Episode 033 - More On the Implications of The Colorless Atoms
Date: 08/26/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1669-episode-thirty-three-more-on-the-implications-of-the-colorless-atoms/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 033 is a four-person episode (Cassius, Elaine reading, Martin, and Charles — who arrives late and is tired) covering approximately lines 788 through 864 of Book Two. Elaine reads the continuation of the colorless-atoms passage, which argues: (1) colors of the seeds cannot be the cause of texture, since touch and color are different sense faculties perceiving different properties; (2) since seeds of any figure may be of any color, if color were intrinsic we would see white crows and black swans; (3) color fades when gold is divided into thin shavings and purple cloth is drawn thread by thread, suggesting it is not a fundamental property of the seeds; (4) since not all bodies emit sound and smell, those cannot be fundamental properties of the seeds; (5) a judicious mind can imagine bodies void of color as easily as it imagines bodies without smell or sound; and (6) the seeds must also be free of warmth, cold, moisture, smell, and taste — and must lack all properties “liable to dissolution,” in order to provide the eternal foundation upon which the security of all things depends.
The discussion goes deeper than in Episode 032. Martin notes this section again presents a model to explain natural phenomena without supernatural agency — valuable precisely because it works as a model, even where specific claims have been superseded. Elaine identifies a logical flaw: the argument that color fades when gold is divided into thin pieces proves nothing about whether color is a fundamental property, because you also lose the ability to perceive shape at those scales — it is simply the limit of the senses. Martin replies with a surprising counterpoint: unlike ordinary properties, self-similar fractal structures (the Apfelmännchen — the German name for the Mandelbrot set, literally “little apple man”) do persist at smaller scales. DeWitt’s 11th derived principle is referenced: atoms are characterized by three qualities — weight, shape, and size — with color explicitly excluded. Cassius and Elaine explore the limit-of-observation problem: Epicurus does not stop at the boundary of direct perception but draws analogical inferences beyond it, and this is the deep issue the group keeps circling.
The final third of the episode is the most philosophically dense. Cassius reads from Philip De Lacy’s commentary on Philodemus’s On Methods of Inference (pages 142 and 144), which classifies knowledge into three categories: things immediately perceived; things that can never be known even through inference; and things not directly perceivable but knowable through analogical inference from perception — including atoms and void. The Epicurean position on void is offered as the key test case: void cannot be touched or seen, but its existence does not conflict with any known fact and is positively supported by the empirical fact of motion. Elaine is comfortable with this reasoning at the macro level. Martin notes another Epicurean assumption — that atoms behave as hard bodies — that may not hold in all cases. Cassius asks what “known” means to Martin; Martin gives a pragmatist answer: “reasonably confident that this is an accurate description of reality as it is relevant for us.” Elaine explains pragmatism versus skepticism at length — the skeptic is paralyzed by the impossibility of absolute certainty; the pragmatist accepts that residual doubt so tiny it is irrelevant to decision-making is simply not worth inhabiting. She connects p-value selection in scientific experiments to prolepsis and pattern recognition: there is no external criterion specifying which p-value to use — it is ultimately a trained, experienced, subjective judgment. Brain stimulation experiments that produce unattached “senses of certainty” are cited. Martin agrees and adds that the pragmatist move is especially important where statistical quantification is impossible. Cassius closes by reading De Lacy on the Stoic method of contraposition versus the Epicurean method of empirical analogy: the Stoics argue from a priori logical necessity, the Epicureans from the principle that there is an analogy between the apparent and the non-apparent. DeWitt’s caution that reasoning by analogy is very tricky — you must be dealing with comparable facts — is quoted as the final note.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 33 of Lucretius Today. 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. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. 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. Today we’re continuing in Book Two of Lucretius, approximately line 788 through 864 of the Latin edition. Today we’ll have Elaine read the text for us, starting right now.
Elaine: And since the eye receives within itself one stroke when it is said to perceive a white color, and another contrary one when it views an object of a black or any other color — and since it is of no moment by what color anything you touch is distinguished, but rather of what peculiar shape and figure it is — you may conclude that there is no manner of occasion that seeds should be stained with any colors, but that they should cause that variety of touch by the various figures with which they are imbued.
