Ep. 264: Plato’s “Timaeus” on Cosmology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 264 is something like, how is nature put together? We're reading Plato's dialogue Timaeus, probably written around 360 BCE. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, unable to quite stabilize the wandering revolutions within me, even with my regular harmony and rhythm.

0:33 Wes: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Wes Alwan, persuaded by necessity. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:40 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, desperately seeking the sixth Platonic solid in Portland, Oregon.

0:47 Mark: Whoa.

0:48 Wes: Which turns out to be Susan. That's a solid 80s movie reference.

0:56 Mark: And Seth is caught with no power in a snowstorm. So he did suffer through this dialogue. Well, that's the way he described it, but yet does not get the payoff,

1:05 Dylan: only to be ungratified by no recording.

1:08 Mark: Well, I knew what this was coming into it. I wouldn't have liked this had I read it a dozen years ago, but I kind of enjoyed it, you know, after doing Parmenides and the Parmenides and things. What did you folks think?

1:21 Dylan: So it was probably the third time I read most of it. The other two times I had read, I guess, selections, big selections of it. I confess that I found it more than most dialogues and most things we read, more uninteresting in itself than it was reflecting on it as a whole, especially once I got deep into Timaeus speeches. I find it tiresome after a while, honestly, in a way that I don't usually, and maybe that's almost surely just me, but that was my personal experience with it when I was reading the secondary literature. I found, yeah, I was able to get my head around it.

1:56 Mark: So it's an ancient cosmology, so you might think that this is all obsolete. Why are we even reading this? But it's kind of a spiritual successor to our Leibniz theodicy episode. It's a lot of the same kind of point of view of how the world is. It's an optimally created world. And what does that mean in terms of physics and biology and everything else? Our relationship to the universe.

2:17 Dylan: That's exactly right. Like a lot of Platonic dialogues, it just is so, so detailed. And you have to sort of do the two things of paying attention to the details within. Ext out, like sort of, well, what's going on here? Kind of thing. And my own experience was I find it a little more tiresome than usual. Part of that might be my experience with the Leibniz. Maybe I'm just getting tired of forms and I just like I'm done with forms and that's where I'm at. But we'll see.

2:42 Mark: What's your history with this, Wes?

2:44 Wes: I must have read it at St. John's but I don't remember. I really don't have any memory of it. I mean, I have memories of it being talked about, the receptacle and all that stuff, but this might as well have been the first time reading it. I enjoyed it up to. It's about 100 pages, right?

3:01 Mark: Yeah. And we didn't need to read 100 pages to get the gist.

3:04 Wes: I thought it was pretty delightful in the first 50 something maybe pages. It's when it starts getting into the absurd descriptions of things like taste, how taste works. It becomes a bit of a slog through that stuff.

3:19 Mark: Did you know fire burns you because of the pointy triangular molecules? It's true.

3:24 Wes: Which is cool. I mean, the whole atomism that's being introduced here. I thought this started with Epicurus or Democritus. I'm thinking of Epicurus because of the Lucretian form of atomism where you get these invisible entities that explain the world, the macroscopic world, in terms of their spatiotemporal microstructure. So although it turns out to be all triangles here and I guess squares,

3:49 Dylan: it's a mathematical atomism, which is interesting in and of itself. Right. It's not a physical atomism.

3:55 Wes: Well, the extent to which it's physical is something we can discuss. Come up with the receptacle as well.

4:00 Dylan: Yeah, sure.

4:01 Wes: But yeah, so I thought, wow, cool. Plato did this before Epicurus and Lucretius. Plato is an atomist of sorts. And his atomism actually might help us understand something about the relationship between his forms and the tangible universe. It might help us understand participation, for instance. So there's a lot of interesting metaphysical stuff going on here and a lot about the nature of scientific explanation that's really interesting. And then it's kind of delightful on its face. It's just a piece of literature. It's fun in many ways. But like you and I know Seth felt this way too. I think it's in the second half when you get all these detailed descriptions that you know are wrong. So it's like, oh yeah, is that the way taste works?

