Episode 044 - Additional Evidence By Which We Conclude The Mind Cannot Survive Apart from the Body
Date: 11/14/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1760-episode-forty-four-the-mind-cannot-continue-to-exist-separately-from-the-body-af/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 44 covers lines 548–633 of Book Three, a further accumulation of evidence that the soul cannot survive outside the body. Elaine reads a passage whose absurdist moments — “the air would become an animal if the soul could be confined within it,” and the image of a dying man’s soul “creeping up the throat” — prompt laughter. The group notes Lucretius’s characteristic dark humor when ridiculing opposing positions. Charles observes that Lucretius treats fainting as the soul nearly departing, which must have made fainting genuinely terrifying in antiquity; Elaine explains the vasovagal response and draws out the Epicurean lesson: more accurate knowledge about what is actually happening routinely reduces unnecessary fear.
A sustained discussion develops around the concept of dilution and identity. Martin, as a physicist, points out that losing ninety-nine percent of soul particles homogeneously still leaves one particle per centimeter — enough for the structure to remain identifiable. Elaine responds that beyond a certain point of spreading, we simply cease to recognize something as a unified object — the pulverized mineral spread across a planet is still the same mineral but is no longer a rock. Charles notes that modern immaterialists would simply shrug: a soul dispersed across the universe is not a problem for them. The group explores whether this maps onto Stoic pneuma and nous, and Cassius argues the more fundamental question: the baseline agreement required for any philosophical discussion is whether regularity and repeatability count as evidence of reality. If someone denies that regularity matters, the conversation is, in Pauli’s phrase, “not even wrong.”
Cassius draws out the connection between the Lucretius passage and Principal Doctrine 2 (“Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us”), arguing that PD2 is a high-level conceptual argument that presupposes sensation as the criterion of “something to us,” while Lucretius provides the specific natural-philosophy evidence for why the soul cannot survive. He also distinguishes them: PD2 does not actually assert that the soul ceases to exist at death — it only says that what lacks sensation is nothing to us. Lucretius goes further, arguing actual dissolution. Elaine adds that sensory deprivation tanks illustrate how brain-dependent perception truly is: deprived of input, the brain hallucinates, and a bodyless soul would lack even the neurological circuits for that kind of imagination.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 44 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’s 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. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode One for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In today’s episode we’ll cover roughly lines 548 through 633 from Book Three of the Latin text. The topic will be additional evidence from which we conclude that the mind cannot continue to exist separate from the body after death. Now let’s join the discussion with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: (reads lines 548–633)
For it is, as it were, a vessel to the soul, or anything else you can conceive more closely united to it, for it sticks inseparably to the body and cannot be divided from it. So the vital powers of the body and mind exert themselves together and live united by the strongest bonds. Neither can the nature of the mind alone dispense the vital motions of itself without the body, nor can the body, void of soul, continue or use the faculties of sense. For as the eye torn out, roots separated from the body, can see nothing, so the soul and mind cannot act of themselves, because they are spread all over the body by the veins, the bowels, the nerves and bones. Nor could the seeds of the soul exercise those vibrations that produce sense, were they disposed at wide intervals and enclosed by no solid body. They show these sensible motions because they are shut up close, which they cannot exert even when they are forced out of the body into the wide air after death, because they are not under the same restraint as they are within the enclosure of the body. For the air would be an animal, if the soul could be confined within it and maintain those motions of sense which before it exercised in the nerves and through the limbs.
You must confess therefore over and over that the mind and soul — for they both make up but one substance — must needs be dissolved as soon as they are stripped of the covering of the body and their vital powers thrown out into the thin air. Again, since the body cannot bear the separation of the soul but it soon putrefies and stinks, how can you doubt but that the principles of the soul, diffused through the whole body and raised from the very inmost parts of it, flow out like smoke, and therefore the rotten body thus changed falls to pieces and ruins in such a manner because the seeds of the soul which preserved the whole are moved widely from their place and flow through the limbs and all the winding passages of the body? And hence you are fully satisfied that the nature of the soul is spread over all the limbs, and is first broken and divided in the body itself before it flies out into the air abroad.
