Hi allexperts.com - Not sure, maybe I am sending this to the wrong expert. I have been studying Leibniz for about 3 years (retired, at home) and would like to find practical applications to his metaphysics. His metaphysics ends at a top level, with God as the all-seer and all-doer, and below that, his workshop of an infinity of passive monads, many representing humans, each of which can be thought of as a spreadsheet of data, the principle ones being 1) perceptions. a list of where he will go in the future, 2) appetitions. where he would like to go in the future, and 3) present perceptions of the rest of the universe, these being given not directly but indirectly to him by God in continual rapid fashion. So you can think of a human monad as a computer being fed data of the outside world.
His perceptions, to repeat, are given to him by God, they are not direct, but they are the reflected (Leibniz uses that word) perceptions of all of the other monads (for now, let's just consider humans) in the universe, but of course each from their own point of view. So each monad knows everything in the universe from his own pov, something like a hologram. In addition to this each monad must follow a harmonic path pre-established on the 7th day of creation, after which God rested and let his plan unfold. Free will has no effect, because God knew in advance what each man would choose (although not causing it). The question is 1) Would such a calculation be possible allowing that God is in eternity and so knows the future ? 2) Is there any way to formulate each person's next step. 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.
