Episode 055 - Reason Is Dependent on The Senses (Part 2)
Date: 01/25/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1860-episode-fifty-five-reason-is-dependent-on-the-senses-part-2/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The second part of the Book Four epistemology section (lines 469–521) is read by Elaine and discussed. The text repeats and hammers home the conclusion: it is better to offer even a false solution than to abandon the senses as our first principle of contact with reality; the building analogy drives the point that reason founded on false sensory premises must collapse entirely.
Discussion covers what Epicurus actually means by “better a false solution” (Elaine: he is defending the senses as a faculty, not endorsing false certainty in conclusions); divergences within the Epicurean community as recorded by Cicero’s Torquatus and by Diogenes Laertius on whether reason and logic must supplement observation; the fast-brain / intuitive apprehension question; human heuristics such as the sunk cost fallacy and gambler’s fallacy as examples of why common sense is unreliable without checking evidence; and a preview of the coming section on love and marriage at the end of Book Four.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 55 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. 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 is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 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 podcast, we will continue with one of the most important sections from Book 4 of the poem, starting around Latin line 469 and continuing through 521. We’re discussing how reason is dependent upon the senses, and including some controversies that apparently developed in the history of Epicurean thought regarding how best to explain that. Now let’s join the discussion with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: And reason is not able to assign a cause why an object that is really four-square, when near, should appear round when seen at a distance. Yet if we cannot explain this difficulty, it is better to give any solution, even a false one, than to deliver up all certainty out of our power, to break in upon our first principle of belief and tear up all foundations upon which our life and security depend. For not only all reason must be overthrown, but life itself must be immediately extinguished unless you give credit to your senses. These direct you to fly from a precipice and other evils of this sort which are to be avoided, and to pursue what tends to your security. All therefore is nothing more than an empty parade of words that can be offered against the certainty of sense. Lastly, as in a building, if the principal rule of the artificer be not true, if his line be not exact or his level bear but the least to either side, everything must needs be wrong and crooked. The whole fabric must be ill-shaped, declining, hanging over, leaning, and irregular, so that some parts will seem ready to fall and to tumble down because the whole was at first disordered by false principles. So the reason of things must of necessity be wrong and false, which is founded upon a false representation of the senses.
Cassius: Thank you, Elaine. We are today reading the second part of what we started last week, so someone listening along would probably want to go back and read the entire section starting around the line that says “lastly, if anyone thinks he knows nothing, he cannot be sure that he knows this.” The two passages are pretty much a summation of the argument that has been going on for quite a while in Book Four, and after this the argument turns in a different direction. So this is really a dividing point in Book Four as to one of the major topics. But there’s an awful lot here to discuss. Let Martin go first. Martin, explain this to us.
Martin: The most surprising thing is this statement: “it is better to give any solution, even a false one.” What do you interpret that to mean?
Cassius: You know, in everything we’re doing, we ought to be talking on two levels. One is to make sure we explain and understand what Lucretius and Epicurus are saying. And then, of course, giving our own opinion about how to apply it to our lives. So how do you interpret what he’s saying there, Martin?
Martin: First I need to figure out — is this not in contradiction with the position that, at other occasions, he clearly states that we don’t have to form an opinion if we don’t have enough input. So we can leave it open.
Cassius: Do you think you understand the distinction?
Martin: I think I do.
Cassius: Elaine, do you want to go ahead and address that?
Elaine: Okay, so I think the only thing that he’s wanting us to remain certain about is that our senses are how we get information about reality. I don’t think he’s saying we need to have certainty about our explanations — that’s silly, because then your observations can contradict your explanations and you need to be able to overturn them. But he’s saying this basic first principle of belief is that we are actually perceiving reality through our senses. And if you say that fundamental thing isn’t true, then what do you have? You have nothing. So if our senses can perceive things in altered ways — like we can be colorblind — the only way somebody is going to convince me that I’m colorblind is at a minimum they have to talk to me, so I’m using my ears. There’s no way we can get information even when we’re having a dysfunction like nearsightedness unless we are using our senses to get more information. Ultimately, everything besides feelings — if we’re not getting it through our senses, there’s really no other way we’re getting reality information. So that is what they call a first principle, or an a priori assumption, because you can’t prove it with anything else. You have to have that assumption or you can’t go anywhere else. I don’t think he’s saying at all that you need to have certainty in your solutions or false solutions. It’s just that it would be better to have that kind of certainty than to lose your confidence that your senses are giving you information about reality.
