- #1
cabias
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Hi,
Sort of a mish-mash of set theory and ontology here. I've been reading over Leibniz's monadology and I've reached a few conclusions that are different from his, based on my naive understanding of set theory. As I understand it Leibniz's monads function by ordering possible states of the world (the world in which they exist) in a series, similar to the way we experience time, I would wager. I'm making the assumption that the possible states of the world are discrete and can therefore be represented by the natural numbers, so the conclusion I've reached based on my understanding of Cantor's diagonalization would seem to be that the range of possible temporal experiences that a monad could have cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the possible states of the world. To me this implies that a monad is capable of observing the world as being in a state that it cannot actually be in, and thus capable of observing nothing, which seems to go against Leibniz's conception of the world as plenary. I feel certain that I do not fully grasp the nuances of Cantor's argument and I would be very interested if anyone could point out the flaws in my use of it. I've encapsulated my argument very roughly here and I can expand if necessary.
Warm regards, C.
Sort of a mish-mash of set theory and ontology here. I've been reading over Leibniz's monadology and I've reached a few conclusions that are different from his, based on my naive understanding of set theory. As I understand it Leibniz's monads function by ordering possible states of the world (the world in which they exist) in a series, similar to the way we experience time, I would wager. I'm making the assumption that the possible states of the world are discrete and can therefore be represented by the natural numbers, so the conclusion I've reached based on my understanding of Cantor's diagonalization would seem to be that the range of possible temporal experiences that a monad could have cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the possible states of the world. To me this implies that a monad is capable of observing the world as being in a state that it cannot actually be in, and thus capable of observing nothing, which seems to go against Leibniz's conception of the world as plenary. I feel certain that I do not fully grasp the nuances of Cantor's argument and I would be very interested if anyone could point out the flaws in my use of it. I've encapsulated my argument very roughly here and I can expand if necessary.
Warm regards, C.