Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
18. Heraclitus to the Moderns, Determinism, and Democritus's Atoms
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/018-heraclitus-to-the-moderns-determinism-and-democrituss-atoms/

[0:00] Now let's stop here for a second and look over at the reading we hadn't looked at yet. The unity, fewness, and simplicity. The reading that I attached to that. It's on the bottom of page five. It starts. The moderns on the mover. Remember that?

[0:23] Now in the Greek philosophers up to this point, we have maybe four opinions about the mover. And two we found in Heraclitus, one in Empedocles, and one in Anaxagoras. Heraclitus said, "War is the father of all things, and some he has made slaves, and some freedmen, and so on." So that's one thought about the mover, war, right? You have opposites there in the struggle of these opposites, which gives rise to things.

[0:59] Secondly, in choosing fire as the what first cause, he may have been thinking of what the need for a mover, because fire in some ways is not a good guess as a first matter, but it makes a lot of sense as a mover. So if you had to choose between Mother Earth, water, air, and fire, which is the mover, well, fire would seem to be the what the mover. Oh yeah, it makes the water boil.

[1:28] It makes the hot air rise. It changes things, right? Okay. So you have those two opinions that touch upon the mover and Heraclitus. The thing is, before Heraclitus didn't see the mover clearly. Didn't speak about it based on the fragments we have. Then you have Empedocles who introduces love and hate as the movers. Love that brings together, right? The elements. Hate separates them. And then finally, you have Anaxagoras introducing the what?

[1:55] Greater mind as the mover, huh? Okay. So let's look at the first reading here, which is taken from Heisenberg's, actually from his Gifford lectures, huh? But they printed it with the title Physics and Philosophy, but it's the Gifford lectures he gave. And he has one lecture there where he talks about the early Greeks. An interesting one. And he says, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, fire as the basic element is both matter and a moving force.

[2:28] Interesting that he sees that. And we saw that there's a little difficulty in combining the two, because what makes fire a good mover? It's being so hot. Makes it in some ways a bad guess as the first matter, because you're limiting the matter to one quality. And therefore, it makes some sense to separate the mover from the matter, as Empedocles begins to do, right? Where earth, air, fire, and water are more the matter, and love and hate the movers, huh?

[2:55] Although sometimes he has love and hate mixed up with them too. But then you get the Anaxagoras, and they're very separated, right? The greater mind, huh? And matter, huh? Okay. Now notice what Heisenberg goes on to say, we may remark at this point that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word fire by the word energy, and they're somewhat similar things, we can almost repeat the statements word for word from a modern point of view.

[3:24] It's a very striking thing, huh? Energy is in fact the substance of which all elementary particles, all atoms, and therefore all things are made. So with Einstein's equation equals mc squared, right? Huh? You can get mass out of what? Energy, right? So energy is like the matter. But it's also energy is what enables you to do something, right? And therefore, it seems to be like the mover.

[3:50] And energy is that which is moves, huh? Okay. Energy is a substance since its total amount does not change. And the elementary particles can actually be made from this substance, as is seen in the experiments on the creation of elementary particles. You know, in these high energy experiments, now when the particles collide, sometimes you get particles with more mass than the original ones. Well, where does that greater mass or matter come from?

[4:19] From the energy with which they what? Collided, huh? So energy seems to be the matter of which things are made, huh? Energy can be changed into motion, to heat, into light, into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world, huh? So if I want to add this. you'd say energy is the beginning of all things, huh? That's what the physicists are saying.

[4:43] Now, I think got to be careful in that comparison because the energy of the modern physicist is much more what abstract than the fire of Heraclitus. And secondly, the energy of the mathematical physicist appears in the universal equations of modern science. In the equation, something mathematical and abstract. But you see that comparison I make sometimes to the logic and to the even the form of the syllogism.

[5:24] Just take the form of the syllogism. Every B is A. Every C is B. Therefore, every C is A. Now, sometimes Aristotle says that the premises are to the conclusion as the matter. Why does he say that? Well, if you take matter now in the broad sense, not matter in its very concrete sense, but matter in the broad sense, for any parts out of which something is made, can be said to be its matter.

[6:01] Well, you can say the conclusion is made out of the subject C and the predicate A, and the two parts of the conclusion, the subject and the predicate, are already found in the what? Premises, huh? So he gives, in the broad sense of matter, but not the strict sense of matter, the premises are the matter of the what? Conclusion. But now, if you look at what in logic we call the middle term,

[6:31] B there, that's not a part of the conclusion, is it? But B seems to be the what? Mover. It's what brings together A and C, huh? Okay. When I say to give an example there I know this one of my former students an example there, I know this one of my former students. In fact, this man and woman were were good, make a good match, right? So he arranged a party in which everybody there was a married couple, except for these two.

[6:59] So they ended up talking to each other in a week or so. they really didn't get married, and they're married now and have children and so on, right? Okay. Is he a part of the marriage? No, the parts are just a man and woman, right? But he's the instigator, the mover, the one who arranged to bring them together, huh? But notice in the syllogism, I can separate more the aspect which is like matter, and the aspect which is like the what?

