Episode 057 - Taste, Smell, and the Subjectivity of the Senses
Date: 02/12/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1878-episode-fifty-seven-taste-smell-and-the-subjectivity-of-the-senses/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four lines 632–721, read by Charles: different foods suit different palates because seeds fit different-shaped pores; what is food to one creature is sharp poison to another (hellebore, serpent and human spittle); fever changes taste by rearranging the order of the body’s seeds; smells flow from all bodies but travel less far than sound or sight; hounds often lose a trail because of diffusion; colors and other particles affect different species’ eyes differently — illustrated by the claim that seeds from a cock’s body cause acute pain in a lion’s eyes.
Discussion ranges widely: the 1875 Marietta, Georgia newspaper account of human saliva killing snakes; the holy geese of the Roman Capitol saving the city from the Gauls; the evolutionary logic behind organisms being attracted by smell to beneficial food; rooster aggression and the cockfighting tradition; Martin’s story of being chased by a silver pheasant. The closing discussion addresses whether subjective perception means the senses are untrustworthy: the Epicurean answer is that objective reality exists and is apprehensible through the senses, illustrated by Diogenes of Oinoanda Fragment 5 on flux and perception. The episode closes with the “bunch of atoms” nihilism problem and the Cyrenaic Hegesias, who argued for suicide on materialist grounds — and why Epicureans reject that conclusion.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 57 of Lucretius Today. I am 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 we’ll 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 those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information or to add your own comments on each episode. This week we’ll be discussing Book 4, approximately Latin lines 632 to 721. We’re discussing taste, smell, and similar aspects of the senses, and we’ll discuss how the subjectivity of the senses does not mean that we can’t trust the evidence that the senses provide to us. Now let’s listen to the discussion with Charles reading today’s text.
Charles: I shall now account why, as we find, different sorts of foods are agreeable to different palates, or why what is sour and bitter to some seems to others exceeding sweet. In these cases the variety and difference are so great that what is food to one will prove sharp poison to another. And it happens that a serpent, touched with the spittle of a man, expires and bites himself to death. Besides, to us hellebore is a strong poison, but goats it fattens, and is nourishment to quails. And to understand by what means this comes to pass, you must recollect what we observed before, that seeds of different kinds are mingled in the composition of all bodies, and that all animals are supported by food. As they differ in outward shape, and after their several kinds have a different form of body and limbs, so they consist of seeds of different figures. And since their seeds differ, the pores and passages which, as we said, were in all of the parts, and the mouth and palate itself, must differ likewise. Some must be less, some greater, some with three, some with four squares, many round, and some with many corners in various manners; for as the frame of the seeds and their motions require, the pores must differ in their figure. The difference of the pores depends upon the texture of the seeds. And therefore what is sweet to one is bitter to another — it is sweet because the smoothest seeds gently enter into the pores of the palate; but the same food is bitter to another because the sharpened hooked particles pierce the jaws and wound the sense. Now by observing this, things will appear plain. For when a man has a fever, either by the overflowing of the gall, or whether by the violence of the disease be raised by any other means, in such a case the body is disturbed, and all the order and disposition of the seeds are changed. And hence it is that the juices that were before agreeable to the sense are no longer pleasing, and those are more fit to enter the pores that fret and produce a bitter taste. For even in honey there is a mixture of rough and smooth seeds, as we have had frequent occasion to mention before. And now shall I pass on and show in what manner the approach of smells affects the nose. And first, a various stream of odors is continuously flowing from all bodies; for you must suppose that smells are perpetually thrown off, are emitted and dispersed abroad. But some are more peculiar to some animals than others, because they consist of seeds of different figures; and therefore the bee is attracted by the smell of honey in the air afar off, and vultures by the stink of corpses, and so the natural quality of the hound drives them on where the hoof of the stag has led the way, and the white goose, the savior of the Capitol, can perceive the smell of a man at a great distance. So it is the difference of smell, peculiar to different creatures, that directs every species to its proper food, and makes it start at the approach of poison, and by