Episode 014 - Atoms Are Solid and Indestructible And Constitute the Seeds Of All Things
Date: 04/22/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1511-episode-fourteen-atoms-are-solid-and-indestructible-and-constitute-the-seeds-of/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 014 features Cassius, Elaine, Julie, Martin, and Charles working through the Daniel Brown passage where Lucretius argues that atoms (which Lucretius calls the “seeds” of things) are solid, indestructible, and therefore eternal — and that this is what allows nature and living things to continue in a consistent, predictable way without supernatural intervention. The episode opens with a reading of the text (Book 1, around lines 483–598) and then branches into several extended discussions.
The first extended discussion concerns the word “seeds” (semina in the Latin). Charles investigates the etymology live during the episode, looking up the Munro Latin edition at approximately line 501, where the Latin semina rerum primordiaqu’esse appears. The group finds that Munro and Bailey both use “seeds,” while Stallings uses “atoms” and Martin Ferguson Smith uses “seeds and primary elements.” They observe that semen/semina carries meanings of seed, origin, offspring, and cause. Elaine argues that “seeds” is a somewhat misleading metaphor — a seed in our modern sense already contains everything needed for its plant to grow, while atoms must combine with each other to make a body — but the group concludes Lucretius and Epicurus intentionally chose semina to emphasize the repeatability and continuation of composed bodies. Cassius notes that “atoms,” as used by modern people to mean the chemical elements on the periodic table, is equally misleading and listeners should think of these as elementary particles, irreducible and indivisible.
Cassius draws a significant philosophical analogy: just as body and void are two distinct, non-overlapping categories in physics (where body is, there is no void, and vice versa — Principal Doctrine logic applied to physics), so too pleasure and pain in ethics are two distinct, non-overlapping feelings. The point is that “tranquility” or “absence of pain” is not a positive third thing between pleasure and pain — pleasure is not void, it is a positive feeling. Julie provides a medical illustration: sensory nerve fibers can typically only carry one signal at a time (demonstrated clinically by using a mild tactile sensation to block a child’s perception of a needle injection). The group discusses whether pleasure and pain can be simultaneously experienced and concludes that while we can be aware of multiple feelings in different parts of our experience simultaneously (pleasure at the beauty outside, grief at a dead friend), they remain distinct — they do not average into a third emotion — and the Stoic advice to simply accept pain so one is no longer bothered by it amounts to numbing oneself in a way that also blunts pleasure.
Martin explains that Lucretius’s physics uses a “hard body model” that does not match modern quantum physics — elementary particles in modern physics are not hard in the classical sense, and even the void has properties (electromagnetic fields, exchange particles). But this does not undermine the fundamental Epicurean insight that no supernatural action is required to explain the workings of matter. The group discusses science as a process of making observations and testing them (not memorizing a set of facts), and whether knowing that future physics will correct current understanding should prevent us from acting on our best current knowledge. Elaine argues it should not — not acting is itself an action — while Martin adds a cautionary note that implicit assumptions restrict what observations we can make (theory-ladenness of observation). Cassius quotes Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens on the logical impossibility of a “first cause.” The episode ends with Cassius asking whether anyone is familiar with the Reinhold Niebuhr Serenity Prayer (the “courage to change the things I can, acceptance of what I cannot, and wisdom to know the difference”), observing that this maps well onto Epicurean distinctions between determined properties (atom’s eternal characteristics) and contingent events (which could happen or not).
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 14 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. Find out more about the nature and goals of our podcast at LucretiusToday.com, where you can download a copy of the text that we read from each week.
In Episode 14, we move to the argument that atoms are solid and indestructible, and therefore eternal, and that by means of these, living things continue their kind and regularity occurs in the universe without the intervention of supernatural gods. So let’s join the discussion already in progress.
Martin: [reads Daniel Brown’s 1743 translation]
Lastly, bodies are either the first seeds of things or formed by the uniting of those seeds. The simple seeds of things no force can strain. Their solid parts will never be subdued. Though it is difficult, I own, to think anything in nature can be found perfectly solid. For heaven’s thunder passes through the walls of houses, just as sound or words. Iron grows hot by fire, and burning stones fly into pieces by the raging heat. The stiffness of the gold is loosed by fire and made to run. The hard and solid brass, subdued by flames, dissolves. The heat and piercing cold pass through silver — both of these we find, as in our hands we hold a cup and at the top pour water hot or cold.
So nothing wholly solid seems to be found in nature. But because reason and the fixed state of things oblige me — here, I beg, while in few verses I show — that there are beings that consist of solid and everlasting matter, which we call the seeds, the first principles of things, from which the whole of things begin to be.
