Where is intelligence? From Foedera Fati to Foedera Naturae
How Fate Became Nature: An Episode in the History of Intelligence
The History of Intelligence
Intelligence has a history, which is legible through the artifacts it leaves as traces. From cave paintings to cuneiform record-keeping, from Augustine's Confessions to LLM’s, each artifact of our historical record marks a moment in which the capacity to turn contingency into possibility expanded and adapted to new circumstances.
I treat intelligence not as a fixed property of minds or machines but as an adaptive and expansive capacity to find and redirect contingency toward purposeful ends. Understood this way, intelligence is not the exclusive possession of any one kind of being—human, animal, or artificial. It is an emergent property of the Universe itself.
This is precisely the story Lucretius tells in De rerum natura, which was composed in the middle of the first century BCE (ca. 54-59 BCE).
This essay looks at Lucretius' use of the clinamen—a swerve away from a well-worn path—as an episode in that history. The clinamen remains relevant today as a way of understanding how intelligence expands and adapts through an interplay of contingency, volition, and purpose.
Assembly and Contingency
In Lucretius' cosmos, everything is assembled, but every assembly includes many degrees of randomness and contingency. In describing the emergence of volition within an assembled Universe, Lucretius describes two dynamics that are fundamental to how intelligence works: finding contingency within necessity, and turning that contingency in a purposeful direction.
The Stoics offer one path into this argument—the capacity for contingency can be understood as a product of an already existing mind exercising assent—but Lucretius' atomism offers a more direct and more radical account. For the Epicureans, the clinamen is cosmic before it is cognitive: not a feature of ‘the mind’, but a property of the Universe itself.
Volition and the Clinamen
It is common to treat De rerum natura as an argument for free will against determinism. That's true, but it is mostly a poem about physics, and in particular how much elbow room we can find within the laws that govern atomic assemblies. Lucretius uses two related but distinct Latin phrases for these laws: foedera fati—the decrees of fate, rigid and imposed—and foedera naturae—the laws of nature understood as an emergent confederation of constraints, a constitution of what can and cannot happen rather than a deterministic script. Whether the switch from fati (2.254) to naturae (2.302) was intentional is open to speculation, but there is a case to be made that Lucretius was marking an important shift in perspective from determinism to contingency.
Voluntas is related to the clinamen, but it is not the clinamen—and the difference between them is the pivot on which the entire argument turns. My reading of Lucretius follows Long and Sedley's account in The Hellenistic Philosophers, and is substantially in line with Michel Serres' reading in The Birth of Physics. Both distinguish carefully between the randomness of the clinamen and the purposefulness of volition, and it is precisely that distinction that makes Lucretius' physics so productive for understanding intelligence as a property of the Universe and not some psychological feature of a human subject.
The distinction is this. The clinamen is random; voluntas is purposeful. Voluntas, therefore, is not and cannot be random; it is a will that orients an assembly of atoms—a human, a racehorse—toward an objective. The clinamen and volition therefore cannot be the same thing. The clinamen's randomness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for volition. Volition exploits the elbow room that the clinamen opens within the atomic assemblies of the cosmos, bending it toward purposeful ends.
Lucretius offers the example of racehorses, introduced after verses on the clinamen as ‘breaking the decrees of fate’ (2.251):
For without doubt it is volition that gives these things their beginning for each of us, and it is from volition that motions are spread through the limbs. Don’t you see how also when at an instant the starting gates are opened the eager strength of horses can nevertheless not surge forward as suddenly as the mind itself wishes? For all the mass of matter has to be stirred up throughout the body, so that stirred up through all the limbs it may in a concerted effort follow the mind’s desire. Thus you may see the beginning of motion is created from the heart and precedes initially from the mind’s volition, and from there is spread further through the entire body and limbs. (2.261-70, Long and Sedley trans.)
None of this describes the random action of a clinamen, and that is precisely the point. The passage follows one of Lucretius' most explicit descriptions of the clinamen breaking the foedera fati, and the juxtaposition is deliberate: Lucretius wants us to see that the swerve and the will are distinct but related operations within the total cosmic assembly.
The clinamen is the randomness that allows volition to exploit contingency and find elbow room within the foedera fati. This is precisely what my definition of intelligence describes: the expansive and adaptive capacity to exploit contingency and turn it into possibility. Without the clinamen, the foedera fati would be truly inflexible, and volition would have nothing to exploit. Without volition, the clinamen simply creates effects that lack controls. If order emerges from the collision of atoms, it is unintentional, though it could be quite consequential.
Long and Sedley's interpretation of the relationship between volition, physical laws, and the clinamen makes the argument precise:
The evident power of the self and its volitions to intervene in the physical processes of soul and body would be inexplicable if physical laws alone were sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. Therefore physical laws are not sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. There is a minimal degree of physical indeterminism—the swerve….
