Perception and consciousness according to Leibniz- The secret of perception. Particular minds and how they relate to the overall or Cosmic Mind
The problem of perception in materialistic thinking is that it forces us to think that there is a fleshly homunculus Leibniz has a more complicated understanding of particular minds and how they relate to Cosmic Mind. In Leibniz's metaphysics, there is only one mind (the Perceiver or Cosmic Mind or God) that perceives and acts, doing this through the Surpreme (most dominant) monad. It perceives the whole universe with perfect clarity. Only it can perceive and act, because its monads (which includes our minds) have no windows. The monads (our minds) perceive only indirectly, as the Supreme Monad is the only --what we would call-- "conscious" mind. We only think and perceive indirectly, as the Supreme Monad continually and instantly updates its universe of monads. Thus there is no problem communing with God (the Cosmic Mind) as we do so continually and necessarily, although only aqccording to our own abilities and perspective. That we ourselves, not God, appear to be the perceiver is thus only apparent. Also, because Cosmic Mind sees the entire universe as viewed by a kaleidoscope of individual monads, the perceptions it returns to us contains not only what we see (the universe from our own individual perspectives) but what the perceptions of all of the other monads. Thus each monad knows everything in the universe, but only from its own perspective, and monads being monads, not perfectly clear but distorted. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