And first, because we find two sorts of things, unlike in nature, in themselves distinct — body and space — it is necessary each should be entire and separate in itself. For where there is a space, which we call void, there nothing is of body; so where body is, there nothing is of empty space. And therefore such things are as solids and first seeds, which nothing in them can admit a void. Besides, because in all created things there is a void, it is necessary some solid matter should still include this void. Nor can you prove by any rule of reason that anything contains within itself an empty space, unless you will allow what holds it in as perfect solid. And this is nothing else but the close union of the first seeds, which bind and do confine within themselves this void. Matter, therefore, composed of solid parts, eternal is, when all things else must die.
Further, if there was no such thing as we call void, everything would be solid. Then again, unless there were some things solid to fill up the space they hold, all would be empty space. Body from space, therefore, is in itself distinct, for all is neither full nor is all void. And therefore there are solid seeds which make a difference between full and spaced. These solid seeds by no force from without can be dissolved, nor can they be destroyed by being pierced within, nor made to yield by any other means, as proved before. For nothing can be bruised without a void, or broken, or by force be cleft in two, or receive moisture or the piercing cold, or searching fire, which all things else destroys. And the more void the solid seeds can find, the sooner, when they are struck, will they dissolve and fall to pieces. Therefore if these first seeds are solid, free from void, they, as I said, must be eternal and from death secure.
Again, if matter had not been eternal, long before now all beings had returned to nothing, and each being we behold again had been restored from nothing. But as before I proved, nothing from nothing can be made, and what was once in being can never to nothing be reduced. It follows those first seeds must be composed of principles immortal, into which at last each being must dissolve, and then supply an everlasting stock of matter to repair the things decayed.
These first seeds, therefore, are solid and simple, else it could not last entire through ages past and infinite to repair beings perished and dissolved. But still, if nature had prefixed no bounds in breaking things to pieces, the parts of matter broken by every passing age had been reduced so small that nothing could of them be formed that would in any time become mature. For things that are too small are sooner dissolved than again restored. And therefore what an infinite tract of ages past has broken and separated and dissolved, and future time can never be repaired. So that certain bounds of breaking and dividing must be set.
Because we see each being is repaired, and stated times are fixed to everything in which it feels the flower of its age. And yet, though the first seeds of things are solid, all beings that are compounded — such as air and water, earth and fire — may be yielded, however made, and from them be produced, because there is a void still mixed with things. And on the contrary, if these first seeds were soft, what reason can there be assigned once hardened flints and iron could be formed? For nature would want the proper principles to work upon. And therefore these first seeds must simple solids be, by whose union close and compact all things are bound up firm, and so display their strength and hardy force.
Again, because each being in its kind has certain bounds prefixed to its increase and to the preservation of its life, and since by nature’s law it is ordained to know each how far their powers to act or not extend — since nothing changes, and everything goes on as it began — each kind of birds most steady in their course show the same colors painted on their wings. The principles of matter, once they spring, must be fixed and unchangeable. If the seeds of things could change by any means, it would be unknown what could be formed and what not, by what means every being is limited and stopped short within the bounds it cannot break. Nor could the course of time in every age the nature, motion, diet, and the manners of the old sire impress upon the young.
Cassius: Elaine, what are you thinking as you listen to this section?
Elaine: Well, actually my first thought is not so much about the specific content but about the dialect. I didn’t get back and look at the Latin, but I think the translations are all fairly similar in that this is not a very poetic section. You don’t think about it, but this section compared to the beginning — it’s just not as vivid. And the reason I mention that is that people who are attracted to the kind of heavy poetry — I wonder if they’ll get to this part and their eyes will start to glaze over, because it’s pretty dense. You have to focus on it, especially depending on what kind of translation you’re reading. But even if you’re reading one that is in a little bit more modern English, it’s denser. And I wonder if people think, “Oh, this is like my science book that I didn’t like.” For those of us who don’t like that kind of dense science stuff — somehow we’ve got to make this interesting to that group. I would see that as a goal for this discussion.
Martin: On the other hand, poetry is a lot more dense than the science stuff. So I think as part of this being in the mindset of analyzing dense poetry, having a section like this — relatively dry — should not be a problem.
Elaine: Well, that would be a person who likes more of the dry science. I like both, so I fit in both boats.
Cassius: There’s not as much allegory and metaphor in this section. Yes — yeah. That doesn’t mean it’s not heavy. I’m agreeing with what everybody said, because it’s been my personal experience over the years that when I would get to sections like this I would just put the book down. It would be less interesting to me and less motivational. And I would just not be able to make it through these sections at all. For somebody who’s new to it — it’s bad enough to hear all the details of the different Greek gods and what Hercules was doing and the monsters he was wrestling with, and when you don’t have a familiarity with those stories it’s hard to follow things. But at least in those sections I was able to make it through them. But when I would get to these, it would seem to me to be repetitive and unnecessary detail, and I just couldn’t understand where he was going. Which is why I agree with what Elaine said — that’s our task here: to put it in perspective, show why he’s even talking about these things and why he needs each paragraph. Because it’s not repetitive — there are different things that he’s saying in each part. So I hope we can make that interesting for people.