4:46 Mark: You just start skimming. It's fine. Well, let's get some of the broad strokes of the cosmology out there. What is this Based on. Because he says that you can have certain knowledge only of eternal things. You can only have probabilistic knowledge of things that are changing. So this whole cosmology, the description of the world, it's probable, it's a reasonable explanation, but it leaves open the idea that you could do scientific experimentation or future reasoning and revise these particular accounts of taste and all these details. But the principles behind it, the fact that the world is ordered, that it operates according to principles, as if it were copied from something eternal, I think you can know that a priori.

You can know that without checking. He just says it's blasphemous to think that the world is bad. And so very much like Leibniz, if the world is good, we see order in the world. In fact, one of the final practical conclusions, one of the reasons we were given the power of reasoning and all this in the first place, is to observe the motions of the stars. And so observing order in the motions of the stars and other places, of course, in nature, is one of the things that gives us this clue that, yes, actually the world is ordered, it is good, it will be constructed in a way that is as optimal as possible.

It is the best possible world. Which doesn't mean things don't go wrong and that we don't have diseases and things, but we can explain why we would have diseases, why these things we would go wrong with us sort of as byproducts of a basically good design by what he calls a craftsman, the demiurgos. The demiurge, it's often translated as. Which apparently is not him throwing away the ancient Greek gods, because he says, we've got this craftsman that was the ultimate source of creation, but he created all the gods in probably the way that you learned growing up.

And they did the hard work of actually making individual organisms. And so maybe they're the ones that are at fault for some of the laws, some of the things that come out of this. So it's a subtle movement toward monotheism that of course, the Christian commentators were very happy to jump on. But I think technically in not completely heretical to traditional Greek religion.

6:53 Wes: So I think part of the comparison to Leibniz and theodicy that's most interesting to me is the relationship between necessity and what is called intelligence here. Because there are limits to what the demiurge can do. Just because there are implications. Once you set out on the project of creating a tangible universe, something that can be felt and something that can be seen, there are certain implications to that One of the implications would be that you need fire as an element in order for things to be seen. You need earth as an element in order for things to be touched.

And then ultimately, the atomism is the ultimate first, what he calls the receptacle. And then ultimately atomism will amount to the sorts of constraints faced by the demiurge. So the demiurge can say, I want this universe to be beautiful and good and all of that stuff. But as Timaeus puts it, what the demiurge does is it uses intelligence to persuade necessity and to nudge it in the direction of what is good and beautiful. But it can simply say, oh, we're not going to have atoms and elements, we're going to do something else. That's not possible.

8:05 Dylan: One thing that wasn't completely clear to me in terms of constraints was the way in which the universe, being good was a constraint or not like that the craftsman would be able to do anything different. Or is this a conceit on the part of Plato that because the universe is beautiful and it's created by irrational force, that's a constraint? There's nothing else that could be than that. And I wasn't sure if that rose to the level of the kind of constraint on the demiurge's actions or not, whether the demiurge had a choice about whether or not the universe was good or not or beautiful or not.

Because that doesn't even seem to be like, considered as a choice. There's no contemplation of like a devil or devilish action that you get in Descartes metaphysics. There's no notion that the demiurge would create anything that wasn't beautiful, because it seems like the universe is going to be beautiful and it's going to have intelligence, and therefore whatever the demiurge creates is out of that intelligence.

9:05 Wes: Yeah, we get no argument for those assumptions. We simply assume that the universe is beautiful and we assume that the demiurge is good. And those assumptions will actually help get us to several other important conclusions. Right. One of which is that the demiurge is going to create something beautiful and is good at what he does, then his model is going to itself not be something that is a created being. His model, the thing he models the created universe after, will have to be something eternal. So maybe we can go back and look at those initial assumptions.

9:42 Mark: You're pointing out some good differences between the more traditional, recognizable view of a God that we saw in Leibniz and what we see here. I mean, for one thing, sort of a technical matter played. Plato talks about Plato through the character of Timaeus. Let's put it this way. So usually it's Socrates that's talking all the time, or in some of the other dialogues he's used Gorgias or some historical figure. Timaeus to our knowledge, is not a historical figure. And Socrates is in this dialogue, but hardly says anything, just a little bit at the beginning.

This is almost all a monologue by this Timaeus character probably. I read this Robin Waterfield Translation 2008 and Waterfield posits in the introduction that Socrates has been established as a character that doesn't care a lot about these matters, about natural philosophy. So it's just not in Socrates character to want to go on and on about this. So it's Plato's philosophy, but it's in the mouth of this fictional character, Timaeus. So one of the things he says is like, would a universe be better if it was self sufficient or would it need the craftsman, the God, to reach in and fiddle with stuff constantly?