[7:24] Mover or maker. Now the universal equations of modern science—I don't know if you can separate the aspect of being mover or matter so well, right? But the universal equations are like the premises of a syllogism insofar as you can, you know, deduce or calculate something from them. But again, you don't really have matter in strict sense here, in a fortiori in mathematics you don't have matter in strict sense.

[7:52] You have neither matter nor motion in mathematics, so you're kind of shadowing those realities. So you got to be careful not to push the comparison too far here between the abstract

[8:08] equations of the mathematician and fire of Heraclitus. Nevertheless, it is remarkable Heisenberg's statement here, isn't it? You know, it's like you know that in a very general way we're saying something like what he said, right? Or he's saying something like what we're saying, and we have that same confusion, right?

[8:31] And that's why the the Marxists like to go back to Heraclitus and to this idea of fire as the beginning of all things, because they're they don't want to separate the matter and mover. Once you start to separate the matter and mover, you're going to move away, ending up with an immaterial mover. You're on the way to God, right? And so you got to you got to go back to the confusion.

[8:52] You see, but the confusion here comes first in our thinking, right? So Heraclitus has not clearly separated the mover and the matter yet in his mind, huh? And of course, in modern science, mathematics doesn't really contain matter or motion, so it lends itself to the same confusion.

[9:19] Now the other thing we met in Heisenberg is that war is the father of all things, huh? And war is a struggle of opposites, huh? Now that's a thought that comes back very much in the moderns. Hegel's dialectical method, huh, is that takes over from Heraclitus, and Marx took it over from what Hegel. But you see it also in Darwin. There, look at the reading from Darwin.

[9:48] All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature, huh? Of course, he's going to see this war as the what source of evolution, huh? And that's why Marx dedicated his work to Darwin, huh? In fact, there's exchange of books and so on, right? Not that Darwin was a Marxist, but there was that similarity of thought. And the second reading here from Darwin: there must be in every case a struggle for existence, huh?

[10:18] Either one individual with another of the same species, or with individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. This is behind the what. Origin of things, huh? Yeah. Now I quote Lenin for his nice, concise ones. In its proper meaning, dialectics in the Marxist sense, which goes back, of course, to Karl Marx and ultimately to Hegel, right? It's a study of the contradictions in the very essence of things.

[10:47] And in materialism and imperial criticism, development of things from matter, right, is the struggle of opposites, right? War is the father of all things, huh?

[11:04] So you can see a certain similarity between the two positions of Heraclitus on the mover and the moderns, huh? Okay Now the next two readings are in comparison with a little bit of. Empedocles. huh

[11:34] And perhaps the most clearest one, the one where Einstein in his sort of history of the main ideas in physics, the book called The Evolution of Physics,

[11:45] he says the great achievements of Newtonian mechanics and all its branches, its striking success in the development of astronomy, the application of its ideas to problems apparently different in unmechanical character. All these things contribute to the belief that it is possible to describe all natural phenomena in terms of simple forces between unalterable objects. Through the two centuries following Galileo's time, such an endeavor, conscious or unconscious, is apparent in nearly all scientific creation.

[12:14] And then gives an interesting quote from Helmholtz, who's a very famous scientist in the middle of the 19th century, and we still reprint his books, right? They're very important. Notice that Helmholtz says, "Finally, therefore, we discover the problem of physical material science to be to refer natural phenomena back to unchangeable what? Instead of saying love and hate, he says unchangeable attractive and repulsive forces, right? Whose intensity depends wholly upon distance.

[12:44] The solubility of this problem is a condition of the complete comprehensibility of nature. Einstein says, "Thank God it isn't, but anyway, it's just limited to that. But it's kind of interesting, right? They're trying to reduce everything to what? Not love and hate, but something like that, attraction and repulsion between unalterable particles, huh? But as a sort of mathematical thing, right? You know, it diminishes inversely as a square and so on.

[13:18] Notice the one from Newton, and Newton, of course, is so famous that the physicists of the 20th century call the physics of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century they call either classical physics, because in the Greeks obviously classical physics or Newtonian physics. That's their common way of speaking, because he's kind of the model for all these things.

[13:42] He says, "I derive from the celestial phenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then, from these forces by other propositions which are also mathematical, I deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea. I wish I could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, right?

[14:03] That's what Einstein was talking about, huh? For I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled, receded from one another. Right? That's the same thought that you have when you get down to Helmholtz, right, in the 19th century, attraction and repulsion.

[14:31] He has no meaning better than Empedocles knows his love and hate. But you have these contrary causes there to bring things together and separate them. Do you see that?

[14:48] Now the passage of Einstein, there are several, and you could take many other scientists who do talk about a greater mind besides Einstein, but Einstein's the most famous, huh? In many places he talks about this. Huh? It's a very interesting text here. He says, "Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order."