My method of organization — again as I think I said earlier in our discussion here — is that the top-level headline of this section of the outline is that the atoms constitute seeds by which nature and living things continue on over time in a consistent manner, and that this situation with seeds and the way they are able to continue is the explanation that tells us how the world works without supernatural beings steering it.
Charles: Well, I was just going to mention that the verbiage — why Lucretius uses “seeds” — is a callback to the Letter to Herodotus. It’s not explicitly poetic. Right. And that is the letter I think a lot of people don’t read — they’d rather read the Letter to Menoeceus, not the Letter to Herodotus, which is very important to Book One of this.
Cassius: Besides the high-level point that all these things can happen without a supernatural force, I still think it is important for the non-science-minded people to get an idea of the process that he’s using here: that he’s drawing from his observations of nature, drawing from his observations of matter, to make conclusions about particles so small that he can’t see. He’s not making this up from some kind of abstract realm or ideal. He is extrapolating from his observations, but continually basing his conclusions on actual observations he’s making in nature. Which is what science is about — making observations, making predictions, and testing those predictions with more observations. And I don’t think that whole process is very well explained. People in school get this idea that science is about facts — about memorizing facts. And you could almost read this section that same way: while he’s giving us the facts, what he’s actually given us is his process for making conclusions about nature by making observations. I think all of us can do that ourselves. So we can be — whether we’re scientists or not — reading this, and start to understand how we can be amateur scientists. And really to get a firm grasp on the whole principles of Epicurean philosophy, you need to convince yourself by making these observations of nature, testing them out, and saying: okay, so how are things really working? We’re not all going to be physicists — I’m sure not — but we can at least get an idea of what the process is. Which is totally different from taking things on faith.
Elaine: Regarding the usage of the word “seeds” — can we check back whether this is really a good translation? At first I didn’t like it at all, because I thought it’s misleading. But when I thought about it, he might have chosen the word “seeds,” if it’s actually justified by a proper translation, to clearly show — based on these elementary particles — that by calling them “seeds” he’s showing the repeatability of composed bodies.
Martin: The other translations here say “bodies,” so… When I think of “seed” I actually think of something that has components in it already — you know, like the germ, and what’s in it, like a seed of a plant.
Charles: So let me see — Stallings uses “atoms,” which would be the fundamental particles. And Martin Ferguson Smith uses “ultimate particles of matter” — “particles of matter.” I like that — it’s not very poetic again, but “seeds” is more poetic. But really what he’s talking about are the ultimate particles of matter, the indivisible particles. “Seeds” is probably not a great one, because a seed would be something that a tree comes out of — it would have everything needed for the tree in it. It’s not that seeds come together with each other to make the tree. So “particles” would be a much better word.
Cassius: I don’t know where I stand on that at the moment. But as far as what we’ve said previously — I do see that Munro uses “seeds” in his first paragraph that we’ve reproduced there, and Bailey does as well. So it’s interesting that those three seem to be consistent, while maybe the ones we’re talking about are the more current ones. If Martin Ferguson Smith does not use the word “seed” there, then — when I look at page 16 of Martin Ferguson Smith where he lists line 500, I see that there’s a sentence: “It is these which, according to our teachings, are the seeds and primary elements of things — constituents and components of the universe.” So at least there Martin Ferguson Smith uses “seeds.”
It’s an interesting point you’re making, though, and I agree — we currently think of seeds as living things that are composed of many smaller things. Whether that’s what Lucretius and Epicurus were thinking about is interesting to think about.
Charles: Yeah, I think the best thing is really to find someone who can translate us or tell us the original word, and then we can decide on that one — whether the translators took their freedom to express this or whether it’s Lucretius’s own idea. So if we take the time to look for that, we could probably find it. Yeah, yeah, I’m trying to…
Okay — I think I found it. I pulled up the Latin text from Lucretius. We’d have to get someone to verify it, but it seems… we need the Lucretius Latin. Yes — semina — isn’t that presumably the root of “semen”? Latin. Line number 500 from the Munro Latin edition. I don’t know where to start even quoting it: semina rerum primordiaque esse… Has anybody found that section where I am? What line?
Cassius: 501.
Charles: I do think that Lucretius and Epicurus did use the word “seed.”