that means the race of beasts is constantly preserved. But the smell or odor that affects the nose — some kinds of it are emitted much further than others, but no one of them is carried so far as sound or voice, not to speak of those images that strike the eye and provoke the sight. For they wander about and move lazily, and being scattered through the air, die away by degrees before they have gone far. And for this reason, because they flow with difficulty from the most inward part of bodies. And that odors are emitted from the lowest profundity of the subject is proved from this, that the more they are broken or scattered by fire, the stronger they smell. And then we may observe that smells are formed of larger seeds than those of voice, for they cannot pierce through walls of stone, as voice and sound can freely pass. And therefore we cannot so easily distinguish on which side of us the body is placed that diffuses the smell, for the stroke grows cold as it moves through the air, nor does the hot scent briskly touch the organ. And therefore hounds are often at fault and hunt about for the trail. And this happens not only in the cases of the smell and taste, but the images of things and all colors do not affect the eyes of men all alike, but to some they are more sharp and painful to the sense than they are to others. For the cock that claps his wings and drives away the darkness, and by his clear notes calls forth the morning light — the fiercest lion dares not stand against this creature, nor look him in the face, but instantly prepares for flight. And for this reason, because there are certain seeds in the body of the cock, and when admitted into the eyes of the lion, fret and tear the balls, and cause a very acute pain, which the beast in all his courage is not able to bear. And yet these particles are in no way hurtful to our eyes — either they do not pierce them, or if they do, they find a free passage and return easily from the eyes again, so that they do not in the least prejudice the sight.
Cassius: Thank you for reading that today, Charles. There are a lot of very interesting allusions in these paragraphs — from the holy geese of the Capitol to the cock being able to cause trouble to lions, to the age-old question of can you kill a snake by spitting on him. I think I’ve heard that before.
Elaine: I’ve never heard this before.
Cassius: You’ve heard it, Charles?
Charles: Yes.
Martin: I’ve heard of snakes biting themselves, but I didn’t know that this could be triggered by spitting on them.
Cassius: I don’t think it is. Apparently that legend must go deep in Western civilization for Lucretius to be reporting it. Let me search this up while we talk about it. I’m pulling up a lot of spitting cobras — let me subtract cobra. Let me try “human saliva kill snakes.” Oh my gosh — I’m getting all kinds of things. The first one that comes up on StartPage is an article from 1875 from the Marietta, Georgia Journal. It says: “Human saliva kills snakes. The Marietta Journal was told by a gentleman the other day that human spittle was as deadly to poisonous snakes as their bites were deadly to man. He says that while picking up a bundle of straw and trash under his arm while cleaning a field, a ground rattlesnake four feet long crawled out from it and fell to the ground at his feet. He at once placed his heel upon the head of the snake and spit in its mouth. Shortly afterward the snake showed signs of inactivity and sickness, and he picked it up by its tail and carried it to the house and showed it to his wife, telling her that he had spit in its mouth and that it was poisonous. Within the expiration of 15 minutes, the snake was dead. To further experiment, he came across a blowing adder snake which ejected from its mouth a yellowish liquid. He caught it and spit in its mouth and it died. He caught another blowing adder and it refused to open its mouth. He spit upon a stick and rubbed the spittle upon the adder’s nose and it died. Afterward he came across a black snake — regarding it as not poisonous — and he caught it and spit in its mouth. Instead of the spittle killing the black snake as it did the poisonous reptiles, it only made it stupidly sick, from which it recovered. This conclusively shows that poisonous snakes have as much to fear from the spittle of man as man has to fear from their bites.” I am sorry I read all that, but it was just so fascinating.
Elaine: Oh, well it is fascinating. And who knows what he had in his spittle too if he’s in Marietta, Georgia.
Charles: Yeah, and of course there’s not very much reproducibility. People pooh-pooh the idea of large randomized controlled trials that are double-blinded, but I’m going to tell you this kind of thing might make a believer of you in good science.
Cassius: I don’t think this particular guy is spitting into the snake’s mouth the way Lucretius was talking about — I think what Martin said earlier is that it was making them bite themselves. I can’t find any evidence of that. I believe we should consider the ability to spit on a snake and have it kill itself to be a litmus test for whether you are really an Epicurean or not. If you don’t believe that happens, I think you’re totally out of the Epicurean movement.