[15:16] That's a very strong statement, right? Notice he's saying certain, huh? It is. Are you sure about that, huh? Now, why is it akin to religious feeling? Well, because religion says that there is a what greater mind, right? That made the world, right? Okay, and that's why the world is understandable. It's made by an understanding. So he says, when you get doing scientific work of a higher order, you have to be convinced that the world is basically what rational or understandable.

[15:50] Okay, that's it. That's interesting. Now he says, "This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God."

[16:13] Now, notice, huh? The likeness here between Einstein and Anaxagoras is that they come to this as a natural philosopher or a natural scientist, huh? Seeing the intelligibility of the world, because Anaxagoras was not a believer in the Greek pagan religions. There, we mentioned how he got in trouble for saying the sun was a hot stone when the sun is the god Apollo, right? And of course, he he's before Christ, right?

[16:44] There's any mention of Christ at all. As far as you know, he's no mention with with revelation made to the Jews, huh? So it's it's as a natural philosopher and not a believer of the religion that might be around that he comes to this, right? The same thing is true about Einstein. Although Einstein is Jewish, you know, origin, he was not a believing Jew, right? Nor did he become a Christian or Mohammed or anything else, right?

[17:06] So it's as a natural scientist that he comes to the idea of a greater mind, okay? And there are many other scientists. I could point to that. have that. Sir James Jeans, the British astrophysicist, speaks of God as a supreme mathematician, right? He's saying all these now mathematical things, huh? But now, notice the next statement of Einstein. In common parlance, this may be described as pantheistic, huh?

[17:33] He's influenced by Spinoza there, right? But notice, now pantheism is identifying pan, which is a Greek word for all, with theos, which is a Greek word for god. So his greater mind, his superior mind, as he calls it here, is mixed up with things, right? Not separated like Anaxagoras.

[17:57] Now, I see Einstein says in other places, but he never gives a reason for saying why the greater mind is mixed up with things. Why Anaxagoras gives a very good reason for why the greater mind has to be separated from things. In that sense, Anaxagoras's thinking is more advanced than Einstein's about the greater mind. We'll come back to pantheistic. Why does Einstein have that?

[18:28] But the last sentence is like what I was touching upon already. He was not a believing Jew or Christian like that. Denominational traditions that can only consider historic and psychologically they have no significance to me. He was not a believer. Okay. So he comes to us as said as a natural scientist. Now you say Einstein doesn't give any reason why he thinks that the greater mind is mixed up with things, right?

[18:54] So I suspect that he's influenced not so much by argument like Anaxagoras is, but by what custom, Okay? Now you've all read Democracy in America, I assume.

[19:13] Yeah. Well, you know, the second volume, the first volume is dealing more with American institutions, starting from local government, state government, going to the federal government. The second volume is more of a general, the second government, a second volume rather, is contrasting democratic customs with aristocratic customs. So it's beautiful. He goes through the influence of this upon the mind and upon morals and upon manners and upon government and so on, right?

[19:43] And in the first book of the second volume, he's talking about the effect upon the arts and the sciences. And he gets to chapter seven here. It could be longer, but it's interesting that he sees this. And entitled, "What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Towards Pantheism? " Okay. I just gave

[20:08] you a few paragraphs here. I think we developed more, but I mean he's such a principal author. It cannot be denied, he says, that pantheism has made great progress in our age. Now he's in the 19th century, right? The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it. The Germans introduced it into philosophy, and the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions, or some tinge caught from pantheistic doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors.

[20:49] This appears to me not to proceed only from an accidental, but from a permanent cause. Now, you know what he says about the Germans there. If you read through the Enchiridion Symbolorum, right? We have the official pronouncements of the Church, right? Throughout the 19th century, you see they're always correcting some German professor, you know, a Catholic professor, maybe you know, teaching, you know, in an academy university, or at least teaching in a university, but they're correcting him for his what?

[21:19] Pantheism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Kuhn and Rana, right, in the 20th century, they have many statements that sound. Pantheistic, huh? Have you seen them, huh?

[21:31] They kind of waver back and forth. They have some, they some more orthodox and some more pantheistic, you know. So, so you know the the existence of this tendency, right? It's clear.

[21:46] If there is a philosophical system which teaches that all things, material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, should be considered only as several parts of an immense being, who alone remains eternal amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all its constituents, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroys individuality of man, or rather, because it destroys that individuality, will have secret charms for men living in democracies.

[22:16] It's because of this emphasis upon equality, right? You know, this idea of Heraclitus would seem very what aristocratic, you know, and undemocratic. They have, you know, the greater mind, right? God altogether, what independent of things, right? He says all their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination. It fosters the pride, while it soothes the indolence of their minds.

[22:53] That's marvelously said. I often, you know, refer to Star Wars, you know, and the Force be with you. You know that, but they've all heard of that or seen that or something, right? And of course, that's a pantheistic notion of God. And after you die, you become a part of the force, and maybe the good side of the force, the bad side of the force. But I mean, this is not the result of any thinking, but it just naturally occurs to the to the author of those things.

[23:21] Among the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavours to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic times. Against it, all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should combine and struggle. You know, most fitted to seduce the human mind, and even the mind of Albert Einstein himself.