Normally, then, the result will be, in this minimal degree, random. But in the special case of the mind there is also a non-physical cause, volition, which can affect the atoms of which it is a property. It does so, we may speculate, not by overriding the laws of physics, but by choosing between the the alternative possibilities which the laws of physics leave open. (20)
This clarifies the randomness of the clinamen and the purposefulness of voluntas. Nature presents just enough contingency in its laws that something like volition—purposeful intent and action—can emerge and shape subsequent motions, spreading its influence through an assembly of atoms. Volition does not override the laws of physics by imposing a wholly separate order; it finds the exploitable randomness within them and directs it to its own ends.
This is the foedera fati becoming foedera naturae: as soon as intelligence discovers the randomness in what appears to be hard-coded causality, we no longer see ‘decrees of fate’ but degrees of exploitable possibilities. Fate becomes nature as a key moment in the history of intelligence.
Long and Sedley call volition a ‘non-physical cause,’ but this characterization risks opening the door to treating volition as separate from the Universe—which for Lucretius would mean that something comes from nothing, a proposition he explicitly and repeatedly rejects. All things are assemblies, which means all things result from the physics of what is and is not possible. The more precise formulation, staying within the physics Lucretius describes, is this: the Universe has produced a new kind of causality that is capable of reading its own laws, exploiting the contingencies they leave open, and creating the possibility of purposeful action. This is not a non-physical cause. It is physics becoming self-directing.
Lucretius calls this new causality voluntas. I call it an expansion and adaptation of intelligence—the power to find and exploit contingency and bend it toward other ends. The history of Intelligence is the story of turning foedera fati into foedera naturae with ever greater speed and at ever greater scale.
Fate and Counterfactuals
The foedera naturae names a cosmos of possibilities and constraints—a grammar of what can and cannot happen—that leaves genuine room for contingency, randomness, and the new. The difference between foedera fati and foedera naturae is precisely the difference between a Universe of unbreakable laws and a Universe of constrained possibilities. It is the latter that Lucretius describes, even if seemingly hard-coded laws can appear from time to time within the cosmos.
The Lucretian universe is therefore made up of what some physicists are calling counterfactual laws—combinations that can happen and those that cannot. Lucretius is explicit on this point:
However, it must not be imagined that all kinds of atoms can be linked together in all kinds of combinations; otherwise you would witness the creation of prodigious things everywhere: monsters, half-human, half-brute would appear; sometimes small branches would sprout from the trunk of a living creature; often the limbs of terrestrial and marine animals would be united; and Chimeras, belching flame from their hellish throats, would be nourished by nature throughout the all-producing earth. (2.700-8; Martin Ferguson Smith trans.)
Here is one of the earliest statements of what now goes by the name of Constructor Theory in physics—the conception of physical laws as, to use Chiara Marletto's phrase, what can and cannot happen. As Marletto observes, ‘declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible’: constraints are not merely limiting but generative, opening the field of genuine possibility rather than closing it. The foedera naturae are not hard-coded equations rigorously governing motion; they are a grammar of the possible and impossible within which all atomic assemblies take shape, and within which the interplay of contingency and volition becomes an expanding capacity to shape the future by making new combinations possible—i.e., intelligence.
This means that everything that exists does so by virtue of federations of atoms in constant motion. Everything that is any thing is assembled.
Volition, therefore, must be a federation of motions that arises from what the Universe makes possible. Lucretius is explicit: ‘there is another cause of motion besides impacts and weight, from which this power is born in us, since we see that nothing can come into being out of nothing’ (2.285). If nothing can come from nothing—if everything that exists must emerge from the contingent and provisional assemblies of atoms moving in the void—then volition emerges within those assemblies as a new kind of causal power.
The phrase ‘this power is born in us’ translates innata potestas, which might be rendered as ‘innate power’ and taken to imply something god-given or pre-installed. Most translators resist this reading, and rightly so: ‘born in us’ emphasizes emergence, the temporary residence of a new capacity within a particular assembly of atoms, not a power injected from outside.
But that the mind should not itself possess an internal necessity in all its behavior, and be overcome and, as it were, forced to suffer and to be acted upon—that is brought about by a tiny swerve of atoms at no fixed region of space or fixed time. (2.293, Long and Sedly trans.)
This verse establishes that volition is a new causal capacity that exploits the swerve but is not defined by it. If defined by the randomness of the clinamen, then the mind would be random and easily overcome by forces beyond it.
The mind is the emergent locus of volition, not its source. This is a crucial distinction, and one that separates Lucretius sharply from any account in which the mind is the origin of its own powers fenced off from the larger Universe.
