Episode 058 - The Mind's Direct Receipt of Images
Date: 02/20/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1882-episode-fifty-eight-the-mind-s-direct-receipt-of-images/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four lines 722–822, read by Elaine: subtle images pierce through the pores of the body directly into the mind; the mind sees images of a more thin and subtle nature than the eyes see; this explains centaurs and other creatures (horse-image meets man-image and they combine); images are spontaneously produced in the air, fly off from bodies, or rise from earlier images mixed together; memory is inactive in sleep so it cannot challenge false dream-perceptions; dream figures appear to move because rapid sequential images create the impression of animation; the mind focuses on chosen images from an unlimited supply and loses the rest.
Discussion covers why Epicurus treats mind-images separately from eye-images (to provide a materialist counterargument to Platonist claims of non-material perception); the “three sources of images” question and whether Lucretius’s third source — images formed in the air on their own — is adequately explained; Elaine’s flip-book analogy for how dream animation works; how this is a passive (curative) rather than creative imagination — the mind selects from a menu it did not make; Martin’s key point that modern neuroscience says the brain stores patterns rather than images, which is actually closer to Epicurus’s model than the naive view; and the closing application: a materialist explanation for Brutus seeing Caesar’s ghost before Philippi.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 58 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 to our episode. This week we will be discussing the section in Book Four that appears at Latin lines approximately 722 to 822, and we’ll be discussing the mind’s direct receipt of images. Now let’s join the discussion with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: And now attend and observe in short what things affect the mind and from whence proceed those objects that make an impression upon it. First then I say that subtle images of things — a numerous train of them — wander about in every way and in various manners. These as they meet easily twine and are joined together in the air, as threads of gold or the web of a spider, for these are much finer in their contexture than those images that strike the eye and move the sight. These pierce through the pores of the body and move the subtle nature of the mind within and affect the sense. Since it is that we see centaurs and the limbs of Sileni and the heads of Cerberus and the shadows of those who have long since been dead and whose bones are rotting in the grave. Because images of all kinds are ever wandering about — some of their own accord are formed in the air, some are continually flying off from various bodies, and others rise from these images mixed together. For it is certain that the image of a centaur never flowed from one that was alive, for there was never such an animal in nature. But when the image of a horse met by chance with the image of a man, it immediately stuck to it, which it easily does by reason of the subtlety of its nature and the fineness of its texture. And all other monstrous figures are formed after the same manner. These images being exceedingly light and easily put in motion — as I observed before — each of them affects the mind at one stroke, for the mind is of a very subtle nature and wonderfully disposed to move. That the mind is moved, as I observed, by the images of things, you may easily collect from hints, that what we perceive by the mind is exactly what we see with our eyes, and therefore they must of necessity be both affected by the same thing, and in the same manner. And so when I say, for instance, that I see a lion by means of the image that strikes upon the eyes, I know by the same rule that the mind is moved by another image of a lion, which it equally and no less sees — the eye sees the image proper to it — with this difference only, that the mind can perceive images of a more thin and subtle nature. Nor from any other reason is the mind awake when the body is asleep, but because those very images affect the mind, which were used to move the sense when we were awake, so that we fully believe we see a person who has long since been dead and buried in the grave. And it cannot well be otherwise, because all the senses of the body are obstructed and bound up by sleep, and therefore have no power to convince us of the contrary. Besides, the memory is feeble and languishes by rest, and makes no objection to satisfy us that the man has been long in the arms of death, whom the mind really believes it sees alive. And then it is no wonder that the images seem to move and to throw their arms and the rest of their limbs to exact time, and thus they seem to do when we are in a dream. For when the first image is gone and another springs up in a different posture, the first we think has changed its shape. And all this, you must conceive, is done in an instant of time. There are many other inquiries about things of this nature, and we must enter into long disputes if we attempt to give a distinct answer to everyone. First then, it is asked, how is it that whatever we desire to think of, the mind immediately thinks upon that very thing? Is it that the images are always ready at the command of the will? Does the image immediately occur to us the moment we desire? If we fancy to think of the sea, the earth, the heavens, of senates, shows, feasts, battles — does nature form these and provide them ready at our nod? Especially since the minds of others that are in the same country