Ep. 206: Lucretius’s Epicurean Physics (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 206 is something like, how does the world work? And we read Lucretius poem about Epicurean science on the nature of things or De Rerum natura from the first century BC. More information and link to the text please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, my voice crafted to delight you with its smooth and roly poly atoms.

0:29 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan,

0:34 Wes: a foppish casual dance of atoms. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:40 Dylan: spicing all with the grace of poetry in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Mark: Hey, how's it going?

0:48 Seth: Fantastic.

0:49 Mark: That's the new intro is to need to be more cash, not try to grip the reins so much and make the conversation go a certain way. We're just gonna be CAS today. At least I'm gonna be cash.

0:59 Dylan: I think we should mount an effort to change from the old fashioned word groovy to swervy. Everything should be swervy.

1:09 Mark: It has the freedom to slightly change the causal order. That's good. I like that. So, yes, we have done a bunch of stoicism and we hadn't got around to epicureanism. And I thought, hey, we need that other wisdom tradition. We need that other statement of how to live a wise ethical life that was popular around that time from ancient Greece through the Roman times. And then Wes recommended this book, Lucretius channeling Epicurus, which has almost nothing to do with that, with what I just said.

1:41 Wes: I diverted us. I swerved us.

1:43 Dylan: Well, it doesn't.

1:43 Wes: It doesn't give the intro.

1:45 Mark: Tell us what the structure is here, what this book is like.

1:47 Dylan: It's a poem written in Latin. It has an interesting history about how it was actually extant. It was famous in its day and it became famous and subversive upon being rediscovered in the early 1400s. It starts off with a love letter to Venus in which he explains that he's going to explain how the world works in a kind of detailed account that is based on Epicurus, who's like the man of men as far as he's concerned. And that is basically a materialist notion of how the world works, in which everything is born and everything dies, our souls are tied to our bodies and everything is basically rational. It is a beautifully articulated poem. You won't read anything more beautiful about Adam in your life. And I guess that's the other thing that I should have included. One of the things he's most famous for is the atomic theory that the world is made up of atoms. Atoms like an Alphabet.

3:00 Wes: And overall, it's an argument for a naturalistic framework for the explanation of the world in terms of material causes. Let's say, instead of such things as divine intervention or immaterial substances that somehow affect the world and so on.

3:17 Dylan: And I think that way of calling it a naturalistic. I use the word materialist. I think naturalistic is better. There are laws, there's stuff that moves around that bumps into each other, that's the cause of everything. So he has in there how we see things, how we mistake things, how genetics works, how atoms work.

3:39 Wes: Yeah. Evolutionary theory, conservation of mass and energy.

3:43 Dylan: Yes.

3:44 Wes: And we should say some of us read the Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.

3:49 Dylan: It might be two of us read that.

3:50 Seth: Okay.

3:52 Wes: It's a fascinating book about the history of this text and its discovery. I think it was at 1417 by this guy. Poggio.

4:01 Dylan: Poggio Bracciolini.

4:04 Wes: And Greenblatt is making the argument that this book is really critical to the creation of the modern world as we know it. And he makes a very convincing argument, even if you read the last few chapters. And it's not just this book. Right. But there are a lot of different classic texts that were being rediscovered and having their influence. So say Sextus Empiricus. We've already talked about him and his influence on Descartes. But this idea seems to have made a huge splash. And on its heels, you start to see the seeds of the scientific revolution.

4:37 Dylan: And I would say that it's remarkable when you read it, how much of it, even if some of the details aren't quite right, how much of it feels more modern than early moderns do. Thinking about the world and about the way causes work and the way we find out things about the world, and the notion that by default we can figure it out. We figure it out through our senses. And if sometimes our senses get fooled, but that's not because of anything other than we just aren't interpreting it right. We will ultimately figure it all out based upon things in our senses, not by God's telling us, not by someone in authority telling us, not by some kind of inspiration, it will be because the world impinged upon our sensory organs. And we figured out how the world worked because of that.

5:31 Wes: So I wanted to say one more thing about the background before we get into all that stuff. Just that when we say it was rediscovered in 1417, it basically vanished out of existence for a while. So it was written. What's the publication date for publication?

5:46 Mark: 1st century BC is early.

5:48 Wes: Yeah, 1st century BC what had been known of it, it sort of vanished out of existence within a few hundred years as Christianity became ascendant and Stoicism became ascendant. The Epicurean vision of the world, both Christians and Stoics were highly hostile to it. And even though Epicurus kind of had a cult for a little while, including, they basically worshipped his followers, worshiped him as a God, and people kept altars to him and pictures of him in their homes, by basically 500 AD, that was basically all gone. Epicureanism as a force in the world had vanished.

And then it took 1000 years basically for it to be revived. The text, one copy of the text was just sitting in some monastery library until this manuscript hunter, Poggio, came along and found it. So that, to me, is an amazing story. And if Greenblatt and others, I think there's some dispute about it, but if they're right about the effect this had on creating modernity, it's even more fascinating.

