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

0:00 Wes: Oh, I see. Yep, that's right.

0:02 Mark: All right, so where are we going to go from here?

0:04 Wes: So I wanted to back us back up again to book one and talk about the stuff that starts at 640 where he's talking about Heraclitus and other philosophers, which might just seem like a tedious exercise, and defeating other weird theories about how the world is composed, for instance, of, you know, a fire, that its ultimate element, the ultimate thing it's composed of is fire or some combination of earth, air, fire and water. And to say that, no, it can't really be anything like that. In fact, we can explain the qualitative nature of macroscopic phenomena in terms of something that is qualitative itself, except insofar as we think of it as these things that are invisible and have spatial relationships to each other or have spatial shapes and motion.

And I think we would say today, force. In other words, there's an argument here that we have to explain any secondary qualities in terms of primary qualities to kind of reach to Locke's distinction between things like color and smell and the kinds of properties we think that are a matter of the interaction of objects and our senses, and then something that serves as a more fundamental explanation that stands outside of that mere interaction with our senses. But you can see why someone would want to say, hey, the most fundamental things in the world are air, earth, fire and water.

Lucretius himself says, yeah, that's understandable, given the fact that those things play such a huge role in generativity. Right? And when we're thinking about atoms, we actually are thinking about generativity. And by generativity, I mean things growing right from the earth being watered, having the heat of the sun and the importance of air. But he has arguments to say why you will never be able to account for the world in terms of things that are already macroscopic phenomena or things that are secondary qualities like color. You're not going to be able to explain the colors of things if you think that you're going to make blueness of things a matter of having blue colored atoms, you're not going to be able to explain heat.

If you think that you're just going to have hot atoms or cold atoms. It all actually has to come down to properties that are not like. It can't be a relation of likeness. It has to be a relation of an epiphenomenon or a supervenience of these qualities on something that's qualitatively entirely different, just space and motion and atoms.

2:41 Dylan: Towards the end of that section, right around 790, after saying that the elements can't be air, fire, earth, and water, I think he clarifies more is closer to an argument about why I have to have atoms. Something immutable must needs survive, lest the world be reduced to nothingness. For change which leads a thing beyond its limits is instant death to the original. So, as I said a little while ago, things change continually, but from them something has to survive which cannot be converted, lest all the world turns to nothingness. So here, I think, is one of the formulations of why you have to have Atoms.

3:23 Wes: He's restating something there that he said in the context of the previous argument, that. So if you're explaining things in terms of, say, earth and fire and water and things like that, then those elements, either the things that they appear in, they're going to appear as untransformed. They're going to be in basically a heap that's near the bottom of the previous page, will show its nature. Air mixed with earth will appear as air, and in water, fire will just stay fire. Or there has to be like a chemical reaction in which those things change.

But if there's a chemical reaction, yeah, they have to be transformed. But if there's a chemical reaction, there's to be some explanatory basis of that, then we need a smaller atomic unit to explain the basis of those chemical reactions. So that's why things like fire and water can't do the same explanatory work. Qualitatively, they're just either going to be themselves and you're not going to be able to say how something that looks like neither fire nor earth, that has a completely different quality, is somehow reducible to those things. You need atoms to say anything intelligent about that stuff.

4:36 Dylan: So in a way, the notion of elements in the world, in the case of the earth, fire, air and water that constitute everything would arguably be on the right track. That you have everything else in the world constituted of these four things. But these can't be those four things for all the reasons that you were articulating, Wes.

5:00 Wes: Yeah, it can't be any four things.

5:02 Dylan: But we see here at 790, the argument for the reason why you have to have atoms that are immutable is because just like you can't have something arise from nothing, you can't have something decay into nothing. So you have to have something left over. And that's your first idea. That's your first piece of idea of atoms.

5:24 Wes: The relevance of this is previously he's going to say, you know, air and fire and water are chemically transformative of each other if they have any rational purpose. But if they're doing that, then they're essentially killing each other. And we get that same problem of the world dissolving to nothingness. Later on, he's going to talk about color. Are you going to try and explain the blue or something that's green in terms of yellow atoms and blue atoms? Well, either they're going to be pixels. You know, if you look closely enough, you're going to see in the green, you're going to see pixels of, of yellow and blue, or they're going to have chemically interacted with each other and so transformed each other.

And then of course, so we get the same problem of explaining those transformations, explaining the persistence of the world and macroscopic phenomena. We don't want them to be changing each other like that. And we can't do any work by relating qualitative macroscopic phenomena to something qualitative on a microscopic or lower level. That is like enormous part of the scientific revolution. In a nutshell, getting beyond like this is what pre Socratics were stuck on. They were reaching towards some sort of scientific theory, but by doing what they did, they were really stymying themselves.

Ultimately, the implication here is that at bottom, what we need is data. This is why he's going to appeal to the word or sentence analogy here and in several places in and this argument. Ultimately we need things to be informational, not to be like using air, earth, fire and water. That's like using hieroglyphs or some pictorial language where there's no Alphabet. We need an Alphabet. We need things to be information and transformable and to have rules of combination and all that stuff.

7:10 Mark: So do we know how much Epicurus advanced on Democritus atomic theory? My impression of Democritus was that all the atoms were the same and that it was really entirely because of their arrangement and their motion and things that explain macroscopic phenomenon, which of course then calls for some intermediate structures that you need something like molecules or something. But here, the Epicurean version that Lucretius is using, the atoms are of different types. Now, they're not blue atoms and yellow atoms, but they do have different shapes. There's a finite number of types.

He doesn't say exactly how many protrusions an atom might have, but it's not that many. And you can sort of think of all the permutations that are available. And so they're going to be pointy atoms and they're going to be some atoms that are bigger than others, and they're going to be smooth atoms. And that difference between the atoms is not explained further, at least in here, but by some further components, right? You cannot by definition split the atoms. That doesn't mean that they're conceptually the smallest possible things. Because if you say the atom has three protrusions, well, the protrusions are smaller than the atom, right?

But they're inseparably part of the atom for that reason. You know, the practical reason that if the atom could fall apart Then it would, and all atoms would fall apart and things would go down to nothing. So there has to be some smallest bit. The question here is whether it has to be the atoms which are of different types, or whether to explain why there are different types, you have to have something like protons, neutrons, and electrons, for instance.

8:46 Wes: Well, let me just jump in there to point out one thing which is what's important about even if they have different shapes, is that those aren't differences in kind. So there's a big difference between having, hey, I have a fire atom and a water atom and an earth atom and saying, hey, I just have atoms. And the way they differ is in this one property, but it's a property common to all of them. There's a common denominator. In other words. Still, that's what I don't get with the whole air, earth, fire, water picture. And even if it's all fire, then I have this qualitative property which is supposed to explain macroscopic qualities which are really, really different from that qualitative property.

