Episode 040 - Argument That The Mind and Spirit Are Corporeal
Date: 10/17/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1716-episode-forty-the-mind-and-spirit-are-bodily-composed-of-very-fine-atoms/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This four-person episode (Cassius, Elaine reading, Martin, and Charles) covers Book Three lines 161 onward, presenting Lucretius’s core arguments that the mind and soul are corporeal — composed of actual matter, not supernatural or ethereal. Elaine reads the passage, which presents two main arguments: first, that the material body and the mind are demonstrably coupled (fear produces physical symptoms; a dart wound affects the mind; the soul can be “united” through the whole body); and second, that because only body can touch body, the fact that mind and body act on each other proves both are corporeal. The passage then describes the properties of soul-particles: they must be the smoothest, roundest, and most minute seeds, to explain the extraordinary speed of thought. The section closes with the observation that a corpse loses no detectable weight at death — therefore the soul must be composed of extremely fine substance.
Elaine offers a detailed medical reading: the first paragraph’s list of fear-symptoms (cold sweats, pallor, tongue-faltering, vision-dimming, trembling, fainting) is a clinically accurate description of sympathetic nervous system activation. She proposes that in modern terms the animus (mind) corresponds to the brain/central nervous system and the anima (soul) to the peripheral/autonomic nervous system — the “one single nature” being the complete nervous system. She identifies the argument that material can only be affected by material as a standard modern atheist argument still in use today, and notes that the brain-injury-changes-personality argument is another live thread. Martin confirms the first two paragraphs are well-grounded in observation; he notes that where Lucretius says thought is “swifter than anything in nature,” the actual mechanism — nerve conduction via electrical impulse moving ions (potassium, sodium) at up to 100 m/s — is at least consistent with Lucretius’s inference that the relevant particles are very small and light, even if the rigid-body model is wrong.
A substantial segment addresses the Phaedo homework from last week. Cassius explains the setting: Socrates in prison awaiting the hemlock, giving his final defense of the soul’s immortality to his followers. He walks through Simmias’s harmony/lyre argument and Plato’s refutation of it, then traces Plato’s ultimate proof — that the soul contains the life-principle, and since the life-principle cannot admit of death, the soul is immortal. The group recognizes this as a circular definitional argument, analogous to Saint Anselm’s ontological proof of God. Charles cites Molière’s “dormitive virtue” as a parallel example of circular reasoning (a quack doctor asked why opium causes sleep replies: because of its soporific power). Elaine connects the Epicurean prolepses to the theory-of-recollection debate: prolepsis — innate pattern recognition that modern developmental psychology can account for — removes the need for pre-existence of the soul to explain how we recognize abstractions like “smaller” and “larger.” Cassius reads Socrates’ remarkable warning against becoming a “misologist” (hater of argument/reason), which Plato frames as the worst thing that can happen to a man — a passage Cassius notes reads almost as religious advice: don’t lose faith in ideal forms. The episode closes with Elaine’s discussion of synesthesia (she has lexical-emotional synesthesia: certain words have tastes and colors) as a possible explanation for why some people report seeing auras — a neurological cross-communication of the senses, more common in those who report aura-perception.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 40 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. 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. This week we’re going to be discussing the Latin text from Book Three starting at around line 161, and our subject is going to be the nature of the mind and soul. Let’s now join today’s discussion with Elaine reading the text.
Elaine: This mind can think of itself alone and of itself rejoice, when the soul and body are no ways affected. As when the head or the eye is hurt by sensible pain we are not tormented all over the body, so the mind is sometimes grieved or elated with joy when the other part, the soul, diffused through the limbs, is agitated with no new motion at all. But when the mind is shaking with violent fear, we see the soul through all the limbs partakes of the same disorder: cold sweats and paleness spread all over the body, the tongue falters, the speech fails, the eyes grow dim, the ears tingle, and the limbs quake. In short, we often see men fall down from a terror of the mind, from which we may easily conclude that the soul is united with the mind, and when she is pressed forcibly with its impulse, then she drives on the body and puts it in motion.
By this rule therefore we find that the nature of the mind and soul is corporeal. For we see it shakes the limbs, rouses the body from sleep, changes the countenance, and directs and governs the whole man. Nothing of which can be done without touch, and there can be no touch without body. Should we not then allow that the mind and soul are corporeal in their nature?