and in the same place with us think things quite different from these. And then, since we see images in our sleep to step to time, to move their pliant limbs and throw about their tender arms alternately and keep due measure with their feet — are they taught this by art? Have they learned to dance? That thus they play their wanton sports by night? Is not this the truth rather, that what we take for one moment of time — this present now — has many parts included, as we find by reason? And therefore it is that in every instant there are a thousand different images, always ready in every place — so numerous are they and so apt to move. And then they are so exceedingly subtle that the mind cannot possibly perceive them distinctly without the nicest diligence. And so those images die away unobserved, which the mind does not apply itself to receive; but it does apply itself closely to distinguish the image it hopes to find, and therefore sees it. Don’t you observe that the eyes, when they would discover an object exceeding small, contract themselves close and provide for it, nor can they accurately distinguish except they do so. And you will find, even in things ever so plain, unless you strictly apply your mind, they will be as if they were utterly obscure and at the greatest distance undiscovered. Here is the wonder then, that the mind should lose the observation of all other images but those it particularly inquires after and is employed about. Besides, we often mistake small objects for great, and so we contribute to our own delusion and impose upon ourselves. It happens likewise that sometimes an image of a different kind presents itself to the mind; thus the form that was before a woman now shows itself a man, or some other person of a different age and complexion. But this we are not to wonder at, since the senses are all asleep and we are wholly in a state of forgetfulness.
Cassius: Thank you, Elaine, for reading that. I think that if we would come up with a list of topics in Epicurean philosophy that people would be surprised to hear about, this one might be near the top of the list. We’re all familiar with pleasure and virtue and the other issues of Epicurean gods and many other controversial issues. But this is one we really don’t hear discussed very much at all. And it is to my mind something that is so out there in terms of where he gets it from and what he’s thinking that it really deserves a lot more scrutiny than I think people would otherwise give it. There’s a lot in these paragraphs — about a hundred lines — a lot of detail on this particular topic. Let’s take some general comments before we go through each passage. Like last week, let’s start with Martin. Martin, do you have any general thoughts?
Martin: Well, he dwells here on these imaginary images, which only the brain sees and not the eye, and then describes in detail how this works and the consequences. And of course this is the wrong concept, but it’s still interesting that by starting from a set of assumptions, he works out something that was at least plausible at that time.
Cassius: Do you have any thought about why he has come back to the topic of images? Because the images seen by the eye were discussed fairly early in Book Four, but now he’s returning to it and talking about the relationship of the images that the mind collects versus those that are seen by the eyes.
Martin: Because this one is somewhat different. When he was writing about the eyes, that was in the context of the senses — directly experienced. But this one — we see images for the mind that have no direct evidence. So this is a constructed explanation. I think it’s very careful of him to separate this, because he will have had a bit of doubt about this that he didn’t have with regular senses.
Cassius: Well right there where you said “with the regular senses” — is it possible that Epicurus is considering this aspect of the mind as a sense in exactly the same way that he’s talking about eyes and ears and taste?
Martin: Not really, because this one he cannot really take as a measure of reality.
Cassius: You mean that you don’t see those people with their limbs swerving and dancing? He seems to be talking about these as if everybody observes them and they’re commonly observed.
Elaine: I hope we’ll go through this bit by bit, so I would like to get to that one. But the first thing I want to say is: why did he take this up separately? I actually do think he’s describing a sense. He’s not talking about what used to be thought of as the five senses, but the mind — going through the pores, as he says — is definitely involved. And I think the reason he’s doing this is that he’s building a model of reality in opposition to the idealist, the Platonist, who thought that we could perceive a non-material realm with our mind. So he has got to come up with some explanation for imagination that doesn’t involve a non-material realm. And this is what he did — he decided that there are material images penetrating directly into our minds, which is not how it is, but it’s a direct argument against idealism. While Martin was talking I looked up the modern definition of imagination under Merriam-Webster: “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” That still fits with this whole thing. Our imagination is a huge part of human experience, so if he didn’t address it specifically, to me it would have been a glaring omission. And I just keep it in context of what he’s fighting against — that somehow our mind is interacting with something immaterial. That is definitely not happening. Just because his explanation turned out not to be correct, the most important thing to look at is that what he was arguing against is still not correct.
