How to Be an Epicurean

Darwin’s contribution, to my mind, was not just to think out how natural selection might work, but to show that it could be considered a lawful process rather than one based entirely on chance. For the constantly repeated accusation against the ancient Epicureans was that the beauty, intricacy and functionality of the many forms of life could not arise from the random motions of atoms. But, in Darwin’s view, the breeder who seeks to improve his or her flock of sheep or hunting dogs, or the pigeon fancier who presents his or her fluffy tailed or brightly feathered specimens to other fanciers, is employing a technology, and wherever a technology is successful, there we expect to find laws of nature. Nature, too, must be employing a technology to create the succession of living forms of the past near 4 billion years.

To be sure, nature is not aiming to improve any individual species or the livestock or biomass of the planet itself. She is not trying to make animals or entire species faster, smarter or more beautiful. In fact, nature is not trying to do anything. But she mercilessly eliminates some members of each species who aren’t keeping up with the others in producing, and in some cases raising to maturity, offspring who will have their own offspring. As a result, the face of living nature changes in ways we can often explain. Species have appeared and disappeared over the eons, and for this to have happened, there must be laws of nature underlying these changes. Chance – or what we think of as chance, namely coincidence – nevertheless plays a role. Many organisms perish, not because they lack strength, speed, cunning or good metabolisms, but just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A good example is the class of dinosaurs that just happened to be inhabiting the earth 65 million years ago when it was hit ‘by chance’ – though fully in accord with the laws of physics – by an asteroid that wiped them all out.

The Lucretian account of the formation of the cosmos and the evolution of animals, and the Judaeo-Christian account of the divine creation of the world, were recognised as rivals from the early medieval period onwards. Their combat has been long and persistent, but also somewhat hidden from view, which is why Darwin receives too much credit for thinking out the basic idea of evolution by natural selection and too little credit for realising that variation was the key that could solve the problem of the origin of new species. The rivalry was not for a long time manifested in open debate because of the severe criminal penalties attached to blasphemy, a capital crime in earlier periods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and because of the ubiquity of censorship in many parts of Europe.

Why were ideas about the origins of life so dangerous? It was thought that if too many people began to take seriously accounts of the natural origins of life, they would cease to believe that they were created by and responsible to the God who had created them. If they stopped believing they were responsible to God, they would stop believing that obedience to God’s commands and their rulers was obligatory and that disobedience would be harshly punished. If they stopped believing that obedience was obligatory, they would become libertines, criminals and revolutionaries.

Today, the fear that motivated execution for heretics and resulted in the banning, confiscation and burning of scientific books takes a different form. It is not fear of revolutionary violence that explains the persistence of Creationism and intelligent design theories. Some Creationists would probably like to overthrow their secular governments by force of arms and replace them with theocracies. The fear is rather that if the Epicurean–Darwinian theory is true and intelligent design false, divinities and religious texts are not sources of moral authority, and eternal life is not the reward for faith. In that case, there is no reason to obey the Ten Commandments or all the moral ordinances of one’s own church. Moral anarchy, by which Creationists usually understand homosexuality, adultery, abortion and divorce, and the breakdown of the family and society, will result.

If the divine-command theory of morality were the only option, and if the inescapability of death actually spoiled our lives, worries about the social and psychological effects of accepting evolutionary theory might be justified. But it was Darwin himself, drawing on a long tradition of secular British moral theory as well as his own observations of birds and mammals, who first argued that certain forms of altruism characterised group living animals, contributing to their survival. Conscience, or a moral sense, would inevitably arise, he declared, in any social animal that had developed intelligence comparable to that of a human being.

More recent research on primates and young children has confirmed that the moral sentiment of empathy and the disposition to help others, along with a preference for fairness, are to some extent prefigured in our evolutionary ancestors and wired into us from birth. These endowments can be strengthened and extended, as Darwin saw, through formal learning, or weakened by experience and indoctrination. And despite having no conception whatsoever of the descent of one species from an entirely different one, the ancient Epicureans had a serviceable theory of natural morality that I’ll explore in Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo). They showed how it was possible to live cheerfully and ethically as a mortal.

3

The Material Mind (#litres_trial_promo)

The spirit … is born with the body, develops with it, and succumbs with it to the stress and strain of age.

Lucretius

Even if you are not tempted by Creationism, you may well wonder how conscious awareness and the power of perception and thought – mind or spirit – could arise from combinations of material particles. In keeping with their sparse ontology of atoms and void, the ancient Epicureans declared the soul – the principle of movement, sensation, experience and thought in living beings – to be composed of a special sort of atom. ‘Soul atoms’, they proposed, were especially small, especially mobile and very lively. They pervaded the limbs of the human body, enabling us to think, feel and move. Unlike the soul of Christian and other theologies, the Epicurean soul was not immortal or an object of special care and concern by contrast with the body.

We feel and know that we are wholly united with our bodies, says Lucretius. ‘The spirit’s interpenetration of the body through veins, flesh, sinews and bones is so complete that even the teeth are given a share in sensation, as is shown by toothache, or the twinge caused by icy water, or the crunching of rough grit concealed in a piece of bread.’ Too much wine has the effect of ‘confounding the spirit within the body’. Now, ‘the limbs become heavy; [the drunkards] reel about with staggering steps; the tongue drawls, the mind is sodden, the eyes swim’. In an epileptic fit ‘the spirit in every part of their frame is so distracted by the violence of the seizure that it surges and foams, just as the waves of the salt sea seethe beneath the furious force of the winds’.