Cassius: I completely agree with what Elaine just said. Charles, go ahead.
Charles: Yeah, that’s a good point, and I do agree. But there’s something I want to touch on from last week, about certainty.
Cassius: Well, Charles, before you go there, let’s make sure we’re okay on the major point. What I think Elaine is explaining is that what’s being discussed here is the high-level issue that the senses themselves are our ultimate authority and contact with reality. He’s not saying that the certainty of any one particular conclusion has to be accepted. He’s not saying any one particular sensation at a particular moment has to be accepted. He’s saying that the faculty of sense has to be accepted as our ultimate connection with reality because we haven’t got anything else. And it’s a comparison — it’s like “better to cut off your arm than to commit a sin with it.” He’s not saying that false certainty is great and you should stick to your conclusions. He’s contrasting one bad thing with something even worse.
Elaine: And I think it would be a good idea for us to compare translations here. This translation uses the word “certainty,” but Munro — who is always, to my observation, more literal than anyone else — Munro talks about it being “better to state erroneously the causes of each shape than to let slip from your grasp on any side things manifest, and ruin the groundwork of belief.” And Bailey uses the words “rather than let things clear-seen slip abroad.” So it’s the sensation of knowing — we’re talking about our confidence in the faculty of the senses, not certainty in a high-level logical method. Don’t let go of that sensation when it comes to your senses — what else do you have? You could be delusional, you could be losing your sight and start seeing cartoon figures, but how can you be convinced those aren’t real except through your other senses? Somebody is going to have to help you, or at some point you’d have gotten in other information through your senses to know that that’s not correct. You’re still ultimately relying on your senses and not on reason or on gods. The basic point is just that your senses are all you have.
Cassius: Before we go back to Charles — Martin, what do you think about what we’ve said?
Martin: It makes sense, I don’t disagree with this, but I still feel that we do not have to give a solution.
Cassius: So you’re pointing out that he’s talking about “better to give a solution even if it’s false,” and you’re saying that conflicts potentially with the idea of waiting when you’re not certain. I see your point in analyzing that. But I don’t really see it as a major contradiction. Elaine, do you see a way to satisfy Martin on that point?
Elaine: Martin, do you agree that because of incompleteness, in any model we have to have some a priori assumption?
Martin: Mm-hmm.
Elaine: Okay. I think that’s all he’s saying. So I don’t think it conflicts with anything else. And I have seen this quote be misused to caution against questioning conclusions, and I don’t think that’s what he’s saying.
Charles: I wanted to bring that up too — about how this could be misconstrued as a sort of endorsement or proof of dogmatism.
Cassius: That’s basically the subject we’re talking about right now, Charles. And I totally agree with Elaine. What he’s talking about is the general position that the senses are your faculty of perception of all the information you’re ever going to get, and so you can’t lose confidence in that faculty. Otherwise you’re just totally at the mercy of anybody who wants to lead you around through mystical or formal logical arguments. He’s making this in response and in opposition to the prior philosophers who had made the point that the senses are not reliable. He’s not making the statement in a void. This was a huge issue in philosophy then and now — about whether the senses are sufficient to let you know what you need to know to live happily, or whether in the end you have to go to God or to formal logic or to idealism. That’s the reason Plato apparently had “let no one enter who does not know geometry” over his academy. Because they were saying that unless you know those kinds of geometrical, mathematical ways of looking at things, you can never attain truth itself — the senses will never be capable of giving you truth. Epicurus was foursquare against that position, and he’s explaining it in these passages.
Charles: And since our conversation has deviated from what I was originally saying — I just put in the forum a little note about ten devotees witnessing a miracle and using that as a source of certainty, but that doesn’t hold up to the materialist position.
Cassius: Right. If ten people come to you and say they saw something, that’s more evidence than if one person did, but if ten or a hundred or a thousand come to you and say they saw something that just cannot be, then you still have strong grounds for treating it very skeptically.
Elaine: It totally depends on the credibility of those ten people, what your credibility assessment of them is, and the more bizarre the assertion, the more evidence you’re going to want. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There are plenty more than ten people who will tell you the earth is flat, so I don’t really care how many people come and tell me that. And miracles, by their very definition, are exceptions — they don’t hold up to a materialist position of being repeatable. They’re starting from a different place in their reasoning, but how did they really get any of their information? They have to use their senses to know people, to read a book — there’s no way to read the Bible without eyes or braille or having it read to you. They’re just not observing the extent to which they depend on their senses and on reliability and predictability.
