[Music] so the topic tonight is IBN Sina and the reason why I wanted to start with IBN Sina is he wrote his Opus Magnum uh the cannon of medicine in 1025 so this is the 1,000th anniversary year for that book and I just felt like we have to start there um to do this though I people have some of you have seen my lectures before I have to give you background right I just can't just throw you in and then you figure it out so let's start with the background um the time period that IMA lives in is a turbulent time period there is enormous political upheaval because the Middle East is actually reshaping itself but to understand that let me pull the the clock back a little bit so in uh 632 the prophet Muhammad dies and when he dies he's replaced bya Abu Bakr he becomes the first leader of what will become the Arab Empire in 632 his biggest problem is he has to put down the apostates that have popped up and that becomes the rid Wars it takes about a year so by 633 he's done it the the amazing thing about that is it means that in 633 for the first time in history there is a single state that ruled the entire Arabian Peninsula that had never happened before the Arabian Peninsula parts of it had been conquered but it had never been conquered as a single entity by anybody right the Romans owned the North West Corner the Persians owned the northeast corner and by the way the southeast corner at one point they even grabbed Yemen so they even had the southwest corner but nobody had ever conquered the whole so it a single state that ruled it the shock an incredible thing that happens next is Abu Bakr sends a letter to his General KH who was in yma at the time and said don't stop and don't stop well there's only one thing P where he was and that was the Persian Empire the Persian Empire was in its fourth iteration but was 1,200 years old so you can imagine that if you're a person living in that world in that moment you couldn't conceive of a world without the Persian Empire I mean 1,200 years like it it's it's not how would you be able to imagine a world without it the the Roman Empire as an with the name Empire had been around for 600 years but Rome had already been Imperial as a republic for about 300 years so Rome an imperial Rome not necessarily the name was 9th century so that was also probably hard to imagine the world not having to make the sto the long story short khed wed and then subsequent Arab armies Will Conquer an Empire that stretched from Pakistan on one side to Spain on the other side by 7-Eleven they had Spain and they actually invaded Central Asia the Greeks called it bacteria so if I say bacteria that's what I mean um and that meant they had the largest Empire that had ever existed to that dat there have been subsequent Empires that were bigger but nothing had ever been that large before because you got remember they had conquered the entire Persian Empire plus a little bit extra on the east side and then they conquered about 70% of the Roman Empire the southern 70% so Rome survived this but not in especially great shape in the process they ended up with three things that are kind of important for for our story's purpose obviously ended up with a lot more than that but three things for our story one was this pull to go Rome to go towards Rome to be a Roman style Empire to use Rome as its model the other was to use Persia as its model and there was a split and in a way the first fitna kind of represents that split right Mo from damash uh Ali ABI Talib from kufa kufa is in Iraq D is Syria Syria was Roman Iraq was Persian so even in that moment early on in the in the history of the Arab Empire there's this pull which direction it's going to go the theads MUA wins and Damascus becomes the capital and the pull goes in that direction to the point where muia almost captured Constantinople and then subsequently another omad leader almost captured it a second time so Within a very brief period of time the that that Arab State almost finished off the Roman Empire twice twice by the way it was a Syrian refugee who saved the Romans the first time and then they used that he invented a flamethrower uh which is really cool they use the flamethrower to save them the second time just think about like the thought process I really want to throw flame on that guy there how do I get the flame from here right no I just I just feel like the creative power sometimes is underestimated so I said there were three things the third thing was this in a city called gandi shapur was built by uh shaur I first the Persian Emperor there was an academy and that Academy had books from all over the world in it the Great Library was bigger it had a lot more information in it but it it was destroyed in 391 or 392 by a mob so gandi shapur became the largest still functioning Academy on the planet at that time so when the Arabs conquered the Persian Empire they've now inherited this this Academy and at first they weren't really sure what to do with it the amads were were were not really tapping into it but they left it alone so there's a there's a period of time where it's like on pause but then comes the Abbasid Revolution so the abbasids go into revolt against the umiads and it's not looking great for theads by the by that point uh by 750 the omad were having trouble with their leadership it wasn't they had a few good Khalifa but not that many and it was starting to break down so the abids talk the amads into negotiating the amays show up and the abbasids murder them all except for one and in 750 they then decide to move the capital to Iraq and eventually they're going to move it to the city of bad which that was the name of a Persian Village they renamed the Persian Village Medina Salam the city of peace and then they built what they thought was going to be an impenetrable City that nobody would ever be able to capture it had two rows of walls in a circle the first row was short the second row was was tall that way if the enemy breached the First wall you could still be on the second wall and shoot down on them and then they had Dividing Walls in between that were in between height so that you could also use those and the thinking was nobody will by the way have you noticed the Titanic design was shockingly similar it had these compartments inside so that if the side was breached it would fill that compartment but then it wouldn't continue oh if only the Titanic guys knew history they wouldn't have done this um so they build the city and then after a while they go all that material in Gandhi shapur let's bring it here and they make the house