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metaphysics alerts us to the paradoxes that are likely to engulf cyberspace’s future inhabitants. Leibniz’s Electric Language Leibniz was the first to conceive of an "electric language," a set of symbols engineered for manipulation at the speed of thought. His De arte combinatoria (1666) outlines a language that became the historical foundation of contemporary symbolic logic. Leibniz’s general outlook on language also became the ideological basis for computer-mediated telecommunications. A modern Platonist, Leibniz dreamed of the matrix. The language that Leibniz outlined is an ideographic system of signs that can be manipulated to produce logical deductions without recourse to natural language. The signs represent primitive ideas gleaned from prior analysis. Once broken down into primitives and represented by stipulated signs, the component ideas can be paired and recombined to fashion novel configurations. In this way, Leibniz sought to mechanize the production of new ideas. As he described it, the encyclopedic collection and definition of primitive ideas would require the coordinated efforts of learned scholars from all parts of the civilized world. The royal academies that Leibniz promoted were the group nodes for an international republic of letters, a universal network for problem solving. Leibniz believed all problems to be, in principle, soluble. The first step was to create a universal medium in which conflicting ideas could coexist and interrelate. A universal language would make it possible to translate all human notions and disagreements into the same set of symbols. His universal character set, characteristica universalis, rests on a binary logic, one quite unlike natural discourse in that it is neither restricted by material content nor embodied in vocalized sound. Contentless and silent, the binary language can transform every significant statement into the terms of a logical calculus, a system for proving argumentative patterns valid or invalid, or at least for connecting them in a homogeneous matrix. Through the common binary language, discordant ways of thinking can exist under a single roof. Disagreements 93
94 CHAPTER 7. THE EROTIC ONTOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE in attitude or belief, once translated into matching symbols, can later yield to operations for ensuring logical consistency. To the partisans of dispute, Leibniz would say, "Let us upload this into our common system, then let us sit down and calculate." A single system would encompass all the combinations and permutations of human thought. Leibniz longed for his symbols to foster unified scientific research throughout the civilized world. The universal calculus would compile all human culture, bringing every natural language into a single shared database. Leibniz’s binary logic, disembodied and devoid of material content, depends on an artificial language remote from the words, letters, and utterances of everyday discourse. This logic treats reasoning as nothing more than a combining of signs, as a calculus. Like mathematics, the Leibnizian symbols erase the distance between the signifiers and the signified, between the thought seeking to express and the expression. No gap remains between symbol and meaning. Given the right motor, the Leibnizian symbolic logic—as developed later by George Boole, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead and then applied to electronic switching circuitry by Shannon—can function at the speed of thought. At such high speed, the felt semantic space closes between thought, language, and the thing expressed. Centuries later, John von Neumann applied a version of Leibniz’s binary logic when building the first computers at Princeton. In his search for a universal language of the matrix, Leibniz to some extent continued a premodern, medieval tradition. For behind his ideal language stands a premodern model of human intelligence. The medieval Scholastics held that human thinking, in its pure or ideal form, is more or less identical with logical reasoning. Reasoning functions along the lines of a superhuman model who remains unaffected by the vagaries of feelings and spatiotemporal experience. Human knowledge imitates a Being who knows things perfectly and knows them in their deductive connections. The omniscient Being transcends finite beings. Finite beings go slowly, one step at a time, seeing only moment by moment what is hap-
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Page 6 and 7: Chapter 3 Hypertext Heaven 29
Page 8 and 9: Chapter 5 Heidegger and McLuhan: Th
Page 10 and 11: In his essay "The Age of the World
Page 12 and 13: The computer opponent line takes fo
Page 14 and 15: augment human bodily perception and
Page 16 and 17: nologies. He saw in writing technol
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Page 32 and 33: discovered how to enhance human vit
Page 34 and 35: Chapter 7 The Erotic Ontology of Cy
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Page 42 and 43: Gibson raises the deepest ontologic
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Page 48 and 49: Monads Do Have Terminals Leibniz ca
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