I need to get beyond that idea to something way more abstract and not be trying to explain the functionality of atoms in terms of their likenesses. I think this is like a real problem, by the way, because we are still talking about shape. You can see how it gives us a basis for thinking of these different determinations as something like data that's in a common language.

9:51 Mark: I just think he's inconsistent about that. Maybe sometimes when he's talking about atoms, he's talking about them for the reason that there has to be a smallest thing so that everything doesn't dissolve into nothingness. But then when he gets into specific explanations of phenomena, maybe he is a little like, well, I don't know if these are explained directly by the atoms or by compounds of the atoms. So specifically, when he starts talking about consciousness, this is in book four, I think, sensibility, he says, well, that's a combination of the breath atoms, I believe.

It's the heat atoms, the air atoms. He distinguishes those from the breath atoms, I believe. And a kind of atom that we don't have a name for that is specific to sensation. And you put all those together, and that explains what it is that leaves the body. When we die, it has to be something very light because the body doesn't weigh any less. If you can weigh it before and after death. And it's not going to lose any noticeable mass. And the signs that we see that something is alive, well, it's breathing, it's generating heat, it is able to control its limb.

So he comes with these components of consciousness, I think he calls them atoms at the time. But given that one of them is air, and he's just right in this section, said air is not an atom. There's some sort of evolution in the level of specificity he's talking.

11:07 Wes: But, yeah, when you say an air atom or heat atom or something like that, for Lucretius, it's not like those are like fundamental kinds of atoms that they can be designated as, that they could serve some other function. They're just an air atom because they've been recruited to that specific function. And their shape probably has something to do with it and their interaction with other atoms in a particular circumstance. And maybe it is that air atoms can only have a certain shape and size or something like that. But he makes the point that any given thing is composed out of lots and lots of different types of atoms interacting in a certain way. So I think you would have to read air atom there as an atom that's performing an air function at a given time. Otherwise he would be totally inconsistent and that would be a disaster.

11:53 Dylan: One thing I wanted to bring up in the context of Heraclitus is I understood when he has some nasty things to say about Heraclitus, in particular, his silly way of speaking. And then he hones in on the notion that everything is fire, which is attributed to Heraclitus. And I did find myself thinking, especially as I went through that, this notion of constant transformation and constant transformation that is tethered by the constraints of the conservation of motion and there being a finite amount of stuff in the world, stuff like that was very Heraclitean in general. It made me feel like he hadn't read a lot of Heraclitus.

12:43 Mark: He certainly didn't read Eva Brann's book on Heraclitus.

12:47 Wes: If Heraclitus is using fire, he could be using it as a metaphor for something more abstract.

12:53 Dylan: Yes. Our whole discussion about there are other fragments in Heraclitus that you get more of that the tension of the bow and the balance of the parts and the transformation of one thing into another that seem very epicurean in this respect.

13:07 Mark: So there's a question about, since they both have in common, according to the Eva Brann interpretation of Heraclitus and what we're seeing Lucretius say about Epicurus, that they're very intent on proving the law, like nature of the universe. And there's just the question of sort of what is the mechanism by which the Law controls, things interferes. What is the ontological status of the law? And Lucretius is explicit, that things behave as they do merely because of the characteristics of the parts. So in other words, there's no force in the universe.

Right. There's only atoms and void. But he does say, and he makes it clear, like we can't say the Earth is the center of the universe. Right. Space goes on infinitely, so there is no center. However, there does seem to be an inherent directionality. Right. There is down. Even if there are multiple worlds, they would all have to be parallel. They're not spheres that engender their own gravity, the way we know now they must be parallel surfaces that are hanging out in different parts of space, because things tend to go down. So there really is the force of gravity built into the world and presumably the force of inertia as well.

If he says the reason all the particles are traveling and they do so in law like ways, partially because they're ricocheting, but they also have always been moving forward for eternity. So there was some initial movement. Maybe that's explainable by the swerve? I don't think so. I think the swerve is an additional thing like the ricocheting that adds to the movement. So you do have. Even though he doesn't say this straight out, but in the picture here, we have some sort of forces at work.

14:45 Wes: Yeah. The forces include the colliding and the entanglements. And the swerve is just to prevent everything from falling again, you know, from falling like raindrops down. It allows things even to ultimately move back up and to form these little atom clouds through collisions with each other, through getting entangled and not just collapsing down to the bottom.

15:05 Dylan: And those entanglements, even if he would associate them with being characteristics of the individual atoms, seemed to me that they were entanglements that followed rules, which sounds to me like everything I would mean by forces.

15:21 Mark: Do you remember why he said that things go up? You know, I know he said that. You know, Aristotle's wrong. It's not just that things that have Earth tend to want to go down. Things that have air tend to want to go up because then all the air would just go away. Or things that have fire tend to want to go up. Like they would just fly off of the earth and we would never see them again. But that's clearly not the way things work, that even fire has some weight to it. And insofar as it's heavier than the surrounding air or something like that, that's why it goes up. It's because it's lighter than the air.

15:49 Dylan: Yeah, this is around 1060, 1050. This is after he has concluded that we need an infinite number of atoms in an infinite void in order to account for motion.

16:02 Mark: Book one.

16:03 Dylan: Yeah.

16:04 Wes: For it to kind of execute all possible combinations until something stable occurs. Yes. The conclusion of that paragraph is things can't be held assembled by some overpowering lust to reach the center, which again, I think it's the swerve ultimately that produces collisions. And those collisions are what counteracts gravity.

16:25 Dylan: At 1080, they make believe that not all bodies press to the center, but only earth and water, the waves of the sea and the rivers that rush from the mountains, and anything made of so called earthly stuff. But they explain that the light air is whisked away from, from the center along with the bright hot fire. So the signs of heaven tremble in the dome and the sun's flame feeds on the deep blue meadows above. Flown from the center, all heat's collected there. And the topmost limbs of trees would never bud unless they solely drew food from the earth.

16:57 Wes: And then we have ellipsis. We don't get the counter argument.

17:01 Mark: I don't think he has a good answer why these other views are bogus, that Earth likes to go down and fire likes to go up, but we still don't have a good reason why things go up at all. So I accept your hypothesis, Wes, that has something to do with the swerve. But that's certainly not spelled out here.

17:19 Dylan: Well, it wouldn't be the swerve. Right? It just would be the collisions that atoms have with each other.

17:24 Wes: Well, let me read from the Swerve, Part 2. 24. If atoms did not tend to lean, they would plummet like raindrops through the depths of space. And that would mean without ever bumping into each other and without ever going up, no first collisions born, no blows created. So nature could never have made a thing. So the way I imagine it is that the whole function of the swerve is when it, you know, if they're falling like raindrops, and then one swerves into the other and creates a collision, then you can create all sorts of collisions and ultimately you can get upward motion out of that, counteracting gravity. That's the only explanation I found in here of how that would occur.

