Afterthoughts

Abstract

In 1677 Leibniz wrote an essay entitled Dialogus. In the margin of the text we find a short sentence in Latin written by him: Cum Deus calculat et cogitationem exercet, fit mundus, which, in English translation reads: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made”. As often happens when profound ideas are compressed into a short sequence of words, one has to invest a lot of time and effort to decipher the true meaning. Mathematics is a science of structures. Physics applies mathematics to study the world. Therefore the progress of physics discloses the structure of the world. If there is something more in the world than its structure, it is not open to the method of science. By using Leibniz’s way of speaking, we could say that “God thinks things through”, in terms of structures, and science, in its progressive evolution, gradually deciphers the Mind of God contained in His work of creation. However, science is the product of the collective work of many human brains, but the human brain itself is a part of the world’s structure; in fact, the most complex and the most sophisticated part of the world’s structure. In the human brain, the world’s structure has reached its focal point: the structure of the world has acquired the ability to reflect upon itself. This self-referential focal point is what we call the Human Mind. In this conceptual setting, science appears as a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from the question marks that surround us and of which we ourselves seem to be made. The Mind of Man and the Mind of God are strangely interwoven. This entanglement is a source and a driving force of science – the most adventurous adventure of humankind.