6:54 Dylan: At the very least, when you read it, you see the reflection of modernity in the text. And so at the very least, even if its rediscovery isn't a cause, which I'm similarly convinced by Greenblatt, but also other stuff that we've read, that scientists of the early modern era were actively reading Lucretius and being at least affected by that, even if you don't think that there's that kind of causal connection, you will at least see that this ideas of modernity that are part of modern science are alive and well in Epicurean philosophy.

7:34 Seth: So all of the things you say make me think that I should have loved it more than I did, make me feel that I should have engaged with it more than I did, I found myself getting wrapped up in his atomistic explanations, which were complete fabrications. I get the condensation of the text and I get the historical placement of it, but reading it, I just couldn't read it anymore. I started listening on Librivox, and it was much more bearable for me listening to it narrated, except that it just felt like we were going down rat holes of different types of particles and atoms.

And, you know, let me explain to you about the origin of the universe. You know what I kept thinking of? I felt like we were reading Hesiod for a podcast episode. And I kept asking myself why there was too much speculative explanation as opposed to argument. There are definitely elements of the argument in there, but I just felt like the whole thing, the summaries in the text, for example, that we got. I was just frustrated with just the sheer breadth. And I just wasn't, I guess, in the mood to engage it aesthetically. And that's really the problem is I just didn't have the patience to engage it aesthetically the way I think it deserved.

Because the translation that we have is beautiful. It really is elegant and beautiful to read. But I just could not stand to go page after page after page talking about the roundness or the smoothness or the sharpness of atoms that explain why water flows more than honey. I can. I just couldn't take it, guys. I'm sorry.

9:10 Wes: I do want to say, though, that which. I sympathize with all that, but I want to say that, first of all, he does make arguments, and I think they are fascinating if you get into them, because they are really arguments about the nature of scientific explanation ultimately, and why there has to be atoms and void, why other explanations, for example, in terms of elements, don't work, especially in the beginning. I'd like us to get into some of that because it's basically a sustained argument about the nature of scientific explanation.

9:40 Seth: No, I think that's. Actually, I typed this up and then I didn't send it to you guys. I was like, if all we did was just focus on the first two books and talk about that argument for matter and void and the atomistic theory, I think, maybe narrowing the scope to that or whatever. But let's talk about. Why is that argument carried out in the form that it is in this poem? I'm sure there's a literary character to it that I'm not aware of, the type of meter and verse and all that stuff that he used that for some reason.

10:10 Dylan: But it's very simple, Seth, because when you have to drink wormwood, you need to have it laced with honey.

10:16 Seth: Ah, right. Okay.

10:17 Mark: So my experience with this text, just to clarify. So Dylan and Wes, you read this at St. John's is that right?

10:23 Wes: No, it's not on the list.

10:26 Dylan: It was when I was there. My copy was completely annotated. Like I'd spent hours and hours and hours and hours with it.

10:34 Wes: So when I was there, there was a tutor group, including Chester Burke, I think, and Stuart Umphrey, and they all translated it together from the Latin and discussed it.

10:44 Dylan: Oh, that would have been fun.

10:45 Wes: Going slowly on a weekly bas, like for Forever.

10:49 Mark: So I certainly got the feeling going into this that you two had experience with this book. And I was looking at this as our first challenge since we had the St. John's episode of why you should spend time with even historical science. That just seems on the surface like it has purely historical interest. Why would you. So I got into this, but I feel like I have limited Appetite for reading 50 other things of historical science. But I felt like I was being tested by. Based on that, I assented in the abstract to what we were saying in that interview with Peter Kalkavage about being in the presence of a great mind who's thought about these things.

Because the St. John's thing is not just reading philosophical classics, it's reading classics in science and Euclid and things like that. You know, things that are a little outside of my normal area of interest. On the other hand, this peculiar. We very early on in our episodes, we got to epistemology, and we'll do some empiricism. We'll do some rationalism. Well, our empiricism was Locke and our rationalism was Plato. There's a bunch of years between those guys. Like, wasn't empiricism around back then, too? But, yeah, I've never really read anything about empiricism other than, well, Aristotle is more empirical than Plato, but Aristotle, with all his talk of teleology, is really not that empirical.

It's more by comparison. We wouldn't call him an empiricist in the modern sense. Well, this is actually empiricism in the modern sense. And it was going on way back there, so it was nice to fill in that gap of historical philosophy. So Seth bought this book and said, wow, this is really long. Why are we reading this whole thing? And Wes said, I know that our copy is 250 pages or so, but because it's a poem and it has such big margins, it's really more like 100 pages. It's totally doable.

12:34 Wes: 236 pages, Mark.

12:38 Mark: And then you're recommending that we read Greenblatt on top of it? Like, no, this is going to be way enough time for me to get through this fairly big book compared to what we often read. That's the pot calling the kettle black.

12:49 Wes: Seriously,

12:52 Mark: after our suicide episode, when I was shoveling more and more reading onto you, I felt like this was the revenge. But it's always nice, you know, just like when we read all of Walden, to do it as an audiobook first, at least, and just let it sail by. And if I tune out or whatever. And I was a little disgusted by the audiobook just because, again, I was expecting it to be about ethics. Like, when is it gonna get around to ethics? I was just like, okay, well, I guess the beginning is just worthless. We'll get to the good part. And it never got to the good part.

