 Because I need to explain the way that Epicurean physics is connected to their ethics as a background for their ethics. So we got to the point of talking about how worlds come into being and how plants and animals and living things come into being. And the next thing to say is about how sensation and thought happens. And in their view, it happens by sensory objects falling into our sense organs, emanating from objects themselves in continuous streams, of course made of atoms because everything's made of atoms, and void, that, for example, fall into our pupils or fall into our ears and so forth. And the interaction between those sensible objects and our sense organs gives rise to what we call sensation. And sensation, as such, is just some kind of representation of what's actually out there in the world. So sensation, in so far as it's mere sensation, is always true. Falsehood is only introduced when we start adding opinion and adding judgment to things. And thought is essentially a kind of sensation. It's like a recombination of sensations. But every thought that's really valid is a kind of attenuated sensation. So it has some connection to an external object that fell into the sense organ at some point. OK, now there's a lot more to be said about that, but proceeding rapidly through this, human nature. So we talked about, again, animals and plants, how they came into existence, and how they have a kind of natural selection-like view for that. And human nature has evolved beyond our mere animal nature to make use of language and form cultures and cities and things like that, and also various forms of arts, techniques, knowledge, and so forth. But all of that, in their view, has been we can explain as some kind of response to necessities happening in the environment. So we figured out arts like hunting simply because we were hungry and had to survive, protect ourselves against these animals, feed ourselves, and so forth. We started producing clothes and shelter in order to protect ourselves from cold and weather and intruders and things like that. And it's essentially in connection with our feelings of pleasure and pain and so forth that humans express themselves by means of cries and shout, and generally started establishing conventions. And so they have an account of the evolution of language as essentially being pure conventional sounds attached to human feelings and objects that generate sensations of pleasure and pain. Then the Epicureans give an account of why humans came to believe that there were gods. Primitive peoples, they say, originally started believing in gods in order to explain astronomical and meteorological events, like how these very powerful things happen and what these extremely beautiful and powerful things are in the heavens. They assumed these must be gods or must have been produced by gods. Humans aren't capable of producing those things. Certainly plants aren't neither are any other animals. There must have been more powerful beings that these things either are or that they brought into existence. But now we can see that with the development of the atomic theory and Epicurean physics, we can see that those beliefs are wrong and should essentially be overthrown. The first reason is because we can explain these astronomical and meteorological events by our scientific method through natural causes. We can talk about how winds happen when you have a greater aggregation of atoms moving in the atmosphere or something like that, and not because Poseidon is trying to punish somebody with a storm. And the stars in the heavens and all of those things can be explained as just being different kinds of material bodies that are moving in void space. And they aren't something produced by a deity and they aren't gods themselves. Also, they have an independent argument that says when we reflect on the concept of a god, we actually should have an impression of a perfectly blissed out and blessed immortal being. And they think it is very inconsistent with that notion of a god that's supremely happy and blessed to think of them rattling a trident in order to cause earthquakes or getting so concerned about what's happening with human beings that they're throwing lightning bolts and that sort of thing. They think actually this is an impious view of the gods. This view that gods care about what humans are doing and would have their own serenity and so forth interrupted by what these mere inferior creatures on this irrelevant tiny planet in some remote space that the cosmos have to do. That's actually an offensive notion about God. Much less these NFL football player that before every, he's a quarterback and before every play, he bows down and prays to God. And this idea that God could give a shit less weather. Denver wins the Super Bowl or whatever. Gods don't care about stuff like that. They don't care about what's happening to humans. They don't care about what's happening to other plants. They are totally immortal, blessed animals. And so we ought to think of them that way. And we can explain all of these things that are happening to humans and that are happening in the natural environment by natural causes, atoms and void. And mainly we shouldn't fear the gods. They exist outside of nature and they're neither affected by it nor do they try to affect it. What they really should do is serve as models of tranquil, pleasant beings and we should try as much to emulate them and have a life like them. Yeah. On the last part that he said, God exists outside of nature. Does it mean that you believe in metaphysics first and secondly? Well, it's a bit misleading how I've put it there. Nothing is actually outside of nature. Nothing's outside of the universe because the universe is everything that is. So anything that exists exists in the universe and everything in the universe consists of atoms and void. But here we can get into some really technical and difficult problems about Epicurean physics. So they have this idea that gods are immune to destruction even though they themselves must be composed of atoms and void. And it looks like everything that's composed of atoms and void because of how it collides with other atoms and other void space will ultimately be destroyed. But somehow there is this idea of