of wisdom and that triggers the Islamic golden age that's the point when there's a whole new set of philosophy being generated and it's being generated in the Middle East again because right when you think about it the first round of philosophy was generated in the Middle East too cuz really is Greece not the Middle East I'm pretty sure Greece is the Middle East um but it's also worth pointing out philosophy started in what is today turkey it was started by a guy named thy thees was e ethnically Phoenician he was living in a Greek city it was a colony so he wrote in Greek and he spoke Greek but it's blurry which is how everything is Isn't that cool is it cool you can't C really categorize it at that moment and by the way wasn't his student uh but she was like Generations a couple of generations later there was a woman named aspasia who moved from melatos the city where philosophy originated heus anaximander an aam menus were philosophers from that City that followed an's footsteps uh espia got on a ship because her sister married an Athenian she moved to Athens and started a school and taught Socrates and Socrates credits her as his teacher and when you think about it in a way then philosophy got transmitted to Socrates by aspasia by the way she she also uh ended up becoming pericles's lover and peric the younger is her Soden and so she's a real person in case you were like ah I bet this is a myth it's it's not we've trying to delete her we've done our best it's just the problem was is how do you explain Pericles the younger right it's It's Tricky if if if he didn't exist it would have been a lot easier to delete her um so the House of Wisdom brings this in and we see this explosion of new philosophers new information coming around but there was there were some problems one of the problems that they kept running into was Aristotle Aristotle parts of it was easy to read and they were having no trouble getting into it but then there were books like the metaphysics that were driving everybody crazy they were like tearing their hair out they couldn't understand what was in the metaphysics okay so having said all that I want to set up the political situation a little bit I told you there was this pull that you go towards Rome or towards Persia in the end the abids make it so the pull is towards Persia it doesn't take long but the Persians begin to disassemble the Arab Empire from within to be clear the very Act of switching from omaya to abas it triggers the first breakup uh they missed one of those amads he escaped and he went across North Africa and he went to Spain and in 756 6 years after his family members were massacred and he had escaped Syria he broke Spain out of the Arab Empire and ruled it on his own and theads will rule Spain from 756 until 10:31 um so in a really weird way the aasad revolution triggers the the the beginning of the end for the Arab Empire um in 819 the uh area that I'm going to be talking about in a second summoned area breaks out of the Arab Empire it's right in the middle of Central Asia it it's where Kazakhstan usbekistan and turkistan are and it just keeps going in 8 890 the hominids break Northern Iraq and Syria out of the Arab Empire um in 931 uh tabaristan basically goes into Rebellion that's the area just in the northern part of Iran just south of the Caspian Sea it's mountainous there were uh Delite soldiers that were being used in armies as mercenaries they were really good soldiers and they basically start to look at well why are we letting other people uh rule us we could just rule ourselves and zeeds are the first to break away in 931 and then by 934 the buids break away and little by little the eastern part of the Arab Empire just breaks up in um 946 the buids capture bagad and then if there was any doubt at that up until that point if the Arab Empire was going to recover or put itself back together it was erased right because at that point one of the Breakaway Persian States now has the capital of the Arab state but the abbasids are still the khalifas they're still officially in charge on paper but they don't have any real political power every once in a while an abasa would stand up and he would start to exert himself and then the Warlords in the area would fight him and put him back down so that's it the Arab Empire if you know 946 is the latest date you can give it for existing but really by the by the 890s it's it's pretty much finished so it didn't have a long run necessarily but it obviously has a massive impact depending on how you count first and second language speakers Arabic is the third or fourth most widely spoken language on the planet today right it's covers a huge chunk of the world and so there's a there's an impact there but then there's also an impact on philosophy and technology and science that I want to get into a little bit using IA so um IMA was born right around 890 sorry 980 this is just a little flip of the numbers uh 980 ad in the summon state in a village near bukara bhara is in usbekistan um it's almost in the middle of usbekistan he was Persian so some of you are thinking ah I thought it was bistan as Turkish it totally is today it wasn't then so there's a really interesting feature about the Persians that I think is still kind of carries on but it's been changed a little bit so there there really were two Persian societies there was the Civilized Persians that lived in what is today Iran and in into Afghanistan and Western Pakistan and also a little bit into Iraq and turkey and then there were the Saka the guys in the north and they ruled an area that stretched from Romania to the very Northwestern tip of Pakistan so Romania malova Ukraine Southern Russia Kazakhstan usbekistan Turk fistan Kyan Tajikistan that was their area the Sak in English we say skians they were the crazy Persians they were the guys that would they would they would dye their hair starch it so it St stood straight up they would cover themselves in tattoos they would take a fedra you know like psea fed but the actual stuff uh fed ped is a stimulant because you you feel sick o take a stimulant you you won't feel sick you'll still be sick but you'll anyway is that a good idea um anyway they would take the actual edra they would boil it so that they could get to this stimulant and then they would pour wine in it and what they would do is they would pour it into a skull that they had taken from a person they had killed and they would drink it and then they would go into battle that was those guys and they were they were amazing uh I would have loved to have seen it from a