And so that was part of Leibniz's picture and you know, part of a significant portion of the theologians is that God is required at every moment to sustain the universe, but is the active

10:54 Dylan: force of goodness and holding it together. And the craftsman is not that.

10:57 Mark: Yep, yep. So this is more like a deist picture of the craftsman spun this out, created these other gods, created systems. So there are principles that are eternal, that run throughout. And one of these principles is that everything tends toward the good. And we already knew that from Plato's philosophy. Nobody chooses the bad. And so we're actually going to get really specific and biological in like, why do people then choose pleasure over the kind of thing that we are considering Talking about Aristotle and talking Locke. What are other things about the demiurge that make him different?

I don't know that there's a concern here with free will at all. You don't even ask the question, could the demiurge have chosen to create something poorly? Like. No, Everything does what its nature tells it to. And so the demiurge's nature is to create the best possible thing. And then Wes, you mentioned the other thing that's really weird here about this is that again, the whole universe is changing. We can only know about it in a probabilistic way. We can't be absolutely certain, but there is something that the universe is copied off of, which is, I guess, the forms.

He doesn't really say what this source is, other than it is the Eternal, the good.

12:04 Wes: I thought at a certain point we do get explicitly that the source is the forms, but maybe I was just reading into it.

12:10 Mark: Apparently he mentions the forms later in the dialogue, but like it's not right there. And I wrote forms in big letters right at the top. When he brings this up in the

12:17 Wes: first place, I think when we get to the receptacle, right, the forms are the father and the receptacle is the mother, and then the child is the created world, the world of becoming. But yeah, the way Timaeus starts out is he gives us a set of assumptions and one of them is that there's this important distinction between being and becoming. Being being the stable fixed world that we usually associate with the forms that is accessible to reason and that can be a grounds for knowledge of things and then the world of becoming, which is ever changing and not fixed, and therefore can only be a grounds for belief based on sensations. So up front we get Plato's anti naturalistic bent. Right from the beginning. He's not so keen on scientific knowledge as we conceive of it. It doesn't seem a possible source of knowledge because becoming means that everything is changing.

13:16 Dylan: I mean, that's a concise way to understand that. Empiricism is not a solution for Plato at all. You don't really get to know the world empirically.

13:24 Mark: I'm not totally sure about that. You just can't know with certainty.

13:27 Wes: He's going to apply that distinction to this very account and say, hey, the story that I'm telling is a likely story because because it is about the creation of the world of becoming and about this world. We cannot have certain demonstrative knowledge, which is another way of saying, by the way, you know, scientific knowledge isn't mathematical, it's not demonstrative in the sense that we can start from axioms and then derive our conclusions with certainty. What we're doing is modeling. What we're doing is coming up with explanations that satisfy the appearances, but it's a different sort of thing. So despite the anti naturalistic bent, you're getting some thoughts about what scientific inquiry genuinely is. And it has to be distinct from mathematical reasoning, even if mathematics is important.

14:12 Dylan: What we're talking about is reminding me about the role of opinion, especially for Socrates, and the way it works out in a lot of the other dialogues where opinion is acting something like the empirical fodder through which you would then come to the full conclusion about something. And so you see that reflected in Timaeus with the idea that the world of perception, the world of opinion is created and mediated by all these things that allow us to have senses. And then they have a connection that is to be discovered by the intellect to the eternal forms, the eternal world.

I guess you see that reflected back. Not as naturalistic a way, in the sense of scientific inquiry as you do in sort of moral kinds of things. Where Socrates is going through and opinion and going back and forth, back and forth on it, trying to figure out what is the underlying aspect, or at least has the appearance of trying to figure that out. What you were just saying, Wes, that the structure was revealing something about scientific method. I want to hear more about that because it didn't feel that way when I was reading it. It felt much more constructed and not so much out of the activity of someone who was looking at and revising how the world works.