Refrenavit, Refrenatur, Flecti
Volition emerges as a new causality capable of exploiting randomness in the federation of atoms. It is purposeful behavior—an expansion of the capacity for intelligence to shape the motions of assemblies in its vicinity. It can intend, and in the act of intention it can redirect the movement of atoms by exploiting the minimal randomness in their assemblies.
Lucretius describes the involuntary movement of being ‘impelled by a blow, through another person's great strength and coercion’:
For then it is plain that all the matter of the whole body moves and is driven against our wish, until volition has reigned it back throughout the limbs. So now you see that, although external force propels many along and often obliges them to proceed against their wishes and to be driven headlong, nevertheless there is something in our chest capable of fighting and resisting, at whose decision the mass of matter is forced at times to be turned throughout the limbs and frame, and, when hurled forward, is reigned back and settled down? (2.272-83)
This passage is not simply describing the matching of strength with strength. It is tracing the fundamental power of volition to marshal the motions of atoms as an opposing force—to fight against another force not by escaping it but by ‘fighting and resisting’ it. The operative verbs make this precise: refrenavit, refrenatur, and flecti.
Refrenavit and refrenatur derive from refreno—’to rein in, curb, restrain’—built from re- (‘back’) and frenum (‘bridle, rein, bit’: the physical bit placed in a horse's mouth). Refrenavit is ‘he/she/it reined in, curbed.’ Refrenatur is ‘is reined in, is curbed.’ Flecti, from flecto, means ‘to bend, turn, curve, deflect’—broader and more flexible in meaning than refreno, encompassing physical bending, a change of direction, an intervention into an existing set of motions to change their trajectory.
The fundamental power of volition, as these verbs reveal, is the power to bend, curve, curb, and turn existing motions. In these verses it is not yet the power to deliberate possibilities or contemplate purpose. Lucretius is tracing something more primitive and more fundamental: a reactive power that galvanizes the atoms of the body in response to physical force, opposing blow with a resistance that re-orients. This reactive power is the precondition from which the creation of possibility out of contingency will emerge downstream. That development—from reactive force to deliberate intent, from strength against strength to the capacity to turn necessity into possibility—is the story we must now trace.
Fatis Avolsa Voluntas
If Lucretius is tracing the birth of purposeful behavior, he is also tracing the expansion of intelligence as a struggle to turn foedera fati into foedera naturae—finding and exploiting the contingencies that atomic assemblies make available. Lucretius is clear that volition does not simply appear as a god-given feature of the mind, but must be wrested from fate:
…whence comes this free will in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will wrested from the fates [fatis avolsa voluntas] by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? (2.255-60)
The phrase fatis avolsa voluntas—‘this will wrested from fate’—is our clearest indication that voluntas does not oppose fate as a subject versus an object—mind against matter—but struggles within fate by exploiting the randomness of the clinamen. Nothing can come from nothing simply means that ‘there is no place outside the universe … from which a new force could emerge to burst into the universe and change the whole nature of things by turning [vertere] their motions [motus]’ (2.305-6; Ferguson Smith translation modified). No new force can enter the Universe from outside because the Universe has no outside. Nothing can come from nothing. This is made clear in 2.294-307, which hinges on the phrase foedera naturai and marks a clear difference from fati foedera (2254), which appears within a discussion of atoms as moving in an ‘invariable order’.
In vertere motus—to turn motions—we find again the fundamental power of volition: to bend, curve, curb, and redirect existing forces toward other ends. Here Lucretius is simply saying that this turning of motion cannot come from outside the existing assembly of atoms; it must come from within what already exists. Because volition is a new causal power distributed across atoms and their possible and impossible combinations, volition is physics. It has no power outside of its entanglement in forces that are already in motion.
Foedera Fati versus Foedera Naturae
This entanglement points toward something that Lucretius does not state explicitly but that his physics makes possible: the distinction between foedera fati and foedera naturae is not a fixed partition of the Universe into two permanent zones. It is a distinction that shifts as intelligence expands. Much of the Universe appears as foedera fati—as rigid, inflexible necessity—when volition lacks the knowledge and technical means to find or exploit its latent contingency. But the contingency is always there, written into the foedera naturae of every atomic assembly. Intelligence, in each new episode of its history, reveals and exploits that latent contingency—transforming what appeared to be foedera fati into the possibilities of foedera naturae.
Fate becomes nature when we begin to find and exploit contingency. To be clear, intelligence does not create contingency from nothing, which would violate Lucretius' foundational axiom. It finds contingency that was always present in the assembly and gives volition the means to exploit it.
Foedera fati is always potentially foedera naturae.
This is what each artifact in the history of intelligence marks: not merely a new tool or a new idea, but a moment when foedera fati became, little by little, foedera naturae—when necessity opened into possibility because volition had expanded its capacity to find and exploit the elbow room that was always latent in the laws that govern atomic assemblies.