way, which he sort of is because he can't have a view of perception like that because he says all these monads are just self propelling. So when we Perceive something. It's not that we're interacting with that thing and somehow being aware of it. It's that something within ourselves causes us to have this sense of this thing in front of us.

And he wants to call it perception.

13:33 Wes: Right?

13:33 Mark: He wants to use this term even for objects much, much smaller, much, much simpler than we are. So any monad, including these tiniest ones, regulating the smallest of structures, the smallest of organic structures, have this self propelling force. And he says that when anything seems to affect them, he just wants to call that perception. So let's just call the changes that occur in this perceptions. And they're caused by appetite or appetition. Word that he uses. Freaking bizarre.

14:01 Seth: My understanding of that little passage there was monads could not be influenced from the outside. So they don't function like bodies, like mechanical causation. Right. They can't be warmed or cooled or split up or what have you. And so he talks about the soul and he's trying to say that perceptions. I thought at one point the way I understood it was he was saying that a monad is like the soul or it's like consciousness without memory.

14:28 Mark: Well, and I'm trying to in some ways get at why he's. What's motivating him to use the word monad for all these different things. To me, he comes up with this idea of the monad as the smallest possible thing because the smallest possible thing can't be material, like we were saying. And if it's going to be then immaterial. Well, wouldn't it? And all the other things we think of as immaterial substances like God, like our souls, our spirits, or the organizing force behind the growth of animals. So. Right. What Aristotle was calling forms or teleology, those must all be reflections of the same kind of thing.

So all those he calls monads, and he sketches it out enough that he kind of gives us a picture of how all these could be related. I don't know that he has a wonderful reason for insisting that these are all different versions of the same kind of thing, other than that's the simplest explanation. And God likes to do things in a simple way.

15:20 Wes: Well, I think the motivation is it begins as a mechanistic explanation. Right. We want to get to a unified principle, not a bunch of unharmonious principles. So that's why, for instance, physicists are looking to unify quantum mechanics and physics.

15:39 Mark: Sure, yep, yep. All science uses as few laws as possible.

15:43 Wes: Yeah, you want to get to a fundamental principle. In this case, it is in Part that, but he's thinking of what's explanatorily most simple. But I think the physics is a useful analogy in this case. As a physicist, he expects that what he's delving down to is these very similar atoms. But this whole paradox that he's getting at, I think physics still faces it. To explain things you have to be able to cut them into pieces in a sense in order to talk about their causes. At some point that chain of explanation must stop and then you get something which is essentially irrational.

The rational must be built up out of all these irrational elements. And I say irrational because once you get to the ultimate particle, let's say in physics, so that the motivation for all of this is to look for a way that we can get at the paradox of these simple irrational things building up the world without talking about their physical extension, shape and divisibility, which it can have because it has no parts. So the way to sneak around that is to, to say the absolute. Go to the subjective. Yeah, and I think it's in fact it's brilliant. It's to go to this idea that the principle involved in fact has something to do with the subjective perceptions of all these monads which are then coordinated.

And so, so let's go into the different types of monads as well. Because everything has a monad or, or is composed of an infinite number of monads. He distinguishes early on between what he simply calls entelechies, calls them to get at their. He calls them that something like perfections or perfection seeking. He uses that to talk about their self sufficiency and the sense in which they're like automata. And then for animals there are monads that he calls souls. And these animals have distinct perceptions plus memory. So for the entelechies there's this, what he calls unconscious perception.

And by the way, this is another famous thing with Leibniz. He's the first to talk explicitly about the unconscious. So all monads have this very fuzzy kind of vague unconscious perception going on.

17:49 Mark: He uses the word perception, but I think you could think of it as just being apparently affected by things.

17:56 Wes: No, I think it really is perception.

17:58 Mark: See, I guess one of the examples I heard of this is you can talk about a thermometer when it reacts to a changing temperature by you know, the mercury goes up. It's like saying that is a perception by the thermometer of heat, that that's kind of what the basic monads have, that they're affected by things in this way, but they're not aware of it. They can't sort of decide to react or not to react or they, they just have very. It's a very mechanical reaction. Even though we've already said that since they're monads, they're not actually mechanically attached to these things. It's. They're self motivating.

18:31 Wes: They're not aware in the sense of having self consciousness, which is what only or even the distinct perceptions of animals. They don't have the self consciousness or what he calls apperception. But they, they do share something with us as human beings, which is that any, even the most basic monad has unconscious perception, which is something that we can sort of catch catch in ourselves. You know, we, we know that when we go to sleep, for instance, there are things that we've experienced that we've entirely forgotten or we know. He uses that analogy of being hit on the head and having a very fuzzy perception. I do think he actually thinks of it as perception, even if it's this extremely low level unconscious perception.

19:19 Seth: That's what I was trying to, trying to get at earlier. I remember at one point he talks about perceptions and he distinguishes, he says from apperceptions or consciousness. And he's trying to use that falling asleep. There's at one point where he says something very strange about distinguish long periods of unconsciousness from death. Which is kind of an interesting little sentence there. But that we have to I guess sort of either very, very narrowly construe what he means when he says perceptions. That's a very technical term for him. Or we have to sort of more broadly construe it to mean the types of things that go through a mind or a consciousness of sorts that aren't related to perceptions of the outside world, which would be an apperception and don't tie to memory to create something like consciousness.

So if you imagine Descartes thinking thing, but without memory through time and without recourse to any external phenomena to create concepts, whatever passed through that thinking thing is kind of what would be the perception now. How much content they would have, I don't know. And as we'll see, he's going to bring in God later on to kind of fix that for us, to solve that problem for us.

20:38 Wes: But think of it in terms of a gradation. Think of a gradation between the highest consciousness and then the lowest form. But there's no such thing as a complete absence of perception.

20:52 Mark: Actually though he uses the term apperception, what he talks about as self reflective perception, it's not Apperception is not reflection, is not perception of the, the external world. Okay, all of these are, of course I'm going to stop making this qualification, but none of them are strictly speaking, perceiving the external world because we all only perceive what it's already in us and all that kind of stuff because we're all these monads are all, can never be affected by each other. I'm going to stop saying that. Just assume that that's the case.

But with that in that caveat in mind. All of these types of perception are perceptions of things nearby us, of the external world. It could be in our heads or not in our, you know, they're, they're of something that is not apparently the monad itself. I mean, if we're going to talk about unconscious perceptions in a way that we as readers understand, we have to think about something with a mind that is at least a little bit like ours. Right? So I might see something, but I don't really notice it. But then you ask me like, oh, did you see that thing?

Oh, okay, I guess I did. So I had an unconscious perception of it. Or you could use hypnosis to pull it out of me. Or maybe there are things likewise that an animal notices but doesn't act upon or does not bring to the fore of their consciousness. So those are unconscious perceptions. If you're going to say that the smallest, tiniest piece of water, which is a monad, has a perception, you have to be using it in a weird technical way. You have to be saying that it is what we would say in everyday language. It's being pushed around, it's being causally affected by something else and the way it's reacting.

Well, he wants to call that a

22:30 Wes: perception, but it is of the same kind, as radical as it sounds. He means that. And take for instance his explanation of death. The, the monad that is your rational soul could become the monad that is the piece of water. Yes, and the, the only change is its hierarchical relationship to other monads.

22:58 Mark: That should be pointed out that all these monads cannot be created or destroyed because they don't have points, they don't have pieces. Right? They don't have parts. That's the way. The only thing, way something can be created or destroyed is if you build it. But since these monads are just indivisibly simple, they must have all existed out of God's will from the beginning of time and they will continue to exist forever. Which doesn't mean that all animals are immortal or something, so. But so he has that weird explanation of how they can change their properties like you were just talking about.

So we've talked about already monads as the smallest possible things. And we've talked about monads as, you know, so small that they're not even physical. And we've talked about monads as spirits and, and also we've alluded to monads as whatever, the equivalent to a spirit that an animal has, an animal soul, but he even has things in between there. So anything that is an organized organic whole, like a plant or whatever has a monad associated with.

23:56 Wes: With those are, those are entelechies, the lowest level.

23:59 Mark: Yes. So, so in fact one of our cells is going to be itself an entelechy. So they're monads inside monads inside monads. So you could have, you know, a particular thing that you're looking at could have infinitely or a lot. Not infinitely, but a lot of monads associated with. Right.

24:16 Wes: Infinite. It's infinite.

24:17 Mark: It is infinite.

24:18 Wes: And by the way, all matter, for Leibniz is organic. All matter is living. If you looked closely enough, if you had a good enough microscope, you would see that there are animals everywhere.