[23:55] So, in my comparison of Einstein and Anaxagoras, I point out that they both come to the idea of a greater mind from the order, the intelligibility in the world. But Anaxagoras goes further to see that this greater mind must be separated from things, otherwise it couldn't really rule them. While Einstein is kind of carried away with the customs of the modern world, and so democratic customs, there's nobody who speaks with more understanding of them than they talk with.

[24:21] He sees that. Very striking, huh? Very striking. But perhaps you know experimental science too, or mathematical physics and so on, would incline one day of pantheistic notions, because everything is based upon what equality there too, huh? The equation, huh? People kind of wonder, huh? When you talk to the talks about the love of freedom and the love of equality, he says for most men, the love of equality is greater than the love of freedom.

[24:52] They'll give up freedom to a very less extent to get more equality, and therefore you have to really fight for freedom, you know. But so if equality is a dominant thing in democratic customs, it's the dominant thing in mathematical physics too. The equation, all things are forever equal.

[25:15] That's the basis of the thinking. So this idea, you know, of a greater mind, it's altogether what distinct from the mess of other things, right? And having all knowledge and all power, it's it's awfully undemocratic.

[25:34] That's why it seems all the tendency towards communism too. Yeah. That whole idea of this equality, of course, you can't have that. You know, you're always going to have that separation of power. Yeah. Yeah. Really becomes a distinct at that point. Yeah. Yeah. We heard someone say recently that Teilhard de Chardin, whatever his name is there, Teilhard, and I suppose is probably the ultimate pantheist, you know, said he's just very misunderstood because people are coming from a Thomistic thing.

[26:05] They have to understand he's just Augustinian. Okay. Let's look at the last two thinkers here on page nine, Leucippus and Democritus. And these thinkers were spoken of as friends in the sense that they shared common thoughts, anyway, and took them together. It's interesting if you look at the at the fragments from Democritus. Most of the ones that have survived are ethical and political fragments. Even Aristotle speaks of Democritus as having greater familiarity with the natural world than the others, that he was more into the details at least of the natural world.

[26:55] But we don't have a lot of fragments for him. Let's look at the fragment here from Lucippus. Nothing happens at random, but everything comes to be from reason and by necessity, huh? There's a reason why everything happens and had to happen. Okay. Now, if you know the history of modern science, you'll recognize in what Lucippus says here. What was the absolute principle of modern science in the seventeenth?

[27:26] 18th and 19th centuries, and even into the 20th century. This principle in modern science was called the principle of determinism. Okay. And so he's stating it here. Now, the principle of determinism in modern science is saying, a lot of times they explain in terms of past and future. They'll say the past necessarily determines the future. That's just one way of popularly stating it. Past necessarily determines the future.

[28:14] There's no room for what? Contingency, right? No room for luck or chance. Those are just names of arguments of what the real causes are. Now,

[28:28] you can see clearly in the modern thinkers that this thought is associated with the mathematical sciences of nature. And in mathematics, you have complete determinism. There's no what? Luck or chance there. There's nothing like matter that could give rise to contingency, or like free will that could give rise to contingency, and so on, and that. So if you're studying the natural world mathematically, you're accustomed to think of it in deterministic terms.

[29:03] And they often quote, you know, Laplace there in the 19th century, where he said, if you knew the position and the momentum of every particle in the universe at any point in time, you had a supercalculating mind, you could tell the whole future forever, you know, necessity, huh? Because this produced a lot of crises, because people, you know, thought that man is more or less subject to this, and therefore it seemed to say that there's no such thing as free will and all these these things.

[29:31] And others said, well, no, no, we do have free will, so there's something wrong here. But anyway, but this was the absolute principle of modern science in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And one way you can see that is that when the other sciences besides the physical sciences, physics and chemistry, those sciences are trying to be more scientific, and they're trying to what? Imitate the rigor, you know, and the scientific character of the physical sciences.

[30:05] They will always insist upon this principle of what? Determinism. And one book they often use to show this is a book by the famous French physiologist Claude Bernard. He's a very famous physiologist. He's one of the fathers of modern physiology. And one book that we sometimes used in the philosophy of science course, is called an introduction

[30:36] to the study of experimental medicine. Okay, or experimental biology, I might say. An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, and this is a book that we printed, you know, in English in our time, you know, Harvard University Press, for example, right, editions to have. Now, in that book, Bernard is trying to make biology more scientific than it was maybe in the first part of the 19th century.

[31:13] Okay, so it was written around 1860, huh? And if you look at this book, it has three parts to it, and the first part is a general description of the experimental method. Part two is a description of the experimental method in biology, in particular. Part three are more detailed examples from his own work as a physiologist, illustrating the experimental method in biology. If you go back to that first part, which is describing the experimental method in general, in many ways he has a very good understanding of experimental method, a very bad understanding of philosophy and theology, but a very good understanding of the experimental method.

[31:58] And one thing that he says that always sticks in your mind is that he says that doubt, doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method or the scientific method.