It just was more and more of getting into, you know, why there aren't centaurs and why the planets move the way they do in 30 minutes on optics, like it was out of control. But then when I finally had gotten through the whole book, picked out a couple themes like, okay, we could focus on these four or five interesting questions. Then I actually opened the paper copy and started taking notes on it. And I completely enjoyed it. There were parts that I was skimming over, but not as much as I thought. Like, I really liked the whole system. I was interested in his epistemology.

I was interested in how all the different pieces hooked together. And some of it was for authentic philosophical reasons of engagement and thinking about some of these physical things I think are still live today. Even though atoms aren't the smallest particle, is there a smallest particle? Does there have to be a smallest particle? Like, that's actually a real philosophical question still today. And how are the mind and the body joined, et cetera, et cetera? How can you give a physical explanation? Can you account from he voices the hard problem of consciousness?

How could you get sensation out of insensate atoms? Like just the fact that he voiced that and said, yes, I know this is weird, but it happens, you know. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I actually got to the of the process and didn't feel like we necessarily had to cut it down a lot more than we did. And so I hope that we can bring Seth over to my point of view.

14:39 Seth: That's fine. The reason I'm on here is to be educated and swayed not to contribute, that's for sure.

14:45 Dylan: I do take the point that if we just worked through some chunk of book one and two and then spent time talking about the implications, there isn't much explicit sort of ethics in the way Mark is referring to. But I think that there is, threaded through the whole thing very, very significant ethical implications. At least they're claimed, that the naturalist view has implications for why you should live a life devoted to pleasure and happiness, what kind of political arrangement should you have in a community, and how you ought to engage in the world? And what about engaging in the world makes a person happy?

15:31 Wes: I've marked all the places where I think are ethical.

15:33 Dylan: Did you mark the non ethical ones, the unethical ones? There are a few of those too.

15:41 Wes: I think the place to begin, because this is where I think there really is an argument about the nature of scientific explanation. The place to begin would be around 150 in book one, where we're going to get an argument about. First he's going to tell us that we should work out a natural explanation of things that doesn't involve this appeal to gods. And then he's going to give us this model of atomism, which by the way, is not just atomism. That's one of the things which is so interesting about this book. But it's an atomism that is constructed on analogy to reproduction.

And in fact, he often calls atoms seeds in this. In fact, I think he rarely calls them atoms. He has lots of different ways of referring to them in the original Latin, but he's thinking of seeds that sort of engender macroscopic existence. And we could go into that. And then there's an argument basically about why we need atoms. And the overall structure of that argument is, look, we have to account for birth things like natural kinds and persistence of macro level phenomena and birth and growth and decay. And the only way to do that is if first of all we get rid of this notion that something can come from nothing.

We have to reject that idea and appeal to this model in which there are these basic units in the world and their combination and arrangement, and then they of course have different shapes and things like that, but can account for all the macro level phenomena. And then he goes on to argue against different pictures of the world which appeal not to invisible atoms and their relations, but to say qualitative stuff like the world is made up of fire and water and other sorts of things, and why those qualitative explanations can actually work. So in just what I've described there, you have a really robust theory of what it means to give an empirical, rational explanation of the world.

17:44 Dylan: One thing that I would add is there's at least one place where he refers to laws. It's not just that the atoms themselves are defined by their different types, like letters in an Alphabet, that make up the world. They are also bound together according to rules and laws that he's less articulate about. But you see it mainly in him trying to leverage this way of reasoning about the world in terms of elemental constituents, the way west was describing and governed by a couple of basic principles, one which is that something doesn't come from nothing. And in fact the whole world is one container of all the atoms that have ever existed, and it will always exist, but in constant motion and rearrangement, such that things are coming into being and maturing and decaying. Be them sentient beings or be them non sentient entities. It accounts for all of that stuff.

18:44 Mark: A container that is of infinite extent and infinite number of atoms. An infinite number of atoms of each type of atom, which is weird, but I guess I do want to change my characterization. He's not purely an empiricist. He does say, you know, contra the skeptics, you're really in trouble if you don't believe the senses. Everything's going to collapse if you systematically don't believe the senses. So, I mean, he has some interesting points specifically to make about that. But this whole idea that everything must come from something else, therefore the world is of infinite extent and there are infinite number of atoms.

These are principles of reason, I would think. You know, he doesn't say that it's a special rational intuition. He doesn't use language like that. He doesn't really explain where he gets these. I mean, they're pretty clearly based on just observing things and kind of coming up with an idea. But I think he definitely uses the light of reason in that kind of analogy a lot, which makes him sound, yeah, less like a pure empiricist.

19:40 Wes: This is all metaphysics in the service of empiricism, Right? It's in the service of empiricism, but it's not itself an empirical science. It's philosophy of science and ontology, metaphysics.

19:50 Dylan: But yeah, it's somewhat empirical in that he has in a variety of cases, arguments for sometimes it's a little better argument, sometimes it's more speculation. The way Seth was talking about it, about how the world works under these principles guided by this way of reasoning about the world. And it's often mainly illustrative of how far you can take the account using these principles to have a naturalistic account of the world. Because he a number of times admits that he might be wrong about the details. But that's okay because that principle of the world is being revealed to you through your senses is still true. And so if you have to refine it later on, you're good to go. So he's also a pragmatist.