24:26 Mark: But not all constructions of matter are living. And so that's the difference between if you have a plant and you smash it with a stick, you know, maybe it'll try to grow back or.

24:39 Wes: No, no, no, you just, if you kill something, you just dissolve it into smaller animals.

24:45 Mark: Okay. Well, I was actually just even picturing, just like when we were talking about Aristotle, as things having these built in teleological self motivating forces that any, anything that you could call an organism, it could be a cell, it could be a whole plant or something is going to have certain forces that are going to, you know, cause it to try. So if you smash a plant and it doesn't completely die, then it, it will try to re recoup itself or it'll grow differently, it'll grow in a warped way. Whatever. These forces are still going to be at work. Whereas if you smash a chair, it's not going to try to grow back into a chair. Right. That's the difference between a non organic compound of. Yes. Okay. Very small pieces of the chair are still monads, but the chair itself does not have a monad associated with.

25:30 Wes: Right.

25:31 Mark: With it. The lower organic thing does. And this is where he seems to be trying to pull in. Well, not seems to be explicitly talks about this Aristotelian concept. That was also a different form of. It was in Plato of the forms of Objects. So Plato and Aristotle seemed to think that not only do animals in particular, but you know, any number of natural things, you know, if they have some sort of built in tendency of growth, this teleology to it, that's explainable by the form. So we were talking last time about how different, you know, a tiger tries to, to grow and be a strong, healthy tiger. Well, that's because there's a certain abstract form of tiger and the form is

26:16 Wes: the soul of the tiger.

26:16 Mark: Yes.

26:17 Wes: And it's particular to the tiger. It's not, it's not that, that depends. That gets complicated.

26:23 Mark: That depends. Exactly. That depends who you ask. Like, like Plato really thought it was a general thing. So there was sort of the absolute tiger somewhat somewhere out there in the ether that all tigers, all actual tigers sort of would, were connected to and aspire to. So in a certain sense they all had a group soul that, you know, they were all growing toward. Whereas Aristotle said it's in the individual thing, but it's a certain, it's the same type. So by saying the monad is a self regulating thing, he's trying to pack all that, that stuff about forms which had by all of Leibniz's contemporaries, by a lot of his contemporaries been who are trying to do things according to the scientific method.

Just really hated that theory of forms that had so dominated scholastic thought for so long that they thought that, that forms don't explain anything. You should talk about mechanical causes. He wanted to say, yes, when you're doing science you should talk about mechanical causes. But here's where the forms fit in. He, he liked, he wanted to bring that, some modern version of that into.

27:19 Wes: But I think it's again, it's motivated. It's not just, hey, I want to bring this in. It's the problem of this ultimately simple object that has to be at the foundation of the mechanistic world. And yet the fact of its simplicity makes it a bad candidate for being at that foundation. Unless you come up with some work around which is the perception. What he's also doing is he's taking this idea of form and he's making it applicable to every level of existence. So it's not just the tiger that has the, the soul, but it's its heart. And then you could go on down to all these levels. Each one will have its entelechy. So for instance, let's just get at this role of hierarchy with monads and how that builds up animals for Leibniz. The monad that is the soul of the tiger. Is just a organizing principle of an infinite number of other monads.

28:17 Mark: The organizing principle, that's another word for the.

28:19 Wes: There's a strict hierarchy between all the monads. And then the heart is under the hierarchy of the soul, tiger, soul, monad. But it is also the organizing principle of all the lower forms in the heart. So all the functional elements of the heart, even if you killed the tiger and the heart ceased to function and it melts back into the earth or becomes dirt or whatever. Whatever it becomes, there are still. If you had the right microscope. He's also very influenced by the discovery of the microscope and the fact that people were discovering that there were living little animals all over every. Seemingly everywhere. Everywhere you looked with a microscope was teeming with life. So even then, it's a bunch of little tiny living things. They just happen not to be organized into the larger living thing that is the tiger.

29:08 Mark: So what happens to the big monad? Tiger. Monad.

29:11 Wes: He uses the word shrink, I think.

29:14 Mark: So the organizing principle of a tiger becomes the organizing principle of a smaller cell or a piece of water. Yeah, that seems crazy.

29:24 Wes: Enfolding or shrinkage. It's number 73. This is also why there is never any generation from absolutely nothing or complete death. Taken in the strict sense of separation of the soul from the body, what we call generation is unfolding growth, past and future history we call death is infolding and shrinkage. So that monad will have a entire script, or you could think of it as the entire history. You know, it's going to start out organizing principle. There's a whole script, and that script is a series of perceptions. So the perceptions at the point where it's just the cheeseburger monad, is what this unconscious perception, which mark you rightly, say, well, do we call that perception or not? That's a tough question.

30:12 Mark: It's especially weird. And I don't know if this is exactly related to, but tacked onto that not only does each individual monad have its own history, it has the history of every other monad in the. In the universe. Right, right. To a greater or lesser extent, depending sort of how. How close it is. But somehow each monad reflects everything in the totality of. Of God, everything in. In the cosmos. And he uses that to explain.

30:38 Wes: Reflects every perception of every other monad.

30:42 Mark: Sure, exactly. Exactly. And he uses that to explain what seems like intuitive knowledge to all of us. You know, mathematics, all these things that, that other rationalists were trying to say, or Plato was trying to say, we're, we're built in Knowledge that. Oh, that we have every thought that is possible to have. We all of us already have unconsciously and, and we just can, therefore, if our attention is directed to it, you know, it will make sense to us.

31:12 Seth: Mark, there were, there were two aspects of what you were saying that I found particularly interesting. So one is the idea that every individual thing reflects the totality of the universe, so to speak. So there's this sense of the, the macro in the micro, which is kind of a. Was, I think, a new concept, but it's something that we've become accustomed to, I think, in a more modern sense where.

31:37 Mark: Right.

31:38 Seth: Quantum physics, you know. But the other piece of it was that the reflection describes a kind of connection between the, the elements. So he says, you know, obviously each monad reflects more strongly that of which it's a part and that you can kind of think of it as distant echoes for things that are far enough away. But because all of these things are connected, if you were able to grasp all of the, all of the relationships in their entirety, you would essentially be able to completely reconstruct both the past and the future as well as understanding the totality of the present.

32:20 Mark: Yep.

32:21 Seth: And that the guide's eye view, the God's eye view, I found that to be an unexpected. I guess I didn't expect him to be going there. When I got there, I was kind of surprised, I should say, as an outcome, because I didn't, it didn't occur to me that that was going to be part of what he was trying to explain or address with this particular text. And maybe it's just been so long and I'm just so out of it, but I found it to be a very interesting consequence.

32:51 Mark: Wes was saying at the beginning that Leibniz was motivated in this by two problems. One of them was the continuum. The other one was freedom. And this weird relationship between all the monads where each of them reflects the whole and they all act in this harmony, despite the fact that they can't cause things in each other. I was trying to figure out, like it appeared initially in the reading, that where that came from was just from this very old fashioned idea about causality that I made fun of in our first podcast. Very briefly, the, the idea back to Plato, that if you have a chain of causality, the greater thing always has to cause something in the lesser thing.

33:38 Seth: Right.

33:39 Mark: And that's just. And that's how we can, for instance, explain God. Because, you know, there, there are greater and greater things and something even greater of those must have Caused that thing which seems weird notion of causality. It's very non mechanical.

33:53 Wes: It's not just that, it's. It's that monads have no parts and therefore can't be altered. And because they can't be altered, they can't be altered by other monads. It just flows directly from the simplicity.

34:05 Mark: Yes. Okay, well I was going to say it's Freedom is. What?

34:09 Wes: Well, freedom, freedom is. It just can be recast as the mind body problem. So like Descartes, he thinks of everything in the very mechanistic scientific way. So when we do things, you know, when I go to the fridge to get ice cream, it's because there's electrochemical activity in the brain and it tugs on my, it sends electrical impulses down nerves which tug on the muscles and it. And I go up and get the ice cream from the fridge. And that in and of itself is completely, completely self sufficient explanation, mechanical explanation of behavior.

And that mechanical explanation by the way preserves the constancy of the amount of energy in the universe. Which was a principle that was formulated in a way by Descartes, but in an inaccurate way and then formulated accurately by Leibniz because he discovered kinetic energy and then postulated that it was constant. So the problem is if you, if you say well, I went to the fridge to get the ice cream because I was hungry. There's this idea that the mind affects the body. And if the mind affects the body then there's something non material putting energy into a material system and therefore increasing the total energy of the universe.