Nay more, whilst the man is still living the soul often does receive a violent shock, so that the limbs are dissolving, all over the face looking pale as if it were real death, and all the members of the body wan and ghostly, falling to pieces. This happens in a swooning fit, when the soul is going and trembles upon the verge of life, and all the faculties strive to hold fast the chain that binds soul and body together. The mind and all the powers of the soul are then shaken, and are so staggered with the body, that a force a little stronger would drive it to utter dissolution. Do you doubt now whether this soul, thrown out of the body abroad, destitute into the open air, stripped naked, be so far from remaining entire to eternal ages that it cannot subsist so much as for the least moment?
And then, no dying man ever perceived his soul go out whole from all parts of the body at once, nor felt it first creeping up his throat, then rising up to his jaws, but he finds it fail in that part of the body wherein it is placed, as he knows that every sense expires in its proper organ. But if this mind were immortal it would not when dying complain of its being dissolved, but rather rejoice that it was going freely abroad, that it had thrown off its coat as a snake, or as an old stag that cast his heavy antlers.
And why is not the mind, with all its reason and conduct, produced in the head, the feet, the hands, but that every part is fixed to one place and to a certain situation? If proper places were not appointed to all beings in which to be born, and when produced, where they might abide, and where every member might be so conveniently disposed that there might be no preposterous order of the limbs throughout the whole, so regularly does one thing follow another, that fire is never raised from water, nor cold from heat.
Besides, if the nature of the soul be immortal, and enjoys the power of sense when separated from the body, you must, as I conceive, supply her with the use of the five senses, nor can we imagine how without them the soul can live in the shades below. The painters and the poets many ages ago have represented the souls endued with sense, but neither eyes nor nose nor hands nor tongue nor ears can be separately in the soul, nor can they separately retain any sense, nor even be without it.
Cassius: Thank you for reading that, Elaine. I have some ideas that we can probably discuss, but they are more general, and we probably ought to start first by just going through and see if anybody has any comments on the details of what we’ve read today.
Elaine: Yeah. The first two sections here are really going along the same lines as what we talked about last time — this idea of the soul not being able to survive outside of the boundary of the body, really because of being too spread out with nothing to contain it. Which is interesting.
Charles: I got cracked up during part of it and had a hard time not laughing about —
Cassius: There are a couple of things I feel like Lucretius had to just laugh about — like the air being called an animal. There are lots of sections in Lucretius, and maybe even some Epicurus too, where they’re pointing out things that are so ridiculous you almost have to think that they’re laughing as they ridicule another position.
Elaine: I kept feeling your soul creeping up in your throat.
Cassius: Yes — that was one of the first sections I heard laughter there.
Charles: Oh, that’s great. I appreciate his sense of humor.
Cassius: There’s no doubt he’s spending a lot of time marshaling his arguments here on this particular issue of the soul not being able to survive outside the body. I guess we’re in Book Three and Charles, maybe you can correct me, but I’m thinking that as we get a little bit further, we’re going to come to the basic conclusion that death is the end of the soul and we have some pretty well-known passages at the end that are more broad about why we should not worry about that. But I think that’s the direction we’re going in Book Three.
Elaine: And I feel like this is a really important idea here about the loss of density, or parts of a whole — like the seeds of the soul — that at a certain point if you lose density, whatever you were talking about is no longer identifiable as being a thing anywhere. Am I making sense?
Martin: Yeah, but the problem is Lucretius doesn’t make full sense here. From observation he gets a lot of things right, but then again, because this derived model is just somewhat analogous to what we actually know now by medicine and is not really the same, that’s why this concept of the soul having its own particles — special particles, lighter than others — I mean, that’s wrong.
Elaine: Well, yeah, yeah — so I don’t mean that. I think we know that’s wrong. I’m talking about the idea of at a certain point in a spectrum of losing density and cohesiveness, humans no longer recognize something as a defined object. And I hadn’t really thought about that before, but I think he’s getting at that.
