It is instructive, I think, to occasionally read a book written before the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th Centuries. In discovering what people thought of as explanations for natural phenomena and the natural world they occupied in the centuries before the scientific method became the accepted way to discover the reality of things, it becomes abundantly clear why human advance was so painfully slow before that time. Although humans have not increased noticeably in intelligence in the millennia since this book was written it is obvious that the simple speculations outlined in this slim volume were practically useless without a robust method to decide which speculations were reasonable and which were not – through experimentation and accurate verified data gathering. These are the two things that Lucretius desperately needed and had no access to. Therefore speculation rested on unfounded assumption which inevitably gave rise to deeply flawed conclusions. Indeed it is instructive to note that virtually everything Lucretius proposed in this book regarding the mechanisms behind the 5 senses where completely wrong. Without a method of building conclusions on verifiable, repeatable, understandable and rational evidence he was building castles in the air without a single credible foundation.
This is existence without science – basically Lucretius was lost in a world he singularly failed to understand though, rather frighteningly, he was convinced that his assumptions were actually facts both because he was unable to check them and his critics, if any, were unable to challenge him except by producing other equally unfounded speculations. It is no wonder that any technological advance or increase in the basic understanding of the world in that age was glacially slow. Although I cannot recommend this book on any other grounds it is instructive to peek inside the mind of an intelligent, questioning person who does not have an adequate tool set to test his hypotheses about the reasons and forces behind everyday phenomena. Both enlightening in one way and truly frightening in another – lest we forget that forces exist in the world bent on turning the clock back to these ignorant times.
4 comments:
I've had a similar experience reading Epicures' thoughts on the cosmos. I wonder if Thales or another Ionian ever thought of experimentation?
I think the big problem any of them would have running experiments is the inability to measure very much - certainly not temperature or time. I guess that you could do basic chemistry..... but apart from that... I have no idea.
I really must refresh my knowledge of how the whole enterprise got off the ground....
There's science versus religion in a nutshell. (Reminds me of the utterly counter-productive pre-scientific speculation surrounding cholera as exposed in Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map. People made endless bold--even cocky!--assertions about matters we see now they knew not the slightest thing about--almost always because they hoped to get rich off the desperate suckers.)
Without checks or verification, we have no means whatsoever for determining whether a thing is true or valid. All we have is our emotional convictions, which are endlessly proven to be a hindrance to knowledge and not a conduit to it.
You're made of stouter stuff than I to wade through it.
wunelle said: Without checks or verification, we have no means whatsoever for determining whether a thing is true or valid.
Exactly. Without verification all we are left with is people swapping opinions.....
wunelle said: You're made of stouter stuff than I to wade through it.
I read it over the Christmas break and it was only 84 pages which helped. If it'd been a few hundred pages I'd never have finished it!
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