MDDM 65: Mathesis

[Samuel Moyer]

630-7 "And what may that slender Blade of Planetary Surface they took away, not be concealing?...the eight immortals, Victory over Death.  called into being by Mathesis alone.

Webster's : Mathesis = acquisition of knowledge   Archaic: Science, Learning: Mental discipline, esp. Mathematics.

Any math people out there?  I find that the Leibniz was somehow involved in something called Mathesis Universalism...  Leibniz was a contemporary of Newton's.

Not easy to find much on the Internet on Leibniz... some interesting little bits to make one wonder:

We are thus permitted, according to Leibniz, to consider other possible worlds in which different things come to pass, as God did when he chose to create this world rather than all the other possibilities.  Thus we can talk of a world where there is a being which is very much like myself but did not go for a walk on a day which was very much like yesterday on our world, or of a world where there is a being very much like myself but is genetically different from me by one insignificant chromosome.  http://freepages.pavilion.net/pjb/essay142.htm

and then:

Metaphysics is the anticipation of the future. This is why it is not dead. Again, Leibniz anticipated the present with communication theory, computation and so on. But it was impossible for him, in the seventeenth-century, to anticipate scientific thought with rigorousness. So he wrote about metaphysics. Just as we have to write about metaphysics now and for the same reason. 
CDGA: Leibniz had an intuitive idea of what constituted mechanism. In the Monadology he describes the body not as a machine but as the machine of machines where each part is itself a machine. It's interesting to read Leibniz beside someone like Alan Turing and related discussions on artificial intelligence. It is as if Leibniz has articulated exactly that which cannot be thought within the confines of artificial intelligence.

MS: Did you know that Leibniz was in correspondence with Jesuit priests in Beijing, China? The Jesuits wrote to Leibniz about ancient Chinese symbolism. And when Leibniz was translating this ancient language he discovered binary arithmetic. After that, this became the language of the machine. But also, because the definition of life in Leibniz is the implication of an infinity of machines, is the involvement and implication of an infinity of machines, it is extremely apposite to contemporary discussions concerning evolution and cybernetics.

http://www.thepander.co.nz/culture/mserres6.php

Again, if there are any math / philosophy people with some background...   It appears that Zhang suggests another world can exist, perhaps in this blade of planetary surface, ...can exist... does exist, simply because it is a possibility???

Sam

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