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The atom and the I

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The atom and the I

Tobias
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Posted 11/02/09 - 02:30 AM: Subject: The atom and the I	#1
I'd like to think about the idea of the atom and where it came from. I am not suggesting to delve into the atom from the persepctive of natural science. The natural sciences have greatly advanced our understanding of the elemental particles that make up the physical universe, yet I am sure many more discoveries will follow. What I like to do is examine the idea of an elemental particle, a particle that is itself individable (atomos) and fulfills the role of the building block of the universe. To me the concept seems highly counter intuitive. We experience and so did the ancient Greeks, that everything in the world can be divided, i.e. can be modified to become something else. Naturally, with every cut there will be a smaller and smaller piece left and at some point the instruments with which we cut are not adequate anymore. But that seems a porblem of the instrument and not of the thing that is cut. There is nothing in principle that would prohibit a further cut given a sufficiently sensitive instrument. Therefore the creation of the atom is a rather important conceptual move. At some point we conclude there must be an end to the extent things can be cut. Possibily to avoid an infinite regress. This makes the concept of the atom somewhat similar to the concept of causa sui. The causa sui is the cause of itself. We find thois concept to end the infinite regress of cause and effect. The Causa sui was considered by Aristotle to me also first mover. The atom is its materia equivalent and conform Aristotle the atom is only considered passive. While the first cause caused itself, the atom is merely the particle into which everything can be cut up. My question though is how did we come to consider that there must be an elemental particle which can't be further cut up? Similarly, why do we entertain the notion of a cause of itself? Let's take a somwhat empiricist stance and say that we can only think or imagine something we have had some sort of experience with. It might be that the causa sui or the particle are innate ideas, but I consider that a rather problematic doctrine an will for now let it go. But if you have a great idea concerning this take than by all means. We never experience something that is a cause of itself. Similarly, we never experience a particle that is itself impenetrable. We manage tro divide everything further. The only concept I can think of that can create the idea of a self caused something and an individable something is the 'I'. I experience a gulf between me and the outer world. You all are similar to me and I know that, yet, you are undeniably 'not-me'. Everything else is not me too. And no matter what happens to me, they all happen to me and never divide me. Things happen to me and stand in relation to me, but never break me in divided parts. The causa sui is a similar idea. I know that I came into being and that has a cause, yet I also perceive that cause to lay outside myself. It is something that happened when I did not exist. It is something that happened in the outside world, litterally 'beyond me'. I never experience my cause, what I experience is that I 'remain'. I am always I no matter what happens and if I open my eyes when waking up I am me again and all things that happened to me I relate to myself, despite the fact that I was a different person than. So what causes me to remain me? I can only answer that that is me. It might be my brain, or my soul, or God knows what (actually God is the only other applicable answer, but I leave it aside for now) What constitutes me, the person that I am, my identification, is my experiences. But than, the me is the ground of my self perception, in other words, the I is self self caused (or the self is I caused, it remains the same thing, a cause sui). What does this show? It shows that, even in early philosophy, in our conceptualisation of God or nature, the experience of 'I' is fundamental and we extrapolate that experience on the outside world. We treat it as something having similar characteristics to the 'I'. Self experience is fundamental to the experience of the world which we have to assume is a 'self' writ large.
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Posted 11/02/09 - 04:26 AM:	#2
Interesting idea. Thinking about the current string theories etc, I would conclude that all things solid are ultimately built up out of things that don't have the same dimensions as matter, but, when bent, looped and twisted in certain ways, mimics the interaction that ultimately defines matter. Perhaps the event that 'started' the universe wasn't really an event, but something that mimics an event when bent and twisted in specific ways. Err... Or maybe I need to get out in the sun more often.
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brainpharte
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Posted 11/02/09 - 05:47 AM:	#3
It strikes me that the ideas both of indivisible atoms and of causa sui simply are commonsensical logical alternatives to infinite regresses. We reason that it must be one or the other. Our daily experiences show us that things are made of other things and that causes are the effects of previous causes. So we infer that either the causal chain is infinite or that it stops with some first cause, and we infer that all things are reducible to component parts either in infinite levels of such constructions, or that the reductions must stop at some indivisible particle.
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."

