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| Leucippus |
The atomic thinkers were all-out mechanists. And they tried to reduce consciousness to a hurly-burly of
atomai, pushing and shoving, elbowing and shouldering. These atoms are all made of the same world-stuff, ('like many pieces of gold separated from one another,' says Aristotle in
De caelo). But there are both soul-atoms and body-atoms, of which men are mishmashes. What makes some atoms soul-atoms is a particular shape and size. Soul-atoms aren't bent-backed or crook-necked, as some of the other atoms are.
Contrario, they're smooth and curvaceous. And most of them go—whoosh—right to the head. So that's where thinking happens. Yes, thoughts are nothing but atoms, and atoms are nothing but qualitiless sizes and shapes.
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| Democritus, the chortler |
Well, such 'nothing-but' stuff is always foredoomed. We can't reduce the irreducible—the irreducibly qualitative to the quantitative, the irreducibly subjective to the objective, the irreducibly first-personal to the third-personal—so don't let's try. Still, we'll give the atomists a break, for nobody had ever before set out a reductive mechanico-materialistic philosophy of mind. (And doing so wasn't, after all, a primary concern of the school.) Sure, it was a sort of childish philosophy, but, then, Philosophy was still a child herself, still holding Mythopoeia's hand. She spake as a child, she understood as a child, she thought as a child. But now that she's a grownup, she has put away childish things—yes? No. She's gone rather into a second childhood, elsewise she's senile. (And they say that infancy and senility are alike.) Today we talk of neurons and ganglia rather than atoms, but the philosophico-conceptual errors are the same. Back then it was Leucippus and Democritus with a reductionism. Now, millennia later, it's Paul and Patricia Churchland, neurophilosophy's primogenitors, with an eliminativism. Poor Philosophy! The last state is worse than the first. And she really should know better by now. (She
is almost three-thousand years old.)