Besides, since there are no certain colors peculiar to certain figures, and since seeds of any figure may be of any color — whence is it that bodies that consist of such seeds are not in their several kinds imbued with all sorts of colors? It would be common to see crows as they fly about cast a white color from their white feathers, and black swans might be produced from black seeds, or be of any other one or more colors as their seeds chance to be distinguished.
Further, the more any body is broken into small parts, the more you may perceive its color languishes by degrees and dies away. This is the case of gold when it is divided into thin shavings — its luster is extinguished — and the purple dye, by much the richest, when it is drawn out thread by thread, is quite lost. Hence you may infer that particles of bodies discharge themselves of all color before they come to be as small as seeds.
Again, since you allow that all bodies do not emit sound and smell, and did not attribute sound and smell to every body — so since we cannot discover everything by our eyes, you may conclude that there are some bodies as much void of color as there are others without smell or sound. And a judicious mind can properly form a notion of such bodies void of color, as it can of others that are without smell or sound or any other qualities whatsoever.
But lest you should conceive the first seeds are void only of color, you must know that they are without warmth, are altogether free from cold or heat, they emit no sound, are without moisture, nor do they send out any smell from their several bodies. So when you propose to compound a pleasant ointment of sweet marjoram, myrrh, and flowers of spikenard, which send out the richest odor up to the nose — the first thing you are to do is to choose, as far as it lies in your power, an oil that has no smell, that it may as little as possible infect and corrupt those few sweet ingredients — being mixed and digested with it — with its native rankness.
Lastly, seeds do not bestow any smell upon the bodies they produce, nor any sound, for they can exhale nothing from themselves; and for the same reason they can communicate no taste, nor cold, nor any vapor hot or warm. You must separate all qualities from the seeds that render them liable to dissolution, such as viscous, brittle, hollow — which proceeded from qualities that are soft, putrid, or rare. The seeds must have nothing of these properties if you would fix upon them an eternal foundation, upon which alone depends the security of beings, lest all things should fall to nothing and perish beyond recovery.
Cassius: Okay, thank you Elaine. We’re talking more about color again today, and so we’re going to have to decide why and extend our conversation from last week — decide why this is such a significant issue for Lucretius to keep going on like this. I have two potential topics that we might explore if we run out of things to talk about, but before I introduce those, what do you guys think about this section today? Actually, I think we should probably go through it and give some close attention to it, because he’s got several different things in here before we try to take an upper-level view. Martin, what do you think?
Martin: It’s quite similar to last week. For quite a large portion of the poem, it gives an example of how a model could work that describes the phenomena and is based on elementary particles. And again, like last time: this is basically not useful for the canon if it’s presented as a real certain thing. If it were presented as one possibility for a description of how it could work, that would be fine.
Cassius: I’m afraid that’s going to be part of our message for a long time in this section. But I don’t think we need to beat it to death every time — we can just repeat it briefly. What do you think about going over each section in detail just to make it clear what Lucretius is saying?
Let’s start at the top, then. Elaine, you want to start on this first section?
Elaine: He’s just distinguishing color from texture, it seems to me. The touch — the texture — has to do with the shape, but it’s not affecting how something feels to the touch in the way color would. Those are different properties. At least in this first bit, he’s saying that “staining with any colors” wouldn’t cause variety of texture — color is a separate property from texture.
Cassius: Okay. Let me suggest it this way. I’m wondering if where he’s going is a premise that in order for something to exist — or for you to be really confident that it exists — you don’t have to experience it through all five senses. You don’t have to both touch it, see it, taste it, hear it…
Elaine: Well, I don’t know if he’s going there exactly — but I think he’s actually just talking about the properties of the seeds and how we perceive them. The perceptions are not overlapping. And what I would say that builds a case for: when we’re perceiving something through all these different senses, we’re actually perceiving different properties of the seeds rather than only one property. He doesn’t say this here, but you could go from that to: this can give you more confidence in your perceptions, because it’s not that there’s one property of the seed and your eyes and your fingers and your ears and your nose are all perceiving that one property. You’re getting multiple lines of evidence about the same thing.
Cassius: I guess the direction I was going in is: is it not a large part of the point here that an elemental particle can exist and not have any smell to it, or any color, or any taste?
Elaine: Well, I mean — if you don’t smell it or hear it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I think he’s also talking about how some of the properties we perceive are not properties of the seeds themselves but emerge from how the seeds are put together — from the arrangement.
Cassius: Let’s just go back through it in detail and see if we can put that together. This first section — can we agree it says that the colors of the seeds do not cause the texture of the seeds, and that those are separate? Do you agree?
