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'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

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Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#41

Post by goatlover »

djaouen wrote: post #22
hks0 wrote: post #8

> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,” > Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection. That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference. I find this a c…

The real question is, would a perfect Being create an imperfect creation? While I don't proffer any, I think there are valid reasons to do so.

The Christian gnostics reasoned it must have been either a lesser evil god or blind fool who created the material world.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#42

Post by julianeon »

I have to say it's confusing as hell that there's ANOTHER nonfiction book titled "The Best of All Possible Worlds", also about Leibniz, but centered on his friendships with other intellectuals (by Nadler). This seems close enough that people will get them mixed up when searching and ordering.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#43

Post by dotancohen »

cocacola1 wrote: post #34
graemep wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.

I can’t see the good being contingent on a five year old getting bone cancer.

You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler.

The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#44

Post by thesz »

CannonSlugs wrote: post #4

> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation. I like this…

> maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.

This is an argument made by one of the Dostoevsky characters, a famous "tear of a child" argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky

"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."

So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.

Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#45

Post by thesz »

hks0 wrote: post #8

> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,” > Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection. That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference. I find this a c…

I think you will be pleasantly amused by this marriage of logic and religious beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_pro...

It is formally proven that an entity that encompass all qualities of a God must exist.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#46

Post by allturtles »

dotancohen wrote: post #43
cocacola1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t see the good being contingent on a five year old getting bone cancer.

You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler. The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.

Yes, but an omnipotent God could presumably just make Hitlers not exist. The argument rests on the assumption that there are hidden dependencies in the laws of the universe, such that it was logically necessary that Hitler (or insert whatever other evil here) had to exist to make the best possible world. That's hard to swallow.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#47

Post by bewuethr »

Oarch wrote: post #15

My understanding was that Leibnitz was a pivotal figure in the ideas behind early computing. Didn't see that mentioned in the article so much.

In Ideas That Created the Future [1], a curated and edited set of influential computer science papers, the Leibniz contribution is "The True Method" [2], which I read more or less as "if we could formalize everything, we could use mathematical methods to find answers to all questions".

In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.

[1]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5003/Ideas-That-C...

[2]: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/624726/3/The%20true%20method.pdf

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#48

Post by feoren »

verisimi wrote: post #6
CannonSlugs wrote: post #4

> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation. I like this…

> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world? It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and i…

That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.

Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.

However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#49

Post by dotancohen »

allturtles wrote: post #46
dotancohen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler. The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.

Yes, but an omnipotent God could presumably just make Hitlers not exist. The argument rests on the assumption that there are hidden dependencies in the laws of the universe, such that it was logically necessary that Hitler (or insert whatever other evil here) had to exist to make the best possible world. That's hard to swallow.

Consider that many people today, who live better than the kings of centuries past, are depressed. One could conclude that happiness is a state of improvement over past experiences, not necessarily an absolute scale. If this is true (and I personally believe that it is), then evil is in fact a necessary baseline against which happiness can be improved upon.

Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

#50

Post by geysersam »

CannonSlugs wrote: post #4

> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation. I like this…

Couldn't that be a misreading of Voltaire though? I didn't interpret Candide as "there is suffering", I interpreted it as "this is obviously not the best possible world and no logical gymnastics can convince me it is"

(With the collorary that logic is pretty useless in moral philosophy if it's only used to find contrived justification for the status quo.)

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