18:06 Mark: Yeah, and he gets specific about this later about, you know, water vapor coming off of the oceans to make the clouds. Actually, I don't know if he gives exactly that modern version but there was some variation off that.

18:17 Dylan: It was very similar to that, actually.

18:19 Seth: Oh, how clever.

18:21 Wes: One more thing from book two, I'll just point listeners to this. You know, it's a famous part where he talks about how you get these static macro level phenomena out of this buzzing confusion of atoms. And he describes how you have a bunch of sheep being frisky and playing around, but from afar. If you looked at it from afar, it would look like a single white thing on the hill. That's at 310. And it's something that we kind of offhandedly referred to earlier. And then he'll go into how the shapes of atoms in the rest of book two account for variety of phenomena that we see.

18:57 Mark: Do we want to talk about the epistemology or the philosophy of mind first? I think we should try to cover both of them. So book three, his picture of consciousness, of sensation, is what he calls it, I think consistently interesting. You know, he's trying to avoid. Not that he was familiar with the Cartesian mind body problem, but he's trying to. From what we've said so far about how the physical world works, the soul has to be something physical. And he distinguishes the spirit from the soul. He says they're held, conjoint. This is from 1:36 or so book three, I assert.

The spirit and soul are held conjoint and form one common nature. But the captain, so to speak, and lord of the body, is the judgment which we call the soul or mind. It sits in the center of the breast. Here alarm bucks loose and dread, and round these regions gladness caresses. Here then is the mind, the soul, the other, the spirit, sown, broadcast through the body, obeys and moves to the mind's sway and will. The mind thinks by itself, joys in itself, even when nothing is stirring. The spirit or body, et cetera. So the control center and then the spirit is kind of like the nervous system, or rather the pulses that flow through the nervous system, these particles.

So it's a gossamer thin, very tiny atoms which are a compound, like I was saying, of these sui generis, consciousness sort of atoms. And when I say consciousness atoms, those are not like panpsychist. Those atoms are not in themselves conscious. Consciousness has to be. They're not monads like all these other macroscopic process. Yeah, it is something that. It comes as a compound. You would never have individual particles that are aware of things like that. Just doesn't make any sense for him.

20:45 Dylan: In fact, he argues in book one directly against that kind of homunculus style. Everything's made of components that are reflective of themselves.

20:56 Mark: Which is good to keep in mind with the swerve. Because the swerve has to be random or spontaneous. It can't be. The atom decides to swerve. It doesn't decide anything. It is not a mind. Which is of course why those quantum physics descriptions, as raised in every class that I've ever had about free will that raises this, you know, as a consideration says it's a red herring.

21:20 Dylan: It's a terrible argument.

21:22 Mark: The fact that there are random quantum events, how would that add up to free will? Like acting randomly. That's not freedom. Freedom is internally generated spontaneity.

21:33 Wes: There are still philosophers who defend this view, though my preferred view, as you guys know, freedom involves reason, responsiveness and compatibilism. But it is true that people do still defend the view.

21:46 Mark: It's one and the same problem to me as the what I was complaining before about how there are irreducibly different sorts of atoms without any explanation of parts of atoms that could explain why those are different, that I think atoms for them to do the job that he wants them to do, not the whole job, not the. There has to be a base unsplittable part to keep things from. You know, maybe that's a good argument for some lowest level of physical nut in itself. And I think it actually would be more satisfying if it was like the way I characterized Democritus, that they're actually all the same.

So, you know, everything is strings at the bottom or something like that. But when you're talking about actually explaining macroscopic phenomena in terms of the interaction of different atoms, it would be easier to account for why the atoms could have different properties if they had different components. And so why an atom might swerve in a particular way. If it is not just an irreducible brute fact of, well, atoms just randomly swerve, then it has to be explained in terms of some characteristic the atom has, which can only be explained in terms of part whole relationships.

22:56 Wes: He definitely doesn't want to explain it at all, otherwise it would undo the whole free will thing. He doesn't want it to be explainable. The swerve can't be a function of anything deterministically.

23:06 Mark: So nothing comes from nothing, except the swerve comes from the thing itself due to no particular characteristics that that thing has. So it comes from the atoms, but it can't be explained by the atoms characteristics.

23:19 Wes: This is a problem built into the nature of scientific explanation though. So Suppose we did get to. Scientists found the most fundamental particles, physical particles of things. Their properties would explain everything above them. But if they are truly fundamental, we can't rationally explain why they have the properties they have. They would just be brute facts.

23:43 Mark: So that goes all the way down, Dylan, for string theory or something. Not that we need to completely get off track with that specifically, but all the different versions of that that you have read about over the years in studying quantum physics, they have that problem in common.

23:59 Dylan: I think Wes argument is a serious one, which is that the explanatory power of something in terms of its elements, that everything above it is explained by it. You don't have a good way to explain things below it. This goes back to what you were saying before about, you know, there might be one spontaneous act that led to the beginning of the universe, creating something out of nothing. That would be equivalent to the universe having existed for all time. It's equally unexplainable. It's exactly that same kind of problem. It's the nature of scientific inquiry that way.

There's something similar in the characteristic of some of conservation theorems and the rationality of the universe that there's a whole that is then broken up into relationships of parts. I mean, I think there's a strong argument there that the rationality itself is dependent upon there being a finite whole and a conservation of something that can be broken up into constituent parts that are interacting with one another. Otherwise there's no ratio around and there's no rationality for it at all.

25:13 Wes: This is Aristotle, right? Either the explanation goes on forever or it stops. So either with each new particle, I find, I explain its properties in terms of other particles that compose it, or strings or forces or whatever you want to talk about, or it stops. If it stops, then that explanatory unit is itself irrational in the sense that it's not rationally explicable. If it doesn't stop, then according to Aristotle, the whole chain becomes irrational, infected with the fact that there's no stopping point.

25:46 Dylan: Yeah, and you have that kind of argument here, right, that that's why you have atoms.

25:50 Seth: Right.

25:51 Dylan: You take that principle along with the fact that something doesn't disintegrate into nothing, and you get atoms.

25:59 Wes: There's a lot of brute facts on the tables. You know, the existence of atoms, existence of void, the existence of swerves, and I think we assume here we can't explain them.

26:08 Dylan: There's a twist there that's interesting that because it's also in lucretius which is you do get from the constituent things, interactions that are higher order, that are not contained within them fundamentally. So you get essentially emergence. He's arguing straight up for emergence here. That's how sentient beings exist. Sentience is a characteristic of an arrangement of atoms. It's not a force, it's not a law. It's a characteristic of an arrangement of atoms.

26:39 Mark: So I wonder if we take seriously, Dylan, what you were saying about Lucretius being a pragmatist that maybe we could take instead of saying that there are certain brute things that can't be explained, the explanation per Aristotle goes down to a certain level and then has to stop. You know, Donald Davidson that we read seemed to give a. Well, I'm not sure if what he had to say was applicable to actual physical science or whether it was merely to conceptual systems. The context was talking about can we define truth in terms of non semantic properties?

