Waterhouse: "Now, if you--the ingenious Dr. Leibniz--contrive a machine that gives the impression of… — Neal Stephenson
Waterhouse: "Now, if you--the ingenious Dr. Leibniz--contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking--is that really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?"
Leibniz: "You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God's genius?"
Waterhouse: "If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking."
Leibniz: "This is one of the two great labryrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it--which must have been a great spiritual struggle--and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination."
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More from this book
"I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent."
Not that he was doing a good job of being sneaky. Isaac [Newton] was accustomed to being so much brighter than everyone else that he really had no idea of what others were or weren't capable of. So when he got it into his head to be tricky, he came up with tricks that would not deceive a dog.
"But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place--that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."