distance love to have seen that from a distance in any case by the time my story gets to where it is Turkish peoples have been moving into the area and have been actually Crossing all the way into what is today turkey for a few centuries and there is a rival State a Turkish rival State uh the karakhanids who are just to the east of the summoned state so in other words in a in many ways this is the end of Persian rule in that area this story because it it corresponds with it what happened was before the sued state unravels it became a center of learning there was this explosion of philosophers and thinking that was taking place in bukara and just generally in the suited State and so IA being born at that moment in this place positioned him really well to get the kind of education he was going to need to become the person he will become um by age 10 his father was a minor bureaucrat so his father didn't have any like real special connection to anything so this wasn't one of those stories where he like leveraged uh connections this was a story where people recognized his Brilliance at age 10 he had memorized the Quran so he could you could flip the Quan open tell him the page say third paragraph down and he could recite that paragraph from I I can't even comprehend what that what kind of information that is like that just blows my mind um I had a professor who could memorize texts and we we would do this with him we would we would go okay John Stewart on Liberty seventh page second paragraph and we'd flip it open and look and he would recite it was bizarre freaky so by 10 he's already shown that there's something special about him cuz he can do this his father went okay I need to nurture this and he went and hired an Indian grer because India had invented the numbers that we call incorrectly Arabic numerals the reason we call them Arabic numerals is there was a Persian see how complicated this is like India invents numbers and then there's a Persian his name was koraz me that Persian took those numbers and then advanc math he he's the guy guy who did algebra he's the guy who wrote the world's first ever algorithm but it as a result when Europeans first made contact with those numbers they got it through his works and not being able to differentiate between Persians and Arabs they went oh Arab numerals and so that's why and by the way in case you were wondering like because in the Middle East there's one set of numbers and then North Africa Europe that why am I doing this the entire rest of the world uses the other set of numbers they were both from India like there's it's not that one was and one wasn't I don't know why the Indians made two sets of numbers but that's what they did so and then of course the really important thing was Zero but honestly even if they hadn't done zero it still would have been amazing having the digits because do this as an exercise later make a number like 48 but write it the way the Romans did and then multiply it by three you'll it you just don't want to live like there's no there's no what was that what were the Romans even thinking um so what what the Indians did revolutionized everything so that's why you hire an Indian grer to teach your kid math so that's what he did and of course imina absorbed math instantly loved it and then his father went okay I'm going to I'm going to get him into a jurist Prudence school and so at age 13 he's become a master of jurist prudence Islamic jurist prudence and so it becomes really clear this kid is going somewhere so his father uh hired a guy named Al Natali to teach him philosophy and Al Natali was living in bukara he was a famous philosopher at the time and they started going through books together um they did isog by Pirus they did uh Alma guest by pom poos the the uh alexandrian scientist who believe who tried to figure out how to make the Earth be the center of the universe so if you've ever seen these really big complic ated models showing planetary motions uh from that time period that they're all trying to prove the Earth is the center of the universe um which obviously I I know we think it is still but it's it's not we should let go of that idea um and then he read ukids geometry he read uh Aristotle and at some point alali went to Ian and said you've passed me you've eclipsed me there's nothing more I can teach you you're on your own he's 16 at that point so he has taken off Al Natali was a physician and so ifn was just like okay I'll learn that too so he teaches them what he knows by 16 he' become so amazing that the physicians in the area would come to him for advice at age 17 the Amir of the summoned state his name was n II came to him and said I need you in the court you're going to become my my physician and at age 17 he's in the Royal Court as a physician by this point in his autobiography he wrote I I anything that came my way any book that came my way I would just I would just read it I would absorb it and what he says is he would he was he would find the hardest piece that that philosopher was working on the most complicated part of it and he would open the book up to that piece and then he would start to read it and if he thought it was easy he wouldn't bother he'd walk away he only wanted to read that philosopher if that piece was a challenge to him and it stumped him and he got stumped the metaphysics by Aristotle that I mentioned earlier he gets stumped he can't figure it out and he says I I read it 40 times now we don't know how many times he read it it he says I read it 40 times because the thought was if you read the Quran 40 times you could memorize it it became an idiom I read something 40 times meant I've memorized the text and he says in his autobiography he says I still had no idea what it said but I knew there was some powerful wisdom in there I just couldn't figure out how to extract it it drove me nuts this is the first time I'd ever been stopped like this so one day in the Marketplace and he's in the book uh seller area and there's a the book seller says this is the book you want and imn looks at it and says how much and the guy tells him the price and IMA goes I don't need this book and he he he refuses to buy it so then the seller says look the guy selling it really needs money I can lower the price he told me what the bottom line price was you need this book buy it from me and and so IBN buys the book the book was written by farabi farabi was a Persian philosopher from the previous century farabi was another polymath on on a different scale I think than than than most of us can imagine so um fobi had decided