Besides, you see the mind suffers with the body and bears a share with it in all it endures. If the violent force of a dart pierces the body and shatters the bones and nerves, though death does not instantly follow, yet a faintness succeeds and a sort of pleasing desire of sinking into the ground, a passionate resolution to die — and then again the will fluctuates and wishes to live. The mind therefore must needs be of a corporeal nature because it suffers pain by the stroke of darts, which we know are bodies.
I shall now go on to explain clearly of what sort of body this mind consists and of what principles it is formed. And first I say that the mind is composed of very subtle and minute seeds — that it is so, attend closely, and you will find that nothing is accomplished with so much speed as what the mind attempts and proposes to execute. The mind therefore is swifter in its motion than anything in nature we can see or conceive. But that which is so exceedingly quick to move must consist of the roundest and most minute seeds, that may be set a-going by the lightest impulse. So water is moved and disposed to flow by ever so little force because it is composed of small and slippery seeds. But the nature of honey is more tenacious, its moisture more inactive and its motion slower; its principles stick closer among themselves, because it consists of seeds not so smooth, so subtle, and so round. And thus a large heap of poppy seeds is blown away by the gentlest breath of wind and scattered abroad, but no blast can shake a heap of stones or darts. Therefore the smoother and smaller the principles of bodies are, the more easily they are disposed to motion; and the heavier and rougher the seeds are, the more fixed and stable they remain.
Since therefore the nature of the mind is so exceedingly apt to move, it must needs consist of small, smooth, and round seeds. And your knowing this, my sweet youth, will be found of great use and very seasonable for your future inquiries. This will discover clearly to you its nature — of what tenuous parts it is formed — and how small a space it might be contained if it could be squeezed together. For when the calm of death has possession of a man and the mind and soul are retired, you will find nothing taken away from the body as to its bulk, nothing as to its weight. Death leaves everything complete except the vital sense and the warm breath. The whole soul therefore must needs be formed of a very small seed, as it lies diffused through the veins, the bowels, and the nerves — because when it is wholly left, every part of the body the outward shape of the limbs remains entire and they want not a hair of their weight.
And this is the nature of wine when the flavor of it is gone, and of ointments when their sweet odors are evaporated into air. And thus it is when any moisture perspires through the pores of the body: the bulk does not appear less to the eye upon that account, nor is there anything taken off from the weight. For many and small are the seeds that compose the moisture and the smell and the texture of all bodies. And therefore we may be well assured that the nature of the mind and soul is formed of exceeding little principles, because when it leaves the body it detracts nothing from the weight.
Cassius: Okay, thank you, Elaine, for reading that today. Lots of interesting stuff. Any particular one you want to jump in on? Because there are some background issues that I want to discuss today, but I don’t want to let the background issues obscure us dealing with any details that you find interesting.
Elaine: Okay. So it’s almost as if he’s trying to play neuroscientist here and physicist. I think this is especially interesting to me being a physician. It does continue to read as: the mind — I would think the modern-day look would be the brain — and then the soul, the nervous system. So the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system is how we would look at this today.
And so in the first paragraph he’s talking about the sympathetic nervous system with fear and anxiety. He has made a nice, close observation of the effects of sympathetic activation of the nervous system — all of those: the coldness, the paleness, the sweats, the vision dimming, the shaking. This is very observant from a medical standpoint. I’m impressed.
Cassius: Elaine, do you want to go ahead, or I have a question about what you just said? Let’s do each paragraph separately so that we can all comment.
You were just equating the mind and the soul to some modern terms. Which were those two again?
Elaine: Well, he uses mind and soul, and for me, what would be accurate for how he’s describing it — based on what we now know — would be the brain, or the central nervous system, and the peripheral nervous system.
Cassius: Okay. My question is going to be: which one of those two is the one that flies to heaven when you die and plays a harp for eternity?
Elaine: Well, that — you know, for Christians that would be the soul, but they don’t really separate that. I think they use — I don’t know — your soul and your mind maybe are not separate for them. I’m not really sure. I find that whole thing — yeah. I was obviously being facetious to some degree. But I guess in order to keep track of what he’s even talking about, you have to look at it from a couple of different perspectives.
I guess when he says the soul he’s talking about the thing people think of as being the real you. The real you. Or maybe another way he could be doing it — for him — would be the cognitive, the thought part of the mind — the mind that thinks — and then the soul might be the feelings, the emotional. And in that sense they would all still be part of the nervous system. So that’s another possibility.
