Episode #037 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

And to start out the show, I want to take you guys back on my time machine for a sec. I’m not trying to be dramatic. Well, look, it’s already off the rails. Step aboard my time machine, everybody, and come back to a wonderful point in history with me! The year is 2004, alright? Throughout the United States and the rest of the world right now, there is a technological arms race going on. We’ve all seen it. Unless you’re under ten years old, you were there and you experienced it, alright? And something tells me I’m catering to most of my audience. I don’t think I have many ten-year-olds listening to this show. Could be wrong.

If you lived during that time you saw incredible things happen in the area of technology, the devices that were coming out at a super-rapid rate. We saw things like the iPod transform the way that people listen to music. The advent of the iPod made listening to music so much more convenient and efficient than it ever had been before. We saw things like those old Nokia cell phones—those bricks—we saw them offer people affordable wireless communication at a level that we had never seen before. We had all sorts of stuff coming out. We had handheld gaming devices. We had handheld TVs—all kinds of stuff! And the most interesting part about this time period is that we all knew exactly where it was going, but nobody had found a way to get there yet. There’s this really strange consensus among consumers, among inventors, among billion-dollar companies, even, that what we were ultimately heading for in this time period was the all-in-one electronic device—the ultimate, all-encompassing device.

Now, I want you to imagine that you’re living in 2004, and you’re sitting in the front room of your house; and you’re immersed in this culture. Now, you’ve always dabbled in electronics throughout your life, nothing too serious. You’ve created a few products, but one thing that you’re confident about is that these obstacles that these big companies are facing of what prevents them from making this all-in-one device—you’ve solved them. You know how to get rid of those obstacles. And you decide that you’re going to make that all-inclusive combination of all these gadgets into one.

So, for the next six months, your life turns into a montage. Cue the Rocky music. You’re running up stairs, putting on your lab coat, wearing goggles, your Tesla coils in back—you inventing stuff. And finally, after months and months of hard work and conviction, you finally do it. You create a successful prototype for an incredible new device that combines a phone, web surfing, games, a camera, everything. And what do you call this wonderful new device? The BuyPhone. It makes sense because you want people to buy your phone, right? The BuyPhone—it’s catchy.

So, you take your prototype. You take this new, incredible thing that you’ve invented that society has directed its attention to for years now, and you start trying to bring it to market. And look, why wouldn’t you? This is what capitalism is all about. Time to get rewarded for all that hard work you’ve put in, right? But imagine you file for a patent and right before you start mass-manufacturing it, right before you start selling it to people, out comes Steve Jobs waddling across the stage in his turtleneck talking about how he just created the all-in-one ultimate device. And he calls it the iPhone. There’s no thievery here. There’s no deception that went on. You guys were both brilliant people that both independently arrived at the exact same conclusion. The problem is, he just arrived at the idea a little bit before you did.

How disheartened would you be? How disappointed would you feel if that really happened? Just feel those emotions. For me it would be absolutely devastating. I mean, I can’t even imagine dedicating that much of my thought and energy to something just to have somebody else create it at the same time as me or a little bit before. It would crush me, alright? And the craziest part about all this is that if you replace the iPhone in our example with the mathematical study of change known as calculus, this is almost exactly what happened between Sir Isaac Newton—known as the guy that invented calculus, the Steve Jobs of calculus—and the guy we’re going to talk about today, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

But look, we’re going to learn all about that story in the context of his life and his relationship with Sir Isaac Newton. We’re going to learn about all that in due time. But I’ve thought about this for a while, and I think we learn best when there’s a story to tell about something, when there’s some foundation of information that we can branch off of. And I think when it comes to the philosophy of Leibniz in particular, the best way to learn about his contributions to philosophy is in relation to his metaphysical system known as the monadology. We’re going to learn about the monadology as a baseline and then build from there.