Elaine: Well, y’all come visit and I’ll take you to one of those snake handling churches where they give the copperheads and the rattlesnakes to the worshipers, and y’all spit on them and let’s see what happens. We have the snake handlers of Sand Mountain not too far down the road from me — they go to church, they think they’re in the Holy Spirit and they pick up the snakes, and they think that if they get bitten the Holy Spirit will keep them from being poisoned. There was a guy that died that way.
Cassius: And moving on to the poison and the goats and the quails — I guess that’s probably true, although I don’t know what hellebore is. Does it have a common name?
Elaine: “Hellebore” is the common name. They’re in the Ranunculus family. They’re pretty — I won’t eat one, but I know it’s poisonous.
Cassius: So we can easily observe that some things are poisonous to some animals and not others. People who have dogs have to watch out and keep their chocolate away from them because that can poison them. I do want to, when we finish this section of text today, talk about some bigger picture issues of subjectivity versus objectivity. This poisonous aspect is a good example of how you may perceive things differently — and not just perceive them differently in terms of sight or sound, but be affected profoundly differently depending on your context and whether you’re a goat or a human.
Elaine: The quality of poisonousness is not an absolute quality of the hellebore — it’s in the interaction between the plant and whatever animal is feeding on it.
Cassius: That is a much more articulate way of saying it. The spittle of a man is not inherently poisonous to a man, but obviously it’s poisonous to a snake. Then he notices that when someone has a fever, things taste differently — which we know is true. When you’re sick and have systemic syndromes like the flu, things taste funny. This is especially an issue with the coronavirus. And the obvious point is that the very same thing to the same person can be different at different times.
Elaine: So there’s certainly nothing inherently poisonous — it’s a matter of the context and how it relates to the perceiver. And that has to be true in a material universe. In an idealist universe you could have something that had the property of poison that didn’t depend on anything else, but in a material universe we’re going to have interactions between the sense organs and the object and the nervous system and whatever is being eaten. It would have to be in a material universe that different effects happen when different material objects come in contact with each other.
Martin: No comment.
Cassius: And then the smells. This part struck me — you have to be careful reading some of this with the personification of nature. It almost sounds like things that are good for us are designed to smell good so that they’ll attract us. But of course what’s really happening is that organisms which had a preference for liking the smell of things that gave them good nutrition out-reproduced ones that couldn’t do that. Being able to smell your food is a huge evolutionary advantage. And then there’s also the evolution of the food sources —
Elaine: Yes — plants that survive and reproduce better by having their seeds dispersed in the feces of whatever animal eats them: the ones that put out a smell that attracts an animal to eat them are going to out-compete the ones that don’t. And if something smelled good but turned out to be poisonous, if it killed the animal rapidly, those seeds wouldn’t get spread. But if it’s a slow poison, you can have a mimic situation where organisms get fooled into eating things that actually hurt them later — like junk food.
Cassius: I agree with everything you’re saying, Elaine. There are different levels of things going on here. The subjectivity of the senses is one big-picture issue, but you’re also hinting at why Lucretius is flipping back and forth — because he’s also concerned with where things come from and how our minds work. He doesn’t use the word “evolving,” but he’s moving in the direction of explaining how things succeed. But now I want to hear about the geese.
Elaine: Yes, the holy geese!
Cassius: Martin, you know this — it’s certainly all historians of the Roman Republican period who know the story. The Romans were being attacked from outside — I think it was the Gauls approaching at night toward the Capitol — and it was the holy geese, the geese sacred to the temple of Juno, that detected the Gauls coming up and started making noise, and that was what woke up the Romans. The enemy forces had slipped past the patrols, but the geese saw them and started doing what geese do.
Elaine: Which apparently they’re able to smell men at a great distance, according to Lucretius here. Whether they have hearing or smell or something that makes them alert…
Cassius: That’s certainly one of the most colorful stories from the early Republican period. The savior of the Capitol. I thought about whether I could get some guard geese myself, but I’ve stayed with dogs so far. Does anybody have any personal experience with geese? Are they vigilant?
Charles: Senior year of high school they looked like they would bite you, yeah, kind of scary. They kind of charge you sometimes.