Cassius: I mean, I know even in this paragraph he talks about the tongue faltering and speech failing. And what I was about to say is that maybe at least one thing to consider is that the mind can get confused, can get all sorts of disruption going on in it — and yet whatever it is that you think is you is really staying the same, presumably, while your mind is confused. But I don’t think he’s saying that — I don’t think he’s saying that’s not true. He’s actually saying that the soul is united with the mind, and both of them are affected together. That’s his argument: that they are affected together.
Elaine: Right. And then in the second paragraph — the nature of the mind and the soul being corporeal, meaning that only a thing that is material can affect a material thing — and also the mind, the thinking, is affected by material action on the body. So this is actually one of the modern atheist arguments against the soul. You still see this exact line of reasoning when you read modern atheist writing. I wonder if those writers are aware that Epicurus — or Lucretius — was the first record of that line of argument.
Cassius: This argument being, Elaine, that the soul must be bodily because it could only affect the body if it itself is bodily? Is that what you’re saying?
Elaine: That, and also where he says the mind suffers with the body. That’s one of the modern arguments: okay, if there’s something that’s you that’s not the body, why when you get a brain injury are you different? How can that be? The only legitimate arguments against that now are that the mind is the brain plus the environment — because the brain is constantly acting with the environment and is not in a vacuum. That’s a legitimate point of view, but it’s still all material, versus the supernaturalist or universal-consciousness arguments that say the brain is more like a radio that’s just picking up a signal from an incorporeal source. But how could there be an interface? How can that interact if the signal is not also material?
Cassius: Yep, makes sense to me. I have more comments about the second two but I want to hear from Charles and Martin. Charles?
Charles: Not that I have a lot to say on it, but a lot has already been said. As we move to the second part of what we’re going to be talking about today, it looks like to me it divides kind of in half. The part that Elaine’s been talking about already is ultimately the issue that the mind and the soul are corporeal. Then the next two paragraphs are going to be a lot of detail about exactly what type of corporeal, and how fast it moves and so forth. So there’s really a kind of a good division point right here.
It’s a bit indirect and not directly related to the next paragraph subject matter, but I was thinking of the distinctions of how pleasure is often identified — you know, moving, static, mental, and physical — the implications of that with just sort of a conjoined mind and body. It got me going on a whole other line of thinking that’s not related to this section, so I’ve been quiet thinking on that.
Cassius: Well, if you’re trying to extend this discussion to whether that means pleasure and pain are also ultimately corporeal as well — I guess that is an implication of this.
Charles: That’s generally along the line I was thinking.
Elaine: Pain and pleasure being corporeal doesn’t quite make sense to me. The mind that experiences them is corporeal, but there is not like an object that you can point to that is pain or pleasure.
Cassius: Right. There’s not a pleasure atom or a pain atom.
Elaine: Right, we discussed that. But so there are of course neurotransmitters — I don’t mean that — but the actual experience is subjective. It’s not like in the endorphin molecule. It’s an event.
Cassius: Martin, do you have anything while Charles is looking?
Martin: Yes. So the first two paragraphs — he stays pretty much close to observation and uses only the basic assumption that everything is based on particles and void, and there is nothing supernatural. So that means these first two paragraphs seem to me a fairly correct description.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. This is another example of being more likely to be right if you stick with observable things.
Well, we can move on to the second half. Charles, are you still looking for something you want to talk about?
Charles: No, I was looking into the mind-body issue but it’s sort of looking like a dead end.
Elaine: So, as Martin has said, the first two sections would be pretty solid — they’re based on observations, and he hasn’t said anything that we can’t defend today, maybe using different words, but the basics seem pretty right. Then he starts getting back into extrapolating from what he has observed to what he hasn’t observed, and he starts making mistakes. This is a good lesson for budding scientists who might be listening.
I don’t want to belabor this because we talked about some of these issues with the seeds before. I do think it’s interesting that his observations go down to things like the viscosity of fluids — that he’s noticing those things. That’s impressive. He clearly says the mind is “swifter in its motion than anything in nature we can see or conceive” — of course now we would say: what about light, the speed of light? The brain is not as fast as the speed of light. And I guess they hadn’t conceived of electrical impulses traveling down the nerves. I don’t know when the first time was that somebody realized that.