15:26 Wes: I was just thinking about the difference between demonstrative mathematical knowledge and empirical knowledge as we conceive of it. So what Plato is thinking of as a bug, we kind of think of as a feature. And I think Plato would be able to admit that there's evidence in the Timaeus that he could admit that and that he's sort of onto the possibility of scientific knowledge. And of course, Aristotle, right, does a lot with this dialogue, his criticisms. He draws on the Timaeus in many, many different works. He's drawing on the Timaeus because he thinks he sees in it the sort of basis for his theory of prime matter, for instance.

But just going back to the sense of this distinction between mathematical knowledge of stable things or knowledge of the forms. If you want to say that we can have moral knowledge, which is like mathematical knowledge, what we're doing with science can never be like that. Of course it's based on empirical observation. You could call it induction if you wanted. But another way to look at it is just that you're model building. And I think that's the likely story that makes sense.

16:28 Dylan: I guess it's falling a little bit flat. Maybe I'm just asking. Too much of it is you have the model building where you're starting from the lower level and working up. You have your triangles and your right angles. And talking about how physical manifestations are a reflection of those features, as Mark mentioned earlier, it sounds kind of silly. The pointiness is related to the fire and stuff like that. Maybe it's just that Plato seems too much like a string theorist at this point, where he's starting from the bottom and the connection to actual physical phenomena is just left laying there.

17:04 Wes: The Idea of experimentation is absent.

17:08 Mark: Yes, he sure does get detailed about the biology in a way that I think would be impossible if he hadn't inherited this. I actually feel like we could read Galen or something now. I wouldn't be completely weird. To me, while his theory is about what the liver does. So the liver, when you drink too much, when you indulge, it, warns you, it lets out this bile and gets inflamed to kind of alert you, to put you right. Like, this is kind of a weird theory, but it's certainly based on the observations of his day. And they don't have exactly the experimental method.

Aristotle didn't either, but it's certainly still paying attention to nature. Again, there are three parts of this dialogue. Once it gets going, once Timaeus starts to talk creations of the intelligence, how the cosmos was created, and then what happens just because of necessity, and then how the two of those interact together. So most of the fun stuff was in this first part. The stuff out of necessity includes the stuff about the receptacle that we'll get to. And then the third part was pretty much all biology. So once you're talking about necessity, that is a thing that we can not necessarily research and experiment on, but we learn about by doing what corresponded for these guys to empirical science.

18:16 Wes: So, yeah, it's a teleological explanation, right? So the intelligence part of this is the teleological explanation. And the necessity part is what we're more akin to thinking of as being what natural scientific explanation is and ought to be. You know, you have atoms and they do their thing, and we can explain other phenomena in terms of them. And for Plato, that necessity thing is not enough. And part of the problem, right? It's difficult to see how natural selection might work. It's difficult to see how organisms could be so well put together and have all these functions, things they do, and things that seem to serve a purpose simply by random chance.

Although there is a Presocratic Empedocles, I think, to whom Timaeus makes reference in this, who thought that had a kind of weird version of natural selection, where body parts are kind of randomly scattered about and they combine in random ways until you get the right forms, forms that work. It's the random part, the mutation part, and. And then the selection part. It's hard to conceive of that naturalistically. And so that's why we get a. What Timaeus calls the persuasion of necessity. We get the teleological explanation grafted onto the more naturalistic explanation, so that, yes, everything is made out of atoms and basic elements, but in and of themselves, they couldn't have given us the universe that we have, including biological forms.

For that we need intelligence, we need purpose, we need something to order things into what is good and beautiful.

19:49 Dylan: And part of that is going to be that the pieces of the universe have no internal action to them. They can be arranged and they have rules of necessity for how they can be arranged. You can only put a triangle together in so many ways. There's only so many angles, there's constraints there, but they don't have any internal action.

20:09 Wes: Well, they do tend to gravitate to certain parts of the universe and therefore brush up against each other.

20:15 Mark: So this is one of the things that I had read in the Stanford Encyclopedia article that was the difference between Plato and Aristotle, that for Aristotle you have the directionality, the teleology coming from within the organism. Right? The forms are embedded in the thing. So once you have this organism set up, you know, once you've set up a system, then its internal logic. So I'm interpreting you, Dylan, as saying that like this person who wrote the Stanford article, that the motivations, the teleology has to be transcendent of those things. That it's imposing an order on matter which is in itself formless and random and wandering.

20:50 Wes: It's top down rather than bottom up or imminent. Right. It's otherworldly rather than imminent.