Now, when it comes to learning about the monadology, I think the best thing to do is just to tell you what it is in a couple sentences and then fill in the gaps from there. I’ve thought about. I think this is the best way to go about doing it. So, here it goes. Leibniz claims that everything in the universe is made up of these teeny tiny little things called monads. Your mind is a monad that is served by the practically infinite number of little monads that make up your body. And within each of these monads is a sort of cosmic script, a mirror of the universe that allows the monad to understand what aspect of the universe it is as well as all kinds of other good stuff, including full knowledge of everything about itself in the past, present, and future of the universe.

Now, that’s putting it pretty crudely. And trust me, I’m not done explaining that at all. But it provides the skeleton that we need to continue with our discussion of it. I think having that baseline is going to be helpful. The biggest misconception when I’ve tried to describe the monadology to people in modern times is for them to think of a monad as being very similar to an atom. And we can’t really blame anybody for thinking this way. We’ve had it crammed into our heads since we were little kids that the world is made up of these almost infinite number of atoms—smaller micro-particles that make up the more complex macro-world that we exist in. Then you hear about Leibniz talking about these tiny little monads that make up everything, and it’s natural to equate that to the theory of atomism.

But this is far from the case. And to give us some context, let’s talk about where Leibniz was coming from during his time period. The central theme, the pivot point from which all three continental rationalists began their philosophy was the question of substance. We’ve talked about it a couple times before. Descartes defines substance as that which its existence explains itself. And from this, he arrives at the conclusion that the universe has three substances: mind, matter, and God. Spinoza, then, picks up where Descartes left off, and he disagrees with him. He says, no, there’s only one true substance, and that is everything that exists. God, nature, this totality that we’re all aspects of—that is the only thing that’s existence explains itself. Therefore, there is only one substance.

Now, Leibniz takes a different approach. Though he can be seen as similar to both of them in some ways, Leibniz is like Spinoza in that he says that there’s only one true substance. But that one substance was something called a monad which everything is made up of. Now, let’s just stop for a second and think about how different Leibniz is from Spinoza. I mean, Spinoza thinks that there is one substance and that that one substance is everything in the universe. Leibniz goes the other direction. He thinks we have one substance that’s so small it can’t even be said to exist in physical form.

Let me explain that for a second by talking about why the question of substance was so important to the continental rationalists. Let’s take the iPhone example from a little earlier. Let’s say you have an iPhone, and you want to dissect it. And you want to know everything there is to know about that iPhone. Where would you start? If you were given that assignment in school, what would you do? Can you know everything about an iPhone by just looking at it, by just rubbing your fingers all over it? Do you understand the essence of an iPhone just because you play Angry Birds on it all day? Well, of course not. So, what are you going to do? Are you going to break it open, see what’s inside of it?

Let’s say you took a hammer and you beat on the side of the iPhone several times. And all the green stuff falls out of it—you know, all the circuit boards and transistors. It’s a ghastly sight. Would you say that you understand everything there is to understand about that iPhone simply because you looked inside of it and saw all the parts? Well, no. But you are getting a little closer, right? I mean, you’re taking something incredibly complex—the iPhone—and you’re starting to break it down into smaller pieces. And you’re starting to understand the function of each one of those pieces. Maybe through enough observation you could find out that, oh, this little green chip over here controls the camera, and this little green chip controls the headphone jack, for example.

But even if we do that, we still don’t understand anything about the nature of the iPhone, do we? We don’t know everything there is to know. I mean, where did all this green stuff come from? Don’t we need to understand all that stuff before we can truly say we know what an iPhone is? I mean, isn’t the fact that these materials were mined out of a cave somewhere, or some guy coalesced them together with dirt—isn’t that an important element of what an iPhone is if we wanted to know?

Well, just how in this example we’re taking this incredibly complex thing and breaking it down into simpler and simpler parts to try to understand it better, this is the exact same tactic philosophers used when trying to glean an understanding of our place in the natural world. I mean, if you think an iPhone is difficult to break down and understand, these guys had to do it with the entire universe. And this process of breaking complex things down into the simplest pieces to understand them—we do this all the time in modern times, and we don’t even realize it because we’ve been doing it every day of our lives.

