I just finished reading Michael Kempe’s beautiful intellectual biography of G. W. Leibniz: The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. Among other things, Kempe explores one of the many ways that the great German polymath was centuries ahead of his times: Leibniz’s decades-long effort to develop a blueprint for a universal thinking machine, a kind of proto-A.I. for the nascent Age of Enlightenment.

The ultimate goal of this Quixotic project was nothing less than breathtaking: Leibniz wanted to automate the laborious and time-consuming process of knowledge production and scientific discovery in order to resolve deep epistemological disagreements in all fields of study. For reference, here is how one respected Leibniz scholar, Brandon C. Look (University of Kentucky) via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, describes the origins of Leibniz’s ambitious and awe-inspiring intellectual project:

“While there [at the University of Altdorf (Universität Altdorf), a university in Altdorf bei Nürnberg, a small town outside the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg] Leibniz published in 1666 the remarkably original Dissertation on the Art of Combinations (Dissertatio de arte combinatoria), a work that sketched a plan for a “universal characteristic” and logical calculus, a subject that would occupy him for much of the rest of his life.”

But what did Leibniz’s characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator consist of? (Although these mysterious-sounding Leibnizian terms of art are often used interchangeably, they refer to two different aspects of Leibniz’s proposed universal thinking machine.) For his part, although the English-language translation of Kempe’s new book does not refer to the characteristica universalis or calculus ratiocinator by name (you will not find any references to these terms in the index), Kempe’s work does contain many tantalizing references to Leibniz’s dream of developing a “universal symbolic language” (p. 37) to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. (See especially pages 109-111 and 121-122 of Kempe’s book.)

As it happens, no less a first-rate thinker than Kurt Gödel, considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, was intrigued by Leibniz’s dream. By all accounts (see here, for example), Gödel was not only fascinated by Leibniz’s ideas, especially the possibility of a universal symbolic language or characteristica universalis; the great Austrian logician also further believed that Leibniz’s dream “had been nearly forgotten by society” and “that this was due to a shadowy conspiracy meant to prevent the intellectual advancement of mankind”. Wait, what?! Was this episode in Gödel’s intellectual life just another example of his lifelong “paranoia”, as many of his biographers have claimed? (At the very least, that one of the most logical and rigorous thinkers of all time was himself a proponent of such a far-fetched conspiracy theory shows us just how compelling and pervasive conspiracy thinking can be!)

Although the great Kurt Gödel makes a lone, solitary appearance in the erudite pages of Kempe’s beautiful new Leibniz book (the reference to the Austrian logician appears on p. 121), Kempe makes no reference at all to the possibility of a worldwide conspiracy to suppress Leibniz’s ideas. But what if Gödel’s “Leibniz Conspiracy” were true? Stay tuned, I will consider this possibility in my next two posts …