Elaine: Okay.
Cassius: And then the next one: “since seeds of any figure may be of any color.” I don’t understand the part about the crows. That does seem to be right — are there white crows? I guess they’re mostly black. He says white crows would show white from white feathers, and black swans might be produced from black seeds. When he was saying that, did he know there were black swans? Or is he saying there aren’t black swans? Or is it possibly a translation issue in terms of types of birds? Bailey says crows and swans, and maybe Munro does too. I think he’s giving a counterfactual — he’s thinking that since we don’t see white crows and we don’t see black swans, that that tells us something about the seeds. But I’m not sure what he means by this section and how it relates to the others. Martin?
Martin: He’s presenting it so that we see some things show up in only one color, and not in multiple colors. They’re not individuals which appear in a different color — the one kind always shows up consistently in one color.
Charles: I’m a little late but I’m here.
Cassius: We talked for a while before you got here, so you’re not too far behind in the discussion. Elaine read the opening, and now we’re trying to go through the details of the opening paragraphs and dissect them before we try to reach any sweeping conclusions.
Okay. So, before — when Lucretius has talked about shape and figure — he has said that those are properties of the seeds, because he’s discussed the rough seeds and the smooth seeds. I think he’s saying here that color is not like that. Color is different because it goes away before you get to the level of seeds. And when he gets here with the breaking down of the gold — what is a “purple guy”? What is this? Let me look: Daniel Brown says “a purple guy by much the richest.” It’s like a guy-line or something? It has “threads” implied. Must be talking about the purple thread — you know, how expensive purple fabric was. I think he must mean a thread, or he’s describing a dyed fabric or a process.
Elaine: I think he’s talking about something like a thread — a “guyline” must be an old definition. So I think this is about purple-dyed cloth drawn out thread by thread.
Cassius: Elaine, I want to come back to what you said a moment ago — about the fundamental particles only having certain properties and not others. You were saying he’s going in the general direction that color is not one of the properties of an elemental particle. I’ve seen a couple of different lists of what some writers claim are the fundamental properties in Epicurus’s lost works. Going back to the DeWitt book, DeWitt lists as his 11th derived principle that atoms are characterized by three qualities: weight, shape, and size. Color is not one of them.
Now, DeWitt could be wrong in his summary, and I think there’s another list I’ve seen by another writer whose name escapes me at the moment. But pretty clearly, one of the premises we’re working with here is that atoms do have certain fundamental qualities but color is not one of them.
Elaine: Okay. So when he’s talking about that — you can sort of logically derive this from color fading away in gold when you take it apart — when the fabric gets smaller and smaller, you don’t see the purple anymore. But you know, that’s true of texture too. So that’s not really — that’s a logical blunder. If it’s just getting smaller, you can’t see it at all. So why would you be able to see the color? I don’t know why he went there. That’s just a mistake.
Martin: But not necessarily. Not necessarily — if there are structures which are on different scales self-resembling. When you go smaller and smaller in scale, you still see the similar shape. This is what the Germans call the Apfelmännchen — the “little apple man” — the Mandelbrot set. An amateur mathematician came up with this about thirty years ago and it was quite talked about. Coastlines, for example, sometimes show something similar — self-similar structure at different scales.
Elaine: So — what I’m talking about here is: he says that because the color goes away when it gets small and you can’t perceive it anymore, that means color is not a property. But you can’t see the shape either at that scale. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. That’s more a feature of our senses having a limit beyond which we can’t perceive — that’s not a conclusion I would make. But he did, so I mean… I don’t see any reason to think — from just this observation, that color goes away before you get to seeds — that color is not like texture. That didn’t convince me.
So the next part: “not all bodies emit sound and smell, so we wouldn’t attribute sound or smell to the seeds since not everything that’s made out of them has sound or smell.” That seems reasonable.
Cassius: Elaine, going back to what you said a moment ago — did you use the word “texture” because it’s in the text somewhere?
Elaine: I think he uses “touch” to mean texture — and the sense faculty itself — because “touch” is our sense faculty, but the texture is what we feel: smooth or rough. Munro uses “sensations of touch” and that’s what I’m calling texture. If you’re feeling the smooth texture of something, and once it’s broken down into very thin threads you’re not going to get that same touch sensation — I wouldn’t say from that that it tells you anything much about what it’s made of, because it’s just the limit of the touch neurons in your finger. You can only break that sensation down so far before you lose it, because it depends on how closely together the neurons are for touch, whether you can distinguish the texture features. So I just wouldn’t have gone that way with my reasoning, but I think I see what he’s doing.