that he wanted to be able to criticize everything and anything he wanted to be able to have commentary on politics and religion which of course gets you killed so he decided not to publish anything while he was alive he refused to take any Patron patronage money so he refused to have a patron he just would get simple jobs like a guard or a gardener he would just get a any kind of job to keep himself alive and he'd move around and he'd study under philosophers and write and write and write and right and then in his will he published all his books and then that way he say whatever he wanted and not get killed for it so alarabi really believed in Aristotle he was an Aristotelian he thought this was the key to understanding what needed to come next right that it would become the basis for all the philosophy that would follow uh I'm not quite as sold on Aristotle but I love what they end up doing I'm more of a platonist I just for the record whenever you walk into a philosophy Department almost everybody's Aristotelian I find these conversations really silly in part because dude that was 20300 years ago there wasn't an update like how are we still having this argument um surely there's been an up there has there's there's been a bunch of philosophy since you don't have to be aristan or platonist anymore you can we can move on now like you can be a hiigaran for example it'll get you in all sorts of trouble because people hate them um but it doesn't matter you can still be that you don't have anyway so fobi goes through and he's working on Aristotle and one of the things he's trying to do and everybody had been trying to do it up until this point as well was reconcile it with Islam so alindi many people refer to him as the first Arab philosopher I'm not sure that's technically true but he he's maybe the first big name Arab philosopher that might be the clearer way to say it he spent a lot of his time saying saying look wisdom can come from sources that are not Muslim and it's just fine God is is much bigger than we are there's no reason to think that there's only one source of wisdom and so there there was a lot of that going on so by the time we get to F he's still working on this this is still an issue for him having said that there's like at that point there's 150 years of trying to reconcile the the two IM Sina isn't actually all that interested in in doing this reconciliation because in I sina's mind there is one science one important science and it's logic so imn was the first Vulcan he was the first Spock from Star Trek where he wor he worshiped logic he thought logic came before everything else so biology is great but you know what's better logic and his reasoning was it's funny that I use the word reasoning his logic was I should right that makes more sense um that once you have an OB observation you have to verify the observation with logic it's not enough to Simply accept that the observation is correct in other words logic is the necessary ingredient in everything today I think our our attitude is the different fields of science are somehow above logic you use logic to get there but it's not it's it's the tool that gets you there for IA it wasn't the tool that got you there it was the end all be all and that the Sciences served logic so his interest in the metaphysics gets really interesting because of the way it was translated into Arabic in Arabic it was considered Divinity but Aristotle isn't talking about Divinity in the metaphysics right he's talking about metaphysics so there there was a translation issue that I think was also messing people just in the title the real problem with Aristotle's metaphysics though was it was written idiomatically so if if you say an idiom the words in the idiom don't make literal sense but people in the culture at that time period know what the idiom means because they have they know they know what it means because they were taught it so I read Aristotle 40 times you think oh he read it 40 times that's not what it means it means I memorized it but because he's in that period everybody around him knows what it means today we might not know what it means my favorite idiom is the stitching time saves nine because I keep trying to in you know imagine a needle and thread going through a clock a stitching time saves nine nine wats we don't know like $9 nine lives and it means does anybody know perfect he got it okay so what he said was if you if you do a stitch now so my button here I put a stitch on it now my button won't fall off and then I'll have to do nine stitches to S it back on so A Stitch in Time says maintenance is better than letting the thing break and replacing it but you don't know that from the words because it doesn't make any sense it doesn't there's no literal thing so what alarabi did was he went through the metaphysics trying to figure out what all the idioms really meant so he would he would take a shot like he take a guess and then he would he cracked it like a code and then he made a book and that's the book imn Sina bought so in that moment imn Sina could unfold Aristotle in his brain because he had the idioms from the metaphysics by the way there were idioms that they had run into in other texts as well they just went I I just won't know what the sentence means I'll skip it I'll go to the next one but now they know what those sentences mean too because albe had figured it out alanabi was the kind of guy who liked to challenge the convention and one of the things that he said and it's one of the things that was sort of baked into Arab Society was that God simply wouldn't abandon the non-christians non-jews and non-muslims and for that matter the non zor asrian because in most people in the Muslim world at the time believed if you were zor asrian Jewish or Christian you did have a pathway to Salvation you didn't have to necessarily be a Muslim to get to heaven it was easier if you were because you had the full instruction manual but those other three religions had enough of the instruction manual that they could get to Salvation alabi went well what about the Hindus and the Buddhists and the animists and the polytheists and then he said there's no way a all merciful all good God who only does the truths would have abandoned them so there must be a path for them too meaning that there are multiple ways you can gain wisdom from the world and of course this ends up influencing everybody afterwards but it builds on the tolerance that had already been baked into the system so imn Sina has has figured out Aristotle he's thrilled out of his mind he's