Martin: I believe that was Giovanni Galvani — about 240 years ago or so.
Elaine: So that’s a long time after him. So that makes me think of Walt Whitman — “I Sing the Body Electric.” He’s made some mistakes as far as the weight. Of course, all this stuff about weighing the body after death reminds me of those attempts to weigh the soul that you see from certain people. But he’s incorrect — insensible fluid loss through the skin does affect the weight; he just didn’t have instruments accurate enough to measure that. The loss of aromatic particles from substances that have smells — those are molecules, and that does affect the weight. But the soul has still never been shown to have any weight at all.
Martin: There are measurements out which show it’s 21 grams, but others dispute — they say this is just noise which is over-interpreted. So there’s a number out there that the soul weighs 21 grams, but I don’t think that is scientifically valid.
Cassius: So I thought it was 21 grams — and if the soul weighs something, then it actually is material, still — because only material things have weight.
Martin: I have done on a number of occasions measurements of water evaporating. This is very difficult because if you use a very sensitive balance, then you want to look at the effect on the weight — but then water can behave very funny. For example, I tried to determine the age of eggs by spectroscopy and then controlled their weight. Typically the weight was going down, but then there was a leak in the water bath where I kept them, and the weight suddenly increased because a little bit of water made it back through the shell. And when we try to weigh chemicals there can be hygroscopic effects — you put them on the balance and the weight goes up even though you haven’t added anything. So you have difficulty making accurate measurements because of very small changes.
If someone is telling me he put a 70 kilogram human who is about to die on a balance and then considered 21 or 30 grams as something significant — that is plain noise.
Cassius: It’s interesting how relevant all of this is to today’s arguments between atheists and religionists.
Charles: Yeah. That’s where this is always going to go back — to the issue of whether there’s an immortal soul that’s going to survive the body after death. I suppose it doesn’t completely answer the question when you say the mind and soul are corporeal like Epicurus is saying here. I suppose somebody could still argue that a corporeal soul could be immortal. But the argument will continue on as we proceed past today to show that that’s not the case.
Charles: No, I was just reading into the whole weight-of-the-soul thing. It’s called the 21 Grams Experiment. I remember hearing about that in like seventh grade. That’s a Wikipedia page. Let me just link it.
Elaine: I don’t want to go into detail about the errors because I feel like we’ve covered that in other sections. It’s good enough to note that when it comes up — but we don’t need to belabor it.
Martin: But I have something a bit in defense. Of course I completely agree that he uses the wrong model of hard-body interactions of these particles, and all these wrong statements come from that. But on the other hand, there is something in it. There is this conclusion that the particles have to be lightweight — because when we see what is involved in moving through a nerve, we see that the signal is just an electrical pulse, which can move at up to 100 meters per second in the fastest cases, and what moves as a material thing are very lightweight ions like potassium and sodium. So what comes out of Lucretius’s reasoning isn’t completely wrong — it is in fact fairly small particles which are involved in the transportation of information along nerve fibers.
Cassius: Anybody want to carry that in any direction?
Elaine: I’m curious what you were thinking — what you wanted to cover beyond this.
Cassius: Well, I’d like to go back and clean up a little bit from last week, based on some links that Charles provided on harmony and some Socratic arguments. But before we go further — we have to come to an agreement. Are we going to pronounce the name of this dialogue “Phido” like the dog, or “Phaedo”?
Martin: Should be “Phaedo,” no?
Charles: I wouldn’t say “Phaedo” — the AE makes a different sound.
Cassius: Okay, because it’s Greek and not Latin — so it can be either a long E or a long A. We’ll call it “Phaedo” in honor of Martin today. I’m just partial to “Phido” because I like dogs. I’d like to think it was about a dog.
Anyway. So the reason we got into it last week was Charles found the link about Simmias, who made the argument to Socrates. The Phaedo is the dialogue in which Socrates is giving his last speech to his followers in prison right before he drinks the hemlock. This is the dialogue in which Socrates gives his most elaborate and refined defense of whether the soul is immortal, what happens to you after you die, and all of these really serious issues about death and what happens afterwards, if anything.