Cassius: I heard Charles say something very strange a moment ago — it sounded something like he attacked a goose at a zoo.
Charles: It was my senior year of high school. Part of our class trip we went to various places around Duluth — a city in northeast Minnesota — and we went to the zoo there for a few hours. There were just like Canadian geese walking around and they were pretty ornery. So everybody was kind of chasing them, and one came up real close to me, so I smacked it on the top of its head.
Elaine: I would be concerned that your friend was being aggressive, but I think geese can be pretty aggressive themselves.
Charles: No, I’m the one who slapped it.
Cassius: Did you walk up to it and slap it or was it coming toward you?
Charles: It was coming toward us.
Cassius: Self-defense! Good. Be careful — don’t come at Charles wrong because he might slap you. I shouldn’t have tried testing out whether or not my spit would kill it.
Cassius: Can we turn our attention now to the issue about smell — about how the stronger smell comes from something that’s like cooked?
Elaine: That made sense to me, Charles — I love to roast vegetables. I’ll cut some Brussels sprouts in half, rub olive oil on them, salt them, put them in the oven at 450, and you don’t smell anything for a while. But then you start to smell them and you’re like — and then you go and shake the pan and I know when they’re done not just by the timer but by the smell — they’re almost but not quite burned.
Charles: I made Brussels sprouts like that a few years back and it took a week for the kitchen to smell back to its normal self.
Elaine: I don’t burn mine though — I bring them right up to that point where they’re crispy.
Cassius: You can’t smell them when they’re raw, but you can smell them from the other room once they’re really starting to cook.
Elaine: Right. And I’m still a little surprised about not being able to smell food through a stone wall.
Cassius: I guess that depends on the food. A stone wall is going to stop smells, isn’t it?
Elaine: I guess. Even masks — at work when I’m wearing the N95, if any of my patients are listening please don’t be offended, but some teenage boys — the smell of their feet when they take their socks and shoes off can be powerful. There’s a certain bacteria that causes that called Pseudomonas. I have learned over decades to not breathe through my nose when I am taking off the shoes of a teenager. But I notice that wearing the N95, there are smells that can get through it. But when I’m around smelly feet, I don’t smell them through the mask. It’s nice — maybe we’ll keep wearing those for a while.
Cassius: We’re discussing some very technical scientific issues today so I don’t want to leave Martin out of the conversation. Anything about smelling today, Martin?
Martin: I have nothing to add to it. I’m just listening.
Cassius: Okay. Does anybody know — is it true that hounds are often at fault and cannot follow the trail? Are they more wrong than right?
Elaine: I live in hunter central, a very rural place. I don’t know many people that actually hunt with their dogs in a proper bloodhound sense.
Cassius: At the very end of the smell paragraph: “And therefore hounds are often at fault and hunt about for the trail.” I didn’t read too much into that other than that dogs aren’t perfect. He’s talking about the direction, right — the diffusion?
Martin: Like the sound is easier to tell the direction from than smell.
Cassius: And he says that’s because of the way the smell is diffused. But of course if there were no directionality at all, then what he said earlier about the vultures being attracted by carcasses wouldn’t work. So there is some directionality.
Martin: The directionality doesn’t come from the smell itself — it comes from the animal, which uses the inhomogeneous distribution in space. By varying its path, it figures out where the concentration is higher and moves toward the source. So that’s how it usually works. And dogs can lose the track if there’s only a faint trace — they run around in circles, turn their heads, trying to determine where the smell strikes them more.
Elaine: Or they’re interested in many smells, so they might be distracted by another smell they’re more interested in. They might not have the same goal as the hunter!
Martin: That’s a good point. Maybe it’s not that they can’t smell it — they just have a different preference.
Cassius: It’s funny. And the number of particles in the air that can be smelled, and what the threshold is — that’s different from animal to animal and within members of the same species. So there’s the participation of the perceiver in the perception. A bit of a diversion — Charles commented that in this area the hunters don’t use dogs. That’s a bit strange?
Martin: I think dogs are typically used because if they don’t kill the animal immediately, the main purpose of the hunting dog is not to hunt for animals but to search for wounded animals so that the hunter can follow and finally kill it.