Cassius: I’m thinking that if you use the word texture, that certainly conveys the way it feels to you — similar in my mind to the way it smells or the way it looks, any color it might have. So those are all different perceptual channels. When DeWitt says that one of the characteristics of an elemental particle is shape — I’m thinking that’s probably going to be one of those logical deductions: if it exists at all, it’s got some kind of shape, even though we might not have the ability to know what that shape is. So I don’t know if that’s the relevant distinction, but that’s what comes to my mind.
Elaine: You can also still eliminate shape if you use the color analogy — it makes the shape go away too at that scale.
So I think at many turns here — maybe at every turn — we’re coming into an observation that at some point you reach a limit to your ability to observe: to touch it, see it, smell it, or anything. And at that point you’re no longer able to verify directly through your own senses what’s going on. And then the question becomes — stop. That’s what I’m hearing: Epicurus is not stopping, and that is such a deep issue we’ll never be able to deal with it today. I think we’re going to come back to that over and over again. What happens at the limit of observation? What do you do then?
Cassius: That’s one of those issues I was going to talk about at the end. So okay — next paragraph. What are we looking at?
Elaine: Okay — so now he’s saying, since your mind can imagine bodies void of color — and since you can imagine that — and also, it’s not all bodies that emit sound or smell. I don’t really like that line of thought: “because you can imagine something void of color, therefore you can imagine something without smell or sound.” But there are things that are transparent. I don’t know why he didn’t mention glass. They had glass — so there was glass, and it’s not very transparent… or something.
Martin: No, the Roman glass I’ve seen in the museums is transparent.
Elaine: Yeah, so I don’t know why you would have to imagine something without color. That’s interesting. I would have used glass as my example, were I Lucretius.
Cassius: I don’t think that’s very complicated — he’s just saying, we’re seeing things without sound or smell, so those can’t have to be fundamental properties of matter. He’s not really saying anything about what causes the sensations of sound and smell right there.
Elaine: And that’s not really — I mean, for smell, you actually have to have particles that come off the object. So it’s not the particles themselves that are at issue so much as whether they’re volatile — whether they come off so that they can interact with your nose. If they’re not being emitted, you’re not going to smell anything.
When he gets to “hot or warm” — everything has a sensation of temperature relative to us, unless it’s at our same temperature. We’re not going to perceive a difference — it’s not going to strike us as being hot or cold if it’s the same temperature as us, because there’s no heat transfer. Though that again is a matter of our perspective.
I mean, virtually all of these things we’re talking about are matters of subjective perception based on our senses. And he’s really not talking about that — he’s talking about the properties of the seeds. He hasn’t really gotten to how our own senses limit what we can perceive. I think that’s important. You’ve got to include both parts of that when you talk about this. But I don’t know what’s next; maybe eventually he gets to that.
Cassius: Well — to quickly touch on where he’s going to go after the passage we’re talking about today: the next thing he says is not only do the elemental particles not have these qualities of color and smell and so forth, but they also don’t have the ability to think — nor do they have any consciousness or spirit in them. So he’s really reducing the attributes that elemental particles must possess, it seems like, down to an absolute minimum. And maybe the premise is that any time we can perceive particles differently based on our perceptions — in terms of color or smell or heat or anything like that — his reasoning must be that if we can perceive them differently, then this quality cannot be part of their fundamental elemental nature. Do you agree or disagree that that is where he’s going?
Elaine: Yeah, I think he’s just establishing what he thinks are the properties of the seeds and what’s not. Which is a legitimate physics activity. He just went beyond what he could observe. But I think that’s what he’s doing.
Cassius: Charles, you have any commentary yet?
Charles: I do not. I’m also pretty tired.
Cassius: Okay. Martin, anything at the moment?
Martin: No.
Cassius: Elaine, anything further on the last paragraph, or have we covered it?
Elaine: I think it’s pretty much in line. Nothing really — well, he says “you must separate all qualities from the seeds that render them liable to dissolution,” so he doesn’t want properties that could be dissolved or broken down to be attributed to the seed level, so that things don’t fall to nothing and perish. Which is back to his point about nothing being changed at a certain level — which, as we discussed last time, is not true. But it’s okay.