[32:18] Doubt is intrinsic to it. He sees that even after a hypothesis has been tested and confirmed, and maybe tested and confirmed many times, you still don't know for sure that it's true. And it may be suitable at some later time to test it again, right? And you may possibly find that it is not correct, right?

[32:48] Now, I think I explained that we did logic, right? But the reason why this is true is because of the form of the argument. You're saying if H is so, if my hypothesis is so, then P is so. Some prediction you make, right? Okay. Now, if you go out and you observe or experiment and you find out that P is in fact so, does it follow that H is so?

[33:18] No, that's not a syllogism as we saw. And so elementary logic would tell you that this is not. So if my hypothesis is that Purpose dropped dead last night, that's why he's in class all the time. If Purpose dropped dead, I predict he'd be absent from class. He's absent from class. Therefore, he dropped dead. I tell him that's wishful. But it's not logical thinking.

[33:48] So given the form of the confirmation, the statement precisely is not a syllogism. It doesn't follow necessarily that H is so. So no matter how many things you predict are true, they come true, right?

[34:06] You still don't know that the hypothesis is so. He doesn't say it's clear; he's not saying obviously, but but he sees that's true in science. That doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method. Now Einstein, he says the physicists didn't fully, you know, realize this until the relativity theories. Why? Because Newtonian physics had predicted so many things that came true that they began to think Newtonian physics must be true.

[34:39] And I guess you know they tell me that the last planets were found in this way. You know that they began to observe and to calculate more carefully, and they discovered that the known planets were not exactly following the paths they should be according to Newtonian physics. But they had so much success in Newtonian physics, rather than question it, they said there must be other planets unknown to us that are affecting the movements of the known ones, and their mathematics so exactly predicted those planets were, and they could read the telescopes, and that's how they found the last planets.

[35:12] That's kind of an amazing thing, right? You know. So Einstein says before the theories of relativity, many scientists were thinking that hey, this must be true. And then all of a sudden Einstein showed that with a different hypothesis he could predict what Newton predicted plus some things that Newton couldn't predict, right? And now it became crystal clear Einstein says that hypothesis is never known to be true.

[35:39] It always remains a system of guesses, he said. Of course, obviously the more predictions you make, the more probability there is that you never know, never sure. So that says Bernard has a very good understanding of the experimental method. You see that? Yeah. But when it comes to this, he says, but we cannot doubt. He says the principle of determinism. To doubt that would be to doubt science.

[36:11] Well, there you can see how that's kind of the absolute principle. You can doubt everything except this. You know, if you doubt this, well then science is out of the door. So it is like the sacred, absolute principle of modern science. So you can see that when they're trying to make biology more scientific, they realize that there are differences, you know, between biology and physics and so on.

[36:35] But to be scientific, you have to keep determinism. That's what they thought anyway. Now you take something even less scientific than biology, like psychology, right? My favorite example is Freud, okay? And Freud on dreams, huh? Now if anything seems to be at random or not have a reason or necessity, it's our crazy dream. And my cousin Dow just to have these crazy dreams, and he'd recount them in the morning, and we all laugh.

[37:13] And this one dream that I remember he had, he was being chased by a tiger in his dream. He's running away from the tiger. Did I tell you this before? Huh? He's being chased by a tiger. He's running down, so he's running down this way, and finally he turns a corner, runs down and. It's a dead end, no way out. So he turns around to face the tiger, and as the tiger comes up, it says, "I would like to buy a raffle ticket."

[37:38] So he laughs. Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is all irrational, right? Yeah, that's what dreams are, right? But along comes what Freud, right? Just a minute now. There is a reason why you dreamed that last night, right? What seems to you to be what something irrational has no reason for it, something that just happened, you know? See, no. So Freud writes his treatise on dreams, right?

[38:08] And we're going to find out something about you from your dreams, right? And why you you dream this, huh? So you know, I take that as a good example because in something as apparently irrational as dreams are, like this dream of my cousin and so on, Freud thinks that to be scientific, we've got to what? We must admit that you had to dream that last night, huh?

[38:32] And when you use that, then as a way to probe into your subconscious or some other part of you, right? But there you see how that's the absolute principle for that, the principle of determinism.

[38:47] Now Aristotle was to reject this, huh? And he was to reject it because of his understanding of matter as potency or ability, and we'll be coming to that later on. Okay. In the 20th century, the principle of determinism was challenged finally in what quantum theory, huh? And it was Heisenberg who first formulated the principle of what indeterminism, huh? But as Heisenberg said, quantum theory reintroduced Aristotle's understanding of what potency or ability, huh?

[39:23] Um. Now that was a tremendous shock, right? And in that respect, you can say that the quantum theory was a greater change in modern science, the science of the 20th century, than even relativity theory, because the two relativity theories didn't what call into question the principle of determinism, which had been the absolute principle, but quantum theory did, huh? See. And that was a tremendous shock, huh?