Cassius: So let’s continue going through this passage as closely as we can and take the next sentence up to the point where it talks about the empty parade of words. The sentence says “for not only all reason must be overthrown, but life itself must be immediately extinguished unless you give credit to your senses. These direct you to fly from a precipice and other evils of this sort which are to be avoided and to pursue what tends to your security.” Anybody have anything specific?
Elaine: These passages right here I think are true. Well, to the extent he’s repeating, he’s repeating for emphasis, because this is so emphatically important. The process of reason is dependent on observation — if you can’t make any observations, what are you going to have to reason with? And if we had been completely deprived of any sensory input, I have no suspicion that anything like reason would ever develop in the brain, because it wouldn’t have any object to act on. We start getting sensory input in utero.
Cassius: Martin, make sure we’re saying the right thing here. I’m thinking this would be a good point to draw in abstract sciences like geometry. Geometry doesn’t start with observation, does it?
Martin: It was motivated by observation. Almost everything in mathematics was motivated by observation. Then the mathematicians think about how to put it together based on some logical principle, and they create a system which is disconnected from reality — they have these idealized things because for them you can make easy logic and draw conclusions. But the price they pay is that there’s no guarantee that the conclusions match reality. It’s more or less by chance that what the mathematicians say — if the model is reasonably good — matches what we see in reality. So in that sense mathematics becomes disconnected from sensory input. But originally almost every branch of mathematics was motivated by sensory input.
Cassius: When you say they’re motivated, I would say that’s so general a statement that to some extent everything in life is motivated by observation. But when they start talking about imaginary numbers or lines of zero width — they’re specifically saying these things cannot and will never be observable. Is that right?
Martin: Yeah, because mathematics doesn’t need observation — it’s built from logic. And I very much hesitate to attack mathematics too strongly because in practice it works too well too often. We lose credibility if we hammer too much on how wrong mathematics is, because it’s not really wrong.
Cassius: I think the best starting point would be to acknowledge that there’s a difference of opinion here. Epicurus is saying that reason will be overthrown unless you base things ultimately on observation, and Plato and others are saying that’s wrong. Epicurus is saying to Plato “you’re wrong.” Now whether in the end a logical science like geometry ends up being useful is another question. Elaine, thoughts?
Elaine: I just wouldn’t have any idea how Plato would have ever gotten an idea of geometry if he had never had any sensory input in his whole life, or how he would even communicate with anybody to let us know what was going on. So I suppose that’s maybe an unanswerable question.
Martin: No, no, no — not Plato, not mathematics. We shouldn’t equate mathematics with idealism. Unfortunately it seems a lot of mathematicians fall into that same trap, but you can look at mathematics from a completely different perspective and be fully compliant with mathematics without becoming a Platonist. That is a distinction we need to make — mathematicians are not automatically Platonists. It’s their choice, and it’s a wrong choice, but it’s a choice they can make based on their freedom of opinion.
Charles: I agree with that. And also, about how Plato could think of geometry without sensory experience — I find it hard to come up with a three-sided shape without visual representation to distinguish it.
Cassius: Okay. Then the very last sentence in that section: “All therefore is nothing more than an empty parade of words that can be offered against the certainty of sense.” That’s a very strong and clear way of making the point. Anyone have any comment? Just to clarify from you, Cassius — you agree that he is not saying it’s healthy or good for you to hold on to false conclusions just in order to experience certainty? That he’s using this as an example of a bad thing, but not as bad as this other bad thing?
Elaine: Oh yes — the way you say that, I don’t have any problem with that at all.
Cassius: It’s interesting how communications can be unclear sometimes. But the main point I see in all this — and this is something I want to bring up — is that in addition to the obvious statements he’s making here, you could read these sentences without any knowledge of Plato or Aristotle or any of these other thinkers, and the basic point stands on its own. However, many of the people reading this at the time he was writing it would have been familiar with those other ideas, and these other arguments have basically intimidated or persuaded the majority of academics of his time that it is necessary to understand abstract logic and geometry and mathematics in order to gain truth. So it’s a continuing debate — whether in answering Plato and the logicians you simply say “you’re wrong and point to observation,” or whether you attempt to unwind their positions using their own logic against them. And my observation is: not their logic.