He was saying no, actually you get truth. And I forgot what the other one, verification or something, you know, there are a couple other things that go with it that they just get introduced as a group. And so that's kind of the sense I'm getting here with the physical system is that he has an argument for atoms, for the movement of atoms, for there being infinite space and that there is a down, so there's no center to space, but there is a directionality built into the coordinate system of space. We haven't mentioned time here. He thinks that time does not exist as another dimension, is merely parasitic on the existence of matter and motion.

He doesn't say a lot about that.

27:52 Wes: So it's not one of our fundamental things.

27:54 Dylan: Yeah, motion is fundamental for him, not time.

27:57 Wes: Motion void in atoms. And time comes out of that, emerges. It's another emergent property.

28:01 Dylan: It does for Aristotle too, by the way, but.

28:04 Mark: So he's trying to argue that this whole system that he's sketched out makes sense when you look at macroscopic phenomena. But he's not necessarily in a geometric kind of way trying to boil down and say these are the basic postulates that we have to leave unproven. And building on those, we have the axioms. He's just not thinking in terms of that, that maybe it is that the elements of this system come together and when taken together they make for some sort of reasonable explanation. Now if that's really the case, if he's being as pragmatic as that and not just say here's a chain of deductive argument and here's where it stops.

If it is more of a group Davidson sort of setup. Then I think you could make an argument that, well, let's go the Heraclitean view instead and think that the logos, the ratio, something that Lucretius doesn't mention, that instead is fundamental. Like there could be multiple systems that explain the macroscopic phenomena pretty much equally.

29:00 Dylan: Well, I was with you all the way to the end.

29:02 Wes: There can be multiple systems, but they all have to have the same general structure. Right.

29:07 Dylan: There's going to be features of all of them that are successful that you would recognize as being characteristics of reason. I would venture to say something like a conservation theorem or conservation law. That's a feature of it being rational.

29:21 Wes: Exactly. Maybe just to elaborate on that, like, yeah, what would happen if we found out there weren't a conservation. Like, what would the world look like?

29:29 Dylan: I think it would be utterly uninterpretable.

29:31 Wes: That's the really fascinating thing about this, right? These are things that can be empirically investigated. And yet if we assume that the universe can be explained, some of this just falls out of that. And that's what Epicurus, and then now Lucretius is doing. He's giving these very, very abstract arguments for why the universe must look like this. And he's right.

29:50 Dylan: And it goes the other way, right? Is that the consistency of the world with respect to conservation principles, for instance, points to the world being rational as evidence for it.

30:01 Mark: So I'm just trying to think of what Wes was just saying. I agree with you, Dylan, that something about the law of conservation of matter has to be in there. But I don't think that all the rational systems, as Wes just said, have to be atomic. What would the epistemic status of this versus a basically monistic system? So, you know, we just did the Bhagavad Gita. So everything is ultimately underlyingly Brahman, which is kind of like the string theory. The way I don't actually. I've never actually read anything, I think, you know, a scientific paper about string theory.

30:32 Dylan: The closest thing you're going to get is something like. If you want to say everything is fields, right? I mean, the closest thing would be is quantum field theory, where the things that we would think of as elements elemental are resonances of the field. You're going kind of a different route there.

30:49 Wes: But they're still conceptually atoms. Right. By atoms, we really ultimately just mean our explanations have to have a ultimate common denominator and it has to be ultimate and it has to be common or we cannot have a rational explanation of the world.

31:02 Mark: Exactly.

31:02 Dylan: And all you're doing when you make that move from the atoms in the sense of some uncuttable things, you then say, well, actually they're resonances of the field. If what you're doing is. You're saying, well, I don't really like that there are multiple examples of fundamental entities. I really think there really ought to be one thing.

31:24 Mark: It's just simple.

31:25 Dylan: I can get my one thing if I have one uber field and then all other fields and all other particles are derived from that one field.

31:37 Mark: It just has to have a swerve.

31:38 Wes: I'm getting goosebumps.

31:39 Mark: It doesn't have to have lots of individual swerves among all the particles. It just has one swerve that creates ricochet. I don't know.

31:46 Wes: It's not a swerve, it's like a bend in the. It's a.

31:51 Dylan: Well, if you guys want to talk about this stuff, there's a book that it would be some work for us to go through. But it's really good on this kind of stuff stuff.

31:58 Mark: Can we say, just very briefly anything we have not said about the soul based on what we've kind of been saying, that the soul is not going to be a little soul atom. It is an emergent phenomenon. But there are particular atoms involved with it and they are gossamer. They are spread throughout the body. Right. The soul is in the center and the spirit, which is kind of, you know, part of the same thing, the same general kind of stuff is spread throughout the body. This explains movement. So the soul gets an idea which it is itself caused by say seeing things in the world.

So it's not like it's a entirely self contained motivation generating machine. No, it is influenced the soul through the senses. Like the reason that we act. You know, it's not purely free will, it's not purely swerve. A lot of it reminded me of William James and his talk about reflexes and habits and things. That it is the physical phenomenon of particles and really semblances which are these images of things but flying through the air and through our sense organs, determining the mind to make a decision. And then that mind which is very quick, it must be made of very small atoms because they're so quick.

Then can send signals to the body and get you up and moving.

33:17 Wes: Yeah. And this is one of these again, another radical idea, right. Which is that we ourselves are scientifically explicable via the same sorts of methods that we use to investigate the world. Because we are just one More of those phenomena.

33:32 Mark: But it's pretty torturous, this explanation of how it can be a thing. He has an argument about how could it be that such a light, gossamer substance like the soul and the spirit could move the heavy body? And it's like. Well, you know, it's like the. You've got a sailboat and, you know, just a little move on the tiller and a little bit light breeze can send this giant sailboat moving. So basically, it's because the organism is constructed in such a way that a little bit of push can move our big, beefy bodies.

34:05 Dylan: I think that is pretty freaking awesome. Right?

34:08 Wes: Yeah.

34:08 Dylan: Because he's thinking deeply, kinematically.

34:13 Wes: He's looking at us mechanically. He's looking at us as a machine.

34:17 Seth: Yes.

34:17 Dylan: But in thinking and looking at it as a machine, saying that. Well, I can see in the world examples of cases where very, very little amounts of force generate gigantic actions in much larger things. And so it's not so crazy to imagine something that is the activity of the soul that we recognize as a spirit that I'm acknowledging is something. Something that is virtually immaterial can have activity, action on something so grossly material as my physical body. I think that's awesome.

34:53 Wes: What it points to is the large degree. Right. Of negative entropy that's contained and the fact that there's this system which is basically this big bundle of energy. And.

35:03 Seth: Yeah.

35:03 Wes: You can send some light particles into it through the eye, and it'll have an effect that is, of course, way out of proportion to whatever energy is entered the system. I don't know, Dylan, if that's a good way to put all of that.