20:40 Wes: Yeah, I want to revise in light of what you just said, Dylan, what I was saying that it's just metaphysics and ontology. He's trying to account for macro level phenomena and he's saying the Only way you can do it is in terms of atoms. And it's not like he's doing experiments with gases or other sorts of experiments that might lead him to a theory of the atom, which, even as it was developed in modern science, was not something that was observable per se and empirical in that sense, but was really more a model meant to explain observable experimental phenomena. So he's roughly doing the same thing. It's just more speculative and less experimental. He's going to do thought experiments.

21:18 Dylan: Yeah, and he's observing keenly and he's giving examples about the world working. But he isn't doing experiments the way we would think of being decisively different about modern science.

21:31 Seth: He's not doing experiments, but he's not even talking about the phenomenon in the same way that, say, for example, Aristotle did. Aristotle is also remarkably rational and empirical. And the way that he speaks about phenomena, he talks about the appearance or the actual experience of how this thing interacts with this or when you see this. And then he tries to give a causal explanation of that. And this is, I'd say, a step removed from that. I think speculative is the right word only because he's speculating about things. There's no way for him to do any experiments to try to uncover the nature of atoms.

He gets there through a purely inferential reasoning, you know, to say this is the case, and if this is the case, then this must also be the case. And that's actually one of the really impressive moves in the book. It's just the translation we read as a poem. And the fact that it's very speculative at points about what the underlying nature is makes it difficult to. Made it difficult for me to attach myself to the actual argument, which I think is very robust.

22:38 Wes: Why don't we start with the paragraph at 160 just to get a flavor of one of his arguments. He wants to justify this idea that it's not the case that something can come from nothing, which in turn, he thinks implies atoms. The argument is basically that if something could come from nothing, then anything could come from anything. This is sort of like the fact that the empty set implies all things. I think it's similar in form because anything could come from anything, because. So he's thinking about birth and growth here. And there'd be no way to establish why it is that one kind of thing will give birth to the same kind of thing.

23:20 Dylan: For instance, why don't we just read it and go through and do this? So this is 148. It's basically after his preamble where he's sort of going to get going on the argument for atoms. And so this darkness and terror of the mind shall not by the sun's rays, by the bright lances of daylight be scattered, but by nature, Nature and her law, whose fundamental axiom is nothing comes supernaturally from nothing. Fear grips all mortal men precisely because they see so many events in the earth, in the sky, whose rational causes they cannot discern. So they suppose it's all the will of the gods.

But once we've seen that nothing is made from nothing, we'll find our path and see straight through to what we search for. We shall know that things can come to be, and in what manner, without gods. To me, first of all, that's a really big claim. So we're going to. Just by this one principle that nothing comes from nothing, we're going to just get rid of the gods.

24:21 Wes: And again, the overall structure of the argument is just that to explain natural kinds and persistence and macro level phenomena, that's going to be the case that nothing comes from nothing. Which in turn implies atoms. And then. So in this next section.

24:35 Dylan: Exactly.

24:36 Wes: Yep, beginning at 159, we're going to get the beginnings of that argument.

24:40 Seth: The unspoken premise here is that the gods are supernatural in the literal sense.

24:45 Dylan: No, they're not actually. So the gods exist and they could exist in the natural world. In fact, he admits that they do, but they do not cause anything that matters to anybody. In fact, why would the gods interact with human beings at all? So they exist.

24:59 Wes: Gods as they're typically conceived by non Epicureans would be supernatural in the sense of not being composed of matter. But for Epicureans, the gods actually will be animals composed of matter who live in space basically, and don't have anything to do with the world, really.

25:19 Seth: Okay, that's not the vibe I got. I thought he was trying to make the point here that the gods do not interact causally with the world. They do not interact causally with the world. So they cannot actually create something out of nothing. They can't essentially interfere with the natural order. And that's because they're really not part of the natural order.

25:39 Wes: Well, as they're commonly conceived, they're not part of the natural order as it will turn out. He talks about this explicitly later on. They do turn out to be animals. You're part of the causal order. But yes, I mean, I think, Seth, your point is spot on. If you think about gods as they're traditionally conceived outside of the divine order.

25:57 Mark: He needs, for argumentative purposes, to just set up that they're not involved. He does go in later, like, why they wouldn't want to interact, why they have no need to interact. Creation only comes from a lack. The gods are posited as not having a lack, so why would they do anything? Why would they help us? At this point, he's not saying whether they're natural or supernatural, he's just not making that claim. But he does want to put them. I think he even mentions before this in this intro. This is like said about five times in the text, that they live sufficient into themselves.

44. For by necessity the gods above enjoy eternity and highest peace. Withdrawn and far removed from our affairs, free of all sorrow, free of peril. The gods thrive in their own works and need nothing from us, not one with virtuous deeds, nor touched by rage. So that has to do with just his polemical point in why he's going to do this, how he's going to do this, that he thinks that fear of the gods and fear of death accounts for most of the evil in the world, most of the uptightness that people need to get over.