Martin: I mean, that’s the thing — we would need to see more specific examples, because for some situations it depends on how that loss of density is happening, so depending on what it is, we may see this as a whole. It just becomes lighter or something like that.
Elaine: Right. I’m not sure I’m getting my point across.
Martin: But if we have another system — say we have the sense of touch, and this one is diluted by a factor of 100 — that means we have a sensor every centimeter because it’s diluted over the area. So even if we lose ninety-nine percent in that homogeneous way, it still works and we can do much. And it’s still recognizable.
Cassius: I think that’s where Elaine’s going though, right Elaine — just that you’re talking about dilution beyond a certain point changes its nature.
Elaine: Its nature — and I would say, although he doesn’t say this, it changes our agreement to recognize it as a thing. So I think he is relying on that in the readers: that at a certain point of being spread out, the reader is going to say, “Well, that’s no longer an item because it’s too spread out.” And we do that in our minds. So, like, if you had a rock made of a certain mineral and you pulverize it and spread it all over the whole planet, so there’s only one little particle of the rock in any one place — you say, “Oh, it’s all the same mineral,” but you’re not going to say it’s still a rock because it’s too spread out. That’s a conceptual processing thing, the way our brains work. And I think he is relying on that common processing feature of human minds to recognize: okay, it’s impossible, it’s too spread out, so it can’t really be a soul anymore.
Cassius: That goes back to last week — we were discussing not being able to step into the same stream and those other issues about whether something, when it changes, is it the same thing as it was before? And there’s a conceptual question there about how you choose to evaluate it, because you can chop off little pieces incrementally and at first you think it’s the same thing without too much change — but the more you keep going, eventually most people are going to come to the conclusion that it’s just totally different. But at what incremental point is that reached?
Charles: So when I read this, thinking about people who are immaterialists or those “universal mind” people — some of whom say their position is still compatible with science somehow — this would not bother those people today. They would say, “Fine, your soul is spread out over the whole universe. I don’t see a problem.”
Cassius: Right. I’m not sure Epicurus wasn’t faced with those people back in his day, but it probably wasn’t a standard position then in the same way. Still, if you’ve defined the soul as having the capacity to just float around without any problem, then you’re never going to be burdened by any of these arguments Epicurus is making about the physics of it.
Elaine: But I mean — somebody who believed that the soul could be dispersed over the whole universe and would still be functioning as a soul. But is that different from the sort of divine fire argument of the Stoics?
Charles: Oh, I don’t know. The pneuma of the Stoics sounds pretty similar to that.
Elaine: Okay. So, all right — not pneuma exactly… nous or something? Yeah. Along those lines.
Cassius: I’m not disagreeing with you, Elaine. I’m really thinking that both kinds of things are going on. But today, I know people who would read this and say, “What’s the problem? I can be spread out over the entire universe, and so can you.”
Elaine: That’s right. And so that takes us back to the question: at what point does the nature of a thing lose its essential nature? Does it have an essential nature? Is everything just a matter of incremental elemental particles, or is there an essence anywhere that could be said to stay the same even while spreading out?
So the presumption of what Epicurus is saying here is that there is not an essence that can be spread out. It’s got a fixed location within the body, and you know from the fact that it has a fixed location that it’s got a physical presence to it. It’s not just some kind of immaterial ghost that can spread out. And today we might say — which I don’t think would be incompatible with what he’s saying, just a further development — that consciousness depends on a certain complexity of arrangement of matter, and once you’ve lost that structure spatially, it’s not there anymore.
Cassius: Elaine, since you’ve brought that up, let me ask this question that I had on my mind when we started. The opening of this passage talks about how the hands, the eyes, the nose, when separated from the body, are incapable of sense — and that the mind is part of man fixed in one place just as the eyes, ears, and other senses that preside over life. So he’s connecting sense to the issue of the mind and the soul. And then at the very end of the passage today, he comes back to the powers of sense and says: “If the nature of the soul be immortal and enjoys the power of sense when separated from the body, you must supply her with the use of the five senses, nor can we imagine how without them the soul can live in the shades below.” So he is saying it’s impossible to imagine the soul existing without sense. It seems to be getting closer to that view we had about the soul being a nervous system.
