Hidden Minds Read Free

posthumous issue contains all of the hallmarks of Enlightenment thinking: complex mental phenomena are broken down into more fundamental constituents and ‘opposition to reason’ is described as ‘a sort of madness’. Moreover, in the fourth edition Locke began to explore potential laws which might determine how certain ideas (e.g. size and shape) become associated. Locke believed that self-reflection could unravel the mind completely Although he recognised that ideas might exist outside of awareness – stored in memory – such ideas could easily be uncovered at will. There were no inaccessible recesses or shadowy corners. The machinery of mental life could be exposed through introspection, just as one might peer into the back of a table clock to examine its cogs and springs. This was the key difference between Locke and Leibniz. For Locke the mind was transparent, but for Leibniz the mind was semi-opaque.
    Leibniz was, without doubt, an extraordinary individual: uncommonly gifted and enjoying an embarrassment of intellectual riches. He is perhaps most famous for discovering the calculus – a systematic method of calculating areas, volumes, and other quantities very much superior to anything that existed before. Unfortunately, Newton was working on the same problem at exactly the same time, resulting in an acrimonious priority dispute. Nevertheless, it was Leibniz’s method of calculation that proved to be less cumbersome, giving continental mathematicians a significant advantage over their loyal but misguided English counterparts. In addition to discovering the calculus, Leibniz also devised binary arithmetic — a means of representing all values with only ones and zeros and better known today as the ‘language’ used by all digital computers. Indeed, it can be argued that Leibniz anticipated computer science itself by inventing a machine (the wooden prototype of which he demonstrated in London in 1673) capable of ‘reasoning’ by manipulating a symbolic language (over 150 years before Babbage’s Analytical Engine). As if this wasn’t enough, he designed a submarine, anticipated some features of Einstein’s theory of relativity, improved some basic engineering designs, promoted a public health system (which included a fire-fighting service and street lighting), assisted in negotiations that secured Georg Ludwig of Hanover’s succession to the British throne, and helped establish the German State Bank. He was no slacker.
    Be that as it may, when John Locke read Leibniz’s preliminary critique of his
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
he allegedly responded by saying:
    Mr L’s great name had raised in me an expectation which the sight of his paper did not answer. This sort of fiddling makes me hardly avoid thinking that he is not the very great man as has been talked of him.
    Although Leibniz was undeniably an inveterate ‘fiddler’, there can be no denying that his fiddling was of the highest quality. Moreover, when he finally decided to ‘fiddle’ with mental phenomena, it was inevitable that his mighty intellect would deliver a revolutionary and penetrating account of the mind.
    Leibniz did not make a sharp distinction between awareness and its absence. He believed that even when the mind is ostensibly inactive, such as in dreamless sleep, at some level mental processes are still operating. In addition, he postulated a continuum of consciousness. At the top of this continuum, he placed
apperceptions
(that is, the occurrence of clear and distinct mental experiences). Below these were less well defined
perceptions,
and below these
minute perceptions,
which occur wholly outside of awareness because they are ‘either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying’; however, minute perceptions do not always remain unconscious. They can rise into awareness, as when an individual focuses attention on a previously unnoticed sensation or noise.
    Leibniz attributed a central role to minute