So, way too complicated to go into tremendous detail today, but here’s the context. Socrates’ trial had condemned him to death, but by chance the tradition was that a particular ship going to a particular shrine was leaving the next day, and under Athenian tradition they could not execute anybody until that procedure had been completed and the ship returned. So the scenario of the Phaedo is: Socrates is in prison with some number of his friends and followers around him — which does not include Plato — and the ship has returned, and so the execution is imminent. And he gets into a final discussion about what’s going to happen to him and why they should not be despondent about his death because he’s going to a better place.
The dialogue starts off with Socrates giving a couple of arguments in favor of why his soul is going to survive his death. He stops and asks his people if they’ve been persuaded. They have not. And so Simmias raises this argument — that the soul could be like a harmony. When you have a lyre or any kind of musical instrument, once the instrument has been destroyed, once its pieces have been disrupted, the harmony is gone as well. And so he says to Socrates: well, the soul could be like that. Even if the soul doesn’t inhabit any particular part, even if it’s something that’s basically on top of the body and separate from the body — it could still be destroyed when the body is gone. So it’s an argument that does actually track some of the Epicurean arguments that the soul cannot survive outside the body.
But then Socrates pulls out his ultimate argument about why the soul is immortal. And this is the kind of argument that Elaine would hate, I think. His first argument about why the harmony argument is not correct is: Plato says that harmonies have degrees — you can have more or less harmony in a musical passage. And so Plato’s point is: because harmony can be more or less harmonic, the soul cannot be a harmony, because their premise is that the soul is perfect and immortal. So he dismisses the harmony argument by saying that harmonies by nature are imperfect and can’t have anything to do with the soul.
The reason I think that’s significant is that it’s very similar to the argument about pleasure — they take the position that anything that can be made greater or lesser by degrees cannot be perfect or part of an ideal. So he starts out dismissing harmony on the same grounds that they dismiss pleasure as possibly being the ultimate good.
To summarize — the argument that the soul is immortal comes down to a definition. What is it that makes something beautiful? You can’t really describe what makes something beautiful other than to say that it partakes in the ideal of beauty. Charles, I want you to jump in at some point because I know you’ve probably seen some of these arguments.
The ultimate argument about what makes something beautiful or great or small is that there is an ideal of beauty, an ideal of greatness, an ideal of smallness. If something is small it is because it contains the form of smallness within it; if something is beautiful it is because it partakes of the ideal of beauty that exists in some other realm. And the reason we know the soul is immortal is basically that the only way you understand what beauty or smallness or greatness even is, is because you were born with that knowledge — that you brought it into this existence from your pre-existence.
Elaine: Yes — the theory of recollection.
Cassius: That is the recollection argument. No matter how many beautiful paintings, no matter how many beautiful men or women you come into contact with, you’re never really sure that those individuals are beautiful except to the extent that you can identify within them their participation in the ideal form of beauty. It’s very difficult for me to summarize and bring this all back into the immortality argument, but that’s where he gets his ideas and his proof that the soul is immortal.
He concludes the dialogue by saying: “Not life makes something alive, but the soul makes it alive. And the soul has a life-giving power which does not admit of death and is therefore immortal.” Socrates’ question is: “Tell me then — what is it that, of which, if you have it, the body becomes alive?” And the answer is: the soul. “And is it always the case?” And Simmias says: “Yes, of course.” “Then whatever the soul possesses — to that she comes bearing life?” “Yes, certainly.” “And is there any opposite to life?” “There is.” “And what is that?” “Death.” “But the soul has been acknowledged will never receive the opposite of what she brings?” “Impossible,” replied Cebes. And so on to the conclusion: the soul is immortal.
Charles: Impossible replied Cebes.
Cassius: And now he says, what did we just now call the principle that repels the even? “The odd.” And what principle repels the musical or the just? “The unmusical, and the unjust.” And what do we call the principle that does not admit of death? “The immortal.” And does the soul admit of death? “No.” Then the soul is immortal. “Yes,” Cebes says. “And we may say that this has now been proven.” “Yes — abundantly proven, Socrates.”
That is what these guys are doing. They’re defining words in a way that they think makes sense and building a chain argument of definitions by which they can conclude that the soul is immortal — based on how they’ve defined “immortal” and “soul.” They’re not looking at individual people or experiences or atoms that make up the soul. They are playing a word exercise. I don’t know whether this is called an ontological proof.
Elaine: What’s the ontological proof that there’s a god? I don’t know. I have to look that up.
Cassius: There’s a whole lot here far beyond the scope of what we could deal with today. But we’d have to look at Saint Anselm for that stuff.