Cassius: Well, I’ve never thought about what you just said. “Imagination” is a word that’s based on images. We throw the word imagination around and talk about it all the time without really discussing what the mechanism of imagination really is. I presume that when we talk about imagination today, we’re thinking about some kind of action of the mind working on memory. Memory has more of a context for us today. And of course he’s talking about memories a little bit here, but he’s going further. Let’s go through it in sequence. The first passage is basically talking about the images piercing the pores of the body and moving into the mind — and that’s how we can see centaurs and so forth. What do we get from that passage? Martin or Charles first.
Martin: He postulates that these images travel as an entity from the source to the eye — the same as he postulated before for visible images. From today’s perspective this is a nonsensical model. It might have been plausible at that time.
Charles: I’m looking for that section where Epicurus makes a brief comment about the dreams of madmen moving in their sleep.
Cassius: Right, that’s relevant. Now I was remembering when Martin was giving his first general commentary — he made a comment about the difference between what the mind perceives versus what the eyes perceive. And then the second passage is basically saying they’re very similar: “what we perceive by the mind is exactly what we see with our eyes, and therefore they must of necessity be affected by the same things and in the same manner.” But first let’s focus on this little part: “pierce through the pores of the body and move the subtle nature of the mind within and affect the sense.” Let’s look at Munro: “and provoke sensation.” And Bailey: “and arouse its sensation.” So that little part to me says pretty clearly that this is a sense-kind of experience in his opinion. I think it’s interesting — and I know it’s risky to extrapolate too far — but there are at least two parts to what we experience in sense: the actual sensory organ with its peripheral nervous system, like the eye with the retina and optic nerve, and then there is the brain which processes that input. We don’t experience those as being separate when we’re seeing an object, but in our imagination the visual cortex is still part of our brain, still belonging to the sense. You won’t see things if you have only an eye and not a visual cortex. He’s seeing that there’s something like this going on. He’s not completely wrong about that. But he does think it’s a literal material sense responding to literal physical images going through the skin.
Elaine: Yeah. And I want to point out what I think we should all take away: regardless of the fact that nobody talks about it, and regardless of the fact that it’s not held up as a major aspect of Epicurean philosophy in most discussions today, this passage of Lucretius makes it absolutely certain that Epicurus was considering the mind able to receive information directly. He thought there was a specific physical mechanism for imagination coming from outside, not from the actions of neurons within the brain. And I want to point out this little part because I don’t think you agreed with me about this before, Cassius — but it seems very clear now: “some of their own accord are formed in the air, some are continually flying off from various bodies, and others rise from these images mixed together.” He’s contrasting three different ways these images can come about. When he mentioned images formed of their own accord before, you were saying “oh, he just means they’re running into each other” — but he’s clearly contrasting that as a separate thing from “others rise from these images mixed together.” Why would he list it separately if he didn’t mean something different?
Cassius: What do Munro and Bailey say about that? Let me look. Munro says “those which are spontaneously produced within the air.” Bailey says “created of their own accord in the air.” “Of their own accord” could imply an actual will or power, but I don’t think he means they have consciousness. I do think you’re right that he’s saying they’re spontaneously produced — and I’m willing to grant that — but surely you agree that if he means spontaneously, it’s not because they are themselves able to summon themselves into existence by some form of will or intent?
Elaine: Oh no no no, I’m not saying that. But I’m saying he has not explained this in a way that is not “something from nothing.” It’s a little odd that he’s left this. Your explanation last time was that he just means they’re running into each other in the air, and I thought — that’s not what he’s saying. He would have said it that way if that’s what he meant. He does not give an adequate explanation because: it’s not from them running into each other, it’s not from flying off of a body — he says they’re formed in the air on their own accord, without saying from what. And he’s done it twice now. So I think we should be on the lookout for whether he has an explanation for it. But it’s clearly not the explanation you were giving before.
Cassius: Well, I won’t agree that that’s clear, but let’s see what Charles and Martin have to say. Charles, Martin, do you have comments on that point?
Charles: No, nothing.