Because body and mind are entirely interwoven, the body cannot live on and experience sensation without its mind, and the mind divorced from the body cannot produce any thought or movement. At the moment of death, the soul particles escape into the surrounding atmosphere without causing any immediate change in the weight or shape of the body. ‘It is like the case of a wine whose bouquet has evaporated, or of a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air, or of some object whose flavour has departed.’ The death of the body most certainly means the permanent annihilation of that body’s mind.

The Mystery of Consciousness (#litres_trial_promo)

The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, who had no problem with the Epicurean account of the origins of plants and nonhuman animals, famously balked at taking the same view of humans. Where plants and animals are just unconscious material machines, human beings, he argued, are material machines that also possess an incorporeal, immortal soul that endows them with conscious awareness, free will and rationality. Each human soul must have a divine origin. Not only did this claim excuse him from having to try to explain consciousness, free will and rationality in mechanical terms, it enabled the rest of his basically Epicurean ‘corpuscularian’ philosophy to make it past some of, though not all, the censors. (Despite his extensive references to God and the incorporeal soul, his books were viewed with considerable suspicion and for a time appeared on the Index of Prohibited Books of the Catholic Church.)

Descartes’s official theory of the special human soul put him in good and extensive company. The majority of the human race believed in his time, and the majority still believes, that the soul is a something that lives in the body. The soul is thought of as a permanent, indestructible entity that can survive the death of the body. Not only can it survive, it can reattach itself to a new living body – either the resurrected body of the person who died, or one of their descendants, or an animal of another species – where it will continue to see, feel and think to the extent permitted by that body. The Epicurean of today will, however, insist that the soul is not able to detach itself from its original body or attach itself to another unensouled human body. My death, she supposes, will be the end of all my experience and thinking, and it will not be the start of some other being’s experience and thinking, except in the sense that some of the particles composing me may eventually find their way into another organism.

But if we don’t have immaterial and potentially immortal souls or minds, how can thought, experience and voluntary movement be explained? No one today can take seriously the idea of soul atoms. As we see it, there is something about how my living body is put together from individually lifeless and thoughtless particles that enables me to be conscious, aware of my environment, subject to pain, able to initiate actions, to reflect on myself and the world, to make plans and decisions, and to build and create. Nothing more than a brain, composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of subatomic particles, located in an animal body is needed for experience, thought and voluntary movement. And it is not a foregone conclusion that a brain is necessary for feeling and deciding. Other biological structures found in living beings, or even other structures or programs that could be placed into computers, might make thought and feeling possible.

The Evolution of Consciousness (#litres_trial_promo)

It is currently thought that consciousness may be widely distributed in nature. There is little doubt that mammals and birds have experiences and feel emotions, and the sensation of pain must have appeared very early in evolutionary history. As difficult as it is to imagine the experiences of a gecko or a spider, many animals, including fish, reptiles, cephalopods like octopi and squid, and even insects, have a good claim to awareness of a sensory world of flavours, odours, sounds and visible, tangible objects and substances.

Still, it might seem incredible that consciousness and all our mental powers, including rational decision-making and creativity as well as perception and feeling, could arise from purely physical underpinnings, from processes in our brains that work according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The alphabet analogy goes some way towards explaining how individual elements – letters – can give rise to composites – words and sentences – with new qualities. But we may still wonder how, from the ultimately real colourless, odourless, tasteless, silent particles and forces, consciousness can present to us a world of flavour, colour, scent and sound.

No one has ever explained, scientifically, how we can be aware of a world and why we experience the qualities we do – why the scent of roses is as it is, and why certain wavelengths of light are correlated with the experience of red rather than the experience of blue. No one has ever explained how I can initiate an action voluntarily and deliberately. Nevertheless, the Epicurean of today asks: which is more likely? That whether we can ever explain it or not, consciousness and mentality arise from purely physical underpinnings, nothing more being required? Or that a non-physical entity lives in us somewhere and, when connected properly to a functioning physical brain, enables the possessor of that brain to think, feel, perceive and decide?

A more tractable question than ‘How does conscious awareness arise?’ is the question of why conscious awareness is useful. Developing lungs or wings enabled prehistoric animals to exploit particular features of their environment: to move from the sea onto the land where there were new things to eat, or from land into the air, where many predators could be avoided. But what does having awareness, consciousness of a world and, with it, knowledge of how my body is related to other bodies enable me to accomplish what I couldn’t accomplish if I were a well-programmed unconscious machine? With robotics constantly improving and developing remarkable recognition and navigation skills, this question is highly actual.

To see why, despite technological advances, consciousness might be necessary for many living things, consider the simple robot known as the Roomba. The Roomba is a disk, about 16 inches in diameter, with two independently operating wheels, that gets plugged into the wall to charge. It then runs around your floor sweeping up crumbs and dust. According to its literature, it is able to ‘change direction upon encountering obstacles, to detect dirty spots on the floor and to sense steep drops to keep it from falling down stairs