Elaine: Right, right.
Cassius: And that’s where I’m still open in my own mind, because I think it’s possible and probably true that Epicurus is using both techniques. And I’m not sure — when I say Epicurus, it’s also possible that the dispute that we’re talking about developed more after his time, because by the time we start talking about Cicero and what Torquatus is reported as saying, and what Diogenes Laertius is reporting even later, they’re both recording divergences and differences within the Epicurean community, and I don’t think all of those can be laid at the foot of Epicurus. I think some of those divergences were wrong directions.
Elaine: So how do you find out what works best to persuade somebody — reasoning or evidence?
Cassius: It’s going to be totally contextual, based on the person you’re talking with. But how would you find that out?
Elaine: I’m going to use observation. And the research on changing minds seems to show that if somebody’s strongly one way, giving them more reasons and evidence strengthens them in their position and is counterproductive. So on vaccine hesitancy, for example, the best route is to align with their feelings and their values — that’s much more likely to get them with you than going by either reason or observations.
Cassius: I agree with that as a general conclusion. But I’m telling you right now that if I were trying to persuade you of something versus trying to persuade Martin of something, I’d probably approach it differently.
Elaine: You’d better give me evidence.
Cassius: What do you say, Charles?
Charles: I couldn’t hear the first part. What about feeling?
Elaine: For me, feeling is part of the evidence equation. A sense or sensation of knowing — or like the pleasure of knowing — that could get me. Feeling is part of the evidence. And it will lead you into traps if you go only by what feels better — the feeling of knowing something is pleasurable, typically. That’s why reason and evidence won’t necessarily convince somebody. They’ll say “this one feels more correct.” And that’s why you’ve got to appeal to their pleasure or their pain — if they’re risk averse, you can get them on the pain aspect.
Cassius: Okay. Just to keep us moving, let’s direct our attention to the last section we had reserved for today: the building analogy. “Lastly, as in a building, if the principal rule of the artificer be not true, if the line be not exact or his level bear but the least to either side, everything must needs be wrong and crooked. The whole fabric must be ill-shaped, declining, hanging over, leaning, and irregular, so that some parts will seem ready to fall and tumble down because the whole was at first disordered by false principles. So the reason of things must of necessity be wrong and false, which is founded upon a false representation of the senses.” To some extent this is just repetition for emphasis. I remember that Cicero’s Torquatus talks about Epicurus being the master builder of human happiness. And what he’s saying is that if you say the senses are not your way of connecting with reality, then anything else you come up with after that is not going to be right. You can also say this by observation — you don’t have to say it because it’s a logical sentence. You can observe that if you start with misinformation it just builds on itself and snowballs.
Elaine: You can add misinformation anywhere along the way — so you can start with a straight wall and add a crooked one — and at every point your observations have got to be accurate or you’ll go off in a crazy direction.
Cassius: It’s like not believing in evolution and then jumping to aliens. Or believing in a conspiracy theory so strongly that when your leaders look like they’ve been discredited, you decide they’re secretly in power. People can be in the grip of the worst type of hallucination about the nature of reality and refuse to let go of their perspective, even to the point where it really isn’t that much different from Christians going into the lion’s den or snake handlers. They’re so convinced of the reality of their perspective that they’ll die for it.
Elaine: And I just noticed this is really important — where he’s talking about the building, he’s talking about if your tool is not correct. So it’s not even just that you’ve started with a crooked floor — your first instrument is wrong. If you’re using logic as your decision tool instead of observation, your building is going to be crooked. This is a good visual image of the point that he’s making.
Cassius: It’s a very logical — and reasonable — explanation of why in the end you will have a collapsing structure. And it’s something you can visualize very easily. This is maybe the number one analogy people use in life: the skyscraper and its foundations. Because everybody has had direct contact with what’s going on here. If you’re building anything from a cake in the oven to a skyscraper, if you start off wrong or use wrong instruments, the rot is in the core.
Elaine: What concerns me is the context of who we’re talking to. If we’re talking to somebody who understands philosophy and the issues that are involved in formal logic and idealism like Plato’s, then “logic” has a particular meaning. But if someone listening to the podcast is not well versed in philosophy, they may use the words “logic” and “reason” in a very common-sense way. And common sense is actually one of the most inaccurate types of reasoning — DeWitt talks about that. So we don’t want to be promoting that. What we want to promote is accurate communication — does this describe a process the person has actually seen? It is a cognition, it is thinking, but “reason” is a real tricky term because most people associate it with common sense, which is these human heuristics of informal logic that are the most inaccurate. And I don’t want to validate something that they really should be careful of.