like this really he must have been so annoying to be around he's like 17 18 years old and uh he's working for the Amir things are looking great and then the Amir dies he died in 997 there's two years of political turmoil where they have four different Amir by the way three of them were the sons of n II and then uh the Turks finish off the suited State um the the the karakhanids conquer bukara at in 999 and we don't know the exact year that imn Sina left bukara but it was probably 999 because his connections to the state would have gotten him in trouble he escaped to Goran so Goran is in the uh amudarya River delta as it goes into the thing that used to exist called the RLC that no longer exists which is to me personally a heartbreak but I guess who cares right it's just the only planet we can live on we might as well destroy it and exploit it and ruin it um for our children and grandchildren we'll be fine because we're we're just old enough we'll probably make it to our life expectancy is that too cynical anyway um he goes to Gorgan and in many ways Goran it was still summoned rules so the summoned had lost bukara the state had basically collapsed but the Turks hadn't yet captured it um it it it sort of replaced bukara for for a brief period of time and a lot of intellectuals moved there and there was like a another little burgeoning of philosophy and he seemed to do okay for about 13 years and then in 10:12 the karakhanids captured guran so he began traveling through horasan heading west until he got to Goran Goran is it still exists as a city it's in Iran it's just southeast of the Caspian Sea uh the Caspian Sea has this nice little corner there it's just a little it's Inland from there and when he got there he was hoping to have the ruler a guy named kaboose be his Patron but shortly after getting there it turned out kaboose had died so he decided to move and he moved North to dihan Dean is the land in between the RLC and the Caspian Sea he gets sick he's not finding future for himself there so he abandons it and he he goes back to Goran he stays there for maybe a year and then he felt like he was getting in trouble politically so he he decides to leave again and he moves to Ray so Ry was controlled by the buids uh the I I told you there were these two Persian groups from tabaristan that that created States and they had been in fight fight with the zids who who had Gorgan so he's now kind of switching sides right he's moving from one rival to the other he gets to Ray and the ruler of Reay um majal daa this booed ruler had depression like really severe bad depression so imn basically gets hired as the physician to treat this guy for his depression uh sham I'm sorry ma daa's mother her name is s Shirin Shine by the way means sweet in Persian so it's a it's a good name to have um she is the deao ruler of Ray the her son is just laying on a sofa all day staring at the ceiling going whoa is me and so she's actually running the state so in addition to I Sina serving as the the court physician he also takes the role as Court Treasurer and reports her he basically becomes a a glorified accountant so so he goes to hamadan and the reason he goes to hamadan is he wants to see if he can learn more from some other philosophers and the tradition in Western Iran at the time was when a philosopher comes and visits a town that philosopher has to debate one of the local philosophers so so it's like a sports match uh when you think about it it makes a lot of sense because then the audience will hear new ideas that are coming from this other place um but also it's a way to say oh look our philosophy was better our philosopher was better than your philosopher so there's a little bit of like competition as well it's it's not just for the sake of spreading ideas and in the debate with this guy uh I'm trying to remember his name it it'll come to me if I stop trying to think of his name ah anyway in the debate with this guy uh Abu Abu kasum that's his name in the debate with Abu Kasam it got personal and it got really heated and imah threw at him the biggest insult he could conceive of it's like 1015 and he says you don't know logic at that point that guy loses it and he's they're fighting back and forth long story short IM isn't satisfied after the debate and keeps going after the guy so then the guy says you know I might not know logic but I think you took the style of the Quran and then used it for your writings which in my mind is immoral you shouldn't be doing that it it's kind of like plagiarism and it also makes you look like you're trying to pretend you have divine inspiration and so now IMA feels like he's in really big trouble because he may have crossed some kind of boundary there it's not true it doesn't matter the accusation has happened to make things worse Abu alasam gets a job now working for S Shin so he's now moved to Ray so IA goes you know what I'm going to move to hamadan so the philosopher switch towns when he gets to hamadan he starts working for uh Shamel daah who's the brother of uh the depressed guy ma Dela but he's not depressed sham his name is son of course like son is in the thing in the sky uh of course he's not going to be depressed how could you be depressed if your name is big star in the sky so uh he starts working for him things are okay in hamadan they're looking like he's going to be all right and then disaster strikes in 10:23 Shamil daa dies when it happens IA is then asked to stay on as Wier oh I I forgot a little detail sham daa forced IBN to become his Wier Inn was actually kind of tricked into it shamala had been in battle he got injured he asks the court physician to come treat him and then when he's there he forced him into the wizer ship that he didn't want he wanted he wanted to do philosophy and research he wanted to do medicine he didn't want to advise the ruler on how to rule so when when Shams dies in in 10:23 his son says stay on imn Sina grabs his Patron and says look I we got to do something else they go into hiding and while they're in hiding they get contacted so there's this guy his name is Muhammad Ram dman so Ram is an old Persian name like it goes to Shah it's this deep he's he it's think think Gilgamesh style character big muscle big man likes to fight that's s of stum so this is this guy's name and I am a firm believer that names have the ability to shape you um I there's there's been studies some of the studies say no some of the studies say yes so like turns out people named Dennis tend to become dentists and people named Lawrence tend to become lawyers so there really