The point I wanted to raise is that this would have been probably as familiar to the ancient Athenians of Epicurus’ time as anything in the Bible is to us today. Okay, here it is. The ontological proof: “God by definition is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore God must exist.”
Now, what do you make of that, Elaine?
Elaine: It’s ridiculous because it’s the same problem — and really it’s the same problem in a more glaring form that is being made. When Lucretius gets off into these extrapolating statements about seeds he hasn’t seen, it’s just: using words and logic when you’ve never proven your premises, and people get carried away with “oh that must be right, it sounds good” — but you’ve never made an observation. So just because I can imagine a unicorn in the sky does not mean there must be a unicorn in the sky. So when I say that, it’s obvious. But that’s really what he’s doing. There’s no observation. So this is a perfect example of how reasoning should be secondary to evidence. You should use your reasoning on evidence and not just go off on your own with it.
Cassius: There is so much to unwind here, and I agree with what you said, Elaine. We’re not going to be diverted from proceeding through Lucretius like we need to. But as we come across some of these arguments we can go back and cite the context in which they arrive.
I’ve never read the majority of these Platonic dialogues, and I think most of the people listening to these podcasts have probably never read them and are never going to read them. We’re going to have to find a way to explain the context without suggesting that people need to become professional philosophers.
But the Phaedo contains many of the arguments that Epicurus is rejecting — from the issue of whether the senses are trustworthy, to the issues of whether there’s absolute justice and absolute beauty and so forth. And I was laughing through when you read that because it sounds so ridiculous now. And I don’t know why anybody would have ever thought that was anything other than ridiculous.
Elaine: And I think — Epicurus knew it was ridiculous. So it was just as ridiculous back then.
Charles: There are a few sections from the Phaedo which I looked up. I think it’s “Phaedo” — P-H-A-E-D-O. Apologies to our listeners — we know how to speak Greek. We clearly don’t.
Cassius: English Greek. “Phaedo” should be the English pronunciation.
Okay — so there’s one section from the introduction of the Phaedo, describing Plato’s view: “So deeply rooted in Plato’s mind is the belief in immortality” — and then, from the dialogue itself: “Nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation of beauty in whatever way or manner obtained.” It’s circular — it’s so circular.
Charles: One of the criticisms of vitalism and the élan vital was that it was very circular. Molière has an example listed in one of his plays — a quack doctor is being asked why opium causes sleepiness, to which he replies: because of its soporific power. Which is just nothing other than using a different word to describe the same thing.
Elaine: Yeah, so one really interesting thing is this highlights how different the idea of the prolepses is from the idea of an abstract ideal realm where you would know things like “smaller” and “larger.” Yes, I think it would be better compared to the theory of recollection rather than just the forms, if we’re talking of his knowledge. But it’s a similar thing. Epicurus accounted for this argument by bringing in the prolepses, which — if you look at developmental studies in humans today — we do think that we come with some innate pattern recognition, just like other species. That would explain how we recognize things as smaller and larger — it’s a neurologically inherited skill, not a recollection from a pre-existing life.
Cassius: Charles, this may be an area where you can correct me — they were bouncing back and forth on this. If so, Plato was taking a recollection/pre-existence-of-the-soul argument. I gather Aristotle must have gone the other direction because he’s the one who came up with the blank slate and said there’s no recollection — I think that was Aristotle’s position. So Epicurus is then taking a position that Elaine has just described: there is no pre-existence to the soul, but on the other hand you are born with certain dispositions or intuitive faculties that will then dispose you in particular directions.
Elaine: So it’s very deep. I mean, you don’t need a pre-life, you don’t need an eternal existence, to have these features of human biology. It’s really wonderful that Epicurus hasn’t left anything unexplained — as far as this whole idealistic realm, there’s just no need for it.
Charles: Aristotle did reject the theory of forms, because of his reputation as a natural philosopher. A lot of his epistemology is based on induction — but some of the stuff like his teleology would sort of deviate from that.
Cassius: We’re going to need to begin to come to conclusions for today. But there’s one more thing I’d like to close on. It’s interesting that one of the things Socrates says in the midst of all this is that he says no worse thing can happen to a man than this — and I’d almost like to play a game of “try to guess what he thinks is the worst thing that can happen to a man” in the context of what we’re discussing about ideal forms.