Which is a.

35:29 Seth: No, no, let me, let me see if I understand that. So my reading of this had the interaction between the monads being mediated by God. Is that, is that correct that there, there's, there is, there is no way that they can act on each other except through God, through the synchronicity mapped

35:52 Mark: out at the beginning of time by

35:53 Wes: which is another way saying monads can act on each other is another way of saying that the mind cannot act on the body.

36:01 Seth: Okay, then you just answered my question. So the ability for the mind to act on the body is also entirely dependent on the synchronicity that God preordained at the beginning of the universe, right?

36:17 Wes: So he's saying that look there, here's how to solve the problem. They can, it's a violation of the principles of physics, whether it be any causal interaction between mind and body. And so therefore the only way you're going to solve that problem is to say they're in harmony and that there's some third term mediating that harmony.

36:37 Seth: Right. So you know what's interesting is that this kind of helps me a lot with the sections starting around about 82. And he talks about the City of God, which is a fascinating city of God, this truly universal monarchy as a moral world within the natural world that he essentially has created a situation or created a structure where your own relationship to your body, your, your mind or your conscious relationship to your body takes on a totally different. I don't even know quite how to say it. I hope you guys can get what I'm. What I'm sort of driving at here.

That when you think about the relationship between your mind and your body being mediated by God in this kind of moral sphere. Because that is kind of the way he describes it, right? That it truly get the. You truly get the concept of your body being a temple, right. That there becomes this whole set of sweeping moral obligations about self directed behavior and not just behavior between individuals or between other minds or other, other bodies. That's pretty fascinating. I don't know.

38:00 Mark: That's also the attitude towards animals that by making the monad a constant thing at all levels of nature. Whereas Descartes said only people have minds, our bodies are matter, animals don't have minds, they're just matter. So though they appear to be in pain, they're not really in pain. It's just like a clock. And so you can torture them all you want because they don't feel anything, they don't have an inner life. And he's saying no, everything has an inner life. It's just some of them have a sort of a richer, more self reflective inner lives than others, which just seems much more intuitive as, as bizarre as it is to say this crazy ass view of harmony and things not affecting each other except through gods is intuitive at least.

Here's one upshot of the way he's playing this out, that that seems to accord more with our, with our perceptions. So he gives us a reason not just to be good to our bodies, but to be nice to animals and the rest of nature.

39:00 Seth: Yes. I didn't do any real biographical research, not really much to speak of in preparation for this. But who were the prominent Cartesians of the time that he was kind of railing against? Because the more I understand what you guys are kind of.

39:15 Mark: Malebranche.

39:16 Wes: Malebranche. Yes.

39:17 Seth: Okay. The more I understand what you guys are telling me, the more I can just picture him there with kind of a stick, just like poking. Because this seems to be in many, many ways, line by line, you know, like it's a rebuttal of a number of different things out of the Cartesian camp. And I mean he mentions it, he mentions it explicitly in places, but he's really taken the fight to him here.

39:41 Wes: Yeah, because Descartes had that pineal gland. And the whole idea that there was this interaction between mind and body and Descartes solution, by the way, was to say, well, the amount of energy stays constant in the universe, but when the mind acts on it, it just changes the direction which Leibniz refuted in his discovery of kinetic energy. So again, there's this interesting connection between physics and philosophy because what's conserved in the universe is not just the motion of objects, of the speed, its directional momentum. So mass times velocity and then kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared, which

40:16 Mark: gives you something outside the physical world.

40:19 Wes: Exactly.

40:20 Mark: Pushing a force into the physical world, that just doesn't make any sense. Which even without that it still was a problem. How do you have an immaterial substance acting on a material thing? It just, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, just to talk about freedom a little more. So this, this fact that we are not affected as monads, that we are not affected by external things, by other monads or by, by matter, by anything else, means that we have complete freedom and hence moral responsibility. And in fact all animals have some sort of freedom. It's just they can't reflect on it and so they're not part of the moral community, which is.

So it's a really weird notion of freedom because on the one hand everything that we are, our entire history is already future and past is already written in us as monads from the, from the moment that we are born and even before that, from the beginning of time. So in a certain sense, and God knows what this all is. So in a certain sense we're not free at all. Right. God knows what's going to happen to us. But because it's me, because I'm the monad that's doing it, then that makes it my responsibility, it is me doing it. So it feels free even though somebody did know what was going on beforehand.

So he's a weird kind of compatibilist,

41:29 Wes: one of the most jerry rigged part of the argument, parts of the argument, God has to be there to sustain that harmony and that sequence of perceptions. But on the other hand it's an internal. So God gives you the script, but on the other hand the script is still inside you, it's an internal force and it has the appetite that's pushing perception to perception. So he wants to say there's that spontaneity inside the monad, right? But then the fuel of that spontaneity comes from God, right?

41:58 Mark: And it's a constant fuel. It's not like he's not a deist, where God sets it up at the beginning of time and that it goes. It's that we are all kind of like God's thoughts. Like, so think about your own thoughts. That if you're not actually thinking of it, it seems to go away. The image that I have of the tree right now, if I stop thinking of the tree, that image of the tree goes. We are the same to him. That if he stops thinking of us, then we all just disappear. That that's his operation, his nature to be have created the world in this way, just like through his own thought, which is probably not at all revolutionary to him.

That this is just stuff he's bringing from Middle Ages philosophers. But then we should get to the next part. So we already talked about how even though things don't cause things, strictly speaking, no monad causes action in another monads, yet they're all in harmony because of God's plan from the beginning of time. And people would say again with this free will thing, well, if I'm determined from the beginning of time, then you know already God, that I'm going to sin, so I'm not responsible for my sin. Well, he makes the distinction between, okay, so everything is strictly determined from the beginning of time, but that doesn't mean it's necessary.

And by necessary he means that its opposite implies a contradiction. So there are things that are just in your nature, such that if you were to violate this, it would be contradictory. I'm trying to think of an actual thing that does not have to do with math or something. An example to use here. Does anything come to mind or do you guys know what I'm getting at?

43:24 Wes: I'm not sure what you're getting at.

43:25 Seth: I'm not sure what you're getting at.

43:27 Mark: Well, he has a section in here that says, no, you can't say that your actions are determined from birth because according to the way we reason about these things. And this has a lot to do with the workings of human reason. So we say certain things. He comes up with a distinction. I don't know whether he invented this or not.

43:46 Seth: Which section are you looking at?

43:48 Mark: Necessary and contingent. So this is in 29 where it starts. Knowledge of necessary and eternal truths is what distinguishes us from mere animals and furnishes us with reason and the sciences. Okay, so he's talking about what, these eternal truths. Oh, so 33. Yes, there are two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of facts. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible. And those fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. So putting this in a free will context, the kind of necessity that motivates that you would sin is a contingent kind of necessity.

So it's not a contradiction that you would have. So you can say, hypothetically, you could have done something else. And that's just essential to the way that all monads think about their own actions. And we can also use that to talk about the activities of God. So, you know, on the other hand, we have these contingent matters of fact. Their opposite does not imply a contradiction. All of our own actions are like that. So even though in a sense that they're preordained from the beginning of time, in an important sense, to us they don't seem like that.

So we can call them contingent and say that we could have done otherwise and therefore, you know, have punishment and all that kind of stuff that goes with taking moral responsibility. But the other main application that he uses of this is we can reason about God's motives as well. And this is where this principle of harmony comes in, that, you know, God could have created the world any way he wanted, right? He has the power, he's all powerful, can do it any way he pleases, but he chooses in accordance with, with the law of sufficient reason, which is to say he makes the best possible world.

So he puts everything in harmony, right? He sets up all the monads to act in the best possible way with each other. And this is of course, where he comes into a lot of criticism. You know, and probably more famous than anything he wrote is in Voltaire's Candide, the famous book where he has a character that is called Pangloss, that's supposed to be a version of Leibniz that keeps declaring as Candide and his friends go around the countryside. It's been a hell of a long time since I read Candide, so I, I'm sure I'm not getting this exactly right, but he witnesses a lot of suffering in the world and Pangloss is just saying, oh, well, this is the best of all possible worlds and we shouldn't do anything to change it.

And that's just the way God wanted it. And so of course, this is supposed to show that Leibniz is full of crap. And of course, if you actually read Leibniz writing about these things. He, you know, has very detailed and well thought about responses to this. I in fact looked over a appendix, I guess to his theodicy, which is his sort of treatise on God's will and the principle of sufficient reason where he, you know, really tries to deal with this problem of evil and why it really is the best of all possible world, even though it looks really crappy and there looks to be more suffering than not and all that kind of stuff.