[39:53] Now, the it was under you know Niels Bohr and the physicists associated with Heisenberg that this first came out, huh? And so it became known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory because that's where Bohr was, huh? So finally, they used to have these international meetings of physicists, what they called the Solvay Congress, huh? I guess the final showdown was in 1927, huh? Where Albert Einstein and the father of wave mechanics Louis de Broglie, right?

[40:28] Arrived, they're trying to attack the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, and Einstein would get up, you know, one day, and then he would he present a thought experiment, right, that seemed to refute the Copenhagen interpretation, and and Bohr would stay up all night and come back the next day and reply to Einstein. See, I guess the the last one, the Einstein, his last attempt to break it down, it was quite a you know stunner at first, huh?

[40:59] And they actually have a picture of Einstein leaving you know after he proposed it, right? And he's kind of walking out with a real confident look at his face, you know, and Niels Bohr is chasing after him, you know, with a very worried look at his face. And anyway, Bohr stayed up the whole night, right? And he came back the next day, and he showed that Einstein had overlooked something from his own theory of relativity that refuted his objection.

[41:25] Oh. And that was the last time that. Einstein ever tried to what publicly, huh? Overthrow it, right? He gave up, right? And Louis de Broglie, at that time, you know, he saw this. He went back to France and announced his allegiance to Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation, huh? Although a number of years later, he wanted to go back to still to determinism, huh? But it seems that it's here to stay, huh?

[41:51] You know, and most this kind of led to the eclipse of Einstein, huh? And Ehrenfest, who is the physicist who is a personal friend of Einstein, says I'm ashamed of you, Einstein. You know, you can't refute it, right? But you won't go along with it, right? And you're just like those guys who wouldn't accept relativity theory, right? Because it's so unusual. But Einstein wouldn't uh to his to his death; he would not give up this belief in determinism, right?

[42:19] Say, and Heisenberg, when he discusses that, you know, I mean, talk about what a great change this was, and that Einstein, you know, revolutionary genius, he might say he was. He didn't want to give up this, huh? But it seems that we have to. So you have to admire Leucippus for for stating back in the, you know, shortly before Socrates, Democritus almost takes you up to Socrates.

[42:41] Leucippus was contemporary with Democritus. But stating what was the absolute principle of modern science, huh? But in in a way, what you see sometimes when you go from the Greeks to the moderns, you see history kind of coming back, you know.

[42:57] Like the early Greeks, you know, thought there's only change of place, and there's determinism, and then Aristotle rejects it, and the same thing happens in the moderns, right? But it's not really, you know, going in a circle. It's more like a I I compare to a spiral staircase, huh? You're coming back, you know, to the same point, so to speak, but at a different level of experience.

[43:18] And there there are scientists now, you know, biologists who are questioning, you know, Darwinism and questioning this denial of end or purpose in the natural world, right? But they're questioning it on a very concrete level, right? And so again, in a circle, but but a different level of experience, huh? You're coming back, huh?

[43:44] Okay. Now Democritus, in his first fundamental statement here, was probably influenced also by the mathematical science of nature. Um. Because in the mathematical science of nature, there's no what sense qualities. Because there's no sense qualities in math, huh? No substance for that matter either. No purpose. So that influences people a lot, huh? So he's denying that the sense qualities are real. Sweet exists by custom. The bitter by custom.

[44:22] The warm by custom. The cold by custom. Color by custom. But nevertheless, there's another fragment of Democritus that we put with another group. Where he has a little dialogue between the senses and reason, and reason is trying to convince the senses that these things are not real, and the senses that's replying to reason. Our overthrow is your overthrow. And Schrodinger, the the great mathematical physicist, there, he quotes this in one of his essays.

[44:52] He quotes this little fragment of the conversation, the dialogue between reason and senses, and he points out, he says that in modern physics, there's no greenness of green or redness of red, none of those sense qualities. But he says when we read our instruments in the lab, we have to, you know, have the black marking and the red marking and the thing. So all our instruments are red using the blackness of black and the redness of red and so on, but none of that appears in our scientific picture of the world.

[45:24] So the whole scientific picture of the world depends upon something that doesn't appear in the scientific picture of the world, which is a rather strange thing, huh? And it's it's like the paradox, you know, that took place in the 20th century when they went from Newtonian physics, right, to both relativity physics and to quantum physics. What they found out, and Bohr really pointed out this interesting analogy between the two, that the observations that are the starting point in the testing of relativity theory and the starting point in the testing of quantum theory, the observations are made with Newtonian physics.

[46:06] So if you threw out Newtonian physics, you'd have to throw out relativity theory and quantum theory because no way to get to make the observations. See, but the numbers you get in these experiments and observations, you can't order them with Newtonian physics. You have to order them by by the theories of relativity or order them by the theories of quantum theory, right? So it's kind of a strange thing, right?

[46:32] It's a little bit like that other paradox that that Schrodinger is talking about, relativity and quantum theory see a different order in the world or in the numbers that they get from Newtonian physics, but you can't get to that order without going through Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics has, like all physics, has no no sense qualities, right? But you can't read your instruments, or even see your instruments without these sense qualities.

