Dear Denis, My problem with Lonergan as you quoted him and as I find him on the net is that he seems to go in for wooly neologism so I guess my question to myself is whether he adds anything interesting to the Mondaology of 1714 (taken in the technical context of modern physics) that I have not yet quite grasped or whether, as it rather sounds to me, that he has been drawn back into intuitive ideas as most people tend to be. 

"Packet' is, I appreciate, a confusing term. I think it arose in QM because of the mathematical structure of a monadic dynamic unit (Fourier integral), which is irrelevant here. It has become a shorthand for an indivisible monadic unit per se. I find it useful as a shorthand for the complexity of the dispositional properties of such a unit - a packet of dispositions. This is very definitely not a matter of an aggregate of properties or parts. The dispositions of a tennis ball to bounce and roll are not parts. The packets are plural because there are many of them - as per Leibniz and now per QM.

My packet may be what Lonergan calls a thing. I am not sure that Leibniz talks of bodies but he talks of aggregates - maybe these are Lonergan's bodies. The packet is certainly a unity-identity. I prefer to avoid the term whole because it seems to imply something that parts can contribute to. With Leibniz I see only monadic indivisible units and aggregates as arbitrarily defined by us (that might have parts but not in the sense that these come to be a 'whole').

You say that Lonergan has an insight of the unity of 'given data'. In what way does that differ fromor add to Leibniz of Bohr? If it is the same I think it is fine, but not a new insight.
The crux of our divergence, if there is one, may relate to your sentence '...I assume there is some concretely existing data that constitute that packet...' For me, as for Leibniz, the packet is the perceiver. The data are the content of perception. Thus data do not constitute a thing, but an interaction between one thing/packet/monad and the universe. They are concrete in the sense that perceptions are instantiated but not in the sense of being either the dispositional things that give rise to them or those that receive them. The dichotomy of actuality and potentiality I use is again common to Leibniz and QM (and in fact Newton) and I see as being a pretty standard approach to physics, although often not referred to. I am not up on Aristotle's version but I have a feeling I looked into it and it did not seem to be the same. Potential is not 'only potential', in the sense that everything going on in the universe is progression of potentiality. Thus there is no issue about you actually and not just potentially existing. Potentiality and actuality are two 'faces' of existence that are never instantiated one without the other. That would take us back to the mechanistic view. However, the term 'I' will have a different meaning according to which 'face' is being presented. The I as monadic unit of potentiality will be I described from the third person position. The I as actuality will be an 'autobiography' consisting of the data that are the perception of the universe by I. The qualitative features are not of the I as receiver but of the received data. (This is where the muddle of 'objects' having qualitative properties arises.)


There may be a lot of common ground if Lonergan is re-issuing Leibniz but the actuality-potentiality dichotomy is central for me and if it is missed out pandemonium reigns!


Jo