Section 1 Introduction
1.1 Atomism, Ancient and Modern
Lucretius/Epicurus
Bertrand Russell’s best seller: A History of Western Philosophy (Sion & Schuster, 1945)
has a chapter devoted to the Epicureans (Chapter XXVII). Some interesting quotations (highlighted by YO):
~4655 (kindle location)
It was through the problem of avoiding fear that Epicurus was led into theoretical philosophy.
He held that two of the greatest sources of fear were religion and the dread of
death, which were connected, since religion encouraged the view that the dead are unhappy.
He therefore sought a metaphysic which would prove that the gods do not interfere in human
affairs, and that the soul perishes with the body. Most modern people think of religion as a
consolation, but to Epicurus it was the opposite. Supernatural interference with the course
of nature seemed to him a source of terror, and immortality fatal to the hope of release from
pain. Accordingly he constructed an elaborate doctrine designed to cure men of the beliefs
that inspire fear.
~4688 [This is the portion I used in footnote 8]
The poem of Lucretius On the Nature of Things .. Only one manuscript of it survived the
Middle Ages, and that narrowly escaped destruction by bigots. ... he and Benjamin Franklin
were Shelley’s favorite authors.
... Lucretius was passionate, .... He feels towards Epicurus as towards a savior, and applies
language of religious intensity to the man whom he regards as the destroyer of religion ...
~4726
It is through the poem of Lucretius that the philosophy of Epicurus has chiefly become
known to readers since the Renaissance. What has most impressed them, when they were
not professional philosophers, is the contrast with Christian belief in such matters as materialism,
denial of Providence, and rejection of immortality. What is especially striking to a
modern reader is to have these views—which, now-a-days, are generally regarded as gloomy
and depressing—presented as a gospel of liberation from the burden of fear.
... The age of Epicurus was a weary age, and extinction could appear as a welcome rest from
travail of spirit.
1.2 What was beyond Philosopher’s grasp?
`Pure empiricism’ is not enough or What is the true empiricism?
Empiricism: Experience and cognitive
There seems to be considerable misunderstanding about ‘empiricism.’ According to a dictionary
Empiricism: the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Compare with phenomenalism (= the doctrine that human knowledge is confined to or founded on the realities or appearances presented to the senses.)
However, this naive interpretation of empiricism does not make any sense as Kant clearly recognized in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (First ed. 1781; Second ed. 1787); we need various a priori elements to make sense of empirical input; even recognizing an experience as such (as a fact) requires a certain cognitive framework on our side.
Locke, Hume and others did not appreciate the a priori side of the so-called empiricism. For example, Voltaire praised English empiricism, asserting Locke’s sensationalism was superior to Descartes’s rationalism and doctrine of innate ideas (as to Descartes I will discuss later). 1 Clearly, he was pre-Kant.
Descartes, Kant and others thought the a priori framework was God given; only Darwinism could replace this metaphysical element with something (at least potentially 2 empirical: our cognitive device is a product of evolution, In the process of natural selection, regular patterns and structures have been internalized; just as our semicircular canals are the internalized 3D nature of our space. 3 Mach’s sensationalism is different from that of Locke or pre-Darwinian philosophers. Mach was influenced by Darwinism and adopted evolutionary epistemology: our cognition and intelligence are the products of natural selection. Since the external world existed before the human presence (or any intelligent presence), 4 our intelligence was molded by the external world. Thus, the source data of Mach’s empiricism was not confined to the narrow experiences considered by the English empiricists.
I adopt Evolutionary Fundamentalism: 5 (i) Natural science including evolutionary biology that naively accepts the existence of the external world as objective makes a self-consistent system of Weltanschauung (or at least it is tending to this state). (ii) There is no freedom of conduct, although one may have any opinion while staying in this world. (i) alone gives us a self-consistent epistemological system. However, if one denies its conclusions (ii) implies we do not exist in the world where we exists with our cognitive capabilities. 6
The banal empiricism implies ‘pure empiricism’: we are tabula rasa, and what we know comes only from our direct sense experiences (Locke’s sensationalism). As discussed above, however, the true empiricism is to respect not only the ordinary sense experiences, but also our basic intelligence to organize our direct experiences. That is why effective empirical sciences must be on the balance of empirical results in the usual sense and theoretical introspection as noted at the end of 1.2 . Note that basic abstract math concepts (elementary topology, statistics, etc.) are shared by large brained animals (probably octopuses included).
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1 A. C. Kors, Voltaire and the triumph of the Enlightenment course guidebook (The Great Courses, The Teaching Company 2001).