Cassius: Yeah, because he’s definitely going there: “the seeds must have nothing of these properties if you would fix upon them an eternal foundation upon which alone depends the security of beings, lest all things should fall to nothing and perish beyond recovery.” He’s clearly talking about these things for a reason — he’s looking for the eternal foundation and concluding that color, smell, taste, and things like that are not part of it.
And I have no ability to really make much more progress in dissecting it, but I do want to suggest that one of the ways we could probably explore the answer to those questions goes back to some of the commentary and Philodemus’s own methods of inference. I’m going to post in this thread one particular page out of De Lacy’s commentary — page 142 — and for purposes of this discussion I have just sent you a link to this one particular page.
I don’t know whether De Lacy is correct; I don’t know whether Philodemus is correct. At every step along the way you’re going to have to question the authority and the correctness of what I’m about to suggest. But in going through the history of what he calls Epicurean epistemology and Epicurean empiricism, De Lacy concludes — and I’m going to quote this — “The Epicureans divide all things into the following classes.” His first class was things immediately perceived — these are known without inference of any kind. I think that’s an uncontroversial category: if we have a salt shaker in our hand, we can hold it, see it, touch it, taste it, and conclude with great confidence that it’s a salt shaker. There are limits to the conclusions we can draw even about that, but the practical aspect is pretty clear.
Then De Lacy says there are also things that are not immediately perceived — things you can’t hold directly in front of you and test with your senses. He breaks that into three subcategories. The first one is things that can never be perceived or known through inference, regarding which we are doomed to eternal ignorance because of our own limitations — such as whether the number of stars is odd or even. The Epicureans had no standard of truth for that, because there’s simply no way to know.
But the one that we’re talking about and questioning is De Lacy’s categories b and c. He says there’s a category of things which can never be directly perceived but which can be known through analogical inference from perception — and in this category he places atoms and void. That’s the one we are struggling over. If that category is correct from De Lacy’s point of view, Epicurus was holding that we can make analogies from things which we can see and come to conclusions about things we can’t see. And that’s, I think, what Elaine is continuously pointing out — that you may never want to go that route. You may never be willing to take an analogy and say that you’re certain about something if you can’t perceive it directly. What do you think about that?
Elaine: I mean, there are some conclusions I think you probably can support, but others where you’ve gotten too detailed and specific for the information you have available. I think you have to look at it case by case. We’ve been in a long section where there’s been a lot of the latter.
Cassius: How do you articulate your view of how far you can go based only on analogy?
Elaine: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have an overall formula. I don’t think you can put a general line on it — you might need to have the specific cases, because even to make such a formula might have to assume information we don’t have.
Martin: There may be weak indications of something that go in that direction, and those may give us more confidence in drawing the analogy. It would still not prove it, but it makes us more comfortable to say this appears more likely than other possibilities. But I don’t think we can put a general line on it.
Cassius: You just used the word “indication.” I’m pretty sure that “indication” is pretty similar to the word “signs” that they’re talking about in Philodemus, and that’s probably where we’re going — what is an indication really? How do we judge what is an indication and what’s not? Because the very nature of an indication may mean that you haven’t perceived it directly — because otherwise you wouldn’t consider it an indication, you’d consider it a proof or an absolute determination.
Let me throw in the only other part of De Lacy I’ll mention today. On page 144 he elaborates on this category — when you have to go with indications — and De Lacy says: “This point is important because it involves the validity of atoms and void, Epicurean metaphysics. The method here is a less direct form of verification than that of the preceding case. The proof is that there is no evidence to the contrary.” And he quotes: “Therefore verification and lack of evidence to the contrary are the criteria of truth; and the lack of verification and evidence to the contrary are the criteria of the false.” And he says: “Opinions or hypotheses about objects that are unperceived by nature are true in so far as they do not conflict with known appearances or present opinions. The Epicureans posit the existence of a void, although it is not directly experienceable. Its existence, however, does not conflict with any known facts and is indeed supported by the empirical fact of motion, which requires a void for its possibility.”
So there he’s saying that the existence of the void — which can never be directly seen, tasted, or touched — the Epicureans held with high confidence because they deduced it from the observation that motion occurs. Elaine, is that in the category of conclusions you might have a problem with, or is it?