20:55 Dylan: Yes, that's what the craftsman is.

20:57 Mark: I get that in the action of the craftsman. But once the craftsman has then set up the basic principles, set up the matter set up the universe created all these other gods who are then going to, using his directions, put human beings together. You know, that whole idea of the universe is self sufficient, that it's no longer transcendental. Once the universe is set up, once individual systems within the universe are set up, they are self propelling. That's how these previously transcendent principles of order get baked into the things of creation. If we're going to take Plato's word that it's not that the craftsman has to intervene all over the place, like Leibniz thought, you know, it just spins it like a top and it keeps going, that there really is action within systems. Contrary to what you just said, Dylan.

21:41 Dylan: Well, I guess there's a hair to be split here, right? In the role of the generation of the things and then their continual motion. So I guess I had in particular in mind evolution, where your evolutionary account, the very transformation of one being into another, that deep process of becoming, is driven by the constituents themselves, whereas you have whatever each individual entity is going to be. It seems to me the reason you wouldn't have an evolutionary account in this is that you have the craftsman generating the entities in the world or the entities that generate the entities in the world.

And those entities then go about doing their thing, trying to achieve their teleological ends, or getting thwarted in that in one way or another. If it was an evolutionary account, you would have self assembly of the triangles together because of the inherent character of the triangles. That would then. And you wouldn't need a craftsman. I mean, I guess that's what it comes down to is you wouldn't need a craftsman to do it well, right,

22:43 Mark: And I forgot about the role of soul in this when I said order is baked into these systems. It is literally baked in by the imposition of soul. That his soul is something that the craftsman created. It is blended together out of identity, difference and substance. And we could get into more of the quotes of what that means. But it's taking the uncuttable eternal stuff and combining it with this chaotic stuff that was floating around. The principle of its partition and bonding was rational proportionality. It circles back on itself. So its soul has a nature of rotating, just like the planets going around.

And the craftsman makes that part of the entire universe. So the entire universe ends up being an organism. It is an organism because it has a soul. And all these individual entities then have souls as well. And soul is sort of throughout the entire sphere and the outside of it. It's a pretty weird account, a very roundabout way of saying, yes, there is still purposive action in every part of this universe, even though. And it's not just a matter of, well, like particles, attract like particles or something like Empedocles would try to say.

23:52 Wes: Part of the reason for putting soul into everything, the explicit reason, right, is just that for the cosmos to be beautiful, it has to be intelligent. To be intelligent, it has to have a soul. Therefore we have to make the cosmos a living being. That's the initial argument. But I think part of the motivation, right, for injecting the soul and intelligence into the nature of things is to help us understand the relationship between subject and object, between knower and what is known or perceiver and what is perceived. Because it turns out that the soul was the thing with its revolutions.

So now I'm talking about particular souls of particular human beings or animals, right, as opposed to the soul of the whole universe. But particularly souls are capable of perception and knowledge by way of these revolutions. That they have in themselves having to do with identity and difference and their receptivity to identity and difference in the world. It's kind of like the motivation for being an idealist. Why do you want to say the world is made of ideas? Or even if you're not an idealist, why do you want to say that formality or structure is a basic part of the universe?

Because that's the only way you can explain how we are in contact.

25:06 Mark: We haven't really situated this. You know, we had the dialogue, the Parmenides, which is a mid period dialogue, it is generally thought, which criticizes the theory of forms. But here we seem to have like forms, a go go. That is what the universe is based on. And so there's some scholarly debate about maybe this was actually a mid period dialogue. But I guess the current consensus, supported by these stylistic analyses that people have done, is that this is a later dialogue, like back in the Republic, which is another mid period dialogue. And in fact the way that this dramatically is set up is it's like, oh, the previous day Socrates just gave, I guess not the same speech, but a shortened version of the Republic.

He laid down his politics. And these subsequent speeches, which the Timaeus is this dialogue. And the Critias was supposed to be a subsequent dialogue that's only partly done. They were kind of go through like from nature to more about society. The Critias is specifically about Atlantis, sort of this ideal, the Republic, but it was a historically real thing, Atlantis. And I don't remember what Hermocrates, the third person, was supposed to be talking about, but it wasn't actually written to our knowledge. So this is all supposed to be an ethical story that's kind of a new version, more advanced way of thinking about it than was in the Republic.