Here it is: “First let’s take care that we avoid a danger — lest we become misologists.” Which means haters of argument and reason. “Lest we become misologists,” he replied. “No worst thing can happen to a man than this. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of too great confidence of inexperience — you trust a man and you think him altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish, and then another and another. And when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it happens among those who he deems to be his own trusted and familiar friends, he hates at last all men and believes that no one has any good in him.” And then he continues on and says the same thing happens to ideas — that you should not lose your faith in ideas just because you can’t seem to use them like you’d like to.
So I bring that up because it’s almost like a religious argument: don’t give up your faith in ideal forms even though ideal forms, as he is describing them, seem so ridiculous to us from our perspective. He’s really talking about these ideal forms — he’s saying, don’t give up your faith in these ideal forms just because of the difficulties you have in applying them. And there’s so much Christianity, so much religion, that you can read into this Socratic-Platonic material. It is very profound and has to be dealt with at a very deep level.
Martin: Okay. Just to add to the weight — it seems 21 grams is mentioned far more often. I couldn’t find a reference for 30 grams, but in those first measurements they had a range of 10 to 30 grams reportedly. So you do find 30 grams somewhere as well, but 21 grams is much more common.
Cassius: Okay. You have to take care of that — 21 grams is very important. How do they go from it having a weight to it being non-material? Maybe the people who were weighing the soul are ultimately on the atheist side — maybe they’re the ones who are saying it’s corporeal. That’s not a Christian argument, that it has weight.
Martin: I don’t know. I didn’t take it seriously, so I didn’t really follow up on the sources.
Charles: It’s called the 21 Grams experiment. Here’s a Live Science article on that. It was a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall who devised experiments in 1907 that he thought would weigh the soul. He used six terminally ill patients on a scale bed, measured their weight before, during, and after death. For six patients he got an average of 21 grams. On closer examination, however, there were profound flaws: he used a very small sample size, he discarded two of the original six, they didn’t know the precise moment of death in 1907, and it was just sloppy science. But it has persisted like an urban legend.
Cassius: Well, if I were in my familiar role as defender of Epicurus to the nth degree, I would say that probably the reason they’re getting into these details — which we’re criticizing to some degree as inaccurate — is that they want to put together a plausible theory. We think we have a mind, we think we have something going on inside our bodies, so people are going to want to have some kind of understanding of what that is. And Epicurus and Lucretius are offering them an explanation in which whatever it is that’s going on within our brains and our hearts, it’s not something that requires a lot of substance to it. It’s very light and thin and moves very fast, and we don’t know much more about it than that — but it’s not mystical. And of course it also gives you the answer that if it’s part of the body then it’s going to die with the body.
Charles: I think this little excerpt gives us some insight into his beliefs. And then — for years all was quiet on the MacDougall front, but in 1911 he graced the New York Times front page with an announcement that he had upped the ante. This time he wouldn’t be weighing the human soul — he’d be photographing it at the moment it left the body. He expressed concern that the soul substance might become “too agitated to be photographed at the moment of death.”
Elaine: Oh my gosh. Well, you know the word “aura” — people think they can take pictures of it. The aura is actually interesting. Of course, we do have electrical fields because we’re electrical beings. But aura is probably, from what I can tell, partly from synesthesia.
Cassius: What’s that word mean? What is synesthesia?
Elaine: Synesthesia means when your senses are cross-communicating neurologically. There are people who hear certain notes and see certain colors — the frequency of an A-sharp is always going to be the same color for them. Not everybody has it, but it’s not exceedingly rare. I have a form of synesthesia myself called lexical-emotional synesthesia — certain words have colors and tastes. My brain is not all that creative, so “bitter” tastes bitter if you’re a bitter person, if you have a bitter feeling, and it’s sort of a bile green. So obviously neurologically there’s some stuff going on there.
The idea is that synesthesia is more frequent in people who report being able to see auras. Likely they are seeing their reactions to people as a color around them, which just reflects their emotional response to that person.
Cassius: Okay. Well, I’m seeing red as a stop sign for us to complete the podcast for today. Anybody have anything else before we come to an end?
Charles: No, no.
Martin: Not from me.
Elaine: I think we did well — this was an interesting section.
Cassius: Very good. We’ll do it again next week. Thanks everybody. Bye.
Martin: Yes. Bye.
Charles: Goodbye.
Elaine: Bye.