But where I’m going with that is that Elaine’s raised the point that people today — people who are immaterialists — might simply say, “Well, who cares whether the soul has the ability to smell or not. That doesn’t prove anything.” They would say all of that information can be gained without the senses, without the body — that it can skip the senses entirely. You don’t really need those.
Elaine: Right. Okay.
Cassius: And the ultimate direction I wanted to go in: I think it would be interesting to compare the argument he’s making here to Principal Doctrine Two, because Principal Doctrine Two seems to me to be a very high-level conclusion. “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” That is certainly related to what we’re talking about today. But it is an assertion that that which lacks sensation is nothing to us. I’m thinking that Principal Doctrine Two is a very conceptual-level argument where he has defined “something to us” — what constitutes life — as possessing sensation.
So I guess what I’m suggesting is it’s interesting to think about how you compare a high-level assertion like Principal Doctrine Two to all the detail that’s contained in Lucretius. You have to have all the detail in order to accept Principal Doctrine Two, and then even after you have all the detail made in Lucretius, does that necessarily establish the truth of Principal Doctrine Two? You can pile argument after argument — about how the soul probably cannot survive outside the body, how the individual organs are located within a particular location and therefore the mind is too — but do you ever get to the point where Principal Doctrine Two stands on its own without needing all of that argument?
Elaine: So I think, to me, what you’re asking is: are there baseline assumptions you have to agree on a priori? Is there anything you’ve got to say — “everything else I’m saying is based on this, and if you don’t accept this thing then we can’t discuss further”?
Cassius: Yes, that’s the direction I’m going. Because clearly, one of the themes I observe in a lot of this is that you have a conceptual argument that is often really grounded in the definition of words, but you also have at the same time a tremendous amount of observational detail, and we’re insisting that those be consistent with each other — but they’re not the same argument. They’re at a different level of understanding, maybe directed at a different level of people or a different context.
Elaine: I really, really agree. You know, I’m concerned about those things too, and that is why personally part of my philosophy is pragmatism — and I think I’ve mentioned that before. And I think Epicurus kind of hinted at it: like, if you’re not going to agree that pleasure is like sugar being sweet, what’s the exact quote — we just don’t have anything else to discuss. Right?
Cassius: Just to interrupt you for a second — even then apparently it was controversial, because the passage you’re referring to in Cicero’s On Ends says that other Epicureans say you can support the fact that pleasure is the good with logic. Epicurus has just been reported to have said that pleasure as the good needs no defense — like sugar is sweet. But then other Epicureans apparently came back later and said, well, no, you can go further than that, you can prove it logically. So anyway, go ahead.
Elaine: Well, but if you prove it logically, you’re still going to have to have some baseline agreement. My guess is that the baseline agreement is that you’re going to recognize things as being true based on their reliability on a scale. But if you’re not even going to agree that reliability has anything to do with it — predictability, regularity, repeatability — if you’re going to say that’s irrelevant, then you’re just not on the same page at all. There’s no way to have that conversation.
But how many times do you have to repeat it before you’re sure? — that’s not the issue. That’s your personal feeling of confidence. The issue is: does repetition and reliability have anything to do with it? Is that something you’re using? Or is it irrelevant? Do you not care if there’s predictability? Does that mean nothing to you as far as your assessment of what’s true or not? If that’s meaningless to you, you’re not operating remotely like science.
Cassius: Yeah. So you have to have a sort of understanding at the very beginning about the terms of your debate. And that you’re — I mean, Lucretius is repeatedly talking about regularity in the last passage: “So regularly does one thing follow another, that fire is never raised from water, nor cold from heat.” So if a person doesn’t care about regularity as an indicator of reality, you’re just not even in the same perspective whatsoever. I don’t think that perspective even overlaps with one that thinks regularity matters. Once you agree that regularity is something you’re using to assess the nature of reality, then there are all sorts of points on the spectrum — how reliable is this? How much do I need? — that are relatively trivial compared to the prior question: does regularity matter or doesn’t it?