Cassius: I’m never going to be able to stop using those words — supposing you were a lawyer and needed to tell the jury what the law is. The judge is always going to tell the jury that they should apply the rules of the reasonable man and use common sense. There’s a vernacular or a way of talking about things that these issues have to be explained to people in. That is a valid point — it’s just a question of in some context you may have to lay a foundation before you can explain the ultimate point.
Elaine: In law, as far as I can tell, the rationale for the reasonable person standard is that humans are all subject to fallible heuristics — all of us. A heuristic means common sense informal logic, like assuming that proximity equals causation: if you go to a fast food restaurant and get sick, you’re going to blame the food even though it probably had nothing to do with that. That’s one of the human heuristics, along with the sunk cost fallacy. So the law asks you to go with what a reasonable person would think because they understand we’re all subject to these fallacies — they’re not asking a juror to say what someone with perfectly overcome failures of human logic would say. They’re saying what would an ordinary person who is subject to these mistakes say.
Martin: So logic is independent of our reality — and if we mix this up we just create wrong conclusions. So I completely disagree with Cassius on this point.
Elaine: Yeah. I would recommend that you consider grabbing a different word, Cassius. I know a guy who insists on using the word “religion” to refer to sets of cultural practices and insists belief is not part of it, and he makes all the atheists mad on an agnostic website because he’s using the word differently.
Cassius: I cannot agree to that suggestion, and that is because you’re not referring to the source of all knowledge — which is Star Trek, the original series. When I think of logic, I think of Mr. Spock. And Mr. Spock was not really too much involved in playing with premises or syllogisms or dialectical reason. He was always attempting to follow the evidence in front of him. So I think the cultural context of today has a different definition of logic than you’re using.
Charles: To use a contemporary reference, the way I kind of see it, Cassius, is kind of how the “facts and logic” crowd uses the word logic. I think Elaine is right from a technical point of view and Martin from a professional point of view — when you take a course in logic in college, you’re taking a course in syllogisms and induction and deduction. But the people down at the 7-Eleven will use the word logic relatively frequently and they see it as broad and abstract, leaving out the nitty-gritty details and overlooking exceptions — discounting real world variables. And they also see it as discounting feelings as part of reality. That’s where Spock would usually go wrong.
Cassius: Yes — that’s the distinction I draw. But you are slandering the name of Mr. Spock! On feeling you’re right — he was devoid of feeling. But in terms of his processing power, he was the most data-driven of the people on the original series.
Elaine: You can’t say that as long as he was ignoring feelings, because we get evidence of other people’s feelings through our senses, and he was missing that.
Martin: You can apply logic to empirical data, but then it’s no more purely logic. You just use logic as a tool to deal with empirical data — that’s a combination which is okay, but logic itself is separate and independent of reality.
Cassius: Okay, let me respond to that at least at the moment. I think I’m actually agreeing with that. Go ahead, Elaine.
Elaine: There are so many multiple connotations of the word “logic,” but for almost everybody that we might be trying to convince, it includes abstraction inevitably — and so you can’t rely on it. It’s not as reliable as observations. I want — instead of atheists having a day of reason — I want them to have a day of evidence, because reason is super tricky, it’s full of pitfalls and mistakes.
Martin: For me, reason is somewhat softer than logic. In logic you need statements which are absolutely true to come to new statements which are also absolutely true. But with reason you don’t need this, and you don’t have this absoluteness. Reason can lead you to wrong conclusions if the empirical data you start with is incorrect. Someone who doesn’t really understand formal logic can still use reason properly because it mimics logic — but it doesn’t have logic’s absoluteness.