But that's another side of this preordained harmony between all things that, that it makes it so the situation is the best for every monad concerned.

46:50 Wes: Right.

46:51 Mark: Which seems to be an obvious place to criticize him.

46:54 Wes: I don't think there's any good solution to the problem he's trying to solve.

46:58 Mark: Which problem? The problem of evil.

47:00 Wes: Yeah, and the problem of free will versus the mechanistic universe and those sorts of things.

47:08 Mark: Right. And free will as contrasted to the predestination everything is known by God beforehand. The religious version of the free will problem.

47:14 Wes: Right. God's omnipotence and its relationship to free will and its relationship to evil.

47:21 Seth: Doesn't the principle of sufficient reason, doesn't it go something like it's key to existence, that existence has more perfection than non existence. So anything that is existent is more

47:33 Wes: perfect than, well, sufficient reason, by the way, is not the best. That's every effect has a cause or everything happens as a cause.

47:40 Seth: Yeah, that's. But this, this bit about the best possible world, it's basically saying that because this is the world that exists, it's the best possible world because the world that doesn't exist has less perfection because it doesn't exist. And isn't that essentially how the argument goes?

47:56 Mark: Not because it doesn't exist, it's that God made it exist because it had more perfection.

48:02 Seth: Okay.

48:03 Mark: It's not just that God just whimsically makes something exist and because that exists, it's more perfect than any other thing. Because then it would just be tautological to say the world that exists is more perfect than any other world. No, he really think that God. And he's again acting with detailed study of all these scholastic philosophers who are really concerned with oh, can God defy the laws of logic? You know, so he mentions like the distinction between God's will and God's knowledge, God's nature. How does he say it? So in other words, you shouldn't ask questions like can God contradict the laws of, of logic or something like that, because the laws of logic are kind of part of.

48:41 Wes: They're internal to him. Yeah.

48:43 Mark: Yes, part of God's nature itself. So his will is not going to contradict his nature.

48:48 Wes: Yeah, this is 46. So meanwhile, one must not imagine that since eternal truths depend on God, they are arbitrary and depend on his will. So it is only true of contingent truths which depend on the principle of harmony.

49:03 Mark: Okay, so it's the principle of harmony, not the principle of sufficient reason. The choice of the best.

49:08 Wes: No, the principle of harmony is different than the choice of the best as well. But for contingent truths, God arranges the best set of contingent truths consistent with the principle of harmony. Necessary truths depend on his understanding for which they are internal object. In other words, there's a whole problem. Two plus two equals four necessary truth. Could God have willed two plus two to equal five? Well no, because two plus two equals four. Does that mean that God is not omnipotent? No, because that principle of two plus two equaling four is a necessary truth is internal to God.

49:47 Mark: Yep.

49:48 Wes: And then as far as the ironically necessitating all the contingent truths, that's the matter of him choosing the best possible world consistent with harmony.

49:58 Mark: And that becomes the big practical upshot again of this whole system is that we live in the best possible world. And if you don't see that, that's just because you're limited, you're finite. I guess we should say what the other monads have in relation to God. Because God is not himself a monad. He's not the big monad. He's like the rule that sets up all the other monads that we are all, you don't want to say pieces of God because God is individual, but we are reflections of God that again reflect a greater or lesser extent of God. We are all limited that we are defined by our limitation, whereas God is defined as being infinite.

And that's the big difference between us. And sort of as you go up the chain of monadism to become a more complicated soul like animal has or a spirit, which in other words a self reflective soul that can have moral actions, a spirit like we are, then we reflect more of what of God's character and we have sort of greater insight into our perceptions range farther into the various things that God knows. But since we are still limited, this is what causes us to not see the full picture. Do not perceive this world as the best possible world. He uses the analogy of beautiful painting that if you zoom way into a beautiful painting and look at one little corner of it, it probably just Looks like a blob.

It doesn't look that beautiful at all. You gotta have the big picture, like only he does, to see that. It's really awesome.

51:26 Wes: Some of the scholastic arguments that he's repeating here have to do with. Basically it's the problem of once God creates anything at all, it's gonna be fucked up. It's either he creates nothing, or he creates something that's flawed. Because for something to be created, it has to be this finite creation. And finitude requires the admixture of nothingness, and it requires alteration, and it requires all the things that lead to evil. And the other part of the whole classical argument about the necessity of evil and the best possible world is that the best possible world will have free will. And there's no such thing as free will without the possibility of evil.

52:11 Mark: Sure.

52:12 Wes: So there are all those sorts of arguments that he's putting into incorporating into his own system, which is of course

52:18 Mark: not a sufficient response to the problem of evil, because not all evil is caused by people's choices. If an earthquake destroys my house, it's not that somebody had free will and chose that my house be destroyed or something. It's there are other things that are terrible that have nothing to do with free will. But he has an explanation for that too, which is just that somehow things are better because that happened in the long run. Yeah, right.

52:42 Seth: Well, sure. In the very long run, or.

52:44 Mark: Because, you know, unless we had evil, we wouldn't recognize and appreciate good unless bad things happen. It all sounds very weak when you're talking to somebody whose kid is dying of cancer or.

52:56 Wes: Yeah, until you begin to imagine the world in which everyone, to quote, as Good as It Gets, that movie with Jack Nicholson in which everyone eats noodle salad, could call it the as good as it gets principle, which is. It reminds me of these depictions of heaven in which heaven is extremely whitewashed and boring because nothing ever changes. Because change, of course, leads to evil and alteration requires corruption and it requires bodily existence and all the sorts of things that give life not only its pain, but its joys.

53:31 Mark: Have we connected all the dots here?

53:34 Wes: Well, one thing I think we still didn't completely hit harmony. I don't think this is one of the parts of Leibniz's system that have had people treat him as an idealist. In other words, the principle of harmony seems to make the world a sort of matrix situation where all these windowless monads have coordinated stories projected onto their inner theaters. And that phenomenological consistency just is what we call the world. So Leibniz in this reading for instance, says that a monad isn't in a body, it's associated with a body because its perceptions happen to be clear and distinct in relation to that body.

54:17 Mark: So that's part of the monads are non spatial, which, which also monads are

54:21 Wes: non spatial, they're not in bodies.

54:24 Mark: Right. Explain how they could go between different.

54:26 Wes: The body is sort of assembled. And so, you know, he talks about those different perspectives where you get different views of a city and then the different perspectives could be put together for the God's eye view to sort of assemble the three dimensional city. So you get this idea, it's a kind of idealism where the harmony that God is providing there's no need for, you know, what we would normally call external reality. So this is parallel to Descartes getting back of the external world by saying God's not evil, therefore he wouldn't deceive us. Leibniz seems to be saying, well, in a sense God is deceiving us, if you would want to think of it in that way, because he's just providing us with the sort of brain in the vat situation where each monad is like a brain in the vat, but they're all coordinated.

55:16 Mark: Right. Because at the same time he has this principle of, you know, all scientists try to follow Occam's razor, try to say that the simplest theory is the best theory and most scientists don't really have a good explanation for that other than it's easier to communicate what the simplest theory is most often correct. You know, that's just kind of a rule of thumb. But he really, Leibniz says that's a personal preference of God, that that's part of what makes the world beautiful, what makes it the best possible world, is he creates things in as simple a manner as possible. So that if you have a perception of a rock in front of you, and then if I come along later to that same spot and nobody's moved the rock, I'm still going to see the rock and all the other monads involved are going to see the same thing, because that's just simpler. It's simpler to make things harmonize in that way.

56:00 Wes: Is that in this reading, is it?

56:02 Mark: I thought he talked about that a little in here. I don't know, I skipped around in the book a lot, so I could be referring to something else.

56:08 Wes: I don't think it is, but I.

56:09 Mark: That's definitely, you know, one of the things going on here which I think is Is hilarious because he's saying God likes simplicity and the simplest explanation. Kind of like scientists say the simplest explanation is correct in scientific terms. But yet if he wants to give an explanation for why when I hit you, you feel pain, the simplest explanation seems to be that I am physically hitting you and causing pain in you. Whereas he's saying, no, no, no, you had the. From the beginning of time in your monad, the eventual feeling of this pain that then I have this, this harmoniously aligned experience of seeming to hit you.

56:54 Wes: But you understand the contradiction of your depiction and what you're saying is a simpler explanation, which is that it violates. No, you violate the conservation of matter and energy.

57:07 Mark: Only if I say that there are.

57:09 Wes: There cannot be Mark deciding to do something and then it happening in the world as a cause of that.