Cassius: I agree. I think in this case it’s really that they want to emphasize with this word choice the repeatability of composed bodies. That’s clearly an analogy that’s referenced several times here — like in the end he talks about “the sire.” “The nature, motion, diet, and the manners of the old sire impress upon the young” is one example. And I think we started out with a reference to birds — “each kind of birds most steady in their course show the same colors painted on their wings.”
Elaine: Oh, so this is interesting — and has to do with a translation on a video that was submitted to us of a play where the English translation used the word “causes.” I’m pulling up an English-Latin dictionary for semina — it’s the nominative plural of semen, and the dictionary lists: cause, seed, cutting, essence, germ, graft, grain, granule, ground, occasion, offspring, origin, progeny, ray, scion, seed, semen. So “causes” is in there. I wonder if that is why there’s that unusual translation.
Charles: Either way, they all sort of allude to growth in some way — something that will continue to grow, or combine, or evolve, however we want to put it. And it does still have the meaning of the modern seed. So it’s not a very accurate description of an atom. A particle, an elementary particle — I wouldn’t, if I were the poet, have used that term, because the things don’t grow out of the atom like a seed does. A seed has everything in it; it has to come together with other particles to make a body, which is exactly what Lucretius opens up with. “Bodies are either the first seeds of things or formed by the uniting of those seeds.” So that’s not how any other thing we think of as a seed works. A seed is something you plant that will itself grow into the rest.
Cassius: I’d need more sources to back this. Seeds for centuries were kind of used as a benchmark for a lot of materialist philosophy — the word itself was kind of used as a benchmark.
Charles: Yeah, probably because of this kind of discussion in Lucretius — stemming from Lucretius. You know, maybe they didn’t think about seeds the way we do — or semen, so — well, ironically, that’s kind of a synonym for it. And maybe that’s why it could be used, if people didn’t really understand how that was all working to begin with. But these days, as a bad metaphor, it’s not going to get you in the right direction. Listeners need to be thinking of these as elementary particles that come together, not as things out of which other things grow from them. I wonder if that’s why Stallings changed it to “atoms.”
Elaine: I bet. Often I wonder whether he’s switching back and forth between talking about particles versus bodies, which are the combinations of particles. But I don’t think that explains what’s going on here, because he does seem to be pretty clearly referring to the particles, because he’s talking about them being eternal. Certainly the things that we think of as seeds are not eternal — it’s only the particles that are eternal. But he’s talking about the particles being eternal and being seeds, which possibly we ought to be relating — as time goes by, I think there are other attributes of the particles. We’ve not really listed the attributes of the particles yet in the poem, and I can’t recall what they are if I try to list them right now. But in terms of size and shape and weight — it seems like there’s one or two other characteristics.
Cassius: Right. So let’s talk about this process that he’s going through. He observes nature: sounds can pass through walls of houses, iron gets hot, so he’s thinking about heat and cold as particles. We think about things differently now, so it doesn’t seem that he fully understood how heat works. But he is observing nature being penetrated by bodies, or by energy. Like holding a cup — it’s a great image. You’re holding a cup, but if you pour hot or cold water into it, it changes the temperature of the cup. So everybody even today has had that experience: “Oh, this cup isn’t completely solid, because it changes temperature when you pour something else into it.” And that leads him to know that the cup itself isn’t solid. But it must be made of things that are themselves impenetrable. Because then the next — well, somebody else say something about where he goes from there, because all he’s established there is that the cup itself has space in it.
Elaine: I’m a bit distracted — I’m going off deeper into the origin of the terminology of “seeds” in materialist philosophy. I’m reading about Anaxagoras and this book Confronting Contagion: Our Evolving Understanding of Disease, which talks about Aristotle and Theophrastus, as well as devoting an entire paragraph to Lucretius and Epicurus.
Cassius: Well, let me bring us back to this passage then. By saying this — which is more of an extension of what Elaine was saying — the next thing that follows is the part where he talks about that “we find two sorts of things, unlike in nature, and in themselves distinct: body and space.” And he emphasizes that by saying that where there’s space, which we call void, there is nothing of body; and where body is, there’s nothing of empty space. Now you can stop me if you think this goes off too far in another direction, but whenever I read that, my mind is drawn back to Principal Doctrine Three, with the discussion of the difference between pleasure and pain. Because Principal Doctrine Three says that wherever pleasure is present, so long as it is there, there is no pain of body or of mind or both at once. And so whether it has any immediate connection or not, there is at least a distinctiveness and analogy between body and space versus pleasure and pain.
Elaine: Yeah, it’s a way of thinking about things. And you know — I wrote a whole essay that jumped off from that point, that’s on your website.
