Explaining materialism: classical materialism

I've decided to do a series of videos falling on from one another all on the topic of explaining materialism I'm going to start off with the topic of classical materialism what was the materialism of the ancient Greeks and how did it come down to the present day I'll then be looking at a lot of ideas associated with entropy because ideas of entropy derive in the end from the revival of atomism by Boltzmann and therefore are a revival of classical materialism and I'll be looking at entropy and work entropy computers and information with luck I'll do a video on Jeremy England's theory of entropy in life I'll cover entropy and money all the statistical mechanics of money and I'll look at how entropy applies to knowledge and the scientific method later on I may go on to look at mechanical materialism conservation laws and how that relates to value so we'll be starting off with classical materialism while humankind throughout the lands they miserably crushed before all eyes beneath the religion who would show her head along the region skies glaring and mortals with her hideous face a Greek it was who first opposing dared raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand whom nor the fame of gods nor writing stroke no threat that threatening thundered of the ominous sky abashed but rather chafed to angry zest his dauntless heart to be the first to Wren the crossbars at the gates of nature old that is part of an epic poem by Titus Lucretia scarus in praise of Epicurus the Greek he mentions the Greek who first opposed the grodd's if you look if you read through Lucretius book de rerum the Torah which is translated in English as the order of things you see that in the ancient world materialism was a philosophy that sought both to explain the world and to bring consolation to those who would otherwise be in superstitious dread of the gods or apparently supernatural powers we don't actually have the books of Epicurus anymore we've lost them so much of ancient materialism has to be inferred from Lucretius book dear Aaron iturra which is not actually Greek as its title implies it's a Latin work from somewhat later period than the original Greek materialists philosophers but you get a sense of what material is immerse about in the following passage fear holds dominion over mortality only because seeing in land and sky so much the cause we're off no wise they no men think divinities are working there meantime when once we know from nothing still nothing can be created we shall divine more clearly what we seek those elements from which alone all things created our and how accomplished by no tool of gods so it's explicitly Aunty theistic and saying that once you know what natural causes are you can live in peace without fear you can accept the world as it is and that you must seek the natural elements from which things are made what we will now call the atomic elements the basic thesis of greek atomism was that all that exists are atoms in the void these atoms are in constant motion anything which appears as a static object static physical object actually hides continuous motion of atoms behind it Fortis ease or swirling motions of atoms which have a temporary stable appearance and even things which appear to be solid have gaps between the atoms so solid objects are only solid because the atoms are relatively stationary relatively stationary but there are still gaps Lucretius gives the example that when you're in a cave with solid walls and solid roof water still dips drips through the roof the atoms of water penetrate through the solid rock beyond this the atoms are subject to laws of causality and the atoms can be neither created nor destroyed nahee ex nihilo nothing from nothing comes nothing but materialism was a dangerous doctrine and it was suppressed Tomas Nile the author of a new translation of Lucretius writes people have been burned alive for reading this book copies of it a bit in destroyed and denounced as heretical communist atheist hedonist and materialist it is not at all by accident that the writings of epicurus and lucretius were destroyed and those have Plato and Aristotle preserved for all the diversity of the ancient philosophers only one tradition was courageous enough to deny the existence of God and the immortality of the soul and to reject the politics of the state and the aesthetics of representation atomism because atomism denied the gods and was fundamentally subversive from religion once christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire the works of atomism were banned by the church and suppressed now says there have only ever been to real trajectories in Western philosophy idealism and materialism Plato versus Democritus Hegel versus Marx but materialism revived it was thought that all copies of the works of Lucretius and Epicurus had been destroyed then in 1417 broccolini discovered a surviving copy of de rerum the torah in a german monastery and took a copy by sixteen hundred copies had been printed in all the main languages of Europe the circulation of this book had a revolutionary effect on the redevelopment of science there is scarcely a branch of science of the Scientific Revolution which took place from the 1500s onwards that cannot be traced to the influence of the work of Lucretius its importance was that it gave a coherent and non theological account of the world and it gave this account before such an account could be verified by modern science if you read it it's amazing the extent to which the world view in Lucretius is compatible with the world as we are now understand it it inspired a whole generation or series of generations of scientists bacon Hobbs Galileo Newton Darwin Lord Kelvin and Einstein all studied and were influenced by