Elaine: And they use dogs in the South to tree animals — drive them up a tree and circle them. That’s what a coon dog does.
Charles: And then there’s retrievers, if you hunt birds over water. The dog swims out to retrieve them.
Elaine: Although they sure do use them at some airports these days to smell for drugs and bomb-making materials.
Martin: A dog can be trained to smell the smell of chemicals emitted depending on what bomb it is. By the type of bomb they are trained to smell, they will be able to detect it. But they can get distracted by something else too.
Elaine: I went to visit my daughter in Denver last winter and while I was there I visited one of her friends and I was wearing this big blue puffy coat. Their family dog did not like that coat at all — started barking and growling. They were going to think I was the bad person because the dog didn’t like me. I took the coat off and the dog was fine and ran over and licked me. So then I had to leave and I’m in the airport and I had to walk through this gauntlet of airport dogs, and I’m wearing that dadgum blue coat and I’m thinking: oh no, what if this is a coat that dogs don’t like and they’re gonna stir and growl at me and I’m gonna have to go off to the side. But fortunately it didn’t seem to be a universally dog-offending coat.
Cassius: Well, maybe the repelling of the dog by the coat leads us into the issue of the rooster and the lion. Who has any expertise on whether roosters have the ability to scare away lions?
Elaine: Oh my gosh. He’s very specific: seeds in the body of the cock, when admitted into the eyes of the lion, fret and tear the balls of his eyes and cause a very acute pain. Yet these particles are in no way hurtful to our eyes. So I don’t know where that legend comes from — if roosters really scare lions you ought to be able to use them as a scare deterrent. Put up a rooster statue in your yard to keep the mountain lions away.
Cassius: I’m finding a lot when I Google lions and roosters together, but I’m not sure what the point of it is. Here’s one under a hobby farms page: “One of the most effective predator deterrences for a chicken flock is a rooster. Roosters are especially helpful in free-range flocks. They will fend off smaller predators like foxes and hawks.” But that doesn’t seem like it would be a match for a lion. I was thinking that what they were doing was waving their wings kind of like a peacock spreads out its tail.
Elaine: I thought they would do that — just create a visual sight — but Lucretius seems to say there’s more to it than that. This is really interesting because we are not blank slates and neither are other animals. Pattern recognition that is evolved — so if it’s true that a lion is afraid of a rooster, it wouldn’t be a thought process like “oh dang, there’s one of those roosters — scary, I’m gonna run away because he might gouge me.” If it were a universal trait it would be less likely learned and more likely innate pattern recognition, so that animals which were frightened by roosters survived better than animals that didn’t.
Martin: Or it could be that as baby lions they may have playfully approached the rooster and got attacked, so that might have impressed in their minds to run away from roosters. So there could be a rational, learned explanation. And because roosters are too small to really be prey for a lion, lions would have no reason to kill them — but the young animals that messed with roosters wouldn’t survive to adulthood if those spur injuries got infected. That would be a way that an innate fear could become part of a species.
Elaine: Right. Those rooster spur injuries tended to get infected, the young animals that messed with roosters died off, whereas the ones that were afraid of them lived to adulthood and reproduced.
Cassius: And I’m being sarcastic here but it could be that it was a particularly brave rooster — much like the brave geese that saved the Capitol.
Martin: Roosters are very territorial and aggressive. There are dozens of videos on YouTube where people trying to deliver a parcel are running from roosters.
Elaine: They look mean to me. I like to look at them from a distance.
Charles: There’s also the competition of rooster fights — cockfighting.
Martin: I got attacked by a silver pheasant — I was with my wife, and when we approached its territory in the mountain, it just stayed there, packing the ground, and when we crossed what was apparently its border it attacked my wife. She moved first. We continued to the sightseeing spot we wanted and it followed us, kept attacking us, trying to run against us with this impact, and trying to peck us. It didn’t try to use spurs very effectively. But when we left that sightseeing spot it followed us for a while, and finally it gave up. So it seems they’re very territorial and will attack much larger animals.
Cassius: And because I think roosters are too small for a lion to really be prey, they would have no reason to kill them — but as baby lions they may have playfully approached the rooster and got attacked, which might have impressed on their minds to run away.