[47:05] It's a very strange thing, right? So Einstein, and I mean not Einstein, but Heisenberg in his his different lectures, and Louis de Broglie in his, you know, the father of wave mechanics, they both say that this should not be called a revolution. The revolution is something where you replace the former government. But you know you gotta watch you gotta watch the publishers because they'll want to stick on the cover of the book with the revolution, right?

[47:33] If you get Louis de Broglie's book in French, it's Le Quanta, okay? Le quanta. I guess they pronounce it in Latin, Le quanta. But the English title of the book is "The Revolution in Physics." Inside the book, Louis de Broglie says this should not be called a revolution he gives you a reason why it should not. Heisenberg's different lectures, right? They they slap the title on physics and philosophy, right?

[47:57] The subtitle is "The Revolution in Modern Physics." Inside Heisenberg says it should not be called a revolution he gives you a reason why it should not be. It, it strikes me the contrast of that, you know, to to Albert the Great when he's commenting on the the topics of Aristotle, right? what the Greek word means and so on. And he says, if you understand the title, he says, it illuminates the whole work.

[48:20] he says. In democratic times you're, because of our commercial civilization and so on. you're trying to sell the book, right? So you've got to put "revolution" on there, right? All these media guys were all closet communists, weren't they? Come out. Okay. So none of these sense qualities exist, but Democritus has some second thoughts about that, right? In the dialogue, right, the senses and the reason that that's authentic.

[48:50] But what truly exists are two things: the atoms and the what? Yeah. Now, what does he mean by atoms, and why does he think that they're what truly exists? Huh? Well, let's first of all examine the word atom, the Greek word.

[49:29] Now the root here, tom, you find in other words derived from the Greek, anatomy. Have the same root, tom. Now, what does that root, root, tom, mean? You know, in Greek. Cut. Cut. Yeah. Cut. Okay.

[49:58] But now the prefix here, anatomy, anatomy is different. Ah, anatomy. Anam in Greek means up. So anatomy means what? Cut up. Aristotle, you know, did anatomy, right? He cut up animals and examined their parts and so on. Okay. But atom, the a there is a negative prefix, so it means what? Uncut, huh? That's etymology right now. But in the context where he introduces the word atom, it has the sense we'll see not only of uncut but uncuttable.

[50:44] Aristotle's account of this. Democritus apparently did something that Einstein was especially fond of. Einstein was often conducting what he called a thought experiment. A thought experiment is something performed in imagination. Okay, it's a way of clarifying certain things. So apparently Democritus performed this thought experiment. He says, imagine the bodies around us, cut in every way they could possibly be cut. Okay,

[51:26] would something or nothing be left. Something. Yeah, because you can't cut up something to nothing, because then be made out of nothing, right? So if the bodies around us were cut in every way they could be cut, there would have to be something left over, however small it was, uncut, right? And since in the thought experiment you cut the body any way it could be cut, what's left uncut is uncuttable, right?

[51:55] So that's what must be what everything's made out of, these uncuttables, huh? Okay. Now, from some of the texts where Aristotle discusses Democritus's opinion, sometimes Democritus seems to have spoken of the atoms as being very small, but having some size, right, and therefore some shape and so on. But there's one text where Aristotle seems to speak as if he spoke of the atoms as being points, right?

[52:25] Okay. But in either case, they're uncuttable. But he may have had a little ambiguity there between mathematics and natural philosophy, because in mathematics the only thing, at least in geometry, the only thing uncuttable is a what point, right? But you have to go down to a point in the natural world before you have something uncuttable, which is something that resists being cut, right? So he may have hesitated a bit between those two, but we'll come back to that later on,

[52:59] of course. Now, Heisenberg says that if you want to compare our thinking with that of Democritus, don't be so stupid as to compare what we call an atom with what he calls an atom, because we're really misusing the name, huh? And what we call an atom might have been something we couldn't break up through chemical means, but then we found other means to break it up, right?

[53:23] So it would make more sense to compare what we call, let's say, elementary particles, right? Or to something small, even that, with what he called atoms, right? Okay. But we borrowed the word atom from him, right? And they first applied it to what was uncuttable by ordinary chemical means, and then when they realized these things could be cut, other things they should have stopped calling it a what atom, but it didn't.

[53:47] I mean, they're accustomed to calling it an atom, and and people don't know Greek anyway, so it doesn't bother them, so right? It's like the proton, right? If the proton is really, you know, the first major piece of matter, and there's nothing smaller than the proton, well, that comes from the Greek word meaning first, right? But if there are quarks or some other thing before the proton, then it's not first, right?

[54:12] They'll still call it first because, but these names in a way mark our what ignorance at a certain stage, huh? Okay. You see why he spoke of there being purely atoms, huh? There has to be these uncut and uncuttable things, right? Leftover, and they make up everything. I think we explained before why he thought the empty exists. He thought that motion required that there be what? Yeah, empty space.