You know, just for example, look at the sky right now. We look at the sky and we see—what? Air, clouds, and sunshine, right? But what sort of grasp do we have on the sky? Do we understand everything there is to know about the sky? Now, if somebody asked you to explain the sky better, you’d probably say something like, “Well, it’s made up of oxygen molecules and nitrogen molecules and hydrogen and carbon.” And not many people would argue with the fact that you’re doing a better job of describing the sky right there than just saying that it’s a bunch of clouds, air, and exhaust from pickup trucks, right?

The point is, when something is complex, to understand it fully, one really promising method is to break it down into the simplest parts possible, because typically this gives us some insight into how the more complex things work. And this is why the issue of substance is so important to these philosophers. What is some thing that we can look at as a starting point? What material or what thing is so simple that it can be understood on its own without having to refer to something else? In the case of the universe, oftentimes that meant breaking things down into the smallest particle imaginable, maybe not even a particle.

And this is far from a new problem. I mean, people have been talking about this concept since the ancient Greeks. Some of you are going to remember. We talked about it on the podcast multiple times—Zeno and his famous paradox of Achilles running the race, and how we can never actually get to the finish line because before he gets there, he will have had to run halfway to the finish line first. And what Zeno said is that even when he gets to the very end of the race, he’s just going to have to stand by the finish line, in theory, having to go halfway to the end, and then halfway to the end, and so on and so forth into infinity. He can never actually reach the end.

And the important question that he was bringing up is, can things be infinitely divisible? Can you cut a piece of paper in half a billion times? Let’s say you had everything on your side. If you had the proper microscope, if you had the tools and the steady hand of Hawkeye Pierce, could you cut that piece of paper in half into infinity? Now, this is a good question to ask if you’re trying to understand the world better.

Now, in philosophy, we would say that if something possesses the quality of extension—extension is if something takes up space in the physical world. Descartes defined it a little bit further. There’s different definitions of it. But for the sake of right now, if something takes up space in any regard in the physical world, no matter how small it is, it has some sort of length, breadth, and depth. Now, if something has length, breadth, and depth, that length can be bisected in theory, right? That depth can be bisected. And to Leibniz, if something can be cut down into increasingly smaller pieces—and, therefore, simpler pieces—then that original thing that you were cutting in half cannot be the most simple thing that there is. It certainly can’t be a substance—you know, a thing that’s existence explains itself—because the fact that you can cut it in half in the first place proves that it has at least two parts that interact with each other and need each other for the original thing to have existed at all. If you have a piece of paper that’s one billionth of a centimeter wide and you cut it in half and make two pieces of paper that are four billionths of a centimeter, the original thing can’t be the simplest thing that there is, or else you couldn’t have cut it in half.

This is why the monad of Leibniz is nothing like the atom of the ancient Greeks or the atom of today’s world. The atom is a particle. It takes up space in the physical world. It possesses the quality of extension. The monad is incorporeal. It’s a spiritual entity. It can’t possess the quality of extension, or else it could be subdivided and, therefore, be broken down into simpler parts. Some translations even call each monad a soul. But let’s not get off the rails. I mean, each monad is not what we would think of a soul in modern times, typically. It’s not what a soul is if you get your idea of what a soul is from the movies.

The way that I like to think about the monads—when George Bush accepted his party’s nomination for president—and by the way, I’m talking about H.W., President senior as they say—way back in 1988 when he accepted his party’s nomination for president, he referred to the people and vision of America as a thousand points of light. Well, personally I kind of plagiarize him a little bit when I picture the vision of Leibniz here. When I think of this vast web of interconnected spiritual entities, I think of it as a million points of light. Sometimes I say ten thousand points of light if I’m not feeling very sanctimonious that day. But let’s just think about what Leibniz is describing here, alright? In reality, we’re talking about this vision of a universe that’s full of a near-infinite number of these souls—these non-physical, interconnected, metaphysical points of light that all seem to work together, but none of them actually interact with each other.