I think that “does regularity matter” is kind of related to the reliability of the senses themselves. Because Plato might say that no matter how many times something seems sweet to you, you don’t know what sweet means until you get in contact with that ideal form that exists in heaven of sweetness. Just like he would say you never know whether the animal in front of you is a horse — the only thing you can know is the ideal of a horse that exists in another dimension. Or as Aristotle apparently would say, you don’t know that that is a horse until you’ve identified that it has the essence of a horse within it somehow.
Elaine: Right, right. And so if they’re leaving out regularity as a way to know things —
Cassius: They’re excluding it. They’re saying the senses are not reliable. The senses are in fact deceitful. The senses will mislead you. And if you follow the senses, you will definitely end up in error and perdition because the senses are tricks — because the soul is imprisoned within the body. The soul is waiting to get out and escape from the senses so that it can come into contact with God and reality directly. Which is something that is touched on in these passages today: Lucretius just makes the point that the soul should be happy to get out of the body, if that were true.
Elaine: Yeah. I have seen that argument made to religious people before too, and I don’t really understand how they can get out of it, but somehow they do.
Cassius: So I think someone who denies the relevance of regularity to humans in our efforts to understand what’s real — if you deny that — you fall into the group of arguments where today people would say, “Well, that’s not even wrong.” Meaning: we don’t have any basis to identify where you’re right or wrong, because you’re invalidating the very way we know that something is right or wrong, which is reliability, predictability, regularity.
I’m not going to belabor this point too much, but I’ll say it another way. In Principal Doctrine Two, he’s saying “death is nothing to us” — that is the conclusion he wants us to then apply in the way we live our lives. But that conclusion is totally dependent on your acceptance of the issue that “that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” He’s making a logical assertion that depends on your acceptance of that premise. And the next doctrine says “the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all that is painful” — my assertion would be that that is also a high-level conceptual argument dependent on a bunch of specific particulars about the nature of pleasure. That’s why you don’t look at this in isolation. You look at both the general argument and the particulars in order to understand what’s going on. Lucretius is providing a lot of specific observations about how the soul appears to be a part of the body that cannot survive when the body dies and dissolves. We’re in the midst of all these particulars, but we also have to keep in mind the conclusion we’re drawing — that after we’re dead, we have nothing to be concerned about.
Cassius: Martin?
Martin: Yeah. I’m still around. I’m listening. Okay, good, good. I don’t really have anything to add to this right now — it sounds, or makes sense, what you’ve said in the last ten minutes.
Cassius: Charles?
Charles: I’m kind of with Martin here. I mean, I’m not seeing anything inconsistent. Charles, do you have any general comment on the linkage of whether the soul has sensation or not to the conclusion that therefore death is nothing to us?
Cassius: Charles, do you have any general comment on the linkage between whether the soul has sensation and the conclusion that therefore death is nothing to us?
Charles: I’ve made that conclusion before, not exactly with all the nuances that Lucretius has discussed about the soul, but I’ve always linked it — after you die, with the death of the soul and that there is no afterlife — as being part of that. The only alternative I could see would be to be a bit semantical about what constitutes being “without sensation.” Like — would you consider somebody who is a bit boorish to be nothing to us?
Cassius: No.
Charles: Right, right. What about the sort of isolation chamber or sensory deprivation chamber situation — where your consciousness might continue in existence but you have no sensations whatsoever?
Cassius: Well, that wouldn’t render your sensations non-existent — but maybe I misunderstand the sensory deprivation chamber. Elaine probably has confronted that argument.
Elaine: So the sensory deprivation chamber is really interesting. The way our nervous systems are set up, if we are deprived of sensory input, our brains will just start making stuff up. And this actually happens to people not even in sensory deprivation: if you’re losing your vision — having significant vision loss — people will start to see visual hallucinations. They don’t have any kind of psychotic disorder, but their brain starts making things happen because things aren’t getting through. It happens when you’re losing hearing: people will start to have auditory hallucinations — not voices like in schizophrenia, but hearing music or things that aren’t happening.