Cassius: So he says that something like a cup has both solid and space in it — otherwise there wouldn’t be a temperature change. But then he goes on to say there’s got to be something that’s solid and doesn’t have space in it. So a cup has space in it, but there’s got to be something in there that doesn’t have void in it, because they can’t be in the same place at the same time. So that’s the next thing. And then, Elaine, before you go too much further, let me ask you this question: so if the cup is made out of body which is distinct from void, and void that’s distinct from body — what would the analogy be if we apply that to pleasure and pain? What is the combination of things that arises from discrete components of pleasure and pain? The cup arises from discrete bodies and void. What arises from pleasure and pain?
Elaine: Boy, that conversation can fill up a couple of hours.
Cassius: See where I’m going, though.
Elaine: Yeah, yeah. So first I want to say that one of the biggest errors I see in Neo-Epicurean thinking is the “tranquility error” — in that thinking it’s like they perceive pain as the particle and void as pleasure. So either you have pain or you have nothing — you have tranquility, you have absence of motion, you have stillness. And so what people think of as pleasure — everybody knows what pleasure is — but they’ll tell you, “No, that’s not it. It’s absence of pain, meaning nothingness.” So I think it’s really important — if you make this analogy leap between matter/void and pleasure/pain — that you remember: pleasure is not like void. Pleasure is not empty space. Pleasure is itself a feeling. So it’s a totally different type of cup we’re talking about if we’re talking about pleasure and pain, because pleasure and pain — he did not think there was a void, he did not think there were three things. There were only two feelings: pleasure or pain. There was not a third feeling, nothingness. Unless you’re dead — you don’t have any feelings at all — but then there would not be either one.
Julie: I had someone ask me recently: “What if you had some kind of injury where you couldn’t have either pleasure or pain anymore — what would right and wrong mean?” Nothing — it doesn’t have any meaning at all. But as far as I know in human life, there hasn’t been anybody who couldn’t have either one, who was actually conscious. I don’t know of a case like that.
Cassius: I guess I said enough on that for a minute. Part of where I’m going there is: let’s talk about a metal cup. If a metal cup is something composed of atoms that have void within it — but presumably the atoms are predominating and they are shaping the void and shaping themselves and they come together into the form of a cup — if we think about that and try to apply that analogy to pleasure and pain and human experience: what do pleasure and pain combine to produce? Is it human experience, or is it happiness? What word describes the combination of pleasure and pain that we experience? I believe I’m pretty solid here in what Epicurus would say — because just like matter and void can’t occupy the same space, Epicurus did not admit the possibility of a mixture of pleasure and pain occupying the same position.
Julie: And I think of it as physical. The pleasure and the pain cannot be in the same space at the same time. That’s getting to be a little bit metaphorical — I mean, not completely — because you have the same body, and the pain and the pleasure are taking place in the cells of the body. We have neurotransmitters and electrical action going on. So there is something that happens. What we notice in medicine is that your sensory fibers can only perceive really one thing at a time. So if we’re giving a shot to a kid — there’s something we have that has little prickles on one side of a piece of plastic, and it has a hole in the middle so you kind of grip the arm with that, and you give the kid a little prickly sensation. It occupies the pain fibers. So then when you put the needle in for the injection, they can’t feel it, because they can only feel one thing at a time. Which is consistent with this idea that you can only have one of those sensations in one part of your body at a time.
And in one part of your mind — but because the bandwidth of your experience is not quite that narrow, you can zone in so that you’re only aware of, say, your toe. But our brain kind of smooths things out and makes us experience — we can experience our fist and our hearing and our smell and different parts of our body at the same time. So we could have pain in our toe and pleasure in our elbow. We can have pain in part of our mind that’s remembering a friend who has died, and pleasure at looking out at the beautiful leaves. So we can have a whole mixture of pleasures and pains going on at one time in our experience. But they’re not turning into some kind of average — they’re remaining distinct as feelings, not turning into some kind of pleasure-pain oatmeal.
Cassius: I remember we had this discussion once — maybe it was on one of the podcasts about DeWitt, or maybe it was just on a forum thread — but I remember we all kind of came to the conclusion that there’s typically a predominance, not so much an entirely new feeling as a result.
Julie: Yeah, I mean — you’re not making a new fundamental particle, right? You’ve got pain and pleasure — there’s not a third feeling that you’d be making. But you can have multiple pleasures and pains going on in your awareness at any one instant.
Cassius: Charles, my thinking about that has taken some time to coalesce, and I might not be done. I think I have not quite said what I’ve just said in the past, but right now it’s the thing that makes the most sense to me. Because we can be aware of more than one part of ourselves at a time, it’s clear to me that I experience more than one feeling at a time. But they’re not really mixing with each other — they’re distinct feelings about different parts of my experience. And it’s because I can be aware of more than one part of my experience at a time.