[54:39] That if there was nothing empty, we'd all be packed like sardines in a can or something, and be impossible to what move, right? And so he's admitting that what is not is, because the empty is nothing, right? But nothing must be as well as something, the atoms, in order to have motion. So he's admitting what seems to be a contradiction in order to hold on to the reality of what changed aristotle replied and he said well there can be motion in a kind of circular way, without the empty, huh?

[55:12] Because what is giving rise, right? And one thing is moving out, the other is moving in, right? You see. But. What's the main point of talking about these sense things as custom? Well, that they're not really there. See, other word, custom to speak of them. Just like I'm accustomed to say that the sun rises at six ten, but me as a scientist, I say it doesn't really rise.

[55:38] The earth is turning on its axis, but I follow the way of speaking, right? But you know, if you think mathematically, you're going to think without sense qualities. And if you think mathematics is the key to the world, right? Then sense qualities have no place in the world.

[56:04] But you see that even more so in the moderns. You know, all the modern philosophers are tied up with this idea that there's nothing. There's no sense qualities, right? But then they have a hard time knowing the world, then, see.

[56:20] There's nothing objective at all about those, see. Because notice, you know, for him, contact the world around us, it's going to be through our senses, huh? Reason is dependent upon the senses. So if these sense qualities aren't real, right? Then we don't have any knowledge of the world around us, it seems, huh?

[56:45] Now this next passage here, man is a little universe. That's a very famous thing. And in Greek, it would be micro what, which means small or little, and cosmos, huh? And man is in a way a little universe, huh? I was reading Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles who was talking about how, quoting Gregory and Augustine, how the angels and the immaterial substances, right, are minds. They rule the material world in some way, and something like that in man, where his reason rules his body, huh?

[57:18] He's like a miniature universe, huh? But sometimes they point to the fact that that you have a material world and you have an immaterial world, and then man is sort of what? In the middle, right? He shares the material world in his body, but in his soul, he's kind of dealing with the immaterial world. It's kind of interesting, you know, between death and resurrection, right? We're going to be living in the immaterial world, our soul will be living in the immaterial world, right?

[57:47] So he spent all his time in the material world, and we'll spend all his time in the immaterial world, and then at the end, we'll be united again. But the immaterial world will dominate, huh? But we have our body back, and we'll have vocal praise on this time. It says, "We'll settle again, be conducting up there, you know, and so on." Okay.

[58:11] Oh God, you are my God, whom I seek. For you, my flesh pines and my soul thirsts. Right? The body's fighting there as well as the soul. So, primarily, the soul. How can there not be time in the next world if we have body parts? Is that a mystery? Well, actually, in terms of the beatific vision, right? You're going to partake of eternity. There won't be any before and after in the beatific vision.

[58:35] You'll see everything all at once. That'll be the main, the main focus of your mind, obviously. But notice the things that really are in time in the full sense—they have a beginning, end in time, right? And our body won't be subject to corruption, huh? It won't be measured its life anymore by time.

[59:06] Things are measured by time their life that have a beginning and end in time. We won't have that measured by time. So this is a very famous statement on the man's little universe. The the Egyptian not the Egyptians, but the uh the Mohammedan philosopher says man is on the horizon, right, between the material world and the immaterial world. That's a good way of saying it, huh? We'll think of time later on.

[59:41] He's into eternity. We'll think of time later on. Don't start another thing on this. This last one here is something Aristotle will develop. The idea that art imitates nature, right? Reason imitates nature. But he says it in a very concrete way here. We have become pupils in the most important things of the spider for spinning and mending, huh? Who was that saint that was in kind of a prison cell with the spider, and the spider was making its webs, and he, you know, get rid of them, you know, and the spider would go back and do it again, and he'd get rid of it, you know, and then he started to learn from the spider the importance of perseverance.

[1:00:27] The spider just kept on weaving another. Yeah, it's upstate there. We don't know where it was now, but okay. So we learned how to spin and mend from the spider. We learned from the swab how to make houses and things, right? For building, And we learned from the swab and I can give how to sing, right? Okay, that's a very concrete way. But we do imitate, huh?

[1:00:55] So our knowledge starts with our senses, and our senses at first are in contact with natural things. So the shelter we have in a cave or under a tree, we imitate that when we put a roof over ourselves, huh?

[1:01:11] But that'll be very important. Aristotle, I mean, Thomas was saying there that logic, even there, huh? We try to imitate nature so far as possible. And notice what we're saying there in discourse, huh? You know, in nature, if two dogs. Come together, male and female, they produce not a cat or a horse, but another what? Dog. If two cats come together, they produce not a horse or an elephant, but a cat, right?

[1:01:43] So in logic, when two statements come together, what do they produce? A statement, yeah. So Arthur Eddington says, you know, if we put numbers in, what do we grind out in mathematical physics? More numbers, you see. So two numbers give rise not to a statement, but to another number. And two statements give birth to another statement. But ignorance is barren, huh? Yeah. So

[1:02:17] that's a little introduction there to the natural fragments of the first philosophers, right? Okay. Now this is what we're going to be going on to. I don't know if we'll just anticipate a bit here today, but okay. I just keep on copying and just passes around. And they have to copy it. Okay. Count them later.