Sean Carroll

And I want to sort of back up and talk about Leibniz and logic and things like that.

But just to help the listeners with the roadmap of where we're going, what is your shortest answer to the question, so what are the laws of thought?

I know this is probably an extremely unfair question.

Is there a list of the laws?

In thermodynamics, we have the first law, the second law, things like that, or is that a little bit not quite codified like that?

It's not quite quantified like that, yeah.

OK, so you've mentioned probability theory, basis theorem, things like that, and we will get there.

But I want to sort of, you know, impress upon people how important that move was by first talking about what there was before that.

I mean, Aristotle, Leibniz, even, you know, Frege and the more modern versions of logic, they were really about things that were either true or false, not just having probabilities, right?

Yeah.

That's right.

I'm kind of curious about Leibniz because I actually don't know about the aspect of his work that you're referring to, the idea of sort of formalizing thought as arithmetic.

So on the one hand, I can see that it's maybe a precursor to modern computational theories of the mind.

On the other hand, I have no idea what he's talking about.

Like, isn't a lot of thought have nothing to do with arithmetic?

Like, what was his aspiration there?

I am completely unfamiliar with that.

That's amazing.

But I'm very familiar with the spirit of it.

Like clearly Leibniz was a theory of everything guy, right?