26:59 Dylan: 63. When before our eyes man's life lay groveling prostrate, crushed it to the dust under the burden of religion which thrust his head from heaven, its horrible face glowing over mankind, born to die. And then at the end of that

27:15 Wes: section, one man, a Greek, was the first mortal who dared oppose his eyes, the first to stand firm in defiance. That gives you a little bit of a glimpse of the cult of Epicurus to which Lucretius belonged. And again, they worshiped him, ironically, as a God almost.

27:31 Dylan: Our victor returns with knowledge of what can arise, what cannot, what law grants each thing its own deep driven boundary stone in finite scope. Religion now lies trampled beneath our feet as we are made gods by the victory.

27:46 Mark: All right, so let's get back to 159 here.

27:49 Dylan: For if something could spring from nothing, then anything could be born from anything would require no seed. Men could leap out of the sea, from the earth could arise the scaly snakes and birds could hatch from the sky. Cattle, sheep, horses, wild beasts too, would give birth to whatever dwelling on farms and forests and fruits would not stay faithful to their trees, for they would change all things, would bear all things. So that's the first argument, right, is that if anything can come from anything else, then we would not see the natural kinds that we do, we would not see the kinds of dependencies that we do. We would in fact see all kinds of things that don't happen.

28:33 Wes: The structure of the argument is if something could come from nothing, then anything could come from anything. If anything could come from anything, we would see that we wouldn't see these regularities in terms of natural kinds and animals giving birth to their own kind, as opposed to other kinds and all that stuff. And he goes on to say here each thing then has its own engendering matter. If not, how could the mother stay the same? But since all creatures rise from their own seeds, they need a place stocked with their stuff, their atoms, whence they are born and emerge to the shores of light.

And by the way, even though he's talking about animals now and seeds of animals and the ways in which those seeds engender creatures, he's going to think on analogy of macroscopic phenomena being engendered as well. It's almost as if atoms are these reproductive seeds that are giving birth on a continuous basis to the macroscopic phenomena of which they are part reproductive by

29:38 Mark: attracting more of their own kind or by joining forces with others. They're not reproductive by splitting and bouncing

29:45 Wes: off each other and doing all the things that we'll find out that they do. But yeah, yeah.

29:49 Dylan: Again, just to emphasize that the argument is saying that the fact that we have entities in the world divided into identifiable sorts of things, be them kinds or natural kinds, or any pattern in the world at all, that means that there has to be this constraint that something cannot spring from nothing.

30:16 Seth: There's kind of two things that seem to be at work here. The first is an Aristotelian notion of teleology, that there's a natural path that things have, and they're connected to some kind of generative and developmental track. That makes sense. But he's also saying, look, there's order in the world, there's regularity. There's a series of things that happen over and over again. We have grain in the spring and the leaves fall in the fall. And it's not just associated with the individual developmental path for any given thing, but the fact that there's overall regularity is indicative that we don't live in a chaotic universe where anything can happen. There's a reason behind, or there's order behind what actually does happen, the way it does happen.

31:05 Wes: And when he says proper engendering matter, basically he's saying that at bottom there are rules for the how things combine and interact at a lower level, which will explain higher order regularities, and that we wouldn't See these, you know, as Dylan said, these higher order regularities. If all we're left with is divine intervention and things are created ex nihilo and it's the will of the gods and all that stuff, if creation ex

31:34 Dylan: nihilo is even possible, it will always happen, right?

31:38 Mark: I mean, that's not clear. I mean, when I think of like how modern arguments about creationism versus the Big Bang or something, there's at least seems to be a live view that at least once something did come from nothing. Maybe we don't really understand that, but that's no more mysterious than atoms have existed for all eternity, which is Epicurus Lucretius solution. You know, for Kant those were both equally intolerable. We can't really make sense of either of those things. So saying that at least once something came from nothing doesn't necessarily, I think, imply in our minds that anything could come from everything. I think that's one of those things that Kant was pointing out, that we really just don't have intuitions.

32:20 Dylan: But I think that at least once is the problem, right? So what you've done is by saying once and only once, you have the same border of our understanding with regards to the infinite number of atoms or things coming out of nothing or something like that. But once you've gotten past that point that something cannot come out of nothing,

32:41 Mark: something can come out of nothing is the objectionable thing. Again, maybe you think it only happened once, or maybe you think it could happen regularly, but it doesn't. What would make it so it can't only happen seldom, which is what you were just claiming is Lucretius view.

32:57 Dylan: Part of the implicit argument there is that if something can happen, it will. You'll be able to see it and it'll happen on a regular enough basis that you can see it. So if it's the case that something can come from nothing, that's a fundamental enough thing that you would see it happening.

33:15 Mark: He does say kind of anything that can happen will. But I think that follows from his the universe has been existence for eternity and has an infinite amount of matter floating around. You know, that's his ultimate description of why the world exists in the first place, is because atoms tried every possible combination and given an infinite variety of time, then even though most of the attempted combinations are going to be failures, he doesn't say that, but we can think. That's a pretty obvious thing for us. It'll usually be a failure, but every once in a while something will be successful and that will then engender further accretion and growth, according to his picture. And that's going to happen infinitely many times in sort of the cycles of the birth of the universe and its dissolution and then its rebirth later or something like that.