is some evidence that this is a thing uh anyway so I'm going to call him dman cuz I just really like that name um dman figures out where IA is hiding I don't know how and he sends a note to him and basically it's how are you doing I'm a big fan of your work I'd love to make contact right it's that kind of stuff and they they start writing each other letters back and forth the new wiir for S ala the son of Shams ala becomes suspicious that that's in fact what's happening that D manzar is making contact they fig we don't know exactly how they figured it out but somebody ratted IB Sina out and said this is where he's hiding and so the Army comes they break into his house they search it they arrest him and they put him in prison in 10:23 word gets back to D manzar that uh his his idols in prison now just to clarify D manzar is SAA shirin's nephew in other words uh maalala the depressed guy and shamal dala were D manar's first cousins right because Shireen is their their mom so this is like a family affair at this point so in other words uh the S alah the new ruler is his first cousin once removed so dzar takes his army he marches to hamadan and attacks and he captures hamadan he overthrows his cousin and he releases IBN from prison iina then goes to esphahan that's where D manzar was the ruler uh and at this point the buids get into a little bit of trouble there's a little bit of chaos going on and du manzar starts conquering chunks of buoya territory he was put in charge by the buit actually his dad was rewarded a title and then he just takes off and now he's conquering land from his own State and he basically creates a breakaway State uh usually it's referred to as the Kad State or the kaked dynasty so while this is happening the gavids who are over in Afghanistan get interested in what DH manzar is doing and they're wondering if this isn't an opportunity for them to expand West so in uh 10:30 so imn by this point has been in isan for about s years the rids attack and it they defeat they defeat dman they capture esfahan and dman Escape they escape to kistan they wait there for a few months uh the Ravid ruler dies while while in esvan waiting for D manzar to come surrender and D manzar grabs his army goes back and takes asahan back and reestablishes his his State the problem was that while the gavids were in espah they plundered the library so I told you in 1025 imn Sina wrote the cannon of medicine well that was in eson he had been in eson for two years un under the patronage of D dmann Sina starts writing prolifically and he's actually writing whole encyclopedias he's writing treatises on philosophy he he does the cannon of Medicine and well those books get now taken to to GNA the capital for the the gav vids and I my stories usually end badly so this will be no exception um there's Aid ruler named Hussein the gids were north of the gavids north and east uh so they had a big chunk of what is today Pakistan um and theid leader was really mad at the gavids because his two of his brothers had gone and fought the gavids and were killed in 1150 so we're fast forwarding 120 years um Alin Hussein takes his GED Army to GNA captures the city and then there's an attempt to retake it by the gavids but they fail to retake it so to punish them he sets the city on fire and brings fuel into the City and he burns it for 7 days he goes and burns another random city called bust for just to do it just just to bring it home and they burnt the library and the only copy of ia's Encyclopedia was in that Library so we have a we have a lot of ia's works but that got rid of some of it um and he became known as Janus which means World burner so anyway so World burner is on my bad list don't like that guy um in any case they recapture esphahan they they've lost the library right because it got plundered but they start imn goes back to work and he's producing more works again and uh he he and dman are become really good friends to the point where iina actually travels with with du manzar when they go to war when he where he goes to war and in 1037 after a battle uh IA gets really sick and they're at they're really close to hamadan and he dies and uh they bury him in hamadan which I'm sure he wouldn't have liked because he desperately wanted to get out of that City he bet he would have rather have been in esphahan but you know you have to bury quickly so they buried him in hamadan so that's that's his story in a nutshell what I want to do now is I want to show you what he did cuz I've left out his philosophy and I've left out his his major achievements I just wanted you to see kind of the the chaos of the the the world that he lives in let me check the time so I don't so I time this a little bit all right so um his big piece his Opus Magnum of course is the cannon of meas here's what happens when when he was a teenager still he noticed that what most people were calling medicine was just quackery and by the time he gets to the point where he's writing the Canon of medicine Canon comes from the Arabic word Canon Canon just means law so it's literally the law of medicine um so you know right when you're in the University they go you have to read the cannon you have to read the law you have to read the books that inform you about that subject matter um by the time he writes the cannon of medicine he he notices something that he that was driving him nuts and he spells it out and that was the concept for disease in the world at the time was that there was disease it was a singular thing so you know you eat fish and you drank milk and a black cat walked in front of you and Jupiter was in alignment with Mars and now you bleed from the eyes but if the cat hadn't walked in front of you it just had a little cough and that that was that was and so it didn't matter what your disease was because it was just disease there was no concept that there were different diseases and there were different ways of getting these diseases and they would affect you in different ways so IA says okay this is completely ludicrous there are diseases this is plural they have different transmission vectors and then they affect you in a different way and then he says you know there are things that that could be at stake it's not whether you drank milk and ate fish that's not but your health might matter and then he says look here's a thousand cures he says cures are great everybody loves them but you know what's better inter interven stop you from getting sick interrupt the transmission vectors don't allow yourself to get sick to begin with if you can do that it's a lot