Cassius: Okay, in the interest of time, let me begin to bring us toward the conclusion. We’ve spent most of the day talking about how different senses can produce different results for different animals in different contexts. Let me raise this as a general question because it’s come up on the forum: does our description of the subjectivity of the senses mean that the senses are untrustworthy? Nobody can agree on what their senses are telling them — so how can we have any sense of reality at all? How would you deal with that criticism? Let Martin go first.
Martin: That can still be objective reality even though the senses operate differently for different people. Most of the senses are good enough that even though they’re subjective from each individual’s position and capabilities, they still indicate very close to what reality is. And in most cases people can also agree on what they perceive — if they stand in the same spot, everybody sees a rainbow. It’s where more interpretation comes in — like if a complex action happens and you’re trying to recall from memory exactly what happened — that people start to disagree.
Elaine: There are things that can never be completely proved. But my understanding is that Epicurean philosophy says there is an objective reality, however it is perceived subjectively. By not only comparing our own experiences over time interacting with reality, and using our different senses, but also comparing notes with other people, we can get an idea of predictability and consistency and the way matter behaves. We have decided that we are interacting with a reality. Could we be in a simulation? It would have to be a simulation so fancy that it didn’t matter if we were in the simulation or not — we might as well proceed as if it’s real. It’s objective in the sense that it has existence itself, whether we’re there or not. But we can only perceive it from the position of a subject, with our material bodies — we can only interact with the rest of the world materially. We have no ideal way or absolute way to do it. And some people seem to be extremely bothered by that.
Cassius: Charles, you haven’t said too much yet. Do you agree with what’s been said?
Charles: Yes. I’ve encountered my fair share of solipsists online — mostly on philosophy-centered Discord servers. And I do agree with Elaine — the lack of certainty, or the inability to have certainty, bothers them extremely. That can be manifested in more ways than just thinking they’re the only things that truly exist — such as the “empty internet theory,” which is the idea that the vast majority of people online aren’t real but are bots, and only like 10% are actually real people.
Cassius: You can see the grain of truth in the argument that there are probably a lot of bots on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s not something you can prove. And it’s the same thing — like a solipsist or extreme skeptic, even if there is an objective reality, no matter what attempt to assert “I’m not a bot,” it can just be denied, because a bot would say it wasn’t a bot.
Elaine: It seems like a lonely, lonely idea. I know people who think they are creating their own reality rather than perceiving subjectively — which I think is accurate — they think they’re actually creating it. You could never actually meet another person. Let me just make the point I was going to: there is an objective reality but we perceive it subjectively. Charles, do you agree with that?
Charles: Of course. Reality itself can’t be denied or pigeonholed as a product of the mind — it exists whether we perceive it or not.
Cassius: What does the word “objective” add to the discussion of reality?
Elaine: I think people are hung up on it because they want absolutes — some way to bypass subjectivity and have a completely accurate god-like view. But one of the problems we discussed online a little this morning is that when you observe reality, the act of observing affects it — especially obvious at the very small particle level. When you make an observation of an elementary particle you have to intervene with it. You can’t measure all the things it’s doing at the same time. That gets extrapolated in weird ways by New Age people to mean “you can bend spoons with your mind” — but no. Our subjectivity involves interacting with the material — our perception of external objects involves interacting with those materials. There’s really no other way to perceive except by doing that. People are bothered by that because they want absolute Platonic truth, the realm of forms.
Martin: I totally agree with what you said.
Cassius: Before we end today, I want to bring in one of the most relevant passages in the Epicurean text — Fragment 5 from the Diogenes of Oinoanda inscription, in the Martin Ferguson Smith translation. The text says: “Aristotle and those who hold the same Peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable because things are continually in flux and on account of the rapidity of the flux evade our apprehension.” That’s the other position. And here’s the Epicurean position: “We, on the other hand, acknowledge their flux, but not its being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense perception.” And then there’s another sentence, but that’s the major point: the Epicureans were dealing with this issue of whether everything is in flux and unperceivable, and they were taking the position that there is a flux, that things are moving around, but that the flux is apprehensible to our sense perceptions. Any comment on that?
