Monism
Leibniz's Monads
Consciousness as Reflective Perception in Simple Substances
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz holds that reality is made of monads, simple immaterial substances whose whole inner life is perception and appetition. Perception is everywhere in nature, but consciousness (which he calls apperception) is a rarer, reflective grade of perception: a perception of one's own perceptions. Mind and body never interact; God set their series in agreement from the start.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
What consciousness is
Consciousness is apperception, the reflective knowledge of a monad's own perceptual states. Perception itself, the representation of many things within one simple unity, belongs to every monad.
Mind and body
No causal interaction. Each monad unfolds its perceptions from within, and its body is a correlated mirror kept in step by pre-established harmony, like clocks set once to run together. Extended matter is a well-founded phenomenon, an appearance of aggregates of monads.
Mechanism
The split between perception and apperception: a state becomes conscious when it is reflectively known, which some commentators (Gennaro) read as an early higher-order theory.
Core claims
- Leibniz argues that extended matter is divisible without limit, so true substances must be simple, partless monads.
- The mill argument holds that walking inside a perceiving machine would reveal only parts pushing one another, nothing that explains perception.
- Perception is distinct from consciousness, and most of mental life consists of unnoticed petites perceptions, against Descartes's view that all thought is conscious.
- Animals genuinely feel through sensation, while only rational minds have reflective self-consciousness.
Criticisms
Pre-established harmony depends on a divine act and cannot be secularized; without it, windowless monads leave each inner life unrelated to anything else. Placing Leibniz among neutral monists strains the fit, since his basic entities are mental and there are infinitely many of them.
Implications
- AI consciousness: No
- Since the mill argument holds that no mechanism of parts can perceive, a machine considered as an aggregate cannot be conscious.
- Survival beyond death: Likely
- Monads can begin and end only by divine creation and annihilation, and minds are members of the City of God, which follows from the view that souls are simple substances.
- Meaning and purpose: Cosmic/Ultimate
- God chose this world as the best possible and stands to minds as a prince to his subjects, so reflective consciousness has a moral and divine purpose.
- Virtual immortality: No
- Consciousness belongs to a simple substance and cannot be produced by any arrangement of parts, so a simulation could not carry it.
Related theories
- Descartes’s Substance Dualism (Critique)
- Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought (Influence)
- Levine’s Explanatory Gap (Influence)
- Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Influence)
Sources
- Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1710)
- The Monadology, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)
- Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)
- New Essays on Human Understanding, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1765)
- Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes (1641)
- Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, J. Levine (1983)
- Leibniz on Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, R. J. Gennaro (1999)
- Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, M. Kulstad & L. Carlin (2020)
- Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, L. M. Jorgensen (2020)
- Panpsychism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, P. Goff, W. Seager & S. Allen-Hermanson (2022)