World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

What he imagined was an alphabet of human thought. It was an idea that he first pondered as a young student, the basis for his doctoral dissertation at Altdorf. Over the years, he fleshed out a detailed plan for realizing his fantasy. A group of scholars would create an encyclopedia containing the fundamental, incontestably true concepts of the world, of physics, philosophy, geometry, everything really. He called these core concepts “primitives,” and they would include things like the earth, the color red, and God. Each of the primitives would be assigned a numerical value, which allowed them to be combined to create new concepts or to express complex extant ones. And those numerical values would form the basis for a new calculus of thought, what he called the calculus ratiocinator. Leibniz illustrated his scheme with an example. What is a human? A rational animal, of course. That’s an insight that we can write like this: rational x animal = man But Leibniz translated this expression into an even more mathematical sentence. “Animal,” he suggested, might be represented with the number two; “rational” with the number three. Therefore: 2 x 3 = 6