35:17 Dylan: At some level, the combination of sight and smell, particles of light coming into your eyes and particles of scent coming in through your nose, combine together to be part of the motion of the soul that results in somebody lusting after another person.

35:36 Wes: The huge gap between stimulus and response, the huge gap in magnitude. So someone runs for their life because out of the corner of their eye they see something. Some image flashes in the corner of their eye, and suddenly they're expending all this energy. I mean, that's, on the face of it, fascinating.

35:54 Dylan: And as you point out, you have a demonstrably small amount of energy in communicating and affecting those senses that results in a gigantic motion.

36:06 Mark: I guess I just felt like something had gone wrong here when he gives his account of sleep. So this is. Actually, I'm jumping way ahead just to throw this out, because I'm sure we're not going to get to this elsewhere. So page 148. This is in book four. He's talking about how through the whole day, we're constantly buffeted by air. Air is whacking at our skin, trying to get in our pores. That's why everything's covered with hide or horny skin or shells or bark, because the air is just lashing at us all the time. Then we breathe so that there's air lashing at our inside as well.

Since the body is flogged on both sides, since blows thrust into our tiny pores and reach our fundamental parts and elements, our limbs slump, so to speak, to a slow ruin. For jumbled and knocked about are all the atoms of body and soul. And so a part of the spirit is cast outside and a part yields, tucked deep down, and another part, distracted through the limbs, cannot connect or join in mutual movement. Nature walls off their paths to unity. So this is what happens when we're asleep. Is that somehow all the emergent property that is sensation and movement, you know, soul and spirit, those particular atoms kind of get divided from each other, so some of the paths get blocked off.

So the body grows feeble, arms dangle, eyelids fall, we stagger to bed, the knees buckle, etc. And he explains why, you know, when you have a heavy meal, then your body is distracted, you know, working on that, and so you're more likely to be sleepy. So the fact that when you're asleep, a good portion of your spirit jumps outside your body, like, that's what explains why your body's not all active. Because the spirit that's normally coherently connected with your soul and moving your body around, some of it is sunk way down deep in a recess, and some of it is actually through.

The breath has gone outside the body. It's floating around out there. So he's taking too literally the connection. Remember I was saying before, breath is one of the components. Breath and heat are literal components of consciousness, along with the little specific sui generis atoms that are only present in consciousness and sensation. The fact that he has that picture, he doesn't have the conceptual apparatus to say, look, there's a lot of stuff in your body, but some of it is essentially part of your body, and some of it is just visiting. Right?

So the fact that we breathe in and out doesn't mean that we're expelling our soul every time breath leaves our body. Like, that's just not the way it works. The oxygen, as I talk more about this. Yeah, okay. Actually, the oxygen gets converted to Things in the blood. So like there's some chemical reactions going on here, but it is not literally. The soul is not the kind of thing, even if you are interpreting it as knitted permanently in with the body. And so it dies when the body dies. That's his ultimate thing. It can't be hanging around outside your body as part of the breath.

I don't know why that was a particular sticking point to me.

38:57 Wes: But yeah, I think it's fair to say that his explanation of sleeping is incorrect.

39:05 Dylan: He admits in several places that he might not quite get everything exactly right.

39:09 Mark: I purposefully ignored in my note taking his thing about magnetism. But like, we've already talked about that he doesn't have force as a fundamental thing. He has particles in motion. And so if there's magnetism, it can't just be that there's.

39:23 Wes: Unless we take the collisions as the sort of foundation of force.

39:25 Mark: Well, yeah, so that's how he would have to explain anything like magnetism. It just. It's not that there's just a fundamental force of magnetism in the world. Although again, I think he's admitted a force of gravity, which in fact is

39:36 Dylan: exactly how quantum mechanics explains it.

39:39 Mark: Yeah, exactly. So how would you account for force?

39:43 Dylan: Just talking about particles, that's what quantum mechanics does.

39:46 Mark: Oh, you're saying that it does say that the unified force theory is exchange of particles.

39:50 Dylan: All force is the exchange of particles.

39:53 Seth: Ah.

39:53 Mark: So even though literally, you know, we don't think of light as particles flying through the air, which is definitely what he thought about like it's the sun particles.

40:02 Dylan: And you ought to think of light as being particles going through the air

40:08 Mark: because they are photons.

40:11 Dylan: Yes, Yep.

40:12 Mark: Or the idea of sound is a wave. It's a pattern within particles. Pattern within the air. There's no sound atoms.

40:21 Dylan: It's a pattern of the air.

40:23 Mark: Yes.

40:24 Dylan: Light has the interesting distinction of not being a pattern of something the way in which sound is a pattern of the air. But that's that interesting sort of ether question. So.

40:38 Mark: Well, so what did you guys think about this whole mind body explanation? Were you just impressed enough that he was trying to explain mind in terms of properties of body that like. Well, of course he got the details wrong, but you know, we don't really even understand those completely now. So that's totally forgivable. Just. It's great that he didn't run into the problems that Descartes ran into by having ontologically different substances involved.

41:02 Wes: Yeah, I just thought the importance of this is that he's giving a materialistic explanation of mind.

41:08 Dylan: And in part it's a response to fear of death. Right, right.

41:13 Wes: And so, yeah, the next section, the idea is going to be that when the body dies, so does the soul. And consequently we get that fundamental Epicurean lesson that death is not to be feared because there's not going to be anything afterwards. There's no possibility of punishment. And then there's this whole argument about if death can't feel like anything to us, then it can't count as a loss. There's no longer any person left to experience as something unfortunate. Which, by the way, once you get into those counterfactual thoughts about death that become really interesting and bear on the subject of identity and things like that.

So it's a really interesting argument. But yeah, the general idea is that if we can use naturalistic explanations of the world to alleviate ourselves of these sorts of fears, then we can live an ethical life. Then we can be happy and virtuous because we are not driven by superstition and also because we're not driven by ambition and the lust for power and money, because those things are just psychologically ways of engaging in the delusion that we can transcend death.

42:22 Seth: It doesn't work to try to convince people not to be afraid of death because you say, hey, you know what? There's no afterlife. It's all just over. When you die, you die. And the soul, there's no eternal soul. That is not a compelling argument. It's comforting to me because I agree. I'm not going to say I can't wait to be dead. I'm just saying I have no expectation of there being anything after. I have no expectation of being anything when I die. And so I have no fear, but I'm abnormal. This approach, this rationalist, scientific, and this is kind of where maybe the adherents of the scientific explanation could learn something from marketing. There's just no money to be made in trying to convince people to be disabused of their fantasies about death, you just can't do it. Free will and death, those are the two things that just nobody wants to give up.