Elaine: So that is something that back in that day I would have been okay with. It was reasonable enough that I wouldn’t have gone around saying “wait, you’ve gone too far.” But now that we have more information about energy and fields, I don’t think there’s quite the same concept of void as there was in his day. Is that right, Martin?
Martin: Yes, but I think this one — I don’t see as much of a difference. It doesn’t seem to be a problem to me. It’s reasonable enough as a description of what had been observed at the macro level.
Elaine: Right. So it doesn’t bother me. It’s reasonable enough.
Martin: Another thing: one of the other assumptions the Epicureans make is that these elementary particles are like hard bodies — and this is an assumption that is not necessarily the case. Depending on circumstances, particles might penetrate each other without being destroyed. So they do not necessarily have to behave like rigid bodies.
Cassius: Martin, having said that — what does the word “known” mean to you?
Martin: To me it means that we can be reasonably confident that this is an accurate description of reality as it is relevant for us.
Cassius: That’s kind of a pragmatist approach rather than an absolute one. Elaine, what does pragmatism mean?
Elaine: Okay — and this is not something that was thought of as an idea back in Epicurus’s day, so I want to say I think he would be okay with it, but I can’t ask him. I like to contrast it with skepticism. The skeptics got all hung up on the impossibility of absolute certainty — you can’t know anything with 100% certainty, so you can’t know anything, and that’s where they went. But for pragmatists, there is a certain — I will say subjective — point, because everything is subjective that we know, where you say: “I’m not 100% certain that I’m awake and actually sitting on this sofa right now talking to you. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe there’s a tiny percent chance this is not a real sofa and it’s just imaginary and I’m asleep in a very vivid dream.” Okay, there’s a tiny possibility that what seems very obvious to me is not what it seems. It’s so tiny that it’s irrelevant to my decision-making and my life. And so I’m going to go with it. And I’m not going to get all hung up on this idea that it’s impossible to be absolutely certain of anything. It’s kind of like: shrug your shoulders — so what? That’s not really a big deal. Let’s focus on what seems certain enough that we can proceed and make decisions on that basis.
Martin: That’s reasonable, yes. And there are two different cases. One case is where we can substantiate with statistics — this is often the preferred approach in science, but even in science it often doesn’t work. You may need a valid large data series for this approach to work, so sometimes it’s just a qualitative judgment without numbers. We can’t give a precise “this is now 98% probable to be true” — we just have the impression that it has a very high probability.
Cassius: And what is your definition of “very high probability” versus something lower?
Martin: This is a problem, because this addresses a case where we don’t have numbers. So this is somewhat an approximate comparison — we want to say something is bigger or smaller but we don’t have the numbers to actually do that.
Elaine: Well, when you look at medical studies, when you’re looking at statistics, you’ll have to decide at the beginning of an experiment what p-value — what statistical criterion you’re going to use to determine whether a thing is happening or not, whether two conditions are different or the same, whether something works or doesn’t. You’re supposed to pick your statistical requirement before you even do the experiment. And how do you pick it? It’s a decision. There’s no sky-writing from God saying “this is your p-value.” It’s a decision based on what you think is a meaningful standard. People don’t always use the same p-value. There’s always going to be a subjective aspect to confidence.
What determines whether Elaine is confident or not in selecting her p-values? I think there is a prolepsis — a pattern recognition — that gives us a sense of knowingness or certainty. It’s almost a sensation. Like: yep, that’s it. It’s hard to describe unless you put it in the prolepsis category of pattern recognition. There have been some studies on stimulating certain areas of the brain that give people just an unconnected sense of knowing — they feel certain, but if you ask them what they’re certain about, they can’t tell you. So they’re just experiencing that sensation of knowingness. Maybe you could call it a brain sense — similar to vision or smell — but it’s a sense triggered by cognitive information. To me it’s pattern recognition, and it is subjective. It’s probably somewhat different for different people, but similar across the species for the most part.
Cassius: Martin, what do you have to say about what Elaine just commented on — about it potentially being related to a prolepsis or an anticipation?
Martin: I agree with that. This is especially valid for those cases where we cannot come up with statistics — where we simply don’t have numbers but we have observations. Looking at that pattern, we can still feel quite some confidence that we know this.
Cassius: Okay, so pattern recognition based on prior observations to some extent is a factor. Do you agree?
Martin: Mm-hmm.
