Mastodawn

"While critical towards the details of Llull’s proposed categories and procedures, Leibniz was taken with his overarching vision of the combinatorial art. He drew two key aspirations from Llull’s work: the idea of fundamental conceptual elements, and the idea of a method through which to combine and calculate with them."

#leibniz #combinatorial

"Leibniz spared no modesty in promoting the art and the various initiatives associated with it for which he hoped to raise funds from prospective patrons.

He presented his project as being the world’s most powerful instrument, an end to all argument, the ultimate source of answers to some of the world’s most complex and difficult theological, moral, legal, or scientific questions; and a foolproof means to converting people to Christianity and propagating the faith, amongst other things."

"Ultimately #Leibniz hoped that a perspicuous thought language of “pure” concepts, combined with formalised processes and methods akin to those used in mathematics, would lead to the mechanisation and automation of reason itself. By means of new artificial languages and methods, our ordinary and imperfect ways of reasoning with words and ideas would give way to a formal, symbolic, rule-governed science — conceived of as a computational process."

"There are few contenders in the history of philosophy to rival the optimism that #Leibniz had for his project as a kind of panacea. Many of the ideas of his youth never left him. In a 1714 letter, two years before his death, he laments that he was unable to make more progress"

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-the-computational-imagination

"The objects of their embryonic faith have become the living a priori of the digital age — providing the conditions of possibility for our experience and our reflection, our genres of deliberation, our forms of sociality, and our institutions of judgement — regardless of whether or not the machines operate in the ways that we imagine."

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination

Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the death of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

The Public Domain Review

"The initial trickles of Llull's and Leibniz’s arcane combinatorial fantasies have gradually given way to ubiquitous computational technologies, practices, and ideals which are interwoven into the fabric of our worlds — the broader consequences of which are still unfolding around us."