43:24 Mark: Well, so do you think it's really just the illusions or that even if you accept his factual claim, which again, I think is kind of uncontroversial as far as I'm. Obviously it's controversial in the general populace, but yeah, I find it very difficult. I buy his arguments that it would be pretty weird given the relation that mind or soul, the way he talks about has to body it would be very strange if that persisted. Like, no, that's not the way. You know, when something breaks down, it's not like the giant form of it jumps off and goes somewhere else.

There could be a semblance. There could be an echo. So I think he even admits there might even be. You hear that? I don't know if I actually want to attribute this to Lucretius, but, like, if a ghost shows up, you know, it's not that there's a physical soul. It's just some kind of psychic echo in the universe, you know, it's just an image. It's like looking in an old mirror. This is a thing that's been bouncing around for a while. That might be okay, but a more robust survival just simply doesn't make any sense. But even if you accept that, is it.

Would it be soothing?

44:29 Seth: I don't think so.

44:30 Wes: Well, do we want to read some of this fear of death thing? That's actually how the way he ends Book three, it'd be a good way

44:35 Dylan: for us to end this, to not be afraid of death,

44:40 Wes: the death of the episode.

44:41 Dylan: As long as we get to the part that hell only exists in our lives now.

44:47 Wes: Okay, so a little bit above 8:30.

44:50 Dylan: This is the hymn of death, right?

44:53 Wes: Death then is nothing to us. No concern once we grant that the soul will also die. Just as we felt no pain in ages past when the Carthaginians swarmed the attack and under the sky's high shores the whole world shook, struck by the shocks of war and alarm and riot, all mankind over land and ocean in the balance whether to fall to the ruler of either. So too when we no longer are, when our union of body and soul is put asunder. Hardly shall anything then when we are not happen to us at all and stir the senses. Not if the earth were embroiled with the sea, and the sea with the heaven.

And even if the soul ripped from the body retained the power to feel, that still would be nothing to us, whose beings have been fashioned by one fit marriage of one body and soul. And if the ages should collect our matter after we die and return our present forms, lending us once again the light of life. Even that won't mean anything to us once our continuation has been snapped. Who we once were can't touch us now at all. Nor are we gripped with care for who will be. He's kind of giving a hint of eternal return there, right? If there's an infinite space and time and the arrangements can repeat themselves endlessly, we could be Living the same life over and over again.

When you reflect on the unmeasured span of ages past, how many and various were the motions of matter, you may rest assured that the seeds at times were placed in the same order. And these seeds which compose us now, a fact that the mind can't retain in memory. There's been a halt hiatus in our lives, and all the motions of sense have gone astray. Thus, if your future is misery and sickness, you've got to exist in the same future. Time for the ill to catch you. But since death clears the deck, forbidding that would be sufferer to exist, nothing at all have we to fear from death.

He who cannot exist cannot feel pain or care if he's never born again. Once death that does not die has seized his dying life, clear the deck. So there's more really interesting stuff after that, too. There's that part of it, but then there's the more subtle psychological part of this, which involves the ways in which we behave that are predicated on the desire to escape death. And it could just be in the sense of psychical death by amplifying ourselves in the eyes of others, by seeking status, by seeking power. Because the beginning of the next book, he's going to go on about the Epicurean life of detachment and tranquility.

And a lot of that means shunning ambitions again. Ambition and the quest for status is supposed to be kind of a consequence of this fear of death. And the idea that we need to prolong ourselves eternally, even if we don't literally believe that's true, we kind of behave that way. And reflection on that supposedly might lead us towards humility and might lead us to lead a better life. And not one of malignant ambition.

48:03 Dylan: All kinds of bad things, religion over ambition, poor choices about how we live our lives comes right out of our fear of death.

48:13 Wes: Even the way we our identifications with larger groups. So thinking back to Orwell again, and notes on Nationalism, our power units, as Orwell calls them, and our desire to amplify ourselves through identification with a greater power unit and its superiority to other groups. You could even start thinking about social ills and oppression and mass violence in these terms. And there is a section in which he talks a lot like Rousseau, about how civilization doesn't cure our ills, it just kind of multiplies them.

48:45 Mark: So what we were just saying about death not being fearful sounds very much like what we just read in Seneca in our suicide episode, that if you've gotten to the point where you've lived a good life, you've gotten your fill. Just clinging to it more is unseemly at best, and it's based on some illusions.

49:05 Dylan: So it's an interesting different point of view. Right. Where in Seneca, in the Stoics, you get this emphasis, well, if it sucks bad enough, you should just kill yourself. And that's okay.

49:16 Seth: Right.

49:17 Dylan: Whereas here is. You have the point of view of saying you should, as much as possible, optimize towards the pursuit of your happiness.

49:28 Seth: Yeah.

49:28 Wes: So there's a difference between, you know, Epicurus is famous, right. For saying that we ought to seek pleasure, that fundamentally happiness is about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, where pleasure isn't defined hedonistically in our sense as simply living a life of debauchery, but as the kind of pleasure that you get from living moderately and reasonably and having good, close friends.

49:50 Seth: Yeah.

49:50 Wes: There's this enormous difference between the things we do when we're motivated by pleasure and the things that we do when we're motivated by ambition or pride or even bad conscience. Right. If we wanted to get a more subtle account out of this, we could translate fear of the gods and all that stuff into Nietzschean bad conscience, into this kind of harsh, religious, moralistic superego. And this represents a rejection of that, a rejection both of living life for the sake of recognition from others, or living life because you're afraid of the disapproval of others or disapproval of the gods. Nietzsche would call that anti natural morality. Right. And living life according to a more naturalistic morality, one that is focused on pleasure rather than pride, focused on what truly is good for us.

50:46 Mark: So you're defining what is good for us. Just the language that you're using. If we're reacting to other people, it's because it's social pressure. We're afraid. What's more natural is focusing on the self, on pleasure. Whereas Aristotle, you know, is going to say that we are fundamentally social beings. This is why I made the connection to Stoicism. And in my after show with Seth, Seth talked in particular about his problem with stoicism and as being too focused on how you individually feel about things and not merely negative. Not merely. I'm conforming, I'm adjusting.

I'm being cowed by the presence of others. I'm being corrupted by society in Rousseau's sense. But how connection to other people is what actually makes life meaningful. It's not some. I might as well just pursue what individually gives me the most pleasure. Or in Epicurus case, if it really comes down to we just want to avoid pain. Like, pleasure is good, but, like, avoiding pain is the big thing. And as the Stoics have taught us, if we pursue big pleasures like those come with pains, so probably just don't even do that. I wanted to make sure we talked about my favorite part of this, which is his discussion of love and how it's basically illusory and very much like these vainglorious things like pursuing fame.

Just the context, I think, is important here because he's been talking about. This is in book four in Epistemology. So he's been talking about how, yeah, we need to trust the senses overall. But then he's trying to explain where illusions come from, where dreams come from. That perception requires physical particles flying off of something and reaching us. And so these things he calls semblances, or like the images, you know, just like you might see in a mirror. So we're never directly seeing the thing, or what directly seeing the thing means is that there are semblances coming off of it, coming at us.

