The Last Words on Lucretius

Intro

As I said earlier, Lucretius thinks the mind controls cognition and the particles it is made up of are localized in the chest. On the other hand, anima, the vital spirit, is everywhere else in the body but the mid breast. Vital spirit’s particles move to the sway of mind particles and give the body sensation; thanks to vital spirit “even the teeth share in sensation”. Keep that in mind as we talk below about "registering" and "bodily awareness".
The View from 10,000 Feet
Echoing Plato’s analogy of the psyche with a country, where the rational part is the leaders and the spirited part is the military,

Basically like this, but I see courage as an example of the broader concept "spiritedness"

Lucretius says that while mind rules, vital spirit is the “body’s guard and cause of health”. It’s a safety mechanism to protect your flesh. In fact, vital spirit and flesh “twine together with common roots” and he thinks trying to tear them apart would be all but impossible, like taking separating the scent out of curry. He also describes it as being so thin and light, so sensitive, that even thoughts can make it move.
Getting Our Hands Dirty
Now that we have the basics on what mind and vital spirit, animus and anima, are, its time to get down to brass tacks. We’ve noted that Lucretius is a strict physicalist, believing that everything that exists is made out of physical particles. And he thinks that mind and spirit are one and the same thing, yet that mind is cognitive and spirit is not. But why should the same substance be able to act so differently?
Isn’t that paradoxical, or worse, impossible? Well, to avoid that conclusion he’s going to need to give us a satisfactory explanation for this apparent strangeness.
The reason, he says, why they can be the same “stuff” but act so differently is that while the mind is affected the same way as the body, vital spirit is “not one and simple”. What he means is that there are different properties to mind and spirit, they are not pure and simple like, say, hydrogen, carbon or iron. Instead mind and spirit are two subtypes of the same basic type of stuff, an “uber-soul” material, vital spirit. And vital spirit is not a basic element either. It’s a mixture of some sort, like water or soda.
We don’t need to go into the actual physical stuff he thinks make up vital spirit, the mind and spirit because its just not even close to being right as far as what we know to be the components of the nervous system. How could it have been, it would be about 1,500 years before the microscope was invented,

Seawater maginfied 25x

and roughly another 360 before the Electroencephalograph (EEG,  the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) became widely available.