Some people have said “happiness is the whole mix of pleasure and pain.” I would say that’s not right, because if it were possible to have a life of experience that didn’t have any pain in it, that would still be happiness. Happiness is the pleasure in that cup — it is not some extra thing called happiness that has to have pain in it. But your life experience is certainly going to have pain in it — that’s just reality. It doesn’t make the pain a good thing — it’s just that that’s how it is. And there are a lot of really important pleasures that you cannot get without accepting some pain. You can’t have a beloved friend without accepting the pain that one of you will be there when the other one dies. That’s a grief that one of the two of you is going to have to have. If you don’t accept that pain, you can’t have a friend. But that doesn’t mean that we’re glad that things are that way — it’s just that that is the way they are. So I don’t think that happiness is made out of the pain. I think that’s silly. But I think that in the whole cup of your life you’re going to have pain — it’s going to be part of your experience. It’s not part of your happiness.
Elaine: Before you got to that last bit, I was going to say that’s a slippery slope to a lot of the Stoics’ reasoning — that pain is inevitable, so you should embrace it and get used to it, so you can no longer be bothered. And when you numb yourself off to pain, you lose your pleasure — that seems to be how it works. If you’re going to have the whole cup and get all your pleasure, or resign yourself…
Cassius: Yeah. To me, when I look back at the list of Principal Doctrines and see them very, very close to the top of the list — that kind of attitude of there being two things that are incredibly important and yet very distinct — is so closely identifiable in my mind with the statement here in Lucretius: that wherever there’s a space which we call void, there’s nothing of body. So it would be a familiar concept to an ancient Epicurean to consider there to be these two categories in physics and in ethics that are distinct and have tremendous implications arising from them, and yet are not the same in any way.
So since we did get into that cup of pleasure and pain: I will say that there will be a feeling of either pleasure or pain when a person takes a look at the cup of their life so far — their life in the present moment. You’re either going to have pleasure or pain when you think about that, because you have a feeling that gets prompted with every observation you’re making of events. And so if the overall feeling — the feeling of looking at the whole cup, which does have parts of pleasure and parts of pain — if the overall feeling is a pleasure, this feeling of “this is a pleasurable life, this is a good life, I’m glad I’ve lived this life” — then that’s happiness. But it’s a pleasure at observing the whole life experience. Does that make sense?
Julie: It does to me. Or would you say it’s also the total aggregate of the pleasures themselves that led up to that moment?
Cassius: Oh yeah. I mean, it is a part of your brain that is doing this kind of evaluation — valuing of life — and that part of your brain is having either pain or pleasure at that evaluation of the whole. So it’s not that the pain is a good thing. But it may be that certain pleasures that required pain to get them are super meaningful. So the whole — you know — when you’re looking at the whole experience of your life, you have a sense of pleasure. But if you could have gotten those things without the pain, it would have been even better, you could have had even more pleasure. So if we go back to the poem: it says that “anything contains within itself an empty space unless you will allow that what holds it in is perfect solid, and this is nothing else but the close union of the first seeds.” Now he doesn’t know about electrons and subatomic particles and so on, and the space between those. But he’s saying he doesn’t see how you could hold in a space unless kind of the outside part was made of close union — close together — of these elementary particles. Otherwise you fill the cup up with liquid and the liquid would go through the walls of the cup, right?
Cassius: I would just say I just like this process that he keeps using — looking at nature and trying to find examples. And he goes to look at density: if they get more void between the particles, they’re easier to dissolve and fall into pieces — that would be density. But I am kind of curious, Martin — he is really getting into this firmness, like you could have soft bodies because there’s more space between the particles, and then if you get something very dense it’s going to be hard, and that must mean that the particles are hard. I understand the extrapolation. I’m not sure if that’s accurate or not from what we think about elementary particles.
Martin: Well, it’s what I referred to in the previous discussion: what Epicurus applies is a hard-body model, and modern physics doesn’t have that for elementary particles.
Elaine: That’s what I was thinking. So because he didn’t know yet about energy — right? Is that relevant to this?
Martin: He also didn’t have the concept that even the void can have properties. So that means we in actual physics can of course postulate: let’s start off with a space without properties. But at least in two ways properties come in: because if we put something in there, then electrical fields get out there which will fill the void with an electrical field. And in the standard exchange-particle models, particles interact by exchange particles — which doesn’t really explain much, because that would mean the void is full of particles — which doesn’t make sense. But these exchange particles themselves are detected at one position only with a certain probability, so most of the time the space is still empty. But it does have properties. So it is more complicated now.
Elaine: I don’t think that changes what I would say about pleasure and pain. I still think things are different — he didn’t know that things do get a little weirder when you get to the level of what you can’t see, into the subatomic level. It’s not the same as looking at a piece of furniture in an empty room.
Martin: Yeah, and this is the limit of the analogy thing. If you try to extrapolate from the unknown by using the analogy of what you know, this can fail. Here is an example of how this can fail.