And those can bounce around in ways that are confusing. Like, he wants to insist that our senses correctly report the semblances they receive, but it's an act of reason that then says where those semblances came from. So he's giving all these examples of, you know, we can't necessarily tell where a smell comes from because color is a matter of the confluence of light and our eyes, what the color of something is in itself, you know, or would be under normal lighting conditions. We can't necessarily figure out just from the semblance that's coming to us.

53:17 Wes: Our senses never deceive us. We deceive ourselves. And then our interpretation of the sense data.

53:22 Mark: Exactly.

53:23 Seth: Thanks, Kant.

53:25 Mark: Part of that interpretation, then he has to give an account of, like, memory and imagination, how you could have these semblances that could be bouncing around for a while. So this is how he makes the transition to dreams that. Yeah, okay, well, I gave that description of sleep. Our mind is still receiving things or active, even though the sense organs are shut down. And so that's what dreams are. And it's like the echoes of things that we were doing earlier in the day. And these ultimately end up being illusions. So he gives the example of, well, first, like, you know, dogs dream and they.

They think they're chasing the rabbit, and they move their limbs while they're sleeping. And then he gets to. People could imagine you're on the chamber pot and you could piss the bed. And then he moves to wet dreams and he goes on for quite a while about wet dreams. So this is where I get to line 1050, where he actually generalizes about love or introduces the concept of love from wet Dreams. He's just finished talking about wet dreams. So love itself is going to be another kind of illusion. Your love's not around for a change. This is 1052, book four, page 151.

Your love's not around for a change. But still her image is and her sweet name echoes in your ears. But we ought to flee these shadows and scare off the food of love and turn our thoughts to another. Shooting the juice into any available body, not holding it all in for a single lover, saving up for ourselves. Sure, pain and sorrow. If you feed the sore, it'll put down roots and fester and be blister over and drive you mad with trouble. Better write off the old wounds and with new business, stroll after a street strolling trollop and cure yourself.

Shift your thoughts to another while you still can. So that's his introduction of love. Basically, that love is a snare.

55:07 Wes: The man who shuns love can enjoy sex still more, for the goods come with no penalty.

55:14 Seth: What is the point of bringing this up?

55:16 Dylan: It's Mark's favorite part.

55:17 Mark: No, because what would be the reason that you'd want to stay alive? It's not because I think after I die I'm going to be in hell and I'm in pain. No, it's because there are projects, there are relationships that I would be sad. It would be objectively a bad thing if that were be snuffed out. It's not just that I would miss my wife if she died or she would miss me if I died. I'm saying the way that love feels is. Is that it is a creation in itself that is worthy of existing. And it is horrible to think that at some point that's going to end by death.

55:55 Wes: But the argument is that you can actually lose those things because there's no longer a you at the point where you die to have lost them.

56:03 Mark: Seth asked why I brought this up and I think that essential to how we make meaning out of the world is through our relationships with other people. Love is a primary thing. And so love is a direct point of attack for Lucretius, who wants to hold this view that the good of human beings is not social, it is individual, it is avoiding pain. And so he has to dis love.

56:24 Wes: So for Epicurus, friendship will be the highest good. And we'll get to that in our Epicurus episode. So it's not like human relationships in general that he's dissing, it's just romantic ones.

56:35 Dylan: He clearly is combining erotic relations as love. And I don't know if there's a difference in those terms in the Latin or not. He's not considering the relationship that one would have with their lover as being one of friendship or having any of the qualities that a friendship would have.

56:54 Wes: So, for instance. But from the lovely and fresh human face, the body feeds on nothing but those slight images, poor little hopes that are lost in the wind. He's talking about what happens in romantic relationships, which is that being in love phase passes and leads to disappointment. And the things that led us into it might seem at some point kind of delusional. The idea that another person can be my all, someone to whom I should devote my entire life or is perfect. We tend to overvalue the people, as Freud would put it. We overvalue the people that we've fallen in love with.

I think even Lucretius says this. We minimize their faults. Oh yeah, he has that whole awesome section where he talks about the way we minimize the faults of lovers. This is around 11:50. She's black as soot, honey tan, she never washes. Casual cat eyed like Pallas. So all these ways in which we take the negative traits of someone and turn them into something positive. And so I think there is something to that, right? There is something about erotic relationships which at a certain point a kind of realism has to set in after the initial honeymoon period.

58:11 Mark: He's casting it as love is a delusion, right? Lovers are fooled by Venus and her shadows. So it's kind of like he compares it to if you're thirsty and you drink something, then your thirst is quenched. But the way that love happens is, you know, you have sex and you just immediately you want it again. They long to attain, they don't know what and can't find any trick to master this disease. They waver and they pine away from the hidden wound. So basically it's what was being described in Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium is that we want this union with another person. We can't get the union. And so there's something inherently self defeating about erotic love.

58:50 Wes: Merger, right. Going back to Kristevin. Separation, individuation. The attempt at merger is unrealistic. The attempt to find one's completeness in someone is unrealistic. I think that's the aspect of love that he's criticizing.

59:05 Mark: You were alluding before to. So I can't remember what episode it was where it was like nobody actually has sex with another person. You only have sex with your image of another person. What was that?

59:14 Dylan: Is that Lacan?

59:15 Mark: That was some kind of Freudian thing.

59:17 Wes: That's a Lacan thing. That's from Vertigo.

59:20 Mark: Okay. In our Vertigo discussion we were talking about that. So, yes, there are definitely these negative ways to cast this. Lucretius himself earlier on says kind of, why would civilization get together in the first place? Romantic entanglements are kind of a prime initial way that people would get together and start a society. So he's giving this. You know, we see versions of this in Locke.

59:41 Wes: This is closest to Rousseau.

59:43 Mark: Yeah. He basically spells out the Social Contract.

59:45 Wes: Yeah.

59:46 Mark: Which I think is so freaking awesome in this far back in history.

59:50 Wes: But then goes on to proceed to say how society sucks. I mean, to say how it doesn't solve our problems.

59:55 Mark: And I would emphasize that aspect of Venus as being a fundamentally thing that adds fullness and meaning to our lives and not something that is merely an illusion and we should just have calm friendships instead. But we could take that up in another episode. We probably have discussed that in past episodes. We have Erich Fromm on what healthy love is versus unhealthy love. And probably he would have something to say about this. But yes, I'm glad you pointed out, Wes. So we don't have full works of Epicurus left. Lucretius is cribbing largely from this, what, 37 volume physics by Epicurus that we no longer have any of. Is that right? 35 or 37 volumes, according to the Plato code of the Stanford Encyclopedia.