Martin: It’s not written here, but I think elsewhere he mentions that images can get scattered, and these brain-images can also get scattered. The individual particles move around and then by chance come together into something new. But then how is that different from “others rise from these images mixed together”? I don’t think those are the same thing — if the pieces are scattered into individual particles, those particles have nothing to do with the previous image anymore. If they combine into something new, it’s completely new.
Elaine: Right. And whenever he goes to so much trouble to specify something, I don’t think it’s a good idea to gloss it over. So we should keep it in mind: either he forgot to explain it, or there’s some explanation we haven’t found yet.
Cassius: I like the way you’re reasoning, Elaine. We need to just look at the text and pull out of it what it seems to be saying before we make a judgment about it. Let’s move to the second passage.
Elaine: Yes. The second passage says the mind is moved by images, the same way as the eyes — the image of the lion strikes the eye, and the mind is moved by another image of the lion which it equally sees, with the difference only that the mind can perceive images of a more thin and subtle nature. So what we’ve established so far is very clear: the mind is being affected from outside the mind. And if you want to combine what we’re discussing today with the discussion of the gods, it’s hard to disconnect those two — because he’s apparently saying that things from outside the mind cover all sorts of topics, not just gods. I want to be clear, though: the mind can obviously be affected from the outside — gut bacteria can affect it, barometric pressure affects mood. But he’s saying there’s a specific physical passing of image particles through the skin into the mind. We shouldn’t generalize it.
Cassius: Let’s move to the next passage — which focuses on when you’re asleep. The memory is not active when you’re asleep, so it cannot say to us “I can’t be seeing George Washington, because George Washington has been dead for three hundred years.”
Elaine: Yes! It’s really clear that he doesn’t see memory as having any role in imagination other than policing it. If I close my eyes and “remember” my mother, it’s not my memory function doing that in his model — the image is being supplied in a different way than by memory. That’s really pretty fascinating and different from how we understand it now.
Cassius: And he’s clearly saying that there are images from the outside that are separate and distinct from memory, which can lead you to see these things. And I don’t think he ever says that memory can itself produce an image. What is a memory, if not an image?
Elaine: That’s how we think of it today, but he’s describing it differently. The way he’s using “memory” here is more like a thought function that’s separate from images. The memory’s “objection” would be a knowledge that the man has been long in the arms of death — so it’s not talking about memory producing images, it’s a cognitive check separate from images. It’s really fascinating.
Cassius: Martin or Charles — before we move on — any comments?
Martin: No.
Cassius: Then this next passage is the one I’m kind of captivated by throughout this discussion — seeing these things “with their limbs moving to exact time, throwing their arms and the rest of their limbs to exact time,” and then one image is gone and another springs up in a different posture. Martin, Charles — what do you interpret him to mean there? Do you have dreams like that, Martin?
Martin: Not exactly like this, but I have weird dreams. I remember a very weird dream from when I was a kid — I don’t know if it was a person or something, but I think it was a person falling. I tried to catch it, but when I caught it, it was a row — an animal. And then when I wanted to keep it, it turned into a small metal sphere. So there are funny things changing. And certainly as in the dream when they are people, they move naturally.
Charles: I do have very vivid dreams from time to time. Not of people dancing, but very vivid.
Cassius: Let Elaine answer the question then. What does he mean?
Elaine: I think it’s pretty clear that he’s talking about what happens because we’re getting these filmy images penetrating the brain one after another rapidly — he’s talking about something like animation. Do you remember making little flip books as a kid? Or how they used to make animation — these painstaking drawings with just a slight change, put in rapid sequence, and the thing would appear to be moving. What he’s saying is that because there’s not a creature out there moving that we’re seeing with our eyes, but instead we’re getting these images floating through the air one after another — because they’re happening in rapid sequence, it gives the appearance of life-like movement, movement with exact time. Like the image-films coming off of an actual person, but in the dream they’re just combining sequential images that are not really related to each other necessarily — they’re coming off of different things — and then it changes shape but it looks like it’s all a continuous thing.
Cassius: Do you think that means the mind’s focus is sequentially flipping the pages of the book, or is it the images themselves that are doing that?