Elaine: I think so — and his proof is interesting. The next sentence is: “And indeed in no way would the upholders of the view under discussion have been able to say — and this is just what they do maintain — that at one time this is white and this is black, while at another time neither this is white nor that black, if they had not previous knowledge of the nature of both white and black.” So both sides of the argument are referring to sense perception in order to even discuss the issue. The bottom line is that sense perception is the foundation on which you have to deal with the issue of whether there’s a flux or not.
Cassius: Right. And Elaine, I’ve used this example a couple of times recently and I’d like to see what you think about it. When you look at your hand, you see a hand. But at the same time you also know that hand is made up of atoms flying back and forth. If your eyes were geared to see at the atomic level, you would see all those atoms moving around. But your eyes and your other sense perceptions are geared at another level — the level that we exist on. What do you think the implication of that is?
Elaine: To some extent both are true — the atoms are zooming around, and your hand really is composed of atoms. But the way you live is not at the level of dealing with those atoms. You’re dealing with the composite structure that you perceive, and you’re making decisions and living your life at a level in which those particular atoms zooming around are not as relevant to you at the moment. Some of our technology does take advantage of what we’ve learned about the subatomic level — somebody had to have some knowledge of all those particles zooming around to produce the laptops that most of us use every day. We don’t have to know about them, but if we want to use them, somebody had better know.
Cassius: I perceive that when I use that example it can be interpreted as an anti-scientific viewpoint, as if those things aren’t important — but that’s not the direction I’m going.
Elaine: I agree — it’s a pragmatic direction. There’s only so much you need to be thinking about or that’s practical to think about.
Cassius: And there are implications also in the issue that both perspectives are true and valid. Where I’m really going is the nihilist viewpoint: “nothing makes any difference, I’m just a bunch of atoms swirling around in the universe.” Yes, you are a bunch of atoms swirling around in the universe. But that doesn’t make a difference — that doesn’t mean that nothing matters to you.
Elaine: Right — those are category errors. Just because a car is made of atoms doesn’t mean you can’t drive it. The fact that we may be a pinpoint in the universe, the fact that our bodies are made up of nothing more than material things, doesn’t by itself mean that we should just blow our brains out with a gun. It doesn’t mean that life is meaningless and we should just die. Yes, we’re made up of these material objects, and we can get a lot of benefit by understanding all that. But just because we’re made up of atoms is not an indictment of ourselves as worthless. It doesn’t take away our experience.
Charles: There’s quite a bit of that in the Epicurean canon of literature and fragments. And this is conjecture on my part, but we know that Hegesias was one of the Cyrenaics who made his own faction and advocated suicide for that reason. And I suspect that’s the reason why part of Epicurean philosophy is against suicide.
Cassius: That person advocated suicide for what reason, Charles?
Charles: Ultimately I’d have to go back to Diogenes Laertius for the exact reason, but he was a very destitute-minded kind of Cyrenaic. I’d have to clarify this later. But he wrote a book — the book he’s known for was called Death by Starvation.
Elaine: That’s the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking — that’s one of the legal end-of-life options even in states without assisted suicide.
Cassius: The reason I was raising it is that at least in my experience we come into contact with a lot of people who are raised religiously or just from some other cultural context in which they find their value in being part of some mystical system. And if you explain to them that they’re really made up of atoms and void, it blows their mind and makes them think that everything’s worthless and meaningless and they should just go jump off a cliff — because if you don’t have God and heaven and a sense of the meaningfulness of nature, then you’re worthless. And I’m saying that’s part of the answer to that: both perspectives are true and valid, both exist and are important. Just because we’re a bunch of atoms swirling around in the universe doesn’t mean that nothing makes any difference to you.
Elaine: I agree so much with that.
Cassius: Okay, we’re long for today. Let’s bring it to a conclusion. Martin, concluding thoughts?
Martin: I think we said everything we could think of to say.
Charles: Yeah, I said everything I needed to say.
Elaine: I’m just going to say: viva la subjectivity!
Cassius: All right. We’re long for today so we’ll bring it to an end and we’ll be back in about a week. Thanks everybody and talk to you soon.
Elaine: Hey.
Martin: Bye.
Charles: Bye.