EEGs measure the activity of neurons

But if you’re interested in knowing more, contact me and I’ll send you my fairly detailed discussion of it from my dissertation.
Whatever physical bits it is actually made of, in practice this vital spirit is basically what we’d call “bodily awareness”, the mechanism that allows us to do things like avoid running into people walking past us the other way even by the slimmest of margins. And as I’ve said before, given the way he describes them it’s fair to think of its components, animus and anima, as what we’d say are aspects of our overall nervous system.
So to put a bow on it, he is saying that the best explanation for our capabilities is that there is a physical system spread throughout the body that is responsive to outside stimuli, and that is directly connected to a centralized core, made of the same material. This core component uses in various ways the input to guide the actions/responses of the whole being. This centralized material, when activated by the spread-out system, is able to think and feel to varying degrees. Or as we’d say today, the nervous system allows for or creates the initial conditions for basic things like reflexes but also for our ability to measure and judge, and our ability for abstract thought.
Let’s be clear: Lucretius does not think that the chest-brain-stuff (animus) simply takes in data from the anima, stops the flow and considers the data, then sends commands to a body that is silently waiting. Instead the components that make up vital spirit allow for duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body. It allows for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement - he explains that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the spirit, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. But this duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff.
Yet its interesting to note and accept with Lucretius that our bodies register a lot more info than we ever actually register consciously. Think of micro-facial expressions, gut reactions, goose bumps, mosquito bites, or even navigating foot traffic on a busy sidewalk. These are all clearly things the body “notes” – or as I will put it sometimes, registers – even though you as a thinking person aren’t aware. And common sense tells us he’s right: not only are we not conscious of things such as mosquitoes biting us, we have no feeling whatsoever of things such as radiation, yet clearly our body registers it, sadly, to very poor results.
Emotion
Lucretius thinks that emotions are qualities of both animus and anima; they both process and communicate information, and so they can’t be irrational. But its hard for him to call them rational too. He’s convinced that emotions are felt physically in the heart and concludes in part from this that the mid-region of the breast is the seat of intellect and mind. But just because they are felt there doesn’t mean they are only felt there. In fact, he believes that there is more than one kind of emotion; one more or less purely mental (but of course physical) and “spirit-based” or “visceral” emotion that is much deeper and stronger but of course still “cognitive”.
On Lucretius’ account, due to the interactions of the physical particles that make up vital spirit, the mind emotes in an interesting way. Basically, anyone in an emotionally charged situation, anyone emotionally agitated, ends up at whatever emotion they end up at (or calm) by going through a progression from the burn of anger, to the chill of fright, and eventually back to calmness, as the duplex communication between the mind and spirit continues.  Whether true or not, given the importance that anger and fear responses have to survival this makes some sense.  These emotions are utterly important to our survival. The problem of course is that they can sometimes be a little antiquated and therefore lead us to misunderstand what our best reactions to a perceived stress should be.
The idea is that for some emotions, say fear for instance, up to a certain threshold only the mind is “emoting”, but there is a tipping point where the vital spirit is roused. As such, the chest-brain area is usually the part handling (and ‘showing” fears, but after a point the whole spirit system gets involved and you see other behaviors related to fear.
He also explains that while vital spirit moves to the “sway” of the mind, it does not always follow mind’s influence. At least sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it does, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on what beliefs are followed. When incoherent or mistaken beliefs are followed, we get bad desires and bad results. When correct beliefs are followed we get good desire and satisfaction. So to the extent an emotion keeps you from making a smart choice, or makes you feel like doing something stupid, or counter-productive, they would seem to be irrational, yet the real thing to blame here is not that system, its job is to protect your body, and its perceiving a threat!

A very basic kind of fear

But the animus! It’s the job of the animus to be rational, to oversee things. If the mind doesn’t do its job the times when it is within its power to do so, then the cause must be a physiological limitation, stupidity, laziness, or bad character. Nothing about emotions, or mind, or spirit makes it have to be that emotions and emotional responses have to be irrational or bad.
Conclusion
So we’ve seen Lucretius follow Plato and Aristotle very closely in some fundamentally important respects: 1) He’s keenly sensitive to the impact the emotions can have on other thoughts and on actions; 2) He believes there are two types of emotions; one more or less purely ‘mental’ and one ‘spirit-based’; more visceral and deeply felt, but still cognitive. (Of course both are still purely physical.) While some, say an existential dread, are cases where the mind is by and large the only part emoting, there may be a threshold past which the vital spirit is roused. Similarly, there can be emotions, say fear of a predator, that are more basic and active at the level of the spirit, but past a certain point the rest of the spirit system, the mind, may get involved; 3) he believes in duplex communication between the ‘mind’ and the body, and that 4) the mind and the body are both physical. In sum, he’s in basic agreement with Plato and Aristotle’s insights on ethics and psychology. At the very least nothing they said is directly contradicted by Lucretius.
The improvement Lucretius makes is that he not only understands that there must be a physiological explanation to all this, he tries to explain it. At length. And with some very imaginative, even penetrating insights. In fact, it was absolutely state-of-the-art science for 55 B.C. In fact, it was pretty state-of-the-art for a lot longer than that!
Combining the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius on the emotions, the mind, and ethics, we can see a pretty well worked out, defensible position. I call it the P-A-L account, and I call the theory of emotions in the P-A-L account the “pluralist account” of emotions. That’s in comparison to the visceral account, first developed by Homer, and the third candidate-account, which we're about to start discussing, cognitivism.
Review and Preview
We have a “scientific” (physiologically centered), state-of-the-art for its time explanation of how the mind and body are  parts of a functioning system, how they interact and impact each other, and what thinking and the emotions are. And it all fits in just fine with the psychological and ethical insights of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, I think this P-A-L account is so defensible that I try to update it to current state of the art science in the final chapter of my dissertation, and that updated version is my own belief about how the emotions work in ethics.
Unfortunately, This P-A-L account didn’t exactly set the world on fire at the time. Not long after it was all put into place the Stoics came along and did every thing they could to bury it alive. The fact that I had to write this dissertation at all gives you a good idea of how successful they were. Unfortunately for us.
But before we get to them we have to look at the Epicureans, who have their own strengths and weaknesses to examine.