Elaine: The images are striking the mind sequentially, and the mind perceives that as we would perceive a person moving around. So the way he’s describing it — this happens to all of us anytime we see anything moving in a dream. It’s not because there’s a thing we’re looking at that’s moving — it’s because in his model these sequential images are giving that appearance.
Cassius: Okay. Let’s go to the next passage — this is the issue of whether the mind is somehow summoning images of the dead person, or whether there’s just a constant supply of images out there and our mind is selecting from them. Who wants to start?
Elaine: Not me first.
Cassius: Martin, if we try to at least understand what his model is: he apparently is asking whether there’s just a limitless supply of all different types of images constantly surrounding us, because he asks that question here. It seems kind of unlikely that you’d have a limitless supply of all sorts of images of seas and earths and heavens and senates and feasts and battles just flying through the air at any particular time. But he asks that question and then seems to give an answer to it. What do you take from that one, Martin?
Martin: Yeah, I think he really means it like that. As unlikely as it appears today, this is something he says, and it’s not really even in conflict with his model — because he says that these are very subtle, made of very subtle particles, and therefore there can be a large number of them. If you have complex solid bodies of which what we directly see and touch is composed, that’s a lot more limited in what you can put in one place. But these images are so fine that many of them can fill a certain space.
Charles: I’m just curious about what exactly he was implying when he says the images die away unobserved.
Cassius: Yeah — maybe they break apart. But I was about to say we should read the last passage as part of this, because it’s all maybe one thought. Elaine?
Elaine: It’s all connected. First he asks the question as you say, and then he answers it: “therefore it is that in every instant there are a thousand different images, always ready in every place — so numerous are they and so apt to move — and then we notice them if we decide to notice them.” So even though it’s not how we think things are, it’s a brilliant way of giving a material explanation to how we could be having these experiences, how imagination could work, by having this material, filmy, subtle images in the air going straight through our skin into the mind.
Cassius: And this is the part where he’s saying that the mind — just like the eyes — is able to focus. The mind apparently selects from this unlimited supply of images the particular image that for whatever reason it chooses to focus on. And my eye was caught by the phrase “have they learned to dance?” — “that thus they play their wanton sports by night?” He’s almost ridiculing the idea that the images themselves have learned to dance.
Elaine: Yes — he’s poking fun at alternate explanations first, like he does a lot. So what he’s focusing on is that it’s our mind that’s creating from the images the result — not that the images are themselves learning to dance.
Cassius: Is that what you’re getting from it?
Elaine: No — he’s not describing them as having consciousness. But it is the series of images hitting our mind directly — material particle interactions — that’s creating our experience of imagination. The mind is the decider, the focuser. That’s a decision: “I’m going to pay attention to this image and not that image.” And he compares it to the way the ciliary muscles in the eye change the shape of the lens so that we can look at something very small versus something very far away. It’s more of a decisive action — not the mind itself creating the images.
Cassius: I don’t have any answers to suggest, but certainly somebody listening to this will want to compare the opening of Book One where Epicurus casts his mind out into the universe. And they’d also want to compare the discussion in Velleius about the images of the gods — it’s always been one of those counterintuitive issues that Velleius says the images are traveling to the gods as opposed to from the gods. So I think people would want to compare how this projection of the mind that might be involved in the focusing is related to those issues — there are images traveling toward us but our mind is making an active role in deciding which images it’s going to look at.
Elaine: And to me one of the interesting things is that we’re only choosing from an available menu. We’re not creating the menu. So it’s not a creative act in these images for him — which is totally different from how we today associate imagination with creativity. This is a non-creative imagination process. It’s a curation process. You’re choosing what you want to look at but you don’t get to actually make the thing that you’re looking at.
Cassius: And the frustrating thing to me right this second is that anybody listening to this podcast is going to know that where we go from here is another extremely challenging discussion of what people consider to be basically evolution — because after this passage he’s going to make the point that we can’t conclude that just because we have an arm, it was designed to be an arm. So what you’ve just observed about it not being a creative process — at least in this section right here — I don’t know that we should conclude that just because we’re choosing from an available selection, that means there’s not some other part of the philosophy where he says you can come up with your own. But at least right here you’re exactly right — he’s talking about selecting from among available images and not just creating those images yourself. And we today think about imagination as taking memories of things we’ve seen and combining them in different ways — like the horse and the man creating the centaur. That seems pretty normal to us. And that must certainly have occurred to Epicurus as well. So he must have an explanation for how we create things that have never been seen before.
