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Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

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Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#21

Post by jacquesm »

mr_toad wrote: post #19
jillesvangurp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. But with a slight warning though, it's a lot of pages. Even by Neal Stephenson's standards, it's a lot. Not everybody has the attention span for this one. It's a very dense plot, with lots of side plots, asides, etc. (which is kind of the whole point of Neal Stephenson's books) that spreads over 9 books that originally were published in 3 volumes of ~1200 pages each depending on font size and edition you would h…

Don’t threaten me with a good time!

Highly recommended. What is interesting to me is that he managed to place the Waterhouse family (and Enoch Root, a casual immortal) as some kind of Forrest Gump through history allowing you to see it all through the eyes of someone who could have been there. Anyway, no more spoilers, go read ;) And enjoy!

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#22

Post by DoctorOetker »

SilasX wrote: post #11
dr_dshiv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leibniz invented binary — so he kind of succeeded in his quest. He based it on the Chinese iching, interestingly enough…

He was ahead of his time, definitely, and binary logic is one critical step in getting there, but we're a long way from having a formal language to represent all claims that would ever arise in human argumentation to the point that it's simply a matter of calculation to resolve them.

Check out metamath.org I can't fathom any valid argument that couldn't be formalized to mathematical statements. There would still be disagreements on axioms and physical postulates, especially where there are conflicts of interest.

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#24

Post by gjm11 »

It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author.

It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".

And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#26

Post by emmelaich »

gjm11 wrote: post #24

It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author. It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof". And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit w…

'exercise' makes more sense to me but you're right it doesn't look like exercise. Perhaps course and exercise mean the same in this context.

BTW, the lines appear about halfway down the scan.

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#27

Post by adrianN »

SilasX wrote: post #11
dr_dshiv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leibniz invented binary — so he kind of succeeded in his quest. He based it on the Chinese iching, interestingly enough…

He was ahead of his time, definitely, and binary logic is one critical step in getting there, but we're a long way from having a formal language to represent all claims that would ever arise in human argumentation to the point that it's simply a matter of calculation to resolve them.

The whole project kind of died with Gödel.

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#28

Post by quuxplusone »

TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html

The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."

Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.

FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#29

Post by quuxplusone »

quuxplusone wrote: post #28

TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out: https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think…

Oh, the other weird thing about this is that even though the "external" catalog information on makingscience.royalsociety.org and the "internal" catalog information penned on page 2 of the letter both describe it as a letter written to Leibniz, and sent to Leibniz, the text of the letter itself refers to Leibniz only in third person, and refers to some other individual in the second person. But it does make (oblique) requests of Leibniz, e.g.

> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.

I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?

Re: Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

#30

Post by quuxplusone »

darepublic wrote: post #14

Sorry for the dumb question.. where is the transcript? I only see the link to the scanned letter

Dunno about the blogger's months-long effort, but I put a transcript here just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807320
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