Monadology
Explanation
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German polymath and intellectual rival of Newton, published in 1714 a brief and enigmatic treatise titled Monadology, where he set out a vision of the universe radically different from those of his time. All reality would be composed of infinite monads: simple, indivisible, partless substances, each one a unique point of view on the whole cosmos.
Monads are not material atoms but centres of mental activity. Each one perceives (with greater or lesser clarity) the entire universe from its particular perspective. The simplest monads (those of plants or stones) have confused perceptions without self-awareness; more complex ones (those of animals) have perception and memory; rational ones (human souls) additionally have apperception, that is, awareness of their own perceptions.
A disconcerting Leibnizian idea is that monads have no windows: none has any causal influence on the others. How then does the world appear to function coherently? Through pre-established harmony: God, on creating the monads, synchronised them like perfectly tuned clocks, so that their internal states correspond to one another without need for actual communication.
Applied to consciousness, this means that my body and my mind are really collections of monads (the human mind being the dominant monad of a bodily aggregate), each unfolding its own internal sequence. The sense of causation between my decisions and my movements would be a well-orchestrated illusion sustained by divine harmony.
Monadology is, on the one hand, an extravagant proposal even for its time; on the other, it anticipates surprisingly contemporary intuitions: the idea that ultimate reality could be of a mental nature (idealism, panpsychism), the importance of point of view (perspectivism), the notion that each part reflects the whole (holographic universes) and the proposal that the universe is essentially computational or informational.
Today's thinkers such as Whitehead reconfigured monadology in his process philosophy, replacing substances with occasions of experience that influence one another. Leibniz's intuition that every atom, every cell, every particle could have some primitive degree of proto-experience continues to feed panpsychist theories such as those of Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, and contemporary cosmopsychism.
Strengths
- Anticipates the notion of the unconscious and of degrees of consciousness.
- Offers an articulated and systematic panpsychism.
- A perspectivist model: each consciousness is an irreducible point of view.
- Recurring inspiration for contemporary theories (Whitehead, Tononi).
Main critiques
- Pre-established harmony is a theological solution hard to accept outside theism.
- Postulates an infinity of unverifiable entities.
- The 'no windows' clause blocks any observable causal dynamics.
- Difficult reconciliation with contemporary physics.