57:15 Mark: Well, okay, so be a materialist. He's a parallelist. So if you study cognitive science and talk about the different views of these different psychologists, and some of them say,

57:25 Wes: this is the view I subscribe to, by the way.

57:27 Mark: The mental has a causal effect on the physical, or the physical has a causal effect on the mental. Or maybe the mental just goes along in parallel to the physical and doesn't actually have any causal effect. So science would say, you know, Occam's razor would say, if you don't need to use the mental in your explanation, just don't use it. And that's the tech, the behavior.

57:46 Wes: You do need the mental.

57:48 Mark: Well, from your everyday point of view, sure.

57:51 Wes: Not just from the everyday. From a lot of current, who I consider the best philosophers of mind. One solution.

57:57 Mark: I'm not going to defend behavior.

57:58 Wes: Yeah, one solution is to get rid of the mental. But that has its own problems, let's say. So there are different ways around this problem. You're right. I think getting rid of the mental and that's, you know, like Daniel C. Dennett and other people are listening to us. A lot of them may be familiar with Dennett. I think it leads to larger problems.

58:15 Mark: Well, we could go into this a little bit. That the behaviorists just flat out say mental talk is stupid. Let's stop talking about desires and beliefs and just talk about behavior. Okay. That historically has proven to be silly. You know, you can use applied behaviorism for some things, but as a way of really gaining an understanding of mind and psychological phenomenon. It seems goofy, but there are other versions which don't just get rid of mental talk, but say that mental talk is somehow equivalent to physical talk or it's a different level of explanation. So that, for instance, there is some physical analog to my talking about my having a certain belief. But that physical analog is so complicated in terms of all the neurons and let's just talk about beliefs.

58:58 Wes: Yeah.

58:59 Mark: Or functionalism is another view where it's kind of like you've got the code that's running the program and then what the program does, that's the mental state. Having the belief is kind of what all these physical stuff are doing. Which is again, another way of saying, like, it's a different point of view on the same phenomena. So it's not as simple as saying we're getting rid of the mental.

59:18 Wes: Right. Well, it gets very complicated.

59:20 Mark: But yeah, we can talk about those views.

59:22 Wes: Have problems as well. The computational, which you just, the last thing you mentioned, the computational theory of knowledge and consciousness has its own problems and it, you know, and so does the more complicated reduction to physical talk. We should do a podcast where we hit each of these. But the Leibnizian view, it's still considered a major solution.

59:44 Mark: So that's consciousness sits there on top, doesn't actually have any causal interaction with the physical, but is just kind of running in parallel. And there's no explanation of how these things can be hooked up.

59:55 Wes: Well, the parallel seems like harmony. What's linking them doesn't have to be God. And Leibniz, there's some similarities to Spinoza here. He's considered a monist in some ways, ironically, even though it sounds like dualism and monism is very popular among contemporary philosophers of mind. So that's where you get the connection.

1:00:14 Mark: It sure sounds like, from what we've read here so far, that Leibniz does not have a way, without talking about God, to say why these things would run in parallel. That the simplest explanation to me of why these things would run in parallel is because they're ultimately caused in some way or different reflections or aspect of the same phenomena. But again, we're kind of getting away from.

1:00:35 Wes: Yeah, I think we can discuss that in the future. We'll probably have differing views on that.

1:00:39 Seth: But listening to Mark now, I mean, I'm not going to pretend that I in any way, shape or form have any kind of grasp over this particular subject matter. But the more I'm reading that section 81 again, I keep rereading it and it just sounds more and more completely bizarre the more I say it to myself.

1:00:54 Mark: Can you read it aloud?

1:00:55 Seth: Again, this system means that bodies act as if there were no souls, even though this is impossible, and that souls act as if there were no bodies and that the two act as if they were an influence on one upon the other.

1:01:10 Mark: Yeah.

1:01:12 Seth: And he's basically saying, yeah, that's what. That's what I'm committed to.

1:01:15 Mark: Which is not the simplest possible explanation.

1:01:19 Wes: No, I don't think that's necessarily true, Mark. I don't think. It's obviously not the simplest explanation. I think the explanations we're talking about from modern philosophy of mind are very complicated. I wouldn't be able to explain any of them.

1:01:32 Mark: Well, how about we just agree to meet up and fight?

1:01:37 Wes: No, no. Yeah, we will. On the philosophy of mind 1. Because I just can't remember.

1:01:42 Mark: Because my mind.

1:01:43 Seth: Of all the alternative I'm trying to understand, like if you take the view that consciousness, or what he's calling the soul or what have you is somehow a product of physical activities or physical things. So in other words, neurons firing in the brain and, you know, the complex pathways and all the chemicals and all that sort of stuff somehow give rise to consciousness. So if you have that view so that to some extent consciousness or the soul is subject to the. The laws of mechanical causation, just like the body, you're still not avoiding the issue.

1:02:22 Wes: Right, well, he's saying there isn't. There isn't a causal.

1:02:26 Seth: Right, no, no, I understand that he's not saying this, but I'm saying if, if, if we agree that the strict behavioralist there is no mind thing is not adequate. And then you go to the view that consciousness or mind is somehow a product of all of these, of activity in the brain.

1:02:44 Wes: It's the word product, how people have tried to spell out the product part. There's a lot of different alternatives for that Mark mentioned. Functionalism could treat it strictly as causality. You could treat it as emergence.

1:02:57 Seth: That still doesn't sufficiently answer the question of how mind can act on the body.

1:03:02 Wes: And see, I think this is a problem which will never go away. I don't think any of the solutions are adequate. But I think what Leibniz's brilliant little theory does is he helps us at least avoid making a kind of mistake, which I think a lot of people today make. And just to give you an example, commonly you'll see in neuroscience textbooks or articles on neuroscience, you'll see sentences like the brain thinks this or something similar where you take the physical object and then you ascribe to it these mental.

1:03:37 Mark: I actually don't think you're going to find that in any neuroscience text.

1:03:39 Wes: No, no, no, I.

1:03:40 Mark: Your silly misrepresentation. No, it's not say blood rushes to, you know, that, that.

1:03:46 Wes: No, no, no.

1:03:47 Mark: Tests have found increased activity, neuron activity in this area of the brain correlated with subjects reporting thinking of their mothers having sex.

1:03:55 Wes: I have the whole catalog. I track all of this, both in the popular media and in textbooks. I took a course on neuroscience.

1:04:02 Mark: They're doing that. They're doing it as a shorthand for.

1:04:05 Wes: No, I think it's. I think it's an actual confusion. And you see it in the philosophical literature as well. But let me just give you an example. Whether you think it's a straw man or not, at the very least, I think you see it enough in the popular media and I think people are confused about this. The brain doesn't think, people think. And so, for instance, you don't get this neat crisscrossing between the mental and the bodily. What you have is that you have some sort of, you know, as Seth mentioned, brain activity. And then you have some sort of relationship between brain activity and qualia or subjective mental states, experiences, perceptions.

The causal as we understand it scientifically and mechanistically. There's two causal lines. One runs between perceptions and one runs between behaviors. So for instance, again, the ice cream example, electrochemical stuff going on in the brain pulls the marionette strings. I go and get the ice cream. Not only is there no need to talk about me desiring ice cream or being hungry, it creates an irresolvable problem. So the talk about hunger, what you have to say is in the line of perception. And this is what Leibniz is saying. There's a logic to the sequence of perceptions.

There's a logic to me being hungry and then my perception of me getting the ice cream, but that's on its own plane. And then there's a logic to the brain activity and then the behavior of me getting ice cream. But you can't mix those two things up without really confusing and losing sight of the mind body problem. Because again, what if I say I'm hungry, therefore my body moved to get the ice cream? We know that's illegitimate by any standard. We can't say Wes was hungry, therefore Wes moved to the fridge. There was a cause between Wes's hunger and Wes's bodily movement.

It's not because I think hunger is a shorthand, scientifically acceptable.

1:05:56 Mark: Hunger is a shorthand way of referring to a physiological thing. And you could even say that we came up with these mental terms partly because of self reflection, where we're sort of creating this new sphere and we're giving names to things that are happening. You know, maybe we're not even willing them to happen that they're just.

1:06:14 Wes: Do you think one day when you know all the neural correlates you'll describe your hunger in terms of neural correlates?

1:06:19 Mark: No, because it'll be just too complicated to do that. No, you'll never do that. It's a different level of explanation.

1:06:24 Wes: I just don't think it works.