Now, maybe I’m sacrificing too much to give that visual of the points of light that are all interconnected, because in reality these monads are nothing like light at all. For one thing, they’re entirely non-physical. Try to think of one monad as one unit that makes up everything: one unit of existence, one unit of reality. Now, for anybody that before this episode was familiar with Leibniz’s monadology, you fully understand right now that there are a lot of holes to fill in here for us to completely understand what a monad is and how it explains phenomena in the natural world. And we’re going to spend the rest of our time here today trying to fill in those gaps.

But first I want to talk about something that I know at least a few of you guys are out there thinking right now. And that is the question of, why do I care about this whatsoever? What does this have anything to do with me? This is similar to last week when you talked about John Locke and his little 17th-century theory of how the senses perceive knowledge. Oh, that was interesting. They ended up completely wrong. And they essentially filibustered my life for five minutes, forcing me to spend my time listening to one failed hypothesis from the 17th century after another. And you’re going to do that again to me? Why do you do this to me, Stephen West?

Well, let me address that for a second. Well, you’re both right and wrong in different ways. Yes, ultimately, Leibniz and his theory of monads is widely denounced by science today. Though it should be said that nobody’s actually ever refuted the existence of monads just like nobody’s ever actually refuted the existence of the Easter Bunny. I mean, really, they could discover that under the fabric of reality that we think exists right now that there is a non-physical realm like this that dictates the physical world. But let’s go out on a limb and address what these people are talking about.

Let’s say that it is complete garbage. That doesn’t mean that every detail that I tell you about these monads is completely useless to you. Make no mistake, there are a lot of things I could tell you about these monads that would be a waste of your time. I could talk about it for the next three hours about all the ins and outs of his vision of this collection of monads. But certain things about these monads, when viewed in the full context of his metaphysical system, have deep implications in philosophy, and they’re very important. Leibniz wouldn’t be an influential part of philosophy if he just came up with a clever story. So, I promise I won’t wax on about the minutiae. But let’s talk about these little monads and what they are exactly.

Maybe the best place to start is that all monads are not created equal. In fact, they vary considerably from one monad to another. Leibniz talks about how, just how there are no two beings that are perfectly alike, there are no two monads that are perfectly alike in that same way. After all, that’s how we perceive things at all, to Leibniz, by spotting differences between things. If everything was the same, how could we tell the difference between things? Leibniz points out that because of these differences between these monads, they can be arranged in terms of a hierarchy. There is a hierarchy of monads, to Leibniz. Some are more important than others. Some monads have more abilities than other monads.

And this hierarchy can be broken down into a simple, three-tiered system: created monads, monads with perception or memory, and monads resembling what we would now know as a rational soul. The human mind, for example, is a monad. And that monad has a body that corresponds with it. But as complex beings that can be broken down into simpler parts like the iPhone that we were talking about before, we are the sum total of the endless number of monads that make us up. And we have a script that’s programmed inside of each of those monads. That also makes us up.

Now, this can be kind of difficult to get a grasp of. But the vision that he describes of the true nature of the universe, it starts to sound very fractal, much like what seems to be the case in modern physics. He says, “Each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also like a similar garden or a similar pond.” Leibniz famously talks about these monads as not having any windows. And what he means by that is that nothing can come in or go out of these monads. They already possess everything that they need when they’re created.

And this may be the most important part. These monads already contain when they’re created everything that they are using. There is no direct interaction between these monads. There is no, what philosophers would call, secondary causation, where a monad runs into another monad and they get crushed up and causes something else to happen, or a monad senses something around it and adapts to it. There’s none of that. Just think about how beautiful this concept is for a second. Each and every thing in the universe, to Leibniz, has a certain distinctness about it. As an aspect of the universe, it has a certain completely unique concept that it is. And inside of itself it contains from creation everything that it has ever been, is now, or will ever be at any point in the future.

