No, there's definitely a world, and it's the best of all possible worlds.

Yes. Cool.

To expand on what John was saying, what a monad can see of another monad is bits and pieces of its complete concept. For instance, we all know Locke was English. To know the complete concept of Locke is to know how the whole universe is expressed as Locke (or perhaps how the whole universe from beginning to end is implied by him.)

Yea. It drove Leibniz bananas that Locke suggested that matter might think. I think Locke just meant we don't know if it does or not.

That makes sense. He said rational creatures are like little divinities, lol. I guess he thought Locke's mind imperfectly reflected the divine mind. He figured his own reflection was a little clearer, I guess.

Well, so Leibniz thought Locke was shallow. What did he think Locke was? Another monad? Or just a fixture in his own private Idaho?

People park them in Washington DC (known for being a difficult housing situation even if, like Hanover, you have a job.) Could people do that where you live?

Yea. How do the monads see one another if they're windowless?

His mill story is interesting. He proposes a machine that can think. He says if we enlarged it to the point that we could walk into it, all we'd see is mechanical stuff. We'd see nothing that accounts for perception.

I think he's probably right about that.

Probably very energy efficient.. which is part of what the tiny house movement is about. The other part is about owning your home without owning the land it's sitting on... thus the common use of trailer foundations.

They are called "terrace houses" there, which have been minute since Georgian times. — tom

tiny house

In the meantime planning restrictions have become small minded, full of red tape and painfully slow. — Punshhh

That's true in big American cities as well. In some places a tiny house can fly under the radar of restrictions. Finding a place to park it is the trick.

Is there not a tiny-house movement in the UK?

But this could also be viewed as humanity is one being, explaining the common experiences. — Punshhh

One of the things that keeps Leibniz's view from being a variation of Spinoza's is his insistence on moral agency. Ironically, the way it works out is that every victim is basically waltzing with the villain. For L, the victim is not powerless. That's just an appearance, as in a play. In fact L's view is very much in line with the notion that life is a stage and monads are merely actors upon it..

I haven't read Leibniz, but I'm wondering if the esoteric explanation is that the role God is playing is from our perspective like (rather crudely) someone spinning and balancing plates on top of poles, and has to tweak them all continuously to keep them balanced. Each plate could represent an atom. God could delegate the tweaking to a team of angels, infact many teams and hierarchies, these could be the kingdoms of nature. I mean the transcendent spirits in nature not their outer casing(expression) or physical vehicles? — Punshhh

:) I'm not sure. I don't think Leibniz would like the idea of continuous divine intervention. Newton actually proposed that and the reaction of Leibniz was kind of ridiculing and dismissive (there was bad blood between Newton and Leibniz... maybe between Leibniz and England in general)

The idea that 'extended entities are infinitely divisible' makes complete sense to me and has been borne out by science, I think. — Wayfarer

What science?

But the problem is conceiving of what it is that is *not* extended. It's more like a 'principle of unity' than an actual numerical unit of something. Here's one analogy from modern technology - if a holographic image is broken, then each part of resulting pieces contains the whole image, but at a slightly lower resolution. So the original image may be physically divided but still retain its 'wholeness'. I think that is nearer the idea than 'solidity' which is too much like atomism. — Wayfarer

What is the "original image" you mentioned? A monad? Or God?

I'll have to think about that...

I don't know of any usage of "irreducible" that applies. "Solid" is just a metaphor.

Of course the terms of reference of any alternative scenarios are always the same; they are always our ordinary 'real world' terms of reference. When it comes to global skepticism, no 'alternative' position can be framed that isn't framed in those same 'real world' terms of reference. — John

GS isn't required to frame an alternative. It's just based on the possibility that none (or most of) the statements you make about the world are false.

The whole idea of dream versus reality is derived form our own fundamental experience of waking and dreaming. It seems to me, we cannot be 'globally' skeptical about that fundamental experience (as opposed to being 'locally' skeptical merely about aspects of it) or we would undermine the sense of the very conceptual resources we need to frame any question about 'dream versus reality'. — John

Yea.. I think Descartes used the Dream Argument to give the flavor of skepticism. It's good for that because a lot of people know what it's like to have full confidence in a dream world only discover upon waking that it wasn't real. It shows something about confidence.

I once had a dream in which my torso was a giant potato. It seemed perfectly normal to me in the dream. All my friends were like that. The customs of the potato-body people were part of the dream. And now it doesn't seem weird to me that I have a mammal torso.

Maybe the Evil Demon would seem like a more solid argument, but as I mentioned earlier, GS doesn't really need any argument.