1:06:25 Mark: And in fact most of this is not even a matter of self consciousness. It's a matter of explaining the behavior of third party things so that we ascribe this intentionality to them. Because that's just a good shorthand way of explaining a lot of behaviors. And when we came up with this way of explanation seemed to make a lot of sense and enable us to talk about things consistently.

1:06:44 Wes: I don't think that argument works. But again I think that's.

1:06:47 Mark: I think we've gone far enough in this.

1:06:48 Wes: I think that's their philosophy mind talk.

1:06:50 Seth: Hey, what was Leibniz's religious background?

1:06:53 Wes: Was super religious. No, I don't, I don't think it's. Well, he did do a lot of defense of the church stuff but I think he was actually Catholic, he was ecumenical. He was a Catholic minority in Germany is a big political problem but I forget the details.

1:07:12 Mark: But he really wanted to say, you know, in all religions and in all really ways of thought that there's. And this is a very charitable. I like him for this, that there's something right about it. So I was reading a little bit about his relation to China. That part of the last part of his life he was really trying to foster relations with China. He really liked the way the Chinese political system worked that it seemed this sort of Confucian merit based government rather than who you know and feudal stuff that was going on in his. At the same time he thought that they would be much benefited by having Christianity added to their.

You know, that we had much greater wisdom in the west of God's purposes. But he thought that since all these things as the same source God it would be extremely surprising if people that think hard about things weren't getting on some aspect of truth that they just need to see the bigger and bigger, bigger picture and they'll come up with ultimately the right kind of system. And he really thought that this kind of understanding and peace was available between all peoples with just enough careful thought and part of this which is going to lead into.

So let me just say that for next time since I think we're getting kind of toward the end. For next time, we're going to talk about Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which actually was not the name in German, that was a silly Latin name made up by the translator when they put it in English. But in any case, the fundamental project of Wittgenstein here, who's much later, who's early 1900s writing this, was to come up with this precise mathematical language that would replace regular language, because regular language leads to all these goofy philosophical arguments about the existence of God and primary and secondary qualities and does matter exist and all this kind of stuff.

And if we just get the right kind of symbolic language, then we can all come to an agreement because we'll be able to see, you know, what the facts are and see what, more importantly, what we're not allowed to talk about because there is no fact of the matter. Well, this idea actually came not the what we can't talk about so much, but coming up with this perfect symbolic logic is one of Leibniz's first real, you know, from his early career. One of the things he wanted to make his whole career about was coming up with this. He really liked math and thought that all philosophy could proceed on the model of math and that we should be able to solve all these religious differences that people are fighting over and things and political differences by if we came up with the right kind of language, we could just say, sir, let us calculate, we'll solve all our differences.

And in fact, he thought Chinese characters might be a good candidate for this kind of language. And he really didn't do that much in terms of developing this language. And so according to the introduction of this Leibniz election book that I read, people looking in his readings for the payoff of that aren't going to find it. I mean, that's, that's why people like Wittgenstein took this up later and Russell and other folks. But this quest for universal understanding through clarity of language and things is right at the heart of everything he wrote, you know, right up through the monadology.

And it's all ultimately because of this principle of harmony.

1:10:20 Wes: This reading is going to infuriate me.

1:10:23 Seth: You know, Mark, right before you mentioned all that stuff, what I was going to say was Leibniz is a perfect candidate to be a complete and utter lunatic mystic on the backside. He's got all the makings, right? He's got this bizarre philosophical construct that links everybody together through this fabric of God. And he's all into mathematics, right? Mathematicians are Always crazy freak mystics. And Wittgenstein for that matter, has all those makings as well. He was just flat out crazy. That might be something to explore. Somebody needs to write a good piece of fiction that somehow weaves Leibniz and something like. What is it the Da Vinci Code or what was the one that Eco wrote? Foucault's Pendulum. There needs to be something with Leibniz in it. I've decided maybe I'll take that up.

1:11:11 Mark: You know, I found myself thinking that any good piece of philosophy not good in terms of well thought out and accurate, but anything interesting enough to capture your imagination, make you want to read more, you could make like a sci Fi story. I have to test that as we go forward. Just the really boring stuff. You can say, no, I'm not writing a story about truth tables.

1:11:39 Seth: You know, that makes sense that you would say that too, Mark, because you could probably say any great work of philosophy or anything that would make you interesting is something that you could build a concept album around. Because you could probably write one song about truth tables and maybe it would be a nice.

1:11:56 Mark: But you hate truth tables.

1:11:58 Seth: Yeah, it would be like a jingle, like this is how you do it, you know, kind of thing. But you couldn't get. You couldn't get an electric light orchestra or some, you know, late 70s concept oriented album out of it. For sure. You would never get. What was the one with Mr. Roboto, the Styx album.

1:12:16 Mark: Kilroy was.

1:12:16 Seth: Kilroy was here I have it right here.

1:12:20 Mark: As embarrassing to say as that is, actually, that's when my kids pick out records from my stack of records, most of which I got for a dollar when I was in Austin because that was the time to pick up used records. The things with the coolest looking covers are what gets put on. So that was one of the first.

1:12:34 Seth: Well, apropos to absolutely nothing, we were just reading through the closets today and Tracy had a few albums that her dad found buried somewhere and gave to her a couple years ago. And one of them was Thriller, Michael Jackson album, and then also Foreigner, a Foreigner album. But I was just thinking, I'm.

1:12:56 Mark: You got one guitar.

1:12:57 Seth: One guitar, that's right. I know. I was at. I was at a buddy's house this past Wednesday and he just had a mix playing through his ipod on the speakers. And we were sitting around drinking beers or whatever and Styx came on. And for some reason I had this massive flashback that my sister had grand illusion and like I had to beg her to let me sit in the Room and listen. And I thought, what is Miss America? Is that not one of this, One of the songs in there? I just thought there was.

1:13:26 Mark: It's one of the more ridiculous.

1:13:28 Seth: Oh my God. But you know, at the time, who knew? I just thought. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I have no idea why I just went off on that, but the mention of Styx just somehow always kind of turns my crank a little bit.

1:13:39 Mark: All right, so listeners, if you can find a Leibniz related concept album, please report it to us. I mean, I do know of some. Like there's a song called the Best of All Possible Worlds by Bourgeois Tagg. And I'm sure there are other things talking about that and better yet, mostly ripping. Better yet, how miserable. And you're miserable. And you think that this is the best of all possible worlds and you feel like hitting somebody for even suggesting

1:14:07 Wes: that it's the best of all possible worlds, but you're in the worst of all possible crannies.

1:14:13 Seth: The best of all possible worlds depends on you having the worst of all possible lives. Is that the end?

1:14:19 Wes: Someone's got it. Someone's got to take the.

1:14:24 Mark: Some monad has to be in the feces.

1:14:26 Seth: That is correct.

1:14:28 Mark: Lots of them. In fact.

1:14:29 Wes: Someone's got to be on bottom so others can be on top. Oh.

1:14:32 Mark: So I. I have a related question. So I was reading this while on a vacation and hanging out with my sister, who I don't see that often, and my parents and. And even in talking to my wife about this kind of thing. Do you feel like reading philosophical texts like the one this week make you a better conversationalist or not? I want to hear your answers before I tell you my little anecdote.

1:14:59 Wes: I'm just a great all around conversationalist.

1:15:05 Mark: So. So you don't find when that the fact that we've been reading these texts that that has upped your game and you're talking with your significant other and your family members about the things you're reading here or.

1:15:17 Wes: I don't talk to people about this kind of stuff because I don't want to be ostracized.

1:15:26 Mark: Yes, Seth, I know you had a whole discussion about suicide. That was a. You were talking, telling us last week.

1:15:33 Unknown speaker: Yes.

1:15:33 Seth: So I don't know if reading these things makes me a better conversationalist, but it provides me with additional topics for conversation and gives me the opportunity to connect with people in some ways that I might not otherwise have been able to. But I think that's true of any text. You know, the same Guy that I was hanging out with drinking the beer last Wednesday is reading Atlas Shrugged, the whole thing. And I was like, why? Why are you putting yourself through that? And it kind of prompted this whole discussion. But now I'm kind of on the hook when he's done reading it, to kind of come back to him with explaining why most self respecting philosophers think that Ayn Rand is one of the most useless, idiotic, idiotic thinkers of the modern era.

And you know, it turns out he was much more focused on kind of the capitalism versus communism aspects of it and sort of the ability of the individuals to self determine in a kind of economic sense and not so much in a moral sense. But anyway, the fact that he's reading that book enriches our relationship and our ability to have conversation. In the same way, I think reading these things enriches my life and hence makes me able to relate to people in interesting and new ways. More about the ideas obviously than the texts themselves. But I mean, I can remember periods of time in the past where just turns of phrase and ideas would get me so motivated and I would find them so amusing that I'd be laughing and wanting to share them with people, which I think would actually make me less of a good conversationalist.