And in the Republic you had the forms, the forms are the things that are real. Everything else is just the shadows on the wall. They're just insubstantial. There really is nothing for science to study because it really just is images and it's just, it just flits around. Whereas if you say the universe is not merely an image, but it's a model, it's a thing, it is a created being, it is a living, it's a life form in fact. And he asks, you know, do these elements, the air, fire, water, earth, do they have quiddity? Do they have thingness? Are they real things in themselves or are they just our perceptions of them?

Because, you know, either there's the world out there of form and then there's the shadows of the cave. There would be nothing in between. But in this dialogue, he creates kind of like Kant's phenomenal world. It's not merely a matter of our whim. It's not just the vagaries of our perception, but it's a real world that can be investigated, that's in between the two. This is a major move for Plato

27:19 Wes: away from the republic because what happens is, I guess Socrates is given a republic like speech, which he gives a little bit of a recap of. And then he says, you know, to them, I'm going to send you away with an assignment as your assignment. He puts it in different ways, but I want you to give me a commentary on what I said, or I want you, because you, Timaeus in particular, are both a philosopher. You have both philosophical and statesmanlike qualities to your character. I want you to bring this to life. This is going to be your way of paying me back.

I want. That was a very abstract account that I gave so you guys can bring it to light. And Critias says, yep, we can do that, but we're going to go way back. We're going to start by talking about how Athens kind of was a republic at one point. It was outstandingly well governed by this, you know, the noblest and most heroic race who ever lived. And then there's that count of the reason it was lost was because of this conflict with Atlantis and then the natural disasters that ended up wiping out both civilizations. And then they go back after that account.

He says, you know, I've just kind of given a brief summary of all that stuff to tell you the full story. We got to talk about the creation of the universe. It's absurd, it's funny, it's absurd. But that's the way all of this is set up. We're going to bring your republic to life. But to do that, we got to talk about the creation of the universe and lead it back to this kind of historical myth about how Athens really was kind of the perfect city. So apparently the two are related. Right? There's a story to be told that we never get, connecting the creation of the universe to Athens coming about, we

28:56 Mark: do get some connective tissue. This is not purely a work of cosmology, that it gets to ethics by the end when you're talking about human biology. And just like in Locke's account, we've got this pleasure and pain and we sort of got this internal guidance system to keep us healthy and doing the right thing. In other words, in Balance, you know, as Plato always thinks about it, which for Plato means that the rational part of us is in control of the spirited part of us and the appetitive part of us. And so we can see in the construction of the human being biologically how, yes, okay, we have the brain and we start out all out of control when we're infants and we grow up and we, through proper education, we are taught to tamp down.

I mean, of course we need these other parts of us to keep us alive. But if you let the stomach run the show, then you're just going to be running around eating all the time. You're going to be gluttonous, you're going to have vice that way. So it ends up being by paying attention to the way that we are constructed, then you put your values in accord with that. Make your own behavior, your own regulation of yourself as an imitation of the way that the universe itself is structured in its tendency toward the good and it's being ruled by intelligence.

And that is how you're going to live the best possible life. That's what virtue is going to be

30:18 Dylan: by definition, to be your own craftsman.

30:20 Wes: I think this is kind of an apology for becoming right. Instead of taking the usual antithetical stance towards becoming, this is kind of an apology.

30:29 Mark: You could ask, what is the best possible world? Well, the best possible world, it's going to be a model of the form, but it can't just be the form.

30:38 Wes: Exactly. That's what I was trying to get at.

30:40 Mark: Like, that's not a world at all. So there's just by the necessity of embodiment of physicality, you're going to have all these things that turn up being suboptimal for us, and that is his. Again, connecting this to Leibniz, we had a lot of focus on the problem of evil. The way out for Leibniz is going to be free will, and it's all our fault. Well, there's something comparable to that here in that it's not the craftsman that introduced all these flaws. Once the craftsman sets up things according to the best possible principles, when you're optimizing things in the way that the universe actually is made up, we're going to have weaknesses, we're becoming, so we're going to grow old and die.

31:16 Wes: This is the optimal of suboptimal options.