Cassius: Okay, now we’ve gone through this first passage as closely as we can. The points I wanted to raise going forward are things that I think have been apparently a source of debate. Let’s talk about two or three instances where we have an example of a difference of opinion. The first one, at least in point of time, would be Cicero’s On Ends where Torquatus is delivering his explanation of Epicurean ethics. He says that Epicurus finds the ultimate good in pleasure and proves it by saying that every animal as it’s born seeks for pleasure and delights in the chief good, and it remains that way as long as it’s unperverted. And Torquatus says that Epicurus refused to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain is to be avoided. He says — and it almost sounds like Elaine had dictated this sentence — “these facts he thinks are perceived by the senses, as the fire is hot, snow is white, honey is sweet, and none of these things need to be proved by elaborate argument; it is enough merely to draw attention to them.” And then he says: “for there is a difference he holds between formal syllogistic proof of a thing and a mere notice or reminder. The former is the method for discovering abstruse and recondite truths; the latter for indicating facts that are obvious and evident.” And he says: “strip mankind of sensation and nothing remains; it follows that nature herself is the judge of that which is in accord with or contrary to nature. And what does nature give us to judge except pleasure and pain?” That is exactly the point that Epicurus raised — and that is Elaine’s position. However, Torquatus then goes further and says: “some members of our school, however, would refine upon that doctrine” — so they’re smarter than Epicurus apparently — “these say that it is not enough for the judgment of the good and evil to rest with the senses; the fact that pleasure is in and for itself desirable and pain in and for itself to be avoided can also be grasped by the intellect and reason.” And then: “others again — with whom I agree” — that’s Torquatus talking — “observing that a great many philosophers advance a vast array of reasons to prove why pleasure should not be counted as a good nor pain as an evil, considered that we had better not be too confident of our case. In their view it requires elaborate and reasoned argument and abstruse theoretical discussion of the nature of pleasure and pain.” I can’t think of a more clear way to state a disagreement with Elaine’s position than what I just read from Torquatus.
Elaine: Well, he’s saying that they say that, but not that he agrees with it.
Cassius: No — he in fact says “others again with whom I agree — we had better not be too confident.”
Elaine: Oh well, that’s just wrong. If you really make a close observation of yourself, you will know that you are experiencing pleasure and pain, and that is how you create value with your feelings. If somebody can talk you out of that, your brain works very differently from mine.
Cassius: That’s a great argument, and I agree with it. For the moment I just want to emphasize that apparently this was a disagreement back then. I never see Epicurus himself saying anything like what Torquatus reports from these later school members. And we don’t know that we can trust Cicero here, because this is a dialogue that Cicero made up himself — supposedly he had Epicurean texts in front of him, but the entire passage from Cicero could actually be a misrepresentation and mischaracterization of the Epicurean argument. Because the rest of what he discusses in this passage really is a reason-based analysis of the situation, and he’s just said that Epicurus refused to do that. So we have to be very careful with this section. The core texts support the first assertion — that these are foundational, your senses and your feelings. There’s nothing in the core text that goes against that.
Cassius: The other instance we should consider is Diogenes Laertius, in the section well into the Letter to Herodotus where he starts talking about the divisions of the philosophy. He says — reading the Bailey version — “logic they reject as misleading, for they say it is sufficient for physicists to be guided by what things say of themselves. Thus in the canon Epicurus says that the tests of truth are the sensations and the concepts and the feelings.” And then he says: “the Epicureans add to these the intuitive apprehensions of the mind.” And then that paragraph goes on with a lot of important material about how the sensations are primary. But you also have here this disagreement between Epicurus and what appears to be other Epicureans or later Epicureans — Diogenes Laertius is writing in perhaps the third century AD, several hundred years after Cicero and much further from Epicurus. There is this disagreement about whether the intuitive apprehensions of the mind are themselves one of the tests of truth. DeWitt says it’s obvious why they would not be, but apparently some Epicureans said they were. And this “intuitive apprehension of the mind” is apparently not the same thing as anticipations or prolepsis, because in fact that very sentence says Epicurus says the tests of truth are the sensations and concepts and feelings — those are the three things — so these other Epicureans are adding something else to that.
Elaine: Actually, I think I might be able to clear that up. What they are probably talking about is our fast brain — which is based on observations, but happening so fast that we’re not applying conscious analysis, and it’s also subject to flaws in pattern recognition. There’s a really cool book called The Gift of Fear that talks about how people have unease when they’re in the presence of malicious psychopaths and don’t know why — people like Ted Bundy, where people felt weird but didn’t know why. It breaks down some of the things we’re noticing — the slowed blinking rate, skin temperature — subtle things that our senses are noticing and perceiving as not fitting with what we expect from other humans. Those kinds of things should not be ignored, because they’re right often enough that if you’re out somewhere and you get a feeling like that around somebody, don’t get in the elevator with them. So it’s not different from observations — they just didn’t realize that, because they didn’t have access to the research we have now. The whole reason to care about whether we’re making accurate conclusions is so that we can make accurate decisions for pleasure. So the correctness of a conclusion is relevant insofar as it leads us in the right direction of making a choice that we’re going to enjoy.