better than having a cure and that's the foundation for modern medicine the goal is prevention the goal is interrupt the transmission vectors it's secondarily you go to cures because you have to but really that's not ideal that's not the goal and then the other part of it is there are diseases and that's why he's the father of modern medicine if I time people go I looked it up and it said it was hypocrates that's the father of medicine he's the father of modern medicine in case you do this by the way I disapprove of hypocrates being the father of medicine I think it's it should be like peset and then it would be the mother of medicine uh she was a physician from about 4,500 years ago in Egypt uh she was actually the director of the Medical Academy I don't know she I that feel like a much better uh candidate for the person who started medicine than hypocrates hypocrates was 2,000 years later more than 2,000 years later like it's not even close but of course it you're going to always make it a Greek if you can not an Egyptian Skin's too Brown ah so I'm not saying you don't already know uh by the way have you noticed that you can't tell Greeks apart from like Persians and Turks either her Skin's too Brown too I think it's just people are used to looking at the marble statues that aren't painted anymore and they look white they go they must have been white look they did marble white statues but uh just throwing that out there imn did something else that I think is mind-blowing so he was a polymath and he did astronomy he did mathematics he did philosophy he did medicine like he was all over the place uh I wish there was a way to like figure this out but I would bet $10 he had ADHD um maybe 11 $1 I'm feeling really edgy today um one of the things that happened was from the metaphysics so the Greeks were really interested in being and what it meant to be and imn Sina dove into this headlong he fell in love with this and so he he talks about categories of being and all the all these different ways of thinking about being I don't want to get into all of that what I want to get into though is this one piece that he came out of with being that's uh I don't know I find it really interesting so he said look when a thing is you know what I kind of have to tell you what Plato and Aristotle said to make it make more sense so Plato said that the the thing that exists I want something no that doesn't work my boots okay these boots are imperfect and they are right because there's no way for humans to make anything that's perfect except for Persians when they make rugs those are obviously perfect which is why they'll intentionally put one stitch in that's incorrect because only God can make something perfect so that that imperfection that they intentionally put into the carpet I feels arrogant anyway it's also really beautiful at the same time but it it also shows the level of skill that's possible um oh no I might accidentally make a perfect Persian rug here um so except for Persian rugs nothing can be perfect so my boots let's take them for an example so at some point somebody made them that's the reality that we experience but before they made it it was an idea in somebody's head all right according to Plato that's actually a re level of reality that's more real than my boots and then where did that idea come from Plato said there was a plane of existence called the idios translated in English we usually say the forms and what he believed was that the Mind reaches up into the edos grabs the the boot pulls it into the mind and then that becomes the the the idea for it and then uses your hands to make the idea real so this boot is a copy of the thing that was in my head which is a copy of the thing that was in the edios and so that's the real reality this is the copy of the reality and this is the copy of the copy Aristotle comes along his student and goes what that's nonsense what are you talking about and then he says look a thing is a collection of Essences so my boots are brown well although there's different shades of Browns so it's essence of all those different colors there's leather right there's stitching so there's the essence of whatever material is used for the stitching there's it's there's a shape to it right it's a it's a cowboy boot shape um and there's patterns on it all of those Essences when combined make the boot so this platform that I'm walking on is made up of Essences there's the essence of this curve there's the plastic material that's in it if there's wood underneath it for support or aluminum I can't it's not banging so it's it's really well made cuz usually when I get on a stage it's like bang bang so I'm really thrilled with this one Whatever those those are the Essences and then combined that's what makes the thing the thing I'm a series of Essences iina goes what is an what is Essence so if I were to try and figure this out I could actually do it as an information studies event because that thing can be described as a series of pieces of information but as time goes by the information will be added to right for example the Soul on the bottom of my boot is slowly getting worn down so to describe that wear in Terror I would be adding information uh that boot there's a scratch that I will never fix on it because I was in the battlefield of yamama and I hit a rock and it scratch my boot so it's my Yama Battlefield scratch and so it'll it'll be there forever so that would be information I would have to describe and then right as time goes by as my boot gets older and more scratched and more damaged I'm adding information you can take you as an individual when you were born there wasn't a lot of information right it was a lot easier to describe you then than now because now you have some broken bones and some scars and some mental issues and right there some trauma some personal trauma you have a history you have memories and and lot memories too and and I'm starting to get weird spots I think they're called youth spots and uh I've checked they're not dangerous it's just I'm getting old right and so uh that's information and what inar realizes then is time and information are correlated as time goes forward information is generated period And there's no way to undo this because think about it when you die and your body breaks down and decays talk about how hard it will be to describe you as your atoms are being scattered and digested by worms and whatever else that happens it becomes even harder to describe you that information only increases with time and there's no way to reverse it that's the