Leibnitz and Space—The Final Frontier Tony Thorstenson Ohio University Space—The Final Frontier. This notion has been with American culture since the inception of Star Trek, and Hollywood has produced its antithesis, at least to the lay population, in Innerspace, a movie about a microscopic submarine manned by microscopic people and injected into a normal person’s bloodstream. Psychologists talk about personal space: a measurable distance around a person that they need to feel comfortable in a social situation. This, of course, gives rise to the social space talked about by sociologists, which in its turn, becomes a public space. We need look no farther than our current President to see the importance of separating social and public space from private and personal space, which can be of a different variety from the personal space noted by the psychologists. Webster’s New World College Dictionary’s first entry on space states, “The three– dimensional continuous expanse extending in all directions and containing all matter: variously thought of as boundless or indeterminately finite.” This is not counting the nine other definitions given or the twenty–six other definitions listed behind it that are derivatives of the word. When the Theory of Relativity was introduced Webster’s inextricably intertwined space with the notion of time, thus producing a four–dimensional space–time, rather than the commonly accepted three–dimensional one suggested. For the purposes of this paper, however, we will not be specifically concerned with the final frontier, although, ultimately, it will be related, but rather with the last frontier to arrive on the scene, namely, cyber–space. The arrival of virtual reality, real–time chat, instant messaging and the construction of a virtual–world is having a significant impact on our society and culture. Science fiction movies such as The Matrix can give rise to a multitude of interpretations and arguments about the reality of cyber–space. Indeed, it is at this juncture that cyber–space becomes a philosophically interesting phenomenon. While The Matrix is a fun and exciting way to think about cyber–space, I think that a better–suited parallel may be found in Leibnitz’s Monadology, specifically number 17. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception. It is accordingly in the simple substance, and not in the composite nor in a machine that the Perception is to be sought.
If we replace each instance of “perception” with “space” we can immediately intuit the absurdity of attempting to make something take up more space to find the smaller space, but even if we follow this analogy, we would not “see” the cyber–world. We might see a string of one’s and zero’s that are coded into electrical currents that speed by us. Space, like perception, doesn’t grant us access to it via quantifying methodologies, but one might reasonably suggest that we could fruitfully follow Leibnitz’s methods in attempting to articulate the parameters of cyber–space, and, as we will see, the very use of the notion of parameters is a telling indication that cyber–space is not space qua space, (in the Kantian sense of a condition for possibility), but rather, a kind, (of the personal, public and social variety indicated earlier). It may be helpful to think back to Aristotle’s Physics; his principles of matter, form and contrariness are not “kinds” insofar as they cannot be adequately accounted for in a “thing” ontology. To be a kind is to be a “kind of” something,