These monads have in them, programmed by God, to Leibniz, a Broadway script, so to speak, every beat that they’re going to hit for the duration of the universe. Tomorrow you’re going to be at stage right. And you’re going to be dancing around singing Oklahoma. And then the next day you’re going to be dressed up like a flamingo on the other side of the stage dancing around there. God programmed into them a sort of Broadway script of everything that they’re ever going to do or have ever done. But just think for a second about this sort of Broadway script being applied to the most fundamental of substances in the universe. What sort of assignments would they get by God?

Now, bear with me for a second, and think about the implications of this. Let’s say you were one of these spiritual monads. If you’re given a Broadway script, part of knowing everything that you need to know about performing—part of knowing where on stage you need to be and what lines you need to read and everything like that—part of that is knowing where you’re going to be in relation to everything else that’s going to be on stage. And the last thing you want to do in your flamingo costume is to trip over somebody else and just faceplant right off of the stage. You got to know where everybody else is going to be in relation to you.

So, even though these monads don’t directly interact with each other, they don’t need to. By knowing their place in this giant, cosmic, Broadway script, they know exactly where all the other monads are going to be in relation to them. Each and every monad at each and every point in time understands its relationship to everything else in the universe. The point of all this is that God, to Leibniz, by writing into these monads a complete script of the past, present, and future of the universe and every detail about themselves, created a universe in a state of preestablished harmony. He says, “If we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest people and that it is impossible to make it better than it is—not merely in respect of the whole in general, but also in respect of ourselves in particular.”

We’ve probably all heard at some point in our life that famous quote attributed to Leibniz where he says that we are living in the best of all possible worlds. You’ve probably heard that before. Well, there’s another quote. And I forget who it was by, but it’s one of my favorite quotes. If you’re an optimist, you believe that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds. And if you’re a pessimist, you believe that it may be true. Kind of clever.

Anyway, now, God’s preestablished harmony, the best of all possible worlds and what that means, what this means about free will and determinism and the problem of evil—this is all going to be ironed out on next week’s episode. And if the concept of these monads is still a little bit confusing, don’t worry about it. These abstract systems of thought can be kind of hard to fully understand when there aren’t any examples of things that happen in the real world as a result of it. And next week, we’re going to have plenty of them.

This whole subject is very difficult to talk about in a short period of time. And I promise by the end of it it’s going to make a lot more sense. But right now, I want to talk about one other thread in this tapestry that’s going to eventually make sense. And that it is that I want to talk about this interconnectedness of the universe and this preprogrammed script of the past, present, and future and what that has to do with the way that we arrive at knowledge as humans.

So, because the human mind is a monad, and because every monad has in it a complete explanation of itself and how that self relates to everything else in the universe, Leibniz believes, at least in theory, we can use our ability to reason to analyze the relationships between all of these different aspects of the universe and arrive at a complete and total web of knowledge. To use a very crude example—because, look, when it comes to the universe, we’re talking about many, many more moving parts than what I can give—but just hypothetically, if you could understand exactly how you related to some concept, you could learn a lot about it and, therefore, control it.

Let’s say you could learn about how you related to the concept of cancer. Let’s say you could understand how it was connected to you and every other monad in existence for that matter. If you could do that, you would have a lot of information about it. You would certainly be able to determine the cause of cancer and, ultimately, how to destroy it. But practically speaking, even to Leibniz, this is virtually impossible. I mean, just think of the number of calculations you would have to do just to make the most simple of connections in this way. There’s a veritable infinity of monads just making up your body alone. How could you ever actually be able to do the calculations necessary to fully understand how each one of the monads in your body reacts with all the other monads in the universe in the past, present, and future? It’s impossible.

Leibniz understands this. And he knows that it’s impractical. He knows it’s virtually impossible. But it’s not impossible. He talks about for us existing in the world that we live in, trying to find out all the ins and outs of cancer of how each monad relates to another monad is ridiculous. It’s much more efficient for us to just run experiments using our senses. And through pattern recognition and enough trials, we can come to a conclusion about what causes or heals cancer based on the way those trials went. But the important part of all this is that the theoretical concept that it’s possible to arrive at that sort of information is an extremely powerful one.

