Why we need to bring Leibniz out of the closet if progress is to be made Materialism, the philosophy that the universe is made only of matter, and nothing else, is the basic philosophy of science. So Idealism, the philosophy that only ideas, not matter, are real, seems to be a fantasy world.
But materialism as a total philosophy, and not idealism, is quite limited. It cannot explain perception consciousness, the overall governance of the universe or of the brain. In order to understand these, hence consciousness, we must follow the pioneering lead of Leibniz, the only relatively modern, logical, and comprehensive Idealist philosopher: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism Thus Bertrand Russell, having written a book on the logic of Leibniz, abandoned Leibniz on his horrfying discovery of the implications of Idealism -- that yet even logically, there can only be a single perceiver and a single governor of the universe. You can't have two kings in a kingdom, nor two perceptions at the same time. So Russell became a materialist, a philosophy that has no provision for experience or the perceptions of the first person singular (which is consciousness). Thus to understand the governance of the universe or consciousness or perception, we must accept Idealism as a valid philosophy overall, while we can still accept materialism as valid within the range of science (the range of matter). But we must let go of any possibility of overall governance. See 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.