Because the last thing, I mean, seriously, I used to go around, I can remember when I read the Ethics, Spinoza's Ethics, going around and like literally like holding the book in front of people going, you have got to see this. And that certainly did absolutely nothing for my credibility or anybody's enjoyment of my conversation.

1:17:31 Wes: I do remember when I was reading a lot of philosophy, I always thought, and then trying to write about it, my writing was negatively affected after hours and hours of reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I was writing like Kant, basically, and it was not a good thing.

1:17:47 Seth: What you want is, you want, if you read these things and it spurs something in you, you want to share that passion with somebody else. You want other people to be as turned on by the pursuit of, or as vexed by the question, or as agonized by the unknown, the horrible writing style, whatever. And if you can find a way to kind of bring that to light in people. That's why I kind of like what the guys on urban philosophy are trying to do, at least with their video podcast. I don't know about the execution at this point, but you know, going out and getting people to kind of question things and if you can kind of stir that passion, but then as soon as you start name dropping about the things you've read it kind of kills the whole process. Right. So you have to.

1:18:30 Mark: Right. Which seems inevitable because people say, ooh, what I got out of this book is so sublime and incommunicable that you just have to go read that and repeat the experience. I can't possibly boil down all that I got out of that into, you know, something substantial I could just say to you right now to convince you of something or change your mind on something.

1:18:49 Seth: Yeah. I guess you just gotta find people that think things are amusing and funny that you think are amusing and funny and interesting.

1:18:57 Mark: Well, my experience with this since starting to do this is that it made me a worse conversation. I must say. I'm not the most.

1:19:05 Wes: I thought you were gonna say this.

1:19:07 Mark: Well, that's. Yes, of course. But I'm not the most garrulous person. You might not know it from listening to this podcast, but in regular life I tend to get my mind on some track that. Unless then I can sit down with you and just explain the whole thing, that's just not even worth relating. So whether I'm obsessing about some things that I'm working on with music, you know, that's. There's nothing more boring to other people than me talking about my band for three hours, probably, but yet that's one of the only thing that I could easily talk for three hours about.

And it's the same thing with a lot of the stuff that I choose to read. I regard it often as kind of a private thing, and I don't necessarily want to be ostracized. So I'm not going to necessarily start bragging about the narratives of the comic books or whatever that have been making my way through en masse, partially because I'm doing it as like a. Not even so much out of enjoyment, but because I'm doing it sort of a detached historical observer. And I don't want people to think I'm actually a fan. Though of course, I wouldn't continue to do it unless I had some that kind of enjoyment.

So it's somewhat the same thing. You know, you're. You're a big dweeb if you talk in Leibnizian or Hegelian talk. And so you should just stay with the other people who are fans of philosophy to get that stuff off your chest. In the same way, you probably don't talk about your fantasy football team or whatever your secret is with people outside your circle. So I tried on a couple of occasions since I was in a social situation and just hanging out with People for the week of talking about Leibniz or Wittgenstein. And it was more just, you know, I could sum up in a couple sentences, like this principle of harmony.

And then the people would laugh and say, wow, that guy is really fucked up. That's really weird. That's really idiotic. And that's sort of the end of the conversation, which it says something about these philosophers to me and the place that they have in history that even though they were Leibniz, such a sharp guy, has thought about every angle of what he's talking about. But if you try to explain him to people, they're just like, what a freak.

1:21:05 Wes: Yeah. But on the other hand, he invented calculus and had a preliminary model of the computer and all this practical stuff as well. Yeah, but that's sweet. And it's very, very interlinked with his philosophy and kinetic energy. And the other thing is, I think the important thing, even if you think the system is strange, it's still motivated by an attempt to solve some very difficult problems, and it highlights those problems. So if you're interested in those problems, even if they're insoluble, and even if the. I think it's a beautiful system. This is, like I said, it's one of my favorite readings in the history of philosophy.

1:21:42 Mark: Wow.

1:21:43 Seth: Well, but that's also not fair, Mark, to just, like, throw out if you're like, hey, so I was reading this book and this dude thought that, you know, your mind and your body were completely separate, and the physical world and the mental world were completely separate. And it's just an accident, but not really an accident, because God set it up this way at the beginning of the universe, that they would work in harmony with each other. And somebody goes, that's crazy. That is absolutely insane. Right. But if somebody else said there was this tar pit and this animal went down to, like, feed at this tar pit like 10 million years ago, and it fell in and we found the bones.

And you're like, cool, right? And then when they go in and say, well, no, but let me tell you what's special about this bones. Let me tell you about all the stuff that went on behind it. You kind of build the story, and then I understand the significance of this particular set of bones. Right. It means something more to me after you give me the context. The problem is, I don't think you could give the context. That's the whole point of studying. That's the point of studying the history of philosophy.

1:22:45 Wes: Right.

1:22:45 Seth: It's like, if you're going to say, you know what, There were a whole bunch of these guys called the Scholastics and they had all this crazy shit going on. And then there was Descartes. And then. And so Leibniz's response is harmony. And somebody goes, okay, I understand it now. That doesn't make it any less crazy. Thank you for wasting three hours of my time also.

1:23:02 Mark: Exactly. Well, that's what makes philosophy so insular and self referential and maybe so irrelevant to average, you know, folks that have not been studying this in school. You say that should be able to pull.

1:23:14 Seth: No, but this is.

1:23:15 Mark: This, you should be able to say

1:23:16 Wes: that about a lot of hobbies though.

1:23:18 Seth: But this, this I think is a.

1:23:20 Mark: It's not supposed to be a hobby. It's supposed to be discovering useful truths. Not just useful, but wisdom. Discovering things that will make your life richer, that'll let you live better, that will let you do what you're supposed to be doing or figure out what your purpose is on this earth or if that concept even makes sense.

1:23:37 Wes: See, I don't.

1:23:37 Mark: And if, if the actual study of that becomes like, in order to understand it, you have to get so far into these minutae, like, well, why bother?

1:23:43 Wes: I think even though a lot of classical philosophical readings ask the question of what the good life is, it's like when Dick Cheney on the vice presidential search committee, you know, he found himself. Philosophy always finds itself. It always comes back to contemplation and I'm sympathetic to that. I get joy out of these, believe it or not, these readings. It's something that puts me in touch with, let's say, the mystery of things. I don't have religion, so this is what I have as far as practicality goes. I don't want to have anything to do with anything that's useful. I'm anti useful. I want to do literature and philosophy and anything that has no applicability within the world. That's what I want to do.

1:24:24 Mark: Well, it is enriching your life and making your leisure time pass in a comfortable way. That is not.

1:24:31 Wes: It's hard work. It's hard work.

1:24:34 Mark: Okay. A rewarding way.

1:24:35 Seth: Okay, well, I think this question though is, to be honest with you, I think this question is critical for us in this podcast to kind of address if our goal is to kind of do these things the way we're talking about short targeted readings that raise issues that are accessible by non technical reader, if you will, or a lay audience, whatever you want. Like, one of the things I had to ask myself was how interested Is anybody going to be in any kind of ontology.

1:25:06 Mark: Explain. Explain that term for our folks that don't know what that is.

1:25:09 Seth: So ontology is just sort of the study or the theory of what is so explaining what the world is made out of and how things are related to each other in the sense of. Just like we just talked about. So there are these objects and they're compounds and they can be broken down into parts, and the parts can be broken down into other parts. You're talking about what is you're trying to describe nature of reality or the world. And those kinds of conversations are going to be much less interesting to a lay audience than conversations about God and free will and moral responsibility and all the other stuff.

1:25:44 Mark: Well, but ontology is, you know, is there a God? Is an ontological question, right? Is God a thing in your ontology, or in the case of Leibniz, the thing underlying every other thing in your ontology, as well as, you know, are spirits real? Right? Is there just body, is there just matter? Or are there also these spirits that might go on after we die? I mean, these are exactly ontological questions.

1:26:07 Seth: No, point. Point taken. But I think what I'm trying to say is, is it okay for us to get into the subject and have Wes educate us about, you know, where Leibniz fits in the continuum and all that? Let me ask you this. When we get to the point where we're talking about what you guys call the philosophy of mind, right, which is also goes hand in hand with the philosophy of language and we get into, there are going to be topics that I'm just thinking, I'm not sure how interesting they're going to be to people. We joked about Frege, didn't we? I think in the last podcast.