For Leibniz, extensional entities are endlessly divisible. There's no bottom to it. A monad, on the other hand, is solid. It's self-animated and it expresses the whole.

True with regard to all but global skepticism :P — John

Why so? It doesn't seem that it could have any logical flaws because it's not asserting anything.

Even for cogito ergo sum? — intrapersona

That's indubitable. But it's apriori.

Perhaps the impossibility of taking the castle of skepticism, as well as its failure to send out any marauding troops is due to the fact it is a mirage. — John

Doubt is like Jello. There's always room for it. :)

Skepticism is a castle you can't take, but it isn't sending out any troops to molest travelers. . -- mangled Schopenhauer

Sorry jkop... I don't understand what you're asking.

When you see the dream banana. Dude.

So you aren't talking about truth conditions. Truth maker?

Your phrasing is confusing. The truth conditions for "P" are that P.

In the dream, I saw a banana.

Is it possible that you can have an experience, during which you are unable to tell whether you see what you think you see or not? — The Great Whatever

That's an interesting question.

A. I see a banana.
B. The banana I see is real.

Even in a dream, A could be true while B is only true for all practical purposes. Even under the influence of a true hallucinogenic like Datura, there's no question that one is seeing something. It's just that the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction is off-line.

That's cool.

It's good to see you. Where on earth have you been?

Nice quote, but mine outranks yours.

As I remember Don Juan once saying to Carlos Castaneda about what it is to be a warrior (very roughly paraphrased);
"He could be staring at Satan himself, and no one would ever know." — John

Ah. Poker face.

I like the idea that Truth, the elusive one hiding at the bottom of a holy well is the mother of Virtue, and the daughter of Time.

It's hard to see your refection in the bottom of a well, however holy. — John

That's cool. I didn't know that story. The word was in my environment because there's a precision drill bit company called Veritas. I was asking you about Chinese gardens... there are sometimes words and poetry on display in them. Do Japanese gardens ever do that?

That's why in Christianity for example, being anxious is a sin. You have a duty to rejoice in creation. — Agustino

Well..

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.… — Matthew 5:4

Admittedly, the US has definitely made mistakes with regard to the civil war, but our poor foreign policy the last few years didn't just magically create the longstanding Assad regime out of thin air, — Heister Eggcart

I agree. I don't think the uprising would have taken shape in the way it did if it hadn't been for repeated encouragement from the US. That's how the US helped screw Syria.

I think that encouragement proceeded from good intentions. The US thought the uprising would result in a stable democratic state. The fact that it instead resulted in the ruins of a country is food for thought.

Did it have to turn out that way? What did the US government fail to see?

What do you think, Meister Heister?

In some analytic jargons, an utterance is literally sounds or marks used in communication. Is that the same as an artificial indication?

If two people are in agreement, we would say that both are prepared to assert the same proposition. One utters a sentence in order to express a proposition. Is this the way "expression" is being used? If not.. how is it different?

Weighing freedom. That's interesting. So you're basically saying that a well-run state results in a net gain in freedom. If the populace tests the state and finds that there is no net gain, a revolution would be warranted.

In a round about sort of way, I think that's actually true. Freedom is a negative concept. It's a lack of restrictions and boundaries. Freedom is meaningful when it's freedom to... Freedom to innovate, freedom to build large-scale, freedom to benefit from the synergy of a diverse crowd.

Those are all benefits of a state. Eh.. I still don't see the quantification thing working in any specific way. I think you could say that subjectively, people sense whether their private potential is being squashed or nurtured. And this will relate to how well the state is unleashing the potential of the people. "What happens to a dream deferred?"

This is all very rightist, you know.

There should be an answer to the question: how many rapes are as bad as a murder? — Dan

What justifies this statement?

:) It's amazing what sort of turmoil can be going on behind a stoic little face. :’(

I will be discussing useful, interesting and difficult objections in my thesis and anything you contribute will be referenced appropriately. — Dan

You say that the government's rights depend on the value of its actions. I see a problem with calculating value. If the state's actions result in a single death, how do you evaluate that? I don't see life as having calculable value.

I mean.. considering the massive loss of life that took place in the 20th Century because of political conflict, I think statehood should have forever lost its right to exist. Yet here we are.

My view is more organic. The state is something we inherited from our forebears. It's not like we could engineer it from the wilds of the forest and walk into it. So my focus would be less on justifying the state's authority and looking more at how the state is who we are now. We could be tribal nomads, for instance, sitting around the fire at some oasis pondering legitimacy. Things just didn't happen to go that way.