Elaine: Yeah, yeah. So I really think that if Epicurus had had access to modern physics, it wouldn’t have been a problem and it doesn’t really undo the basics: we don’t need supernatural action to make things happen, and really everything can happen just with matter and energy. So he puts the effort into coming up with a consistent system. And if we then correct the physics, it’s still a consistent system with the new physics.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. So we may have poets listening to this, or reading along with us, and also physicists. I don’t think the physicists need to be too bothered by this and throw it out saying, “Well, he had it wrong” — because the thesis that I started with today is that we don’t see any room for supernatural action. And I think that’s the main takeaway.
Martin: Yes. And also scientists normally should have an interest in the history of science, and they know that the history of science is a lineage of making the wrong interpretation and that being corrected. The earlier scientists were from today’s perspective wrong — it doesn’t matter. The earlier scientists were still scientists by applying the methodology.
Elaine: And it’s the methodology — he is using a methodology. He’s just limited by how far he can see. But that’s the way science is — it’s not a list of facts. So I don’t think Epicurus would be bothered by the new information. I think he would have been excited about it, and he would have brought us back to the main point, which is: no supernatural being is needed here.
Cassius: Charles, what do you think?
Charles: I mean yeah, I agree. I don’t really have anything in particular to add, but I did like Martin’s point about the history of physical science and the lineage, and how science back then — yeah, a lot is wrong by our standards. But for their time it was an advancement. Yes. And it will keep going — there are things that we think we understand now that we’re wrong about, we just don’t know which things those are.
Julie: You know, it’s a tradition around the country at the start of medical school to tell everybody: “You’re going to learn all this stuff, and almost all of it — we’re going to change it within a few years. So you kind of get over it. You’re going to have to learn it anyway, you’ve got to know it for the test. But it’s probably mostly wrong.”
Cassius: Let me ask this question, especially of Elaine and Martin. Should we feel sorry for Newton or Einstein or some prior scientist of some prior age who didn’t have all of the electron microscopes and technology that we have? Are we in any way superior to them or better off such that we should look back at them and say that their lives were less satisfying or less well spent because they did not have the information available to us?
Martin: No, not at all. Because we are in the same situation. With all the science knowledge we have accumulated, we just get even more things we would like to know but do not yet know.
Elaine: Yeah, so the reason I said he would be excited about it is because that’s what scientists are like — we get new information, we’re excited about it. But that doesn’t mean you’re ever in a position where — it’s never going to be that way — “we’ve got it all nailed down.” We never get everything nailed down, but we still tend to get excited about learning new things. It’s neat.
Cassius: So you would not suggest that because we’re going to know more in the future, we should therefore not take any action today — because we’ll know more tomorrow, so maybe we’ll have a better decision tomorrow?
Elaine: Well, it depends. We should take action based on the best information that we have. We can’t do anything else. And even not taking action is an action — so there’s no possibility of “not taking action.” That doesn’t happen ever.
Julie: That’s like saying Tesla should never have invented alternating current because eventually electricity would have been more efficient.
Cassius: Yeah — if we just stayed with DC, you mean. Right. But when you’re talking about specific decisions, sometimes you are in a position where you’d be better off not to take some actions without more information, and take other ones that you do have more information about. Somebody listening to the question I just posed could misinterpret that and say, “Okay, well, I’m just going to take action because I’ll never know enough.” Well, in certain situations — like, say, a medication for coronavirus — there are some things about which so little is known about benefits and enough is known about adverse events that it would probably be better not to do that. But that’s taking action — that’s taking action on the information that we have so far. It’s not “not taking action.” I don’t think it’s possible to not take action.
I was basically going back in just the general direction that people will sometimes look at Lucretius and say, “Well, he’s all about physics, and physics has changed an awful lot in the last 2,000 years. And so whatever he has to say about physics is really not relevant to our lives at all, because we know a whole new set of ideas about physics. So let’s just start from scratch and put Lucretius on the shelf and come up with our own ethics based on our own physics.” But I don’t think that’s the right conclusion at all.
Elaine: Well, now — okay, Cassius — I would say you could come to the same conclusions if you’re doing your physics well and you realize that there’s no supernatural action. There really isn’t any other ethical conclusion I can think of that you could come to other than the one Epicurus came to. But why not take advantage of other people having thought through these things? You don’t have to invent the whole thing from scratch. It’s nice to have this thinking. And one thing I enjoy about studying it is knowing that I’m not alone in my approach to life — that I feel sort of in a community with these other people who lived so long before me. I think this is a wonderful feeling.
Cassius: People always say that Lucretius is all about physics — they need to read Book Three and Four. And we’ll get to that in five years. I was looking at that today — we’re about maybe between a half and two-thirds of the way through Book One. So we have a long way to go.