31:22 Dylan: Yeah. So did you guys feel like the path towards mistakes and the path towards suboptimality was clarified any other way than just that kind of what you just said? Well, you made Something physical. So therefore, it's just not going to work very well. It's a model, so it's a shadow of the thing. What does that mean? That at least means that there's some other force that's not being talked about that leads to that suboptimality. What is the mistake that's being made in the fabrication that leads to that? Is it in the things themselves, the parts themselves? Or is it just that the triangles, they get assembled. Oh, they're not quite a right triangle. And so it all kind of cascades. I mean.

32:00 Wes: I mean, it begins with the world. Being cannot be a created world. So there is no way to create that. Once you say it can be created, you are talking about a world of becoming. You know, that's subject to all the classic flaws involved in the world of becoming.

32:16 Dylan: I guess what I'm complaining about is all of that characteristic of decay. Those are just ingrained features into the being of becoming. This is the character of becoming, is that it makes mistakes. And so I guess, on the face of it, I find it just. I guess it's no less satisfying than all the other ways in which you shoehorn contingency into a universe whose metaphysics is founded on perfection. You have to toss it in somewhere because you feel like it's manifest that there are mistakes going on. And so in order to be tilted or have any kind of direction towards the perfect, you need to have an account of the mistakes. And so you just toss it in somewhere.

32:56 Mark: I don't think they're mistakes. I think they're compromises. I really like the example he gives about the skull. We need something where the thinking is going on. We need the brain. And ideally, because the brain is out in the world, the whole way he describes people in the first place is like, well, we need legs to move the brain around. Like, that's the way he describes all these individual things. Ideally, we would have as thick a hide as possible around the brain so it would be protected from the world. And so we have the skull. That's nice.

But it also needs to be able to sense things. And so it can't be too thick. And it has to have, like, eyes. It has to have all these holes in it which somebody could then come along and poke a spear through. So that's not great. But it's a compromise between two ideals of being as perceptive as possible and being as protected as possible. And that's the way when you actually embody something. I was thinking about, like, kids drawing your dream house where you just like on a piece of construction paper. And I'm going to have the giant playground over here, but let's have an architect consult the children.

Like, well, you have to have ventilation, right? You're going to have to clean this. Do you really want your house to be so many thousands of square feet when somebody's going to have to clean all of it? Where are you going to put the bathrooms? Once you actually get into the nitty gritty of embodying something, you have to make compromises with what otherwise would be your pure vision.

34:19 Dylan: So I really like that. And the way that you're formulating embodiment is the way in which necessity is the constraint.

34:28 Mark: So it's not flaws. I don't know. What do you think? Does that mean flaws?

34:32 Dylan: Again, this is what I want to understand, right, Is to the extent that it's an embodied model, again, it seems that the embodiment, the way you've just described it, it makes the correspondence between the model and the thing. It's no longer a model. It's not a model that could ever have perfection. We've put all of that uncertainty, all of the contingency into the embodiment. And then necessity is doing a ton of work. You said you put it in terms of compromises. That makes a lot of sense. But then it makes the role of the forms much less interesting. Right, because the role of the forms, they become the shadows on the wall. Now they're the shadows that inform the necessity. The necessity is the real thing, and the shadow that has no real existence are the forms. As far as I can tell, they're not the source of necessity in this case.

35:23 Mark: Yeah, I mean, that is in the part of the dialogue that's on how the two cooperate. So the biology is not in the necessity section. It's in the intelligence plus necessity. So we've got the souls that are in every animal, and the soul is going to make us tend toward the good, et cetera, et cetera. But then we just have the necessity of the soul being embodied and out in the world. And so I don't know that either is a shadow on the wall. I think these are just supposed to be the mama and the papa making the product.

35:49 Dylan: Maybe there's another one of these things like the tripartite soul from the Republic, where you have rationality or intelligence controlling the horses of spiritedness.

36:00 Mark: And did you think when he actually got around to talking about that in biological terms, that we're used to Plato talking, using mythology, like you were just Saying about the horses and the chariot being pulled and some of the horses try to get away. And so you got to have the intellect be like the reins of the chariot and keep them. If I'm remembering that correctly, I like the style that he talks about. We made the stomach. Make sure to keep that well away below the diaphragm. Keep that away from the brain, the heart, the lungs, the things that are most about the spirit, we can put those right smack in the middle.