34:04 Wes: Right. There's a sort of natural selection at work at the level of atomism, where what corresponds to mutation is just the different arrangements that atoms will fall into based on being infinite and moving through space and interacting with each other in certain ways for an infinite amount of time. And then if they happen to fall under arrangements which are stable, which give us stable, higher level objects composed of them, then that persistent thing becomes a basis for further persistence. Ultimately, in the case of an animal, it can reproduce itself.

34:43 Dylan: But one thing I want to call back to that Seth mentioned. You rightly mentioned Aristotle. Seth in the sense that Aristotle too has this view of things being natural. But it becomes more clear later on in the book. He doesn't believe in teleology, that is things having a function for which they were born to do.

35:07 Wes: Yeah, he explicitly rejects it and has arguments against it.

35:10 Dylan: Yes, they have things that do because they can, but they are not fashioned so that they can do those things. So there are material causes for everything, but there are no final causes for anything.

35:24 Seth: That's fair. I was thinking more of the material cause aspect of. Not that the acorn yearns to become a tree, but that that's what acorns are for, that it's a natural seed, a natural origin which has its own developmental path. I was thinking more of the developmental aspect, but also talking about thinking about the. What might be of interest for somebody who's pedantically inclined or would be to analyze the logical structure of the argument. Right. If what he says is if something can come from nothing, then anything can come from anything. And since our experience of the world is that there has to be some way to articulate anything doesn't come from anything, that that somehow is proof that something doesn't come from nothing. It's an interesting little mind trick. I can't think of how to formalize

36:16 Dylan: it, but let's read the next few lines because he gives more examples in the argument and we can see if it actually does it. So everything can't just spring from anything. Inner capacities make things what they are. Why too does the rose bloom in spring, grain ripen in the summer, the vine pour forth its fruit at the urging of autumn, unless the seeds specific to each thing join at the right time to reveal the creature which the mild weather and quickening earth will bear? Safely, so tender it is to the shores of light. But if they could come from nothing at once, they'd spring up out of season, gestation all haphazard.

From there would be no atoms to be blocked from birth, giving union at bad times. Also, whatever grows would need no time for the coming together of seeds. If it rose from nothing, a little baby is presto, a young man. And seedlings leap through the earth as full grown trees. None of this happens, we know, for little by little things grow, as is proper, from a certain seed. And in their growing they preserve their kinds. You see then that things grow tall and are nourished by matter suitable to themselves. And the earth could never send up its lusty offspring without certain seasonal rains.

Deprived of food, no animal can reproduce or stay alive. Believe then, as all words share one Alphabet, so too, and many things may be made from the same atoms, and not that things exist with none at all.

37:48 Wes: Yeah, all of that, in a way is like saying there are scientific laws, there are rules.

37:54 Dylan: Exactly. They're manifest to us in seeing how the world works. And if there weren't rules, then we wouldn't see the patterns that we see.

38:04 Wes: Yeah, we would see chaos.

38:06 Seth: But it's not just the case that there are rules and generic matters. There are rules and there are specific, like you said, natural kinds that there are things that are appropriate to other things. In other words, matter itself, or these atoms and these seeds align themselves to certain kinds of generative activities and relationships which are governed by those rules.

38:30 Mark: I like the way you put that, Seth, because he's mixing metaphors here, right? He uses this atoms are to the thing like letters in the Alphabet are to words. He uses that several times throughout the text. And there's nothing in there that's generative at all. Right. The letter e is not generative of the word eagle or of any other words with the letter E in it.

38:51 Wes: Well, the syntax is generative, though. The rules of language are syntax. And they tell you how all the different letters can combine. The word forms are the things that have been generated.

39:02 Mark: I'm trying to think if syntax includes consonants versus vowels. I normally think of syntax as verbs versus nouns and sentence structure, but even word structure, I guess they're certainly in English. You can't have five consonants in a row.

39:15 Wes: We should say sentences, not words.

39:17 Dylan: You have to throw grammar in there.

39:19 Wes: Well, syntax is grammar. I should have said sentences, not words. So the thing generated is the sentence. And the syntax tells you what the meaningful forms of sentences are.

39:30 Mark: The argument, as you read it and where you stopped, the conclusion doesn't actually follow. Everything grows from a seed appropriate to itself. It uses food appropriate to itself. It doesn't follow from that that everything is made of atoms, that there are no things that exist that don't have any atoms. Like it just doesn't follow straightforwardly from that. It does make a coherent picture to say, why is it that we can eat certain sort of foods? Well, it's because you are what you eat. It's because portions of that food become incorporated into my body. And that's the reason to say that both I and my food can share at least some of the same kinds of atoms. It is a coherent picture, but it's not universalizable for everything. And there's nothing that doesn't have, you know, from just what's been said here.

40:16 Dylan: There are 200 more pages, Mark.

40:18 Wes: We need a common denominator. Even if we forget about the word atom, we need some fundamental rational unit which is part of our explanation of the picture of all things. Suppose we had two different units of radically different kinds and some phenomena in the world were explained by one of them and others were explained by the other. And never the twain shall meet, right? They belong to completely different explanatory domains. Then we'd have the same problem with macroscopic phenomena. We'd have things which essentially we'd never be able to describe their causal interactions.