principle of entropy 1,000 years ago iina described entropy that cool then he said what if we did this for the whole universe but ran backwards what if I took the whole universe and ran backwards in time well there should be less and less information and then he said what would happen is at some point in an unimaginably far past period of time I would be reduced to a tiny packet of information but just enough information that the entire universe could unfold from it he described a singularity that's big bang 1,000 years ago 950 years before this contemporary period was working on Big Bang he did it I mean he didn't say it was an explosion he didn't talk about atoms and helium and being generated from hydrogen and right none of that but that's effectively what it is that crazy so his legacy is a really weird one because for for the most part at some level we kind of lost a little bit of it in part because of the struggle between the Middle East and Europe and the way we frame things but parts of it we didn't for example the Canon of medicine was required reading in Europe so there was there was sort of a selective way in which some knowledge was lost on purpose and then some knowledge was retained on purpose um I actually was thinking about this as I was talking so I let me drop this I'm backing up to the cannon of medicine so when I was taught this stuff I was taught that ignot semov Vis is the guy who said wash your hands and he is I don't want to take any credit away from sov viice what he did saved millions of lives but I think it's important to understand it in a in a broader context so that you get the the full picture for the record the way he figured it out was also kind of interesting he was a doctor working in a hospital and he noticed a weird phenomenon that when women would go in to give birth the women who saw the expensive doctors the doctors with lots of experience had a really high mortality rate and the the women that were too poor to for the expensive doctors were surviving just fine and right it was completely counterintuitive and he couldn't figure out what was nobody could figure out what was going on and so one day he decided to just Trail the the interns because that's who the poor women were going to they were going to the guys who were still becoming a doctor they weren't actually a doctor yet and you know they would go and they'd work on a cadaver and then afterwards they'd wash their hands whereas the old doctors who didn't have any training weren't working on cadavers and weren't washing their hands and that's when sem Vice went oh maybe we should wash our hands the thing is that's not the first time that kind of protocol was introduced into a hospital in ancient Babylon they had that protocol um there there were multiple times in in human history where there were where there was some kind of protocol hospitals in India 2,000 years ago had a protocol for disinfecting before you would do surgery or before you would treat a patients uh the and of course IA spells it out in the cannon of medicine when he says interrupt the transmission vectors that's exactly what that is so in a weird way one of the things that happened to Europe was because of its biases against non-european culture there there was this mistake made where there were already cultures that had been working on disinfecting protocols by the way soap had been around for for Millennia and were part of the disinfecting protocols but because of that it wasn't until what 220 years ago that it got introduced into Europe and so one of the mistakes of I I think the sorts of biases that we bring into it is especially when we don't know history very well is you you have to keep Reinventing the wheel and and at some level I think we should just stop Reinventing the wheel and and just go with what we we already have and it's something to think about because all civilizations are doomed to collapse so the chaos and confusion and collapse that IA was witnessing that he was a part of is something that will happen again there's no exceptions in history and it's really arrogant to think this is it this is the final thing I think the the the thing that we have to remember is as we go forward and we build really amazing societies cuz there are some really amazing societies on this planet is we need to be humble and we need to think about the future and one of the ways that that we we think about the future is not just we start paying attention to global warming because that'd be great but it's also as our civilization unravels which it will at some point it looks like it's starting to already my alarm bells are going off maybe we should think about how we transmit that information that we've already acquired into the future instead of making future Generations start over again I mean this is weird but they're trying to figure out what kind of symbol they can put on Chernobyl so that in a thousand years when there's no Russian and Ukrainian speakers because those civilizations are gone human beings will know not to go to that spot just the fact that we have to we need to start thinking about the future in those ways because we owe it to the Future and and so anyway I think there's a lesson in iina be Beyond just you know oh wasn't he a brilliant scientist polymath and figured all these crazy things out and and it is how do we frame what we want to see the future looking like as opposed to I'm just going to live now for me and not care about anything else anyway I think I'm out of time at least I'm close yeah okay I'm I've got the signal to stop so I'll stop there thank you so much for letting me talk to you thank you so much Dr Roy uh if anyone has any questions that they would like to ask Dr Roy please raise your hand any has any questions just please raise your hand actually before you do I just remembered I brought Show and Tell okay uh this coin was minted by D manzar in 1034 while IA was living in esphahan so uh if you want I'll let you look at it closer but I just I just felt like if I brought a little piece of History it would be weird because there's a distinct possibility that iina touched this at one point right it's not who knows just monar definitely did cuz you know he touched every gold coin he Meed he's like oh that one that one I would have anyway um anyway so thank you so much Dr Roy for the session uh please note that uh throughout the whole year we'll be having these sessions with Dr Roy himself uh and the next session inshah will be in April and you'll find all the details on our website thank you so much [Applause] [Music]