Lucretius this is not to say that there has not been an attempted idealist appropriation of classical atomism the most obvious example is the idea of what was called the swerve Derrick writer said initially all atoms were moving uniformly in the void and given such uniform motion there could be no condensation of atoms into bodies from this democratise deduced that they must occasionally swerve move off of a straight rectilinear course bump into one another and thus caused the condensation and vortices that make up the universe we understand idealist philosophers then interpret this swerve as a concession to free will let's look at the given by Lucretius the atoms as their own weight bears them down plums through the void at scarce determined times in scarce determined places from there of course decline a little so to speak mere change trend for where it not there want thus wise to swerve down they would fall each one like drops of rain through the unbuttoned void and then collisions neck could be no blows among the primal elements and thus nature would never have created all is it right to see this idea of the swerve as being a sign of free will no it's not and one can understand it better when one sees that modern cosmology has had to resort to something very similar nowadays you'd call it stochastic symmetry breaking essentially the same problem is there when you have to explain the collapse of matter in space in an expanding universe into galaxies if you have uniform expansion of matter at a initially uniform density that gives no opportunity for gravitational collapse to occur because the gravitational field sums to zero in all places now modern cosmology says that quantum fluctuations in the early universe gave rise to fluctuations in density of matter these fluctuations in density of matter in turn caused nonzero gravitational fields in places and then triggered collapse initially of hydrogen atoms and helium atoms formed in the primordial BIGBANG caused them to collapse and form galaxies now if this is true the quantum fluctuations in the initial plasma would be imprinted on the cosmic background radiation and would be detectable as noise with a certain spectrum angular spectrum on the background radiation and when this was actually discovered the noise pattern in the cosmic background radiation this verified the idea that thermal fluctuations could trigger the collapse of galaxies but what are these thermal fluctuations they are random motions random variations in density of the initial particles in the plasma and these are functionally the same thing as the swerve they are seen as a necessity to trigger the gravitational collapse and the condensation of matter but they're also seen as being part of the fundamental theory of motion that we have now quantum mechanics which has built into it this stochastic element this stochastic element which is equivalent to the swerve of Democritus as the 20th century dawned you might have thought that five hundred years after the discovery of Lucretia sis text atomism would have been firmly established but no it wasn't in fact the dominant philosophical trend in physics or something called instrumentalism which was championed by the physicist mark who held that science was only concerned with constructing theories about the relationship between observations on measuring instruments that it should not attempt to postulate real entities which might cause these measuring instruments to have certain correlations the Markus held that atoms were at best no more than the convenient fiction and the atoms did not really exist they were just a fiction that people said well let's pretend atoms exist and that will account for gas pressure this was remarkably influential and it was this theory that Lenin wrote his book materialism and empiric written ISM to attack to attack his philosophical basis now the physicists though didn't read Lenin they did however read Einstein because of the skepticism of physicists who had been influenced by the maahes philosophy Boltzmann was unable to get his atomic theory of gases which provides the foundation of statistical Montana accepted and he was eventually driven to to suicide despairing of ever persuading his fellow physicists of the atomic theory in fact it wasn't until 1905 when Einstein published his paper on the investigations of the theory of Brownian motion that the existence of atoms was really accepted and proven in that paper Einstein calculated what amount of motion you would expect of a tiny particle such as a pollen grain floating in water to get from the random collisions by atoms on different sides of it and he was able to produce a theory of the scale of these motions and the type of random walk that would occur which have Illustrated from a web picture of Brownian motion walk he was able to calculate accurately the motions that would occur if atoms were real and from 1905 the real existence of atoms that was accepted by the physicists it says a great deal about the intellectual acuity of Lenin that although he was not a physicist himself he was able to see the weakness of the MCUs position even though he himself had not read einstein's paper now that is as much as I'm going to say about classical materialism and its rebirth culminating in the acceptance of atoms from 1905 by as a result of Einsteins work the next video I'm going to do will be about labor purpose and how that relates to entropy and I will be focusing on certain weaknesses certain residual and idealisms that people have when they try and conceptualize the Labour process

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 6,896

Rating: 4.9603958 out of 5

Keywords: materialism, Lucretius, Einstein

Id: _CNXoUjqWlU

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018