gods that aren't, that immortally persist. And he says that they exist in spaces in between worlds. And what they are doing is kind of dodging all of the effects of swerves and other movements of atoms so that they're not themselves interrupted or affected by them. And it's unclear whether what he's saying is that really there's no such thing as these gods. It's just an idea that we have of a purely blessed, blissful creature that's unaffected and purely tranquil by everything. It's just an idea that we have and something where we sort of project this idea of an immortal being that's like that. Or if he's really saying there are these androids out in space, these extraterrestrial intelligences that are dodging spaces between worlds in order to avoid being destroyed. We don't have enough evidence there. But it's actually misleading for me to say outside of nature. That phrase makes no sense. There's nothing outside of nature. And there certainly is no, there's no platonic god or a pure form or Aristotle's pure actuality or anything like that. Yeah, question? I don't have a question, but I actually didn't have a thought. Because when I saw that same exact phrase outside of nature, I just thought it meant that the ideal idea of having a god, somebody who was perfectly tranquil and pure and blissful as that was, that existed outside of nature. That that couldn't be accomplished by a regular person and everyday being because that's like a superb ideal. Yes. But the question is, how does that fit with the rest of their psychology and so forth? So one thing is, we shouldn't have an ideal that's not actually sort of attainable in some way or else how can it serve as an ideal for us. And also, how do we get that idea about them? How does that occur to us? Does it occur like the way that we get the idea of a minotaur because we perceive a horse and we perceive a human and then we confusingly combine those two forms into one thing? Or what is the reality that is projecting this thing onto our sense organs that then becomes refined into a thought about what a god is? And there must be some reality to it. So even though Epicureans are often charged and were perceived as being an atheistic worldview, they actually are far from that because they claim to have approved that these gods exist. They say, look, we have conceptions of them. Those conceptions have to be tied to something. And what they have to be tied to is something that's emanating from the surface of some actual object. So gods are actually there, but we introduce a lot of confusing notions about them. And especially in Greek religion, where we portray them as being essentially like human beings and having human desires and human emotions and getting angry and upset and having sex with mortals and things like that, that's a ridiculous view that they wanna get away from and say that all of the prerogatives of the gods, you think you might need to explain Zeus for lightning and Poseidon for thunder and so forth, all of that can be explained on the basis of natural science instead. And so we can get rid of these religious ideas and stop worrying about it. Stop worrying that Zeus or Poseidon is gonna punish me or that I'll be punished in the afterlife or something like that. Because worrying about that upsets our tranquility. And the goal of physics itself and philosophy in general is to give us tranquility. But if we start thinking of gods along those lines, we're going to upset ourselves. And a similar thing for death, okay? We can get really worked up about death and worrying about death. And being upset about it can inhibit our own tranquility. But we shouldn't fear it because it's simply a dissolution of the material parts that make us a living thing. It doesn't mean that we have a soul that's transported to some other region, for example, that might be rewarded or might be punished. In fact, when the soul atoms disperse at death, we can't be pained or harmed by anything. And it's a really positive thing to think about that. There's a limit to this miserable suffering and anxiety that you're experiencing now. Eventually you won't have to deal with it any longer. But mainly, their idea is that death is nothing to us because it doesn't affect the living or the dead. It doesn't affect the living because they're not dead. And it doesn't affect the dead because they don't exist anymore. So there's no way to affect them. So it's really kind of irrational from their standpoint to worry about death. Death cannot possibly affect you. There is no way it can affect you, metaphysically, yeah. Is attaining death considered pleasurable in that sense, or would you remove it? No, because pleasure is an experience and death removes all experience. So it's like a neutral or no? Yes, it's a neutral state, but when you're alive and you attain a neutral state of not having any pain, you will naturally experience pleasure, but that won't happen when you're dead. It won't be pleasant or painful. It will be nothing. And so it is nothing, and that's how you should think of it and not worry about it. Okay, so the reason I go through those is because these last two points about not fearing gods and not fearing death show how their physical view is designed to remove suffering and to have a psychological and therapeutic effect. And that way, their physics are not just empty words. Remember the slogan, empty are the words of a philosopher that relieve no suffering, right? And natural science is worthless if it does not relieve some kind of suffering. The investigation of nature also tells us other things about human nature that have profound ethical implications, and that's what we're gonna be talking about today. So there's further things beyond this. For example, about the nature of pain, about what the human good is and so forth. We will still be depending on our physics to learn a lot of those things, but here's a couple of concrete things that you can get up and running with today. Don't fear God, okay? And don't worry about death. And you can start having a more pleasant and tranquil life like right now in class if you manage to inculcate these lessons. And the philosophy is supposed to be that simple and also be reassuring about pleasure and pain and other things on other levels.