So if you go into a sensory deprivation tank, what I’ve read from other people’s accounts is that you have all sorts of interesting experiences that your brain makes up because it’s not getting any stimulation. But if you’re bodyless, you’re also missing the neurological circuits that could even provide you with that kind of imagination. Someone who believes in disembodied consciousness just doesn’t think the brain is really necessary at all for any of those things to happen.
Cassius: As you’re saying that, that points me to the observation that — comparing Principal Doctrine Two to what we’re talking about — Principal Doctrine Two does not affirmatively assert that the soul is terminated at death. It just basically refers to: don’t be concerned about death because you have no sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us. What we’re talking about in Lucretius maybe goes further than that.
Elaine: It is. It is really. Lucretius is saying that the soul ceases to exist as the soul at death, which is probably beyond what Principal Doctrine Two says.
Charles: Yeah. Yeah, they’re very closely related, but you can’t read the two independently and just link them based off that.
Cassius: I guess Principal Doctrine Two seems to be at a much more conceptual level, as opposed to the natural-physics observational level that Lucretius is talking about. Though Principal Doctrine Two does link them by saying “that which is dissolved is without sensation” — so it is presuming dissolution. But as Elaine was asking Martin earlier, just because something is diluted doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lost its essential nature. Of course, I don’t know what the Greek word for “dissolved” would be. Maybe the Greek of dissolved is more than just diluted.
Cassius: Well, I think we’re going to turn pretty quickly from here to his general arguments about why we shouldn’t be overly concerned about the fact that we die, and we’re going to get out of the more medical observations pretty quickly. Charles, do you know — we’re more than halfway through Book Three now. We’re making good progress.
Charles: You’re doing longer sections. Yeah, I’m going to start doing a hundred or so a week.
Charles: This is a trivial point compared to the others, but I just want to comment — I think it’s interesting that he thought in a fainting fit, in a swooning fit, that the soul was going. That must have been what they thought then: that if you’re fainting, maybe it wouldn’t take very much more for you to die. “A force a little stronger would drive it to utter dissolution.” It must have been scary to see people faint back then.
Martin: There’s a similar thing with children — when they faint, people sometimes wrongly reassure them by saying “you were just like asleep,” and then the children become afraid of falling asleep.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah — great point. That is a great point. Maybe it was a bigger issue back then.
Elaine: There might have been. And I think it’s an example of how knowing more of the details about what’s actually happening can reduce your fears. We frequently have kids or teenagers faint when they get vaccines because they have this vasovagal response — their sympathetic nervous system activates, they get upset, it causes blood vessel dilation, their blood pressure drops, and they faint. It is not dangerous unless they hit their head going down, but it scares people. But now doctors can say, “Yep, that happened — you’re not about to die, nothing’s fundamentally wrong with you.” Knowing more information can a lot of times reduce unnecessary fears, which is a big theme in Epicurean philosophy. Does it work with everybody? As we discussed last week —
Cassius: Well, I’m scanning ahead and I see that we do have at least one more week where we get to discuss the details of quivering toes that have been cut off from feet and things like that. Once we get past that, we should have the much more general arguments, including a specific reference to “death, therefore, to us is nothing and concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal.” So he specifically does link this argument to Principal Doctrine Two, and again we’re going to get into parts that — I think reading the commentators — what we’re about to get into at the end of Book Three is one of the most famous sections of the whole poem, because it is a compilation of arguments that people have read when others die to try to get past the emotional trauma of dealing with it.
Cassius: Okay, well, we probably should come to the end for today. Final thoughts. Martin?
Martin: I have none.
Cassius: Charles?
Charles: There’s another one of those episodes where it’s just way out of my field.
Cassius: Well, Elaine?
Elaine: I think I’ve said everything, but I think this is a very interesting section, despite the fact that we no longer think of something called a soul that has particles. There’s still a lot of useful information in here.
Cassius: Alright, well then with that, we’ll close for today and be back soon. Thanks everybody for your time today.
All: Alright. Alright. Bye.