Cassius: Okay. Well, where I wanted to go before we end today is to continue down page 144 of De Lacy. You’ll see where I’m going, because De Lacy then says — after he’s talked about the Epicurean position on what to do when you have no ability to verify directly — he says: “the Epicurean method of indirect verification must be distinguished from the Stoic method of contraposition, according to which the existence of motion necessitates a priori the existence of a void, because if the existence of a void were denied, motion would be also.” The Stoics based their argument on an a priori principle according to which the opposite would be contradictory, while the Epicureans merely formulated hypotheses to explain empirical facts, on the principle that there is an analogy between the apparent and the non-apparent.
That’s probably too deep to try to go too far into today. But the way I’m interpreting it: the Stoics and certain other people look to a logical formula and say the logical formula is the key. The Epicureans were looking at analogies based on empirical observations. And maybe the analogy will not always prove to be final — you’ll have to revise it when you have more observations — but the fundamental method the Epicureans appear to be using is what I would contend that Elaine is really using, even though she might not say it the same way. An Epicurean is basing his conclusions on observations made in the past, and maybe the patterns recognized from those observations — and that’s the fundamental basis on which you decide whether something is reliable or not. Not just fitting it into a logical formula.
Elaine: Yeah. And if Lucretius had done that, I would have been fine with it. He just went beyond that. But I think that would work for me, and that’s really the feeling I get from Epicurus.
And I also want to throw in that ultimately you get into the subjective pattern recognition — your feelings about how confident you are — which to me is the same as the information that your brain has. There is no absolute rule to tell you when you should feel confident. It’s more a property of how human brains work when we get to that point. People who are not scientists get extraordinarily anxious about this idea that there are objective ways to decide what’s real and what’s not. But at every level of decision-making — whether you decide you’re going to have confidence in a conclusion — there’s always your brain, there’s always subjective processing. And that’s fine. I think if you’re an Epicurean, if you’re a scientist, you’ve got to be fine with that. Or you can’t proceed further. You’ve got to decide that that’s okay, because whether you’re okay with it or not, that’s the way it works.
Cassius: I agree with that. I think this is exactly what people ought to think about when they read the details of Lucretius — and not just get stuck thinking, “this proved to be wrong and this proved to be right, so let’s close the book and forget about it.” It’s the method of analysis that we gain the most by studying and thinking about. Because I try to — people who don’t want to include feelings in their decision-making — it makes them really worried. They say: “Oh, that’s arbitrary, that’s whimsical, you can’t rely on your feelings to make decisions — you have to go by objective facts.” And I think if you really look at these sections, you have to recognize that our subjectivity is always part of our perception and our processing. You cannot ever get away from subjectivity — it’s always there. And if we could get people to see that, I think it would be easier to then say: “So feelings are significant. You can use your feelings to make decisions too.”
What do you think about that?
Elaine: I completely agree with that.
Cassius: What’s going through my mind when you said it — I’m not going to try to state it any better than that — that’s probably a good place for us to begin to conclude today’s episode, because that is exactly correct and that’s what is so significant about all this. Martin?
Martin: I have no concluding remark on this.
Charles: I don’t either. I’ve been paging through the previous episodes in the text, reading them.
Cassius: Well, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to continue to talk about these issues as we go through the rest of the physics — there’s a lot more to come beyond what we’ve already discussed. We can continue to be talking about the issues involved in how to become confident and when you should not be confident, and the whole issue of what De Lacy is describing: this is how you come to the position that alternate possibilities are true, and if you don’t have enough information to choose between them, you have to consider them all as possible until you can. That was sort of implied in the De Lacy material in Philodemus — about how things like an indication are a sign you would need prior knowledge to be able to connect.
Charles: That’s what we’re discussing here — the title of his book being On Methods of Inference: under what conditions can you infer from one set of facts that another set of facts is also true. It’s a tricky business.
Cassius: Exactly. I remember a quote from DeWitt in his book — he says something about reasoning by analogy being very tricky, because you need to be dealing with comparable facts, or else you’re going to be misled by your analogy. Anything else for today?
Elaine: No, I think we’ve been able to get to some good stuff from this section.
Cassius: I think so too. Anybody else? No? Okay. Martin, thanks a lot. I’ll try to get this posted as quickly as I can, and we’ll talk again next week.
Elaine: Alright, hope you all have a good week.
Martin: Thanks. Bye.