Mako
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Posted 11/02/09 - 06:24 AM:	#4
@Tobias Concepts such as the self, atom, god, thing, etc., seem to derive from our mental capacity to generate discrete (distinct, individuated) imagery/conceptualizations. From our ability to capture such features, being 'totalities' in themselves, ' we can subsequently generate more specific conceptions which suggest notions of 'completeness' and 'unity,' such as the atom and the self, as well as the causa sui which you refered to in the op. My point here is that we have a strong natural tendency to conceive in terms of 'thing-ness,' solidity, closure, indivisibility, unity etc.. These fundamental categories (not necessarily Kantian) are central to our notions of such 'purpose, 'the ultimate,' and 'meaning.' Our minds seem to be structured in such a way as to box-in' or package whatever we perceive. Certainly a capacity to separate-out and encapsulate information assists our ability to recall perceptions as unified chunks of data, and further allows us to manipulate them for our purposes. Discrete imagery and symbols allow us to provisionally assume a totality (i.e. a complete set of conditions) which we perceive and manipulate via the use of discrete mental features (i.e. concepts). To put it another way, by conceptually cutting-up the flux of incoming data,, we 'abridge the unabridged continuum of experience and existence.' Math and logic symbols/rules are the purest expressions of our ability to manipulate discrete (binary) units, abstracted as they are into distinct and separate 'packets of information.' To the extent that we conceive of a self or 'I' as a causa sui, the 'god concept ' can be understood as a universal, idealized analogue of the'self.' . The difference with formal symbolic systems such as logic and math is that the symbols come 'pre-packaged' as binary and substantively empty bits of data; thus (in their applied forms) such formal symbols can proxy for empirical variables. I hope my somewhat circuitous explanation is still relevant to your questions re the atom and the 'causa sui.' That is, we possess a native capacity for analysis-via-discrete-concepts, to cut things up into smaller pieces, and we tent to treat such concepts as provisionally indivisible 'simples,' conditional to our purposes, such as with the atom. Building-block concepts such as the 'atom' allow us to reconstruct and theorize about the world we inhabit. As for the 'causa sui,' it's principal practical purpose, as far as I can gather, is for morality (moral agency), which implies practical intentions and strategies, as opposed to the other universal causa sui, 'god', which for me is merely a formal assumption,, i.e. a placeholder concept. Going back to your title, I suppose one could say that the atom posits a physical indivisible while the 'I' (qua self as individual agent) posits the moral indivisible. Edited by Mako on 11/03/09 - 06:08 PM
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Simple Occam
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/02/09 - 06:58 AM:	#5
Divisibility is a function of the part-whole relationship that all observed things display. Everything we experience is composed of smaller parts and the job of empirical reasoning is to show how the combination of the parts explains the whole structure that we do experience. As I'm sure you know, "tom" in Greek mens "to cut", so an A-tom ( or "uncuttable") is defined in the negative. The ancient atomists simply assumed that there must be a smallest part to things. Today the Standard model identifies 37 such "uncuttables" or "elementary particles": 24 fernions (The Standard Model includes 12 elementary particles of spin-¹⁄₂ known as fermions. According to the spin-statistics theorem, fermions respect the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Each fermion has a corresponding antiparticle.) 12 bosons (The known force mediating particles described by the Standard Model also all have spin (as do matter particles), but in their case, the value of the spin is 1, meaning that all force mediating particles are bosons. As a result, they do not follow the Pauli Exclusion Principle) and the Higgs Boson ( The Higgs particle is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model. It has no intrinsic spin, and for that reason is classified as a boson (like the force mediating particles, which have integer spin). Because an exceptionally large amount of energy and beam luminosity are theoretically required to observe a Higgs boson in high energy colliders, it is the only fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model that has yet to be observed.) This model is a scientific theory that offers empirical support for the assumptions of the Greek atomists. Moreover, there is nothing wrong conceptually with the idea of a smallest part or set of parts that compose the complex objects we observe. If there is a maximum speed limit in the universe, then why not a smallest part which is defined by the spped of light? I"m not saying the Standard Model is without it's own problems; they are well-documented. But I think it does show that an atom is not counter-intuitive nor nearly as problematic as a causa sui or uncaused cause. However your conceptual argument for the primacy of the "I" is full of holes... and empty of wholes (because it eliminates the parts).

wuliheron
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/02/09 - 09:01 AM:	#6
The ideas of infinite regress and indivisibles are no more counter-intuitive than the idea that the earth is round. It was not intuition that led people to believe the earth was flat, it was personal experience. Just because you have never experienced repeated frustration in attempts to divide an electron into smaller parts or calculate pi to the last decimal place does not mean they are counter-intuitive, it simply means they are outside of your personal experience. To insist that everything must conform to your personal realm of experience is the height of hubris.