2 Without reconstruction of phylogeny nothing can be concluded, but phylogeny reconstruction may be done empirically, asymptotically (= in the sense that eventually after a lot of hard work). Notice, however, even if you apparently accept the a priori as God given, if you ask how we are given it, you certainly start to doubt God. Feuerbach said, “The question about how God created (the world) is an indirect doubt about God’s creation of the world. Human beings reached Materialism and Naturalism through this question.” (Chapter 23 of Das Wesen des Christentums ( The essence of Christianity ), Leipzig 1841).
3 K. Lorenz, Die Ruckseite des Spiegels (R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Mu ̈nchen, 1973) roughly wrote, “ The oval and semicircular canals · · · furnish the basis of the intuition of the 3-Euclidean space. Nay, I should declare that, obviously in a certain sense, these organs are the intuition itself.’’ We should not forget that E. Mach was one of the chief researchers who clarified the function of the semicircular canals.
4 The fish body with a fluid dynamically admiring shape is the reflection of a property of liquid water that its long time behavior is governed by fluid dynamics. However, that the long time behavior of liquid water obeys fluid dynamics is not because fishes swim in it. Liquid water existed long before fishes emerged, and even without fishes the law of fluid dynamics continues to hold for liquid water. The relationship between our brains and the world must be understood in a similar fashion. That our brains are made to recognize some kind of laws is because the law-like relationships really exist in the world independent of our existence.
5 Y. Oono in Chapter 4 of The Nonlinear World (Springer 2009).
6 I do not know what existence we are allowed to experience (‘feel’) if we do not accept (ii) as a being. I feel strongly that (ii) is a prerequisite for us to exist.
Famous example of the consequence of uncritical fundamental principles:
If one ignores empirical facts and rely only `introspection (logic and math), one could make a big mistake. A typical and notorious example is the following by Thomson.
Thomson and young earth
It is a famous fact that Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) argued mathematically that the age of the earth was at most a few million years to destroy Darwinism. See T. W. K¨orner, Fourier transformation (Cambridge UP, 1988) Sections 56-58 as an exercise of diffusion equation, and J. E. Gould, The structure of evolution theory (=SET) (Belknap/Harvard, 2002) p492- . The beginning sentence of Gould’s description is:
`` In 1866, William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, published one of the most arrogant documents in the history of science—a one paragraph paper (with an appended calculation) boldly entitled “The ‘Doctrine of Uniformity’ in Geology Briefly Refuted. ”
Darwin took Thomson’s objection very seriously: C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (Sixth edition, Jan., 1872) Chapter X, “ Sir W. Thompson concludes that the consolidation of the crust can hardly have occurred less than 20 or more than 400 millions years ago, but probably not less than 98 or more than 200 millions years. ” Then, later in Chapter XV, “ and this objection, as urged by Sir William Thompson, is probably one of the gravest as yet advanced, I can only say firstly, that we do not know at what rate species change as measured by years, and secondly, that many philosophers are not as yet willing to admit that we know enough of the constitution of the universe. ”
Darwin’s second point was indeed the case. At the British Association meeting of 1903, Sir George Darwin, Charles’s second son, vindicated “his un-knighted father by invoking the Curies’ discovery of radium and confound(ed) the earlier estimate of the still living Lord Kelvin.” (R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Company 2006) p99).
Darwin was not very positive about mathematics as the reader can easily guess from its arrogant uses by Thomson above. Huxley said, “ Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheless, what you get out depends what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data. ”(T. Huxley, Autobiography)
However, it is fair to add that Huxley tried hard to conform evolution to Thomson’s ‘young earth theory,’ and also Wallace bowed easily to his mathematics. Only Darwin steadfastly stuck to his slow evolution modes as is stated around p500 of Gould’s Structure of the evolution theory (SET).
Feynman on atomism
In 1-2 Matter is made of atoms of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics vol. I, Feynman says:
If in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or what ever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
As a good approximate statement, I agree with Feynman.
1.3 How numerous are atoms ad molecules?
Feynman lectures 1-3 says:
If an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.
1.4 Why are molecules so small?
`Anthropic principle’
We must pay due attention to the most fundamental empirical fact that the world we experience
is the world in which we exist. This implies not only we live in it but also we have been able
to evolve (as intelligent being) in it. Thus, we must conclude that
(i) Our world has been stable, not so constantly violent.
(ii) Our scale and atomic (microscopic) scale must be quite different.
As is noted in 1.4 to estimate the size of the cell (eukaryotic or prokaryotic cells) is
a purely physics question. I have not yet read any serious work, however. Such is the basic
question of physics of biological systems [I avoid the term `biophysics,' because it reminds
me of physics of minced meat.]
1.5 Our world is lawful to the extent of allowing the evolution of inteligence Why are molecules so small?