I want to say one more thing about this last paragraph — I think this last section is really important where he talks about the seeds, but really the particles, the elementary particles: “If the seeds of things could change by any means, it would be unknown what could be formed and what not.” This is really important, and we might even want to talk about that a little bit more at the beginning of the next section. Because this is a significant difference between this philosophy that’s reality-based and philosophies that are not material — that say, “Well, because everything changes and everything is interdependent, then nothing material is really real, and anything could happen.” But if your philosophy is based on knowing that there are fundamental properties of material reality that can’t just do anything, can’t just be any kind of configuration or shape — that there are these limits — that’s going to put you in a lot more solid ground going forward.
Would you say that’s still true, Martin?
Martin: Yes.
Cassius: Okay. I thought you were going to agree with me, and of course I was going to say yes. I think what you’ve just articulated is exactly correct and a huge point: everything is not chaotic — on the other hand, everything is not determined. There are things that are determined, and then there are things that have an extremely wide range of possibilities within them. If you allow yourself to be a pendulum and swing back and forth thinking that everything is determined versus everything is undetermined, you’re just going to be swinging from bad point to bad point, and the way you evaluate your life… I hope that’s another topic we can discuss sometime soon.
Elaine: Yeah, I’ve just been seeing some arguments about pain and pleasure and hedonism in general — if you want to call it that — as well as free will and determinism. Part of me wants to say, “Oh, it’s just a word game.” But it does have some merit.
Cassius: Well, as I was saying a moment ago, I was also going to include — and I can’t quote it exactly — the suggestion or advice that is sometimes identified with Alcoholics Anonymous. The thing about accepting the things I cannot change, changing the things I can, and having the wisdom to know the difference. I know Elaine probably has that — what is his name? Isn’t it by Niebuhr?
Elaine: That is a prayer. I don’t know — I’m not a 12-stepper, so I’ve never done that, but I’ve seen it everywhere. It’s a prayer for [courage to change] the things I can, something about the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. I don’t remember what the word is about the things I can’t.
Cassius: It’s a reasonable thing to want to do. I raise it here only because of the part that seems to acknowledge that there are certain things that can be changed and certain things that cannot be changed. And I think Epicurean philosophy is dealing with both: we’re dealing with eternal particles which never change and have properties that will basically always provide limitations to what things can be — but on the other hand, those particles can combine in so many different ways that there is a huge range of possibilities as well. So there’s both determinism and indeterminacy at the same time, in certain different fields.
Well, we’re in the closing thoughts section of today’s episode it sounds like. Anybody, closing thoughts?
Elaine: My closing thought would be to remember that thinking of science as a process — and not as a set of facts — might make it more interesting to you. A process of examining causes without ever thinking that there was a first cause.
Cassius: Would you agree with that, Elaine?
Elaine: I don’t know if that’s enshrined in science — I think it’s a reasonable conclusion. I don’t know.
Cassius: Martin, what do you think?
Martin: This “first cause” is highly speculative, so yeah — currently it’s not visible that you get to anywhere like a first cause. That subject is sort of just a logical abstraction that’s really hard to get your arms around.
Cassius: But there’s a section in Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens in which this is discussed — how it’s just impossible, as a matter of logic, to think that there is a first cause. The reason I brought it up was Elaine’s closing thought about science being a process, and the implication that yes, it is a process that’s always going to continue and has always been going on — without ever having been originated at a single point in time by a supernatural creator. Are we still together, Elaine?
Elaine: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think in science you don’t start with anything that has to be that way — everything comes from your observations. See, you wouldn’t start with any of those philosophical positions. Everything is drawn from observations, which is what Epicurus did.
Cassius: Martin, you agree with that?
Martin: No. Even if you don’t have an explicit philosophy, the assumptions we implicitly make decide what observations we can make. So it’s not just pure observations. What we think we know before restricts what observations we can make and how much further we can go. So there is this interaction between what we’ve already accumulated in our condensed experience and where we can go from there.
Cassius: Okay. I don’t disagree with that.
Elaine: So I think maybe I didn’t state my point well enough. I would just say that I don’t think you would insist on clinging to any kind of idea that you would say should be unfalsifiable. So if you were talking about an “unmoved mover” or things like that — you wouldn’t have anything that was unassailable, that couldn’t be subject to observation. Does that make more sense?
Martin: Yes, it is.
Cassius: Okay, I just didn’t state it very well. Okay. It’s been a great episode today. Anybody have any additional closing thoughts? Well then, in that case, we’ll come to a close. I hope y’all have a great week. Bye-bye.
Martin: Yes, thanks everybody. Thanks, bye.
Cassius: Okay. Bye.