They're kind of close to the brain. The brain can give him orders. This is not a dry Aristotelian text. Even though he's doing some kind of boring biology. Is this a metaphor? Is he talking literally? Or is the fact that, like, oh, this is just a likely story. This is the best we can do, means he really can kind of be a little unserious about all this. Like, yes, I'm absolutely serious about everything being made according to the best. But these details, I don't know. I'm just gonna spin a tale here. I'm just thinking like Plato putting this in the mouth of this guy who, again, is a experienced statesman and philosopher, but is not necessarily a deep specialist and is just coming up with this at Socrates request.

Not like the thing that he's been doing his dissertation on.

37:20 Wes: Yeah. And calling it a likely story obviously kind of indicate that we are to treat it as a bit of mythology within some underlying truth to get out of it.

37:30 Dylan: It depends on how you interpret likely. Right. You can interpret likely as on the side of, well, this is mythology that is a kind of truth. Or you could interpret it the way you might interpret, I don't know, the standard model as a likely story for the way in which the universe works. Meaning it's likely that it works this way because it makes sense, it fits together, it explains a bunch of stuff. It has consistency.

37:55 Wes: It's a play on words. It's not just about probability. It's like what it's talking about. In the same way that opinions can be in a way alike or attuned to appearances and likenesses, the likely story is contrasted to rational, demonstrative knowledge where nous. Where intellect comes into contact with. With the forms. So this is precisely not that you're

38:18 Dylan: making a really good point, Wes, in it being a play on words and pointing out that calling it a likely story, you're turning like, into an adverb. And you shouldn't be thinking about probabilistic terms like likelihoods and stuff like that. You should be thinking about the way in which it's a model. The way a model is like the thing it's modeled on.

38:39 Wes: This is. Commentators typically draw attention to this, to the ancient Greek. I forget what it is. Muthos maybe. I don't know.

38:46 Mark: Yes, we haven't had an actual quote from here yet and I want to give one before we end this, the first half here. So it's page 31 of my version. It's 41C. He's just talked about how the craftsmen created these other gods and turned over the rest of creation to the other gods. He turned once more to the bowl he'd used previously to mix and blend the soul of the universe. This is some obvious metaphor. Where'd this bowl come from anyway? He poured into it what was left of the ingredients he had used before, mixed them in the same way with the only difference between they were no longer as unfailingly pure as before, but were a grade or two lower in the scale of purity.

Once he had a complete mixture, he divided it up into as many souls as there are stars. And he assigned each soul to a star. And then with each soul mounted on its chariot, so to speak, he showed it the nature of the universe. He told them the laws of their destiny, how it was ordained that the first incarnation they would undergo would be the same for all of them, so none of them would suffer any disadvantage at his hands. And how after he'd planted each of them in the appropriate instrument of time, they were to be born as the most God fearing of creatures.

And he explained that human nature comes in two forms. The superior kind was that which subsequently come to be called male. He then describes this like, all the souls are first put in men. You know, this is very much like a karma, a reincarnation thing. If they don't act as purely, then they'll come back as women or as animals. And he has mythical kind of things, like why some people came back as birds later. Like, clearly this is mythos. This is not merely the most likely story. He's mixing in good guesses at biology with some pretty fanciful stuff here just to make it vivid.

40:24 Wes: No matter how fantastic your model is, it's kind of like the epicycles thing, right? Describing the heavenly motions. Your model can be as fantastic as you like. At some level it can still account for things, even if you're talking about a God taking a bowl and mixing together identity and difference like it's some kind of dough and dolloping them out into portions and all that stuff.

40:48 Dylan: Your soul starter in your refrigerator that you throw in.

40:52 Wes: Yeah, exactly. That can still serve as an explanatory model. So that's one of the fun parts of modeling, is you can create myths and stories and still have them do some sort of explanatory work.

41:04 Mark: Well, I think we've given the broad outlines of the system here. There's a lot more to say, obviously, about I think we need to pull out a lot more quotes to get into, like, what is it to mix identity and difference and create this soul paste? And then the receptacle, which is the thing that matter has to begin, how he thinks that the elements are formed out of these basic geometrical atoms. Like, there's a lot of really weird stuff. So we're going to get into that in part two. Supporters. Go ahead. It's the next thing in your feed. It should be uploaded right now. Go to it.