To Mega Therion
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/02/09 - 09:50 AM:	#7
If I remember correctly the atomistic theories in Greece arose as a reaction to the Eleans; they tried to explain change while maintaining along with the Eleans that nothing comes into being or perishes. Nothing I know of would suggest that they based their concept of the atom on the self; not that the Eleans based their One (which was in a sense a model for the atom) on it. I'm not sure about Indian atomism, but the one Indian philosophy I am somewhat familiar with, Buddhism of the early Abbhidharma-sutras, is both extremely atomistic and denies that the self exists. Which brings me to my next point. Do you ever experience an 'I'? Because as I see it all that we are immediately aware of are our perceptions; an ego is a kind of useful fiction but I wouldn't say it would be parsimonious to admit it into our ontology.

unenlightened
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/02/09 - 10:11 AM:	#8
Simple Occam wrote: As I'm sure you know, "tom" in Greek mens "to cut", so an A-tom ( or "uncuttable") is defined in the negative. Whereas the origin of the word "individual" is from the Latin - meaning indivisible.
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

Jehu
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Posted 11/02/09 - 06:46 PM:	#9
The philosophical realist holds that that which is ‘real’ (truly exists) and is the origin and cause of the ‘appearance of things’ (phenomena) resides somewhere within that particular class of things that are called ‘physical’, and that all physical things arise as a result of properties and activities that are intrinsic to some unspecified number of fundamental physical building blocks which have yet to be definitively identified. Such a stance is, however, is logically untenable, as I shall explain. The ‘causes of a thing’ (that which is necessary and sufficient to a thing’s being the sort of thing that it is) must reside either ‘intrinsically’ (within the thing itself) or ‘extrinsically’ (elsewhere), there being no third alternative. That which is possessed of its own intrinsic causes must partake of an absolute or necessary existence, for if that which is necessary and sufficient to the thing’s existing (its causes) is inherent within the thing itself, then the thing itself must also exist. Conversely, that which is dependent upon extrinsic causes partakes of a relative or contingent existence, for since the causes upon which its existence depends must necessarily exist antecedent to the thing itself, such a thing may either exist or not exist – contingent upon the coming together of those causes. Now, herein lies the principle problem with atomism: two or more absolute entities (atoms), because they cannot relate to anything extrinsic, are not capable of forming the sort of unions that might account for the development of more complex physical entities. In other words, you cannot construct a relative world from absolute building blocks, for the blocks will not hold together. Still, there must be at least one absolute entity, if we are to avoid the infinite regression of relative causes, and so we must look elsewhere for it.
It is not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye is able to see, that is the true reality.

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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/03/09 - 07:30 AM:	#10
It's an interesting idea, but very anachronistic I think. 'The I' or 'the self' didn't exist in Greek philosophy; instead there was 'the soul' (psuchê ) which was a kind of very fine matter that penetrated the whole body. For the atomists, the soul was itself composed of atoms and would dissolve at death; it certainly wasn't a unity of any kind. As To Mega Therion mentioned, the idea of 'the atom' was a reaction to the Eleans' arguments against change, and I think may have been related to the Pythagoreans' concept of "monads" (nothing to do with Leibnitz's). The "cause of itself" as cause of its own existence never occurred in Greek philosophy that I know of, though I could be wrong. Aristotle's prime mover was the cause of the motion of other bodies, but it did not itself move, so could hardly be called a cause of itself. And the matter of which those bodies are composed always existed. I can't think of anyone proposing a real "causa sui" before Anselm, though again, I could be wrong. PS. Is it just me, or do half of the above posts not even have anything to do with the OP, besides the word 'atom'?
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.

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