It would be possible that they wouldn't have causal interactions or they would do things that really violate our intuitions about orderliness in the world. So the important thing is that everything has to be in this one language, that there is a common denominator. I mean, that is an extremely powerful argument. We take it for granted. So it's hard to see it as something as original as it is.

41:14 Dylan: It's fundamental to rational thought altogether. To me, that's why it's. The centerpiece of this, is that he is keying off the. The very thing that makes thinking about the world rational.

41:25 Mark: And the unspoken conclusion, based on what we were saying earlier about the gods, is that either the gods themselves, as you were saying, have to be part of this physical world and they have to have causes. They have to grow from God seeds and eat God food or there are no freaking gods like the gods in the ordinary sense. I don't know what he considers the ordinary sense. The ordinary sense is maybe they live on Mount Olympus and, and that kind of stuff. So that's not what Christians would consider, say the ordinary sense, but the sense of them as non physical Beings that have some special way of interacting with the world. He's just simply ruling that out here.

42:01 Dylan: Importantly, there aren't gods that exist that we make sacrifices in order to please them. Like killing our children so as to launch ships.

42:12 Mark: Even just them seeing us, like seeing that we've made a sacrifice.

42:15 Dylan: Yes.

42:16 Mark: In order there to be division, you have to have atoms that are flying off of you, creating a semblance and hitting the eyes of the gods. And the gods would have to have physical eyes.

42:28 Seth: The fact that he brings up the example of Iphigenia, which is of course a prototypical, like we make a sacrifice to the gods. But what was the point of the sacrifice? It was so that a God would intervene in the natural order and provide propitious winds to get the fleet from Mycenae to Troy. And what I'm brought of mind when I was reading slash, listening to this was Hume and Spinoza on miracles. This sort of anticipates those arguments of there's really no such thing as a non natural explanation for any phenomena. Whether you call it God, whether you call it the gods, whether the point is there is a natural order and the natural order is rigid, it is definite, it is incontrovertible.

And like you said, Dylan, it's that idea that there's an order which cannot be contravened, from which there's no transcendent intervention, non causal. The word cause doesn't exist here in that sense. But that's really what we're talking about here. And that is a tremendously radical way of thinking, I suppose, for this particular period in time.

43:39 Wes: What follows now, beginning with just after 215. I guess he's going to give more arguments for why we need atoms. And one of these arguments is that we can't really explain. Just like we can't explain growth properly without it. We can't explain decay properly without it. And the propagation of kinds. Maybe the thing to move to now is the indestructibility. Is this where indestructibility is beginning? Exactly.

44:05 Seth: You hit on that right there where you were talking about 215. Right. Not only is it not possible for something to come from nothing, it's not possible for something to return to nothing.

44:14 Wes: Right.

44:15 Seth: He sort of is backing into the. Even though the text doesn't go this way, the argument backs into the idea of atoms, which is predicated on the perceptual piece. Something doesn't just disappear, it can't just go from existence to non existence, it has to dissolve or disappear. Gradually, yeah, but in perhaps a non perceptible way. Therefore there have to be things that we can't perceive that explain this. That's really what's going on here.

44:47 Dylan: Right around 245, indestructible atoms whose intertwinning some force would have to sever matter itself is indestructible. Things must remain intact till a force comes sharp enough to destroy their inner structure. Nothing returns to nothing. When things shatter, they all return to their constituent atoms.

45:06 Wes: To destroy something isn't to take matter and make it disappear from the world, it's to rearrange its structure. Basically, it's to take an ordered higher level structure and cut apart its atoms and cut it up into its atoms. And this is the kind of thing that we would expect to see happen gradually. Like with decay. If something is dead and its body is decaying, when something dies, it doesn't just suddenly leap out of existence. It doesn't just suddenly disappear. We see this orderly process of disappearance. And that process, he thinks, is evidence for atoms. This idea of something gradually losing its matter makes it clear that there have to be parts to be lost.

45:49 Dylan: And in this way, everything that exists in the world is a transformation of one arrangement of atoms to another arrangement of atoms. And one of the key pieces for getting the atoms out of that is that you have this whole that has a rational order to it. And in order to get that rational order out of it, you have to have ways in which things can be attached to one another and ways things can't be attached to one another. I guess Mark was saying that it's not yet been made a slam dunk that you get atoms out of that argument.

46:25 Mark: Right. He's sketching a picture that is coherent and he's trying to counter then potential objections like that seems weird. How could there be things that I can't see and so like, well, there's air that you can't see, there's smells that you can't see, there's sounds that you can't see. He goes through all these other things that you can't see that obviously produce effects in the world. So therefore, why is this so weird? This is the best explanation for what we do see.

46:50 Seth: I think the erosion argument is actually the most powerful.

46:53 Wes: I think in these arguments someone is objecting. Atoms are invisible, they can't be invisible. And then he's going to say, well, he's going to show how that's possible. But I think the actual argument that they have to be invisible comes later on and it has to do with the fact that they can't serve their explanatory role. If they are just phenomenal objects with color or if they're like fire or something like that, it'll be impossible for them to serve the explanatory role he wants them to have.