1:00:37 Wes: Yes. Not having a girlfriend. Epicurus was a prolific writer. Only to see it all, almost all of it gone, which is very fitting. Right, because that's Epicurus's point. All of this stuff, you know, all of the work we do is going to vanish anyway. We're not going to become immortal by becoming famous, but we do have fragments

1:00:58 Mark: of him in other people's works. We're going to do another Epicurus episode where we're actually giving the words of Epicurus as they've been quoted by other people, just like we had to do with Parmenides and with some other folks like that. So we're not going to do that right away, but it'll be within the next six episodes. We'll certainly get that in there. So we'll get, I think, hopefully back to more of this talk of his ethics and how it compares to stoicism and other stuff. You know, it's not like the Stoics didn't write about physics as well.

It's just that we don't have a work like Lucretius's that I know of that lays out the Stoic physics in detail like that. And maybe there is one. And I just. It's not as interesting to people. I don't. I don't know. I found this surprisingly interesting. And given that he's working in the general area of what mechanistic science eventually came down on, we can draw those connections between having a mechanistic, naturalistic view of nature and what the ethics is supposed to be very much like we can.

1:01:58 Unknown speaker: Now.

1:01:58 Mark: You might think that once you take God out of the universe, then it becomes meaningless and you might as well kill yourself. Well, Lucretius doesn't quite say that. So where does meaning come from for him, I guess is the last question.

1:02:10 Wes: I mean, this is something I brought up on our preliminary discussions. For Epicurus and Lucretius, these naturalism and naturalistic scientific explanations of the world are supposed to be relief, right? They're supposed to help make us happy, presumably help us fashion meaning. But the way they've been treated traditionally is that they seem to undermine, or it was thought that because they undermine religion, they also undermine public mores. They underline social cohesion within a society, they lead to nihilism, they prevent people from finding meaning. So it is a unique kind of position to say, oh, reducing everything to atoms and a lack of souls and all that stuff is somehow going to help make us happy. It's something that requires some sort of defense, which is not given in this book.

1:03:02 Mark: I mean, it goes with my objection to Stoicism as saying, there is a meeting that you should be pursuing objectively. And, like, that's too much pressure for me. I don't like that. So I would rather have this kind of thing that's just like, no, we're going to die. And we have the joys that we can generate from ourselves and the ways that we act as an animal to play with, and that's what we got. We can still pursue high culture and do poetry and do all sorts of wonderful things, but don't get too high and mighty about what the universe expects from you. The gods are not looking down and saying, you better do this or I'm going to you up.

1:03:36 Wes: But I think there's also something supposed to be ethically salutary about seeing oneself as continuous with the natural order and not having this kind of great pathos of distance that human beings are radically Separate from nature, which is represented in so many different ways.

1:03:55 Seth: Right.

1:03:55 Wes: It's, you know, through immateriality of the soul or the earth being at the center of the universe and so on. What are the ethical consequences of saying that? In fact, no, we are also animals, we are creatures. We are created by these deterministic forces outside of us, which by the way, Lucretius does emphasize. He emphasizes the free will on one hand, but he also points to the fact that we are part of the natural order and so affected by things. We. That whole stimulus response thing that we talked about where some stimulus comes in and then we respond to it and that creates a kind of ambiguity where we are these at Lucretius account, there's some capacity for freedom, but we're also determined and there are real ethical consequences to that.

Life is not just about did I conform to some societal standard, to some religious creed or to some set of laws outside of me? Ethics becomes more about one's own self determination. I think you could do an existentialist reading of this, in other words, is what I'm arguing.

1:05:04 Dylan: I really want to keep talking about some of these things because I think this is getting into a really interesting sweet spot. But I can't start doing that now.

1:05:15 Mark: Do you have any closing thoughts?

1:05:17 Dylan: I had not read it in a long time. I really enjoyed reading it again. I also who can't more highly recommend. Just as a pleasure to read, especially if you love books and you like a good story. The Swerve by Wes mentioned earlier by Stephen Greenblatt is just such a pleasant book to read. It has a nice chapter section about Epicurus in it, but has lots of other interesting history and presentation of the motion of thought, you know, intellectual history over the past 2,000 years that bears directly on the themes that we've been reading in this book.

1:05:58 Wes: Yeah, and some very good in the final two chapters. I think it is really interesting. Detailed reflections on the profound effect Lucretius had on modern thought and ultimately early modern philosophy, Montaigne and Shakespeare. And then there's Gassendi, a scientist who wrote A defense of Lucretius. Had an enormous impact. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the scientific revolution was nudged along by this.

1:06:29 Mark: Next time we are scheduled to read some essays on aesthetics from Johann Gottfried von Herder. We'll post those specifically on partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming. Hey, well, thanks everybody for getting through this. This is a good one. It was a long one. Why don't you chime in on our Facebook page or on the blog post accompanying this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com or follow us on Twitter or email us directly@peltiallyexaminedlife.com our closing song is another one from my new album, Mark Lint's Dry Folk. It is available to hear in full for free at marklint.bandcamp.com or I have CDs in hand.

You can order one at partiallyexaminedlife.com store along with the partially examined life 2019 calendar, the new tutoring service that I'm now offering, and many other things. The song is called Came Round. I thought it was appropriate given the discussion of love in Lucretius at the end of this episode. Thanks everybody and good night.

1:07:27 Seth: Good night.

1:07:28 Dylan: Good night.

1:07:37 Unknown speaker: You came round I saw your shoes you came round and I felt used you came round I don't know when you came round and stole my pen.

1:08:13 Mark: You made me up to listen I hope you weren't enough

1:08:21 Wes: I heard you

1:08:22 Mark: out I didn't buy it you feel throughout.

1:08:31 Wes: The

1:08:34 Unknown speaker: you came round to get your stuff you came round you'd have enough.

1:08:53 Mark: You made me up to listen up you did didn't hear me

1:09:00 Unknown speaker: we could

1:09:01 Mark: not want for real us we couldn't last.

1:09:14 Unknown speaker: If you're feeling it at all you will not miss my call if you're feeling you're alone you've got to listen for my tone if I'm away I'm dreaming of you I'm living me through believing it's true I'm seeking nothing and I'm finding it I often face the fact that I'm okay but I miss you every day and the hold you've got upon me in a smoky kind of way it's been years and years and they dragged on so slow when I'm alien and angry and I will not let you go when you enter in my brain and start kicking things around I feel lost and tossed and lonely and I cannot feel the sound.

It's amazing that you're ended it's amazing you existed it's incredible I think of you much more than you insisted and wherever you are now you should detect what I allow. There's an arrow point in front me poking right out through my brow and the beam that it projects passes over and infects a stream of inspiration Intermittent and complex pieces of my soul blasted out of this black hole astronomical but finite and what's left is what you stole and I give you the last word. If you believe one thing you heard. And the next time you come round, I will dismiss you as absurd as you did me.

1:10:51 Mark: You made me up to listen up. You weren't enough. I see you sing, not listening. Get over it.

1:11:08 Unknown speaker: You came round. I smelled your breath. You came round. I felt my death.