Cassius: Yes, yes, yes. I don’t have a problem with what you just said, because that’s the ultimate test of everything. You’ve concluded that the goal of life is pleasure, so you’re going to come back to that in the end. Why would it be a problem if you’re using an inaccurate tool like common sense instead of actually looking to see what’s going on? Because common sense may lead you in a direction where you keep throwing good money after bad because you’ve got the sunk cost fallacy.
Elaine: So there are common sense things — examples are where people will make decisions that lead them away from pleasure unless they take time to remember that that might not be right, and actually look at what the evidence is for this decision before making it. Like the gambler’s fallacy — in poker or at a slot machine, someone is so consistently having bad cards or bad slots that eventually they think they’ve got to have a good one coming soon, because they’re using this fallacious heuristic. The reason we know the gambler’s fallacy is a fallacy is because somebody bothered to take time to look at the evidence and what’s actually happening.
Cassius: And my only point in these discussions is that I want to make sure I know who I’m talking to, because there’s going to be some number of people who would answer your hypothetical by saying that the man who uses common sense is never going to gamble in the first place. People that are going to talk like that are probably not going to get a lot out of this because they’re not going to bother to listen to enough explanation or enough evidence about pleasure — they’re going to tell you that you’re not supposed to seek pleasure for some common sense rule that says something bad about it.
Cassius: Okay, we’ve gone a little long, so maybe we ought to try to come to conclusions. Martin, looking at this whole paragraph — there’s one exaggerated statement that stands out.
Martin: “But life itself must be immediately extinguished.” This seems very exaggerated to me. I understand — if you don’t trust your senses, you may doubt whether the abyss is there and fall into the abyss, so you’d be at risk — but I wouldn’t say life gets immediately extinguished.
Cassius: Let’s look at the other translations on that — Munro says “at once,” Bailey says “straightway.” Maybe Bailey’s “straightway” is the most preferable of the three, because you’re certainly right that in terms of time, certain people can do crazy things for unusual periods of time before they get punished by reality, but in the end they usually do.
Charles: Yeah, nothing I haven’t already said.
Elaine: I think this is a fantastic passage that really lays home the importance of accepting as a first principle that we are using our senses to connect with reality, and we don’t even really have any other way to talk about reality except through our observations — our senses, our feelings.
Cassius: And bouncing off that — you’ve said it’s a fantastic passage, and I completely agree. It’s always been kind of interesting to me that this fantastic passage, which I think is one of the most important in the whole book, is kind of buried in the middle of the fourth book instead of being at the very beginning somewhere.
Elaine: Yeah, it should be big bold letters.
Cassius: There are in earlier sections some statements — I remember there’s one in Book One to the effect that if you can’t be confident about things that are immediately in front of you, then you’ll never be able to be confident about things that are unseen or further away. So there have been hints of this in earlier books. But this is one of the most critical concepts and one of the things that everything is built on — the reliance on the senses. And of course, he’s preceded it with a long discussion of images and illusions that’s set the stage. Now he’s basically come to the payoff conclusion that the senses are the criteria of truth and everything has to be referred back to them. From there he’s going to move on to the section that Charles has been waiting for — love and marriage and things that go along with that — though he doesn’t turn to that immediately, he talks about a few other things first. But we’ll eventually get to it before we finish.
Charles: Before the epistemology was more interesting, yes. Tell your girlfriend that and see what she has to say about that part.
Cassius: She’s almost done with the first episode, I take it? And of course one thing we’ll have to discuss when we get to that section is the constant question — it came up on the Facebook group this weekend — of whether Epicurus recommended in favor of or against marriage and children. We have several evidences that help us analyze that, but the section we’re going to get to at the end of Book Four here is one of the most important parts that factor into that. So we’ll get to that soon enough.
Elaine: That’s always been a bit of an absurd question, because you just have to look to the evidence. In the context of a particular situation, you’re not going to have a one-size-fits-all rule.
Cassius: Absolutely. Let’s wait till we get to that point. Anything else for today? Hearing nothing — thanks everybody, and we’ll be back in a week or something.
Elaine: Thank you.
Martin: Thanks.
Charles: Bye.