47:22 Mark: Yeah. Key to that explanatory role, as you were saying, is that they're indestructible. I know he says that in texts that we've already passed. Where's his argument?

47:30 Wes: That's later on in the book. That's more around like 5:30. And then when he gets into the alternative theories, around 6:50, fire and other stuff, that's where he's going to really tell us why they have to be invisible. Actually, even though he's not so explicit about it. Seth, did you want to say something about that erosion argument?

47:50 Seth: Only that this is around 3:15, 314, something like that. Iron though it is, when worked in the fields will surely grow thin. We see stone pavements trodden and worn by the trample of crowds. Bronze guardians of the gates show right hands thinned away under the touch of people, greeting them as they stroll by. And so we see long handled things diminish. But if we ask which atoms fall and when envious, nature shuts the door on us. Nor can you watch the weathering of the rocks that hang over the salt and gnawing sea. But in unseen atoms, nature governs all.

I just think that especially the rocks and the sea example, something that you think of as being as permanent and solid as a rock worn down over time by the sea. And then you can see, no pun intended, in the sea floor. Right. In the sand and the. You can see the evidence. There's almost a macro version of the Adam argument as you see the kind of fine grains of the rock making its way, turning into sand or the seabed or what have you.

48:53 Wes: Also just the fact that it happens over such a long period of time, which implies that over any given shorter period of time something very, very small is being taken away.

49:04 Seth: Yes. And that the idea that you say you can't see it, well, it would take 10 lifetimes for you to see significant change. Right. For example, in the rock cliff as it's pounded by the sea. And yet the change is there.

49:17 Mark: And I think what you were just referring to Wes around 540. Why he says that they have to be indestructible. It's not really much of an argument here, but it follows directly from what Seth was just Quoting. If matter were not everlasting by now, this world would have returned to nothing. Even the rocks, these things that seem really solid wear down. There has to be some limit to the amount that things can wear down, or else it would have done so.

49:42 Wes: Yeah, because ultimately we have to have these. Right? There'll be these solid units that are going to be bouncing around, arranging themselves ultimately into macroscopic structures. But if they were being eroded by all that activity, they'd never have the chance to enter into those higher level relationships. They'd just be busy eroding all the time.

50:03 Mark: So in between those two places, he argues for why there must be void, empty space, vacuum, as opposed to just having, you know, every empty space filled with air atoms.

50:14 Wes: It's required for motion, both external and internal to objects. The motion implied in nourishment. It's also implied in differences in densities and objects. And the fact that sound can go

50:24 Dylan: through walls, incidentally, it's one of the things that I dearly loved about Lucretius is all the atoms are always moving. So even in solid things, the atoms are moving around a little bit. I think that's just awesome.

50:43 Mark: And they're even swerving a little bit of their own volition randomly, like radioactive decay. Throw in the swerve at this point. But it's something he doesn't actually dwell on at great length. So you might as well throw it in anywhere, right? Because if he's talking that everything has a cause, it sounds like this is a giant mechanistic system. But he does actually want to leave room for free will. He does want to leave room for spontaneity, for unpredictability. And that's where this idea of, yeah, the atoms are always in motion, but it's not entirely predictable. They can slightly deviate, they can swerve from what you would expect given purely inertia, bouncing off other things.

51:25 Wes: They have to swerve. One of the reasons is basically that if they don't swerve, their susceptibility to gravity just means that they're just constantly falling down like rain. So just imagine a universe which is space, and a bunch of atoms falling in parallel to each other like rain. It's only because they swerve that they can bump into each other and create the process that will lead to their entanglement and higher level macroscopic phenomena. That's one reason, and it's funny because it's seldom mentioned in any secondary literature. They usually just mention the other thing I'm about to say, which is that he wants it to be the basis for free will.

So he recognizes that he's painting a very deterministic picture of the universe, which seems to make it impossible to have free will. And the swerve is the way out. But I think actually the more interesting argument for the swerve, it's basically a version of making molecular bonds possible. This is, by the way, around 220.

52:28 Dylan: He starts from thinking about the world as being a bunch of individual free particles just moving and then says, okay, well, they're going to have to get together. What happens when they get together?

52:40 Mark: They certainly don't have a congress.

52:45 Dylan: The world is born out of that.

52:47 Mark: I just love his little snotty asides because, like, when he's talking about that, certainly they didn't get together and decide who's going to go where and at what speed.

52:55 Wes: You know, that is around the swerve. Right. So to, like around 215. Another fact I wish to have you know, I love this, like, this use of language. It's always very like school marmy. Another fact I wish to have you know, when the atoms are carried straight down through the void by their own weight, and at an utterly random time and a random point in space, they swerve a little, only enough to call it a tilt in motion. For if atoms did not tend to lean, they would plummet like raindrops through the depths of space. No first collisions born, no blows created, so nature could ever have made a thing. I gave my own account of what I think that means before. But then he goes on after that to say, oh, and if you want to explain it by atoms having different weights and so knocking each other from above, that's not going to work either.

53:51 Dylan: Then the will part comes around to 260. This is in book two, by the way.

53:54 Wes: And then the will is. Yeah, 253, 252.

53:57 Dylan: But remember, it's book two as well. It's not book one.