Elaine: I think this is it. And if we find another passage that adds to it, yes we should be on the lookout. But I think he is exactly answering your question with his model: we’re not creating those images — they were out there, and they come to our minds. And we’ll see.
Cassius: And if your reading is correct, Elaine, he’s saying the images can really somehow form themselves into combinations that did not exist before. We see them because we decide to, but we didn’t create them. Is there a place in his theory for our own minds to manipulate those images and rearrange them in ways they’ve not been combined before?
Elaine: That’s not what he’s describing here. But I do think that this is a very comprehensive model. If we find something different I’ll change my tune. But this is a very complete model of his explanation for how imagination is material. This is how imagination is material.
Cassius: Elaine, you said this discussion is of imagination, and you’re limiting it to that word — which sounds to me like a very passive process. Although the mind is deciding. The mind is choosing from a menu. I don’t see that he’s left any…
Elaine: We’re so used to our modern understanding of imagination that it’s hard to imagine that people before us might not have thought about it that way. But people did think about it other ways. That’s how research and science trickle down to a point where it seems like “oh, well that seems obvious — how could you think about it any other way?”
Cassius: So Elaine — today the word “imagination” would convey the idea that it’s all made up and none of it’s real?
Elaine: No, no — that’s why I went back and read the definition: “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” And the last part there is maybe the more controversial bit. The second Merriam-Webster definition is “creative ability.” So today: “the act or power of forming a mental image.” Lucretius would say: “the act or power of choosing to perceive a mental image” — so we’re not forming it, it was already formed. It’s pre-formed outside of our heads. We are choosing to perceive something that’s not present to our ordinary senses. Because these images are flying around in the air and running into each other — they’re not really representing a real material object, but they themselves are material objects.
Cassius: Charles and Martin — before Elaine and I get too carried away — what other thoughts do you have?
Martin: No, I’m fine.
Cassius: Well, you certainly helped end the discussion earlier with some very deep material about the imaging section being much more literal. And Elaine, there’s a risk in Lucretius of taking metaphorical things literally — like when he’s talking about Venus in the beginning, that’s clearly poetic — versus when he’s really describing a literal concrete mechanism. It could be tempting to metaphorize the concrete descriptions, and I think we should resist that.
Elaine: I think so. And I think one of his clues to us is that he’s not as flowery when he’s doing the science — this is your science textbook part, not the poetry part.
Cassius: Right. But before we begin to conclude — we really haven’t touched on the very last paragraph, which has an important caveat about all this: the mistaken conclusions we can reach due to how we receive these images. He ends with the reference to “the form that was before a woman now shows itself to be a man, or some other person of a different age and complexion, but we are not to wonder at that since the senses are all asleep.” It’s so interesting to me how he refers to the senses — he really does seem to be considering the mind as a sensory organism, analogizing it to a sensory organism but clearly seeing it as separate from the eyes, ears, and so forth.
Elaine: Right. And “we are wholly in a state of forgetfulness” — so he’s separating out memory as well. Only the sense — the executive functions, as we would say today — are active. I also want to point out that when we’re looking around a space with our eyes open, our expectations play a strong role in what we’re going to select out to see. This is the classic experiment with the gorilla running out onto the basketball court — people told to watch for players from one team bizarrely missed the gorilla walking out beating its chest. So the mind’s decision about what to look at is a significant process.
Cassius: I certainly agree with that. And as we close, what comes to my mind is the Diogenes Laertius discussion of anticipations — he’s previously said that Epicurus held the anticipation to be at least in some respect related to having seen a number of instances in the past of a particular thing and then combining those images into a composite, which we then use as a test to compare against something we see new. So at least in that context, it appears that memory has some role — evaluating these images, as Elaine has laid it out here. But Elaine, I think a lot of people would presume that Epicurus is saying in some places anyway that the mind does observe things and form composite images which are essentially pre-concepts or concepts. Are you disagreeing or how do you fit that together?