See, when we arrive at the truth as human beings, Leibniz thinks that it’s very important that we make the distinction between what he calls the two different kinds of truth. This is one of the most important parts of his philosophy, and it’s going to have very real implications on next week’s show. Leibniz says that whenever something is true, it is either a truth of reasoning or a truth of fact. Now, what we’re talking about here is going to feel very familiar if you remember back to what we talked about on the Avicenna show where we talked about necessary existence versus contingent existence. Well, truths of reasoning are necessary truths, and truths of fact are contingent truths.

Let me explain. A necessary truth is a truth that needs to be true. There is no possible way that it can’t be true, because to suggest anything otherwise would be a contradiction based on the definition of the thing itself. For example, if I say pentagons have five sides, that is a necessary truth, alright? There are no four or six sided pentagons, because if they did have four or six sides, they wouldn’t be a pentagon anymore. Pentagons by definition have five sides. To say anything otherwise would be a contradiction.

My favorite one that I’ve heard—and look, it’s a very common one in philosophy books; I didn’t make this one up—but it’s all bachelors are unmarried. See, this is a really good one, because it’s not about a triangle or something. It can apply to us in the real world. We can see what they’re talking about when they say necessary truths. You can’t be a bachelor and be married. If you were married, you would lose your membership to the bachelor club. You wouldn’t be a bachelor anymore. If somebody said, “All bachelors are married,” there’s no reason for you to run all around the world and make sure that all the bachelors are still definitely not married, because if they were married, they wouldn’t be a bachelor anymore. This is a good example of a truth of reason to Leibniz. And the important part is that truth can be arrived at through rational reflection alone here.

Now, on the other hand, a contingent truth, or a truth of fact as Leibniz would say, is one that may be true right now, but stating the opposite of it would not be a contradiction. The opposite could also be true. For example, I could say that I left the light on in the other room. Sure, I could get up. I could walk into the other room and see that I left the light on. And it certainly is a true statement. But the inverse of that could also be true. I could have not left the light on. This is what Leibniz calls a truth of fact, and it’s much different than the all-pentagons-have-five-sides truth or the all-bachelors-are-unmarried truth because those are always true.

Now, if you were going to try to arrive at knowledge about our place in the natural world, which kind of truth would you want in an ideal scenario? Which one of those would you choose? One interesting thing to think about—how many of our modern-day scientific truths are based on truths of reasoning, and how many are based on observation, truths of fact? Very easy to see what Leibniz is getting at here. We could run into a lot of problems.

I mean, just imagine living in a single room in one of these giant, sprawling mansions on the countryside, you know, one of these homes that has over 100 bedrooms surrounding you on all sides. And for your entire life you’ve only lived in that room. And one day you decide that you’re going to move outside of your room, and you’re going to try to understand a little bit more about this mansion that you live in. You’re going to start conducting your own scientific method. You’re going to observe the mansion around you and try to arrive at conclusions about it.

Now, imagine if in every room that surrounds your room some really inconsiderate person that stayed there the night before left the lights on. But in every other room in the mansion the lights were off. You might do your scientific experiments about the mansion around you, get to the rooms that are immediately surrounding your room. And you might conclude that you exist in a mansion where every single room in the mansion has the lights on. But you don’t actually live in that world.

Now, what if a janitor just randomly is wandering around the mansion, notices that the lights are on, and turns them all off one day or turns one of them off one day? How confused would you be? How much time have you wasted in the process of arriving at these scientific truths that are based on what Leibniz called truths of fact? And here’s a better question. Was the time truly wasted?

Some good questions to think about this week as you wait for the next installment where all of this starts to make real sense. Thank you for sticking with me today. It’s tough to do this sometimes in an episode form. But I look forward to continuing this conversation with you on next week’s episode.

Talk to you soon.