1:26:42 Mark: Yeah. And Frege is central to Wittgenstein.

1:26:45 Seth: But is that something we're really going to want to put people through? Is somebody really going to want to know about? I think I made the joke about use versus mention. You know, these. These sorts of things. Like, I'm throwing this out there as a topic for us to think about in discussion.

1:27:00 Mark: And obviously, actually just for our listeners, you threw out this obscure topic of use versus mention in discussing. What should we talk about in our completely drunk podcast that will be our number 50 or whatever number it was, we should discuss something especially obscure. I guess I was thinking that one of the things that interests me, I'm always interested. I'm charitable in this way that I think if people are excited about something, there must be some reason for it, that people are generally right in what they get excited about and they're wrong in what they reject.

And I apply this most directly when I talk about music that if somebody has a lot of fans and you think it sucks, well, you're just not getting it the way they do. And maybe it's because they're all 12 years old and you're never going to be able to reduce your intellect such. You know, that's fine if you want to dismiss it for that reason, but it's probably something else and you can probably find your way around it. So a lot of people like the Grateful Dead, I hated them for a long time because it was just a bunch of druggie bastards that like them and.

But no, I finally found my way into them. Well, it's the same with a lot of philosophy. So there's something. If these respected academics are really into something, then there's some fuss that's worth exploring. You don't have to ultimately like the thing, but it's worth to me looking into. And that's what I see in all these. So I'm up for doing podcasts on Ayn Rand, even though I think Ayn Rand sucks as well, because she generates a lot of excitement and there are a lot of, I would say, a substantial portion of our potential listenership. You know, maybe Ayn Rand is one of the only contemporary philosophers that they've heard of.

1:28:27 Seth: I. I am not disagreeing with that at all. So don't get me wrong. I. I certainly don't want to restrict topics to anything that we just find objectionable. Do we need to think about that when we pick our topics of saying, you know, this is good, because the Monadology actually covered a broad range of topics and brought into play the question of free will and the existence of God and a lot of other sort of things.

1:28:47 Mark: And the problem of evil. Yep.

1:28:49 Seth: But especially when we're talking about Wittgenstein.

1:28:51 Mark: Well, with the Tractatus specifically. And I was thinking about this because I looked over the Tractatus to see what to ask people to read. And so I'll say it here, and I won't say it again if you're going to read. And of course, you can always look at the website to see the link to the reading and what I want you to read. But so it's more or less continuous and every sentence is numbered, so it's 1 and then 1.1 and then 1.11, then eventually it gets to 2, etc. So you want to read from 1 up to 4.12, which actually 4 is really, really long. And in fact, even some of the stuff in the beginning of four gets very technical and into formal logic.

But then Skip ahead to 6.3 and read to the end. So the stuff in between there, you might want to skip and like, read the major, like, what is 5.0 and what is 5.5? Try to get a sense of what's going on there. But it all gets into very symbolic logic. I know he was contributing a lot to creating the system of symbolic logic that folks use today. And I'm assuming that our audience is not going to want to learn all this just to figure out what was cool in the Tractatus. So we're already running into that, where there's this esoteric area built into what we're reading.

So let's read the beginning, let's read the end, let's get a sense of what the whole thing's about, to see what his big philosophical point is, which is we should have such a logical language as this, because things that cannot be represented by that kind of logical language are stupid questions that we should not be asking. And I think we can just take it as it goes, like, do a reading in an area, and if it was just painful and is getting too esoteric, then don't do another reading in that area. But we'll try to cover the big names in philosophy, but then just try to go a lot of different directions and just see what's interesting to our listeners and to us.

Well, let me, before I sort of give the credits and things, any closing thoughts on this.

1:30:34 Seth: I still think there's a wonderful mystic or maybe dark magic aspect to this whole thing that I'm hoping somebody will find and exploit.

1:30:43 Mark: Now, it's only because I was leafing through other Leibniz readings that I know he was like, just explicitly, really against mysticism in some ways. And you're talking about the ancient qualities of numbers and how the Pythagoreans really saw numbers as important. And this is, again, was to try to give an ultimate support for this math, like true language, that would settle all philosophical problems. But then he criticized that all the numerologists following that who sort of attach a mystical quality to this, which mystical, in this case just means that you can't penetrate its mysteries, that he really thought that you can penetrate these mysteries.

It's not that we're going to have God's eye view on things, but he wanted to make actual practical use of these and create calculus out of numbers rather than worship numbers. So I don't think he would consider himself a mystic. At the same time, I also read somewhere that him believing in unconscious perceptions opens the door to maybe that we have some perceptions that we are unconscious of that are not like our normal perceptions. Right. So it's not. Yeah, we could have perceptions of sight that we aren't focusing on and that. So we don't call them conscious perceptions.

But heck if we just don't know what's going on in our minds. There could be other kinds of perceptions and ways in which we are clued into things. Saying that we are all reflections of the entire universe and that we all have this kind of innate knowledge and we all have all the thoughts that could be thought already in our head in some respect. You know, this is all part of this. But you know, you could attach that to. He does talk about angels and angel types and he's open to these crazy ass metaphysical ghosts or whatever. You know, there's room in his system for all sorts of mystical things.

Things which is kind of cool, I guess for somebody so hard headed.

1:32:25 Seth: Interesting guy nonetheless. Definitely. Yes, I'm now motivated to understand more about. He apparently met Spinoza. I know I keep talking about Spinoza,

1:32:33 Wes: but this, he did, he did.

1:32:35 Seth: This whole thing is firing up the old Spinoza stuff and yeah, let's, we'll do some Spinoza. But he, he apparently met him and disagreed violently with him while respecting his intellectual.

1:32:46 Wes: Yeah, they had some polite, they had some polite exchanges. Yeah. By the way, the French philosophe Diderot in his encyclopedia and he basically disagreed with Leibniz about everything. But just talking about how, what a genius Leibniz was, he said something like when you consider all the branches of knowledge Leibniz contributed to and what a genius he was and blah blah, blah, you just want to burn all your books and go off and sit in the corner and never do anything intellectual again.

1:33:17 Mark: Okay, actually I, there's a point I was going to make earlier that, that when you were saying this before and we were talking about this last time in terms of genius and sort of what makes thinkers be remembered. And a lot of this does seem to be. If somebody produces something just unarguably impressive, like creating calculus, then you tend to listen to what they have to say in other areas. Obviously they're smart. So Plato, you know, in not a very nice way, states as everybody who's good at something thinks they're a genius at everything. So maybe the other side to Leibniz is You could respect him for his creations in mathematics, but say, wow, he was pretty wacky in other areas and the fact that he was a genius,

1:33:59 Wes: not just mathematics, gives us physics, gives

1:34:02 Mark: us a reason to read him. But certainly it is not give us.

1:34:08 Wes: I don't think.

1:34:08 Mark: I don't think there's any affirmative action we should take.

1:34:11 Wes: I don't think there's any affirmative action here on this. Philosophical stuff stands on its own.

1:34:17 Mark: Well, we want to hear what you folks have to say in our discussion groups. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com you'll see links to forums and places where you can talk to us about things. Go to itunes. Subscribe to the podcast Hey, I just wanted to give a shout out to Mr. Ken Gerber who designed the art you will see at Partially Examined Life. And probably if you're using an ipod or something, the art you see on your little screen right now. And in fact the little caricature he did for us showed up in the big entertainment magazine here along with a mention of the Partially Examined Life, the Isthmus in Madison.

On our blog you will see a link to the article to read about how journalists can copy things off of our website and profess to be reporting about us. No, I'm just grateful for the publicity and for the printing of that thing. Ken now runs a blog himself which is cartoonstand.WordPress.com you can go and just like we did request cartoons and if he likes the idea, he might just do it. He's just an awesome artist and has done my album cover recently and just a lot of other work for me. And then also our recent connection to urbanphilosophy.net a site whose express purposes to bring philosophy to the masses.

And they were nice enough to offer us some free discussion space that we, you know, can be the moderators of and topics focus specifically on us as opposed to the other philosophy forums, some of which I showed up to and tried to put, you know, a little links to our podcast that got deleted as spam. Those bastards. So thank you much Reed Wittgenstein for next time. Good night.

1:35:54 Seth: Good night.

1:35:56 Wes: Night.

1:35:56 Mark: Or good day. Why do we assume people are listening to this late at night?

1:35:59 Seth: Because. Because we're recording it late at night

1:36:02 Mark: because it's 11:30 my time.

1:36:06 Wes: 11:30 my.

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