Elaine: I think the mind is classifying and evaluating them, but the images themselves in his model are coming from the outside. But surely you agree they store these images as well — that the mind stores them? Where is he saying that the mind stores them as an image rather than the image coming as a fresh supply?
Cassius: I agree with you that he’s not saying that here. I think there are other sections where he would combine those with this, because I don’t think this section can be read to eject the idea of memory of images entirely.
Elaine: I mean — we recognize he is proposing recognition of images as different from storing them or creating them. I haven’t seen anywhere where he says we have a stored image. But I may be missing that.
Martin: That is the same misconception that some people have about how memory works. We don’t store images in our brain. We store patterns. And if you see a new image, our pattern recognition works on these patterns and compares them, and from there we recognize images. It’s not that we store images.
Elaine: Yes, exactly right.
Cassius: Well, that’s obviously a very important way of talking about it. Because Martin is right — if Epicurus did think that we store images, then that’s not right either. But that’s how a lot of people popularly think about it today.
Martin: And it’s quite interesting that from this concept of pattern recognition, his idea on this one is actually closer to what we understand today than the simplistic idea that we have a wide storage of images in the memory.
Elaine: Yes — except that the patterns we’re recognizing are definitely not coming through our skin.
Cassius: Right. All right, we probably ought to begin to close for the day. Martin, how would you like to close?
Martin: No, everything said — no need to close from me.
Cassius: Charles, anything to add?
Charles: Not this week, no. Do you agree that the mind stores patterns rather than images?
Cassius: Charles — do you have a thought about that? The mind stores patterns versus images?
Charles: I mean, I don’t know that I’ve read much into that recently to have an opinion. I mean you’d have to break it down in a lot of different ways. The images that Epicurus is talking about here obviously have a particular meaning. I’m not sure what an ordinary person, if asked to define what an image is, I’m not sure they could or would be able to very easily. But yeah, I agree that the mind stores patterns.
Cassius: I will look for some modern writing on imagination and memory in case anybody wants to look at that, just to see what the current state of affairs is — because it is a kind of hot topic in neuroscience research. It strikes me as something we don’t talk about very much, and my goal would be to make all this understandable to a relatively educated but not necessarily specialist person. And I suspect that there’s a relationship between what the memory does and whether images are stored in the mind, and if not images, what is stored — and those things probably do relate very closely to what Epicurus is talking about.
Elaine: I think it’s important to know what the material process is. Even though it’s not coming from the outside, it’s still relevant to a materialist philosophy to know that there are actual material mechanisms. Epicurus — as I said earlier in the discussion — is extrapolating a totally materialist theory of everything out into these areas that people don’t normally think about. So it may lead in unexpected directions. One way I would summarize what we’ve got going on here today: a lot of people who are just casually familiar with Epicurus would consider this discussion to be an unexpected direction of Epicurean thought.
Cassius: So Elaine, how would you close for the day?
Elaine: I would close with this: this section is the Epicurean model that attempts to explain imagination and dreams in a totally materialist way, so that there’s nothing supernatural or idealist involved in us having the experience of images that are not coming through our eyes. So when you’re getting ready to fight the Battle of Philippi and you’re Cassius and Brutus talking before the battle, and Brutus says that he is seeing Caesar’s ghost — you have an explanation for what Brutus may actually have experienced. You can say: “No, you didn’t really see a ghost — but it also wasn’t supernaturally generated. It has an explanation. Just like if you’re hearing thunder, it’s not the gods stomping around — it’s just a material process.”
Cassius: I don’t know if I’m remembering that from Shakespeare or whether it’s in Plutarch’s story of Brutus, but that’s certainly part of the historical or literature record anyway — that Cassius and Brutus had that discussion.
Elaine: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — or maybe Banquo’s ghost?
Cassius: No, I think it’s Caesar’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and probably in Plutarch as well. Anyway, if no one has anything else for today, we’ll close and come back in a week or so.
Elaine: Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!
Martin: Yes, happy Valentine’s Day.
Charles: Thank you very much. Bye bye.