Barbicane and Lucretius

A reader with the diminutive name of Michael the Lesser writes and asks:

Now the assumption that I hold is that atoms move in orderly and predictable ways. My body is made of such atoms and thus all of the organs involved in making the noise I use to speak should then act in orderly and predictable ways.

Now there is a certain noise that I use to refer to the idea of dog and that is the sound “dog.” So, if I were to be speaking with you and made the sound “dog”, you would understand that the pressure waves were referring to the idea of dog.

Now, how is it that when I will to communicate the word dog in my mind through speech, that the pressure waves that come out of my mouth are the noise that we have agreed upon in language is referring to the idea of dog?

What I’m after is what is the connection between the will in the soul and the movement of the body? If I had sufficient knowledge of all the atoms in my body, given that they are orderly and predictable, could someone predict the movement of my arm before I willed it to move?

Or let me put it into classical terms as best I can, how does my will give the atoms in my arm the final cause to go up?

My comment: I can speak to some of this, but not to the underlying assumption, which I am not sure I understand, much less share.

“Now the assumption that I hold is that atoms move in orderly and predictable ways.”

I am not clear on what you mean here. If you mean that the carbon atom in your liver, let us say, reacts chemically to a hydrogen atom in the fashion carbon atoms are wont to do, fine. This is orderly and predictable.

If you mean that getting an unexpected ulcer due the stress of coming home one day and finding your house has been hit by a meteor and your wife ran off with the mailman, I am not sure that this is predictable in the ordinary sense of the term. There is a psychological component to stress which physics is incompetent to address.

If you mean that when you sit down to a piano and play an improvised jazz riff, so that even you do not know exactly which keys you will strike in which order as the spirit moves you, then, no, in no sense of the word is your hand moving a way any mortal man can predict.

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