We'll have to see what you think after the next handful of posts!

Lucretius' Conception of Mind

A Recap and a Rolling Start

As I said last time, Lucretius believes that when the mind is pushed-upon a wave of particles sets in motion, stirring the will. If you read my posts on Plato this should remind you of Plato's similar claims on how the outside world impinges upon the mind and body.

But to "stir the will" has to be explained in physical terms too, and Lucretius comes up with a theoretical physical system called "vital spirit" to do so. More on that later but for now we'll note that the physical substance vital spirit is diffused throughout out the body.

Whatever you call the stuff that moves the body around, the real trick is explaining the interconnectedness of the body and mind, of will and physical action, in a thoroughly materialist, physiologically centered manner. And a good, useful explanation will allow us to understand what it means for the mind to see and understand anything at all. Unless you're up to date on current neurophysiology, this is a pretty tall task.

So yeah, Lucretius has to be pretty bright to come up with such a system nearly 2000 years ago.

But enough back-slapping.

Isn't Physical "Soul" a cop-out?

On Lucretius' account every living thing is replete with "soul", which is completely material, just as much as your foot, ear and every other part of your body. (So don't you who believe in immaterial souls try to hijack this, and don't those of you who eschew such talk get upset!). Material soul is not a cop-out, but I'm going to tell you right now the concept gets pretty hairy so we're going take it nice and slow.

Lucretius actually uses two terms that can be translated into English as "soul": anima, which, for you religious types, is the one traditionally equated with what you mean by soul, and animus, a newer (relatively!) term he uses to make a very novel distinction.

Most simply put, in Lucretius' theory its the difference between the irrational and the rational mind. But even this is hiding some serious complexity. Both the "irrational" anima and the "rational" animus are part of (or two types of) the same stuff, vital spirit. Vital spirit is an admixture of various physical elements and, as I said above, is distributed throughout the body. We'll see that actually it works in a way similar to the central and sympathetic nervous systems. First lets focus on the part of all this that is most accessible to us, the animus, the rational part, what Plato and Aristotle called the psyche.

Animus or Psyche, its the Mind for Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius

For Lucretius, the animus, the rational part of the vital spirit, is responsible for all higher cognitive functions, things like abstract thought and planning ahead. So an able translation of animus is "mind', with all its implications of higher order thought and moral understanding. Lucretius at times also calls it "intellect", "head", "guiding principle" and "dominant force".

As funny as it may seem, Lucretius believed, (like many of his contemporaries, Aristotle and Homer) that mind is located in the middle of the breast. It will be very useful to keep that in mind so you can picture how he can talk about "thinking" in your chest, which will help you to better understand him overall. But let me say it again - like the rest of the vital spirit - mind is composed of matter.

A Primer on Mental Activity

Lucretius makes it clear that vital spirit causes sensibility in us, which allows the mind to have experience. And in order for action to occur, the mind must "judge" the benefits/merits of the results of an action. But this does not have to be done consciously. Just as important, the mind is not a 2-way transmitter (e.g., a walkie talkie) that, for example, "feels" a bug crawling on the skin and then tells the hand to squash it.

NO:

Think about why he is right that this doesn't make sense. If the mind were like a walkie-talkie, by definition only one end at a time can communicate. So if you had a bug on your leg, what would have to happen for you to get rid of it?

First, the body would feel the pressure on your flesh. For your mind to "know it" too would require one of four things:
1) Luckily, at the same moment when the body felt the pressure, the mind happened to not communicating out any messages and so able to receive transmission,
2) The body would not only feel the pressure on the skin, but also "knows" that the mind should stop transmitting and could force it to by accompanying important messages with a message such as "over" to tell the brain to start talking,
3) The body itself would just "know" how to stop the bug (like a reflex),
4) The body is constantly transmitting messages whether or not the mind is in a position to hear them, and sometimes the brain listens in for whatever reason.

However plausible you find any of these explanations, they raise more questions than they answer. Instead, Lucretius, like Plato and Aristotle, thinks there is a special, interactive and reciprocal communication between the body and the mind (and the emotions), a process I will continue to refer to as duplex communication. The mind and the body are both duplex transmitters, such as cellular phones, which allow two constantly running communications to both be understood by their targets.

YES:

For Lucretius, Plato and Aristole, how the mind and body interact

More Details on Mind and Thought

According to Lucretius, mind is able to represent events to itself much faster than they actually occur or would happen. For example, if in real life, if Tim Lincecum throws his two-seam fastball 90 miles per hour, the hitter has .46 seconds to swing at it. Go ahead and imagine that now.

Big Time Timmy Jim

However long you took to visualize it, says Lucretius, it was quite a bit faster than .46 seconds. Another example of the relative speed of mind is how long it takes for the mind to "think ahead", as when you get a joke before its completed. (Here's an article on thought-speed).

I'll get into it more in the next post, but this also relates to something that will be very important to the P-A-L theory (when I finally flesh it out!). Not only is Lucretius really big on how fast mental representation is, he also makes it pretty clear that for the mind to "see" doesn't require deliberation. As he puts it, "within one moment of our sensation, many tinier moments are hidden whose existence reason discovers". And what he means by "discovers" is that the contents of our mental pictures are full of information "right there" and only need to be picked up or picked out. Yet we also superimpose assumptions on the information we process with our minds, so that things not "perceived by the senses" seem to us just like sense perceptions.

But what of it? Well it means that for Lucretius some (maybe even most) things are understood by the senses and not just "passively received" by them. And that means that a lot of what you might call "analysis" or "judging" doesn't require conscious deliberation. And as far as ethics goes, it also means that he is in agreement with Epicurus' saying that in a way we choose to engage in poor or irrational behavior because we often have a strong will to impose questionable - or even flat out wrong - interpretations on the things we see and hear.

We'll come back next time to look at the anima and more fully understand vital spirit.

 

Introducing Lucretius

Introduction

I think that the Roman poet Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) is the most underrated philosopher of the ancient world. There, I said it.



So far as we know, he only created one work, De Rerum Natura, which is usually translated as On the Nature of Things. As the title suggests, it attempts to explain the universe, including the workings of the human mind. In poetic form. In Latin. And you've probably never heard of it. I hadn't heard of it myself until about halfway through grad school, and I didn't read it all until I was working on my dissertation. But the point is, it is without question the best piece work ever put out by any thinker who has ever called himself an Epicurean.

You might think it funny, then, that I group him with Plato and Aristotle and not in my treatment (soon to come) of Epicureanism. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1) I think Epicureanism, generally speaking, is quite close to Platonism and Aristotelianism when it comes to ethics; 2) I think Lucretius differs from orthodox Epicureanism in ways that allow him to be read as a "physicalist" "scientific" or "materialist" continuation of the psychological and ethical ideas I've discussed in Plato and Aristotle. I don't want to put too fine a point on that, in the end I don't need to convince anyone that Lucretius was secretly a Platonist or an Aristotelian and not an Epicurean. I just need to explain to you how Lucretius can fairly be read as usefully and consistently continuing what they started regarding how the mind works and how that feeds into ethics. I do this not only because it strikes me as correct, but in building out the argument of my thesis, I thought it useful and even important to show how the Plato-Aristotle view of the mind might look in a more "scientific" setting.

The First thing You Need to Know about Lucretius

Lucretius, as is true of any Epicurean, was a materialist. And he was an amazingly thorough materialist, even by their standards. I'm going explain that and then I hope you'll see why I'm going to switch to "physicalist" for the rest of my discussion of him.

The main point of materialism is that everything is made out of actual physical stuff. There are no ghosts, souls, or anything else of the kind unless you can explain how they are made out of physical particles. And everything that happens in the world happens to stuff. In On the Nature of Things Lucretius sets out to explain how this all might work, with the best science of his time. An example of how very thorough he was - He argues that seeing is literally taking in atoms, in the ‘shape’ of the object one sees, which then physically impinge upon the mind.

Next time, we'll delve into Lucretius' conception of the mind.

Wrapping up Aristotle: On the Emotions and Akrasia

The Problem of Akrasia

We’ve been discussing Aristotle’s take on lack of self control, explaining that there were two types: weakness of will and impulsiveness. I discussed how these two types of character led to a deeper understanding of the emotions. Now we want to take this knowledge and see if we can use this knowledge to work towards our goals of showing that good and bad are more than just relativistic, arbitrary concepts, and that ethics has a real job to do.

The ancient Greeks had a term for being unable to control yourself, for going against your better judgment: akrasia. I’ve discussed this earlier, but I’ll restate it here without making an obvious argument, as a sort of signpost to where we are going: judgement should not be thought of only in terms of the sort of thinking you do when doing algebra problems. Judgement of a kind is going on all the time inside you, even if you aren’t aware of it.

With that said, lets put it aside for a moment and focus on finishing up with Aristotle.

Akrasia is a very important concept in ethics for the simple reason that it’s hard to explain why it should happen. If we know what’s right and wrong, if we can think and understand that we should or should not do a particular thing, why then do we still sometimes do bad things? If you have an ethical theory that insists morality and moral behavior are at least sometimes products of human cognitive ability, that is if you believe that you use your brain to consider right and wrong, good and bad, you’d better have a good explanation for why thinking people don’t do what they know is good all the time. Otherwise it might be easier to think that what we think has nothing much to do with what we do.

You and I both know we do not do what is good all the time, so we need an explanation. And it can’t be some sort of self-serving or question-begging claim everyone knows is wrong but that will “save” your theory from being obviously weak. A good theory will account for such problems legitimately, or you might say ‘organically’ in that it ‘grows’ out of’ the structure.

So in this installment we’re going to see how the innovations we saw last time from Aristotle will help solve the problem of akrasia. More specifically, we want to uncover if and to what extent emotions contribute to or explain akrasia. We’re asking Aristotle to tell us whether emotionally excited people who do bad things are acting voluntarily, involuntarily, or some mix of the two.

Well, first off Aristotle notes that common sense and experience tell us sometimes people really do deliberate and fail to stick to the results of the deliberation because of their emotional condition. (Later down the road we’ll discuss the ‘how’). Second, he notes that sometimes people see this possibility coming and ‘wake’ themselves, regaining control of themselves before it is too late and they get overcome. Because both of these things are true, common sense tells us that some things done through the emotions are not done knowingly and so they are involuntary. Let’s think of a couple of examples.

Consider the difference between an enraged soldier in battle and an wealthy executive being insulted by his spouse or lover at a country club cocktail party. You might argue that the soldier’s and the executive’s responses are “voluntary”, but they have important differences.

Emotions and Akrasia

The ethical issue is that some emotions are inevitably, strongly going to be experienced given a certain context. So we need to understand how reasonable it is to expect a moderation of the emotion or at the least keeping a good handle on behavior in such situations is. In some cases emotional action will violate one of the three standards for an act being voluntary (not in ignorance of relevant factors, unforced, the result of deliberation), and so in those cases, the action should be considered counter voluntary. After all, how could a soldier expect to survive if he isn’t reacting to the seriousness of a life and death struggle? Similarly, how could the businessman keep his reputation if he responds inappropriately to his wife? If he hits her he’s obviously gone beyond acceptable behavior, but if he is made to look ineffectual he’s in bad shape too.

Whatever sort of thinking and judging is going on in cases where you are overcome by emotion, it sure seems to common sense to be “less” than the sort of conscious deliberation you might go through as you’re diligently crafting your cover letter for a new job application, the sort of thing I’ve called the conscious deliberation of a reasoning agent.

So to that extent you might be inclined to say that motional actions sometimes do not involve planning ahead and accepting the consequences of your possible actions. In some cases at least, the spirit of calling something “voluntary” is violated even if the term somewhat loosely applies. But how do we distinguish those cases?

Aristotle and Plato both say that behaving uncontrolled with respect to the emotions is actually in a way giving in to reason – it is “intelligent” behavior, even if inappropriate or just plain wrong. The idea is that temper is rational in that it is open to the dictates of reason in a way the appetites aren’t: cognition is going on even if reflection isn’t.

As Aristotle puts it, temper relative to reason is like a hasty servant to its master, or a dog barking at someone approaching the home. The hasty servant runs out of the room before hearing everything said and then fails to carry out the instruction. And the dog is on alert even before it knows whether the visitor is a friend. Both reason and sensory appearance can cause an emotion and temper is not only a quality of the act, it is a source of it, it’s a feeling and a mental event.

Thinking back to the anger situations of the soldier and the businessman, in such circumstances either reason or appearance (or both) will indicate something like “unprovoked aggression” or “insult” and temper, as if having reasoned out this sort of thing is a good cause for “going to war”, moves immediately into hostile mode. So this “incomplete thinking” is in a way temper following reason.

On the other hand, in a case of too much appetite, (the ‘kid in the candy store’), all appetite needs is for perception to say “pleasant” and you hatch a plan to get enjoyment even though you just ate. While appetite drives you immediately to seek gratification for the sake of gratification, a person who loses their temper, while open to reason, doesn’t always exactly “plot” the satisfaction of temper. It’s in the service of reason, misunderstood.

Aristotle’s Answers

The “separation” we see in a weak person’s action is often missing in the behavior of the intemperate one. While the intemperate person is wholly in the moment, the weak one is fully aware and methodical in their choice. When you get down to it, what Aristotle says about the emotions is that some emotions really are counter-voluntary. This means that his ethical theory and others like it has good reason to assume that some emotional acts are counter-voluntary. Therefore there’s a big moral difference in doing something wrong based on an emotion that is fundamentally counter-voluntary. And as we’ve noted, in some cases its just going to be the case you will experience a counter voluntary emotion.

Now if you act from an anger of such violence that you “see red”, you don’t know what you are doing. And if you are incapable of knowing what you are doing, but later regret what you did, then clearly you acted counter-voluntarily. (If you didn’t regret it, then it sure seems like the outcome matches what you would have willed.) What can we do with that?

Aristotle defines the emotions as “all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgment and that are also attended by pain or pleasure”. This cognitive (thinking-centered) definition allows a three-step process by which to examine emotions and understand their impact. And it should give us some insight into how we can develop a strong understanding of right and wrong. He asks us to ask:

1. What is the state of mind of the (e.g., Angry) person?
2. Who do we usually get (angry) with?
3. On what grounds do we get (angry) with them?

Answering these questions gives Aristotle this definition of anger: an “impulse accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself and one’s friends.” But how does it help us understand right and wrong?

First, thinking seriously about people you are dealing with or observing in this manner will train you to be a better judge of character, temperament, motive and tendencies. Second, I believe it tells us that what’s notable about the emotions is how powerful their felt experience is bound to be on certain occasions, and how this is still intimately tied to our cognitive abilities. Third, it helps us understand that akrasia, which might on the surface look like people choosing to do what they know will hurt them, is at least in the cases of certain emotions, not that at all. In the case of being enraged it’s a quick solution to what appears to be a life and death threat – whether, as in the case of the soldier the potential for physical death, or in the case of the businessman, the potential for social or societal “death”.

It is up to those of us who really care about right and wrong to fairly understand what type of person we are dealing with, what type of context they are in, and what the likelihood is that their emotional response is controllable before we determine whether they acted good or bad, and how to punish them if necessary.

There’s still a lot more to be said on right and wrong, but for now we’re done with Aristotle. Next time we’ll begin on Lucretius’ discussion of mind, which develops what Plato and Aristotle started in a highly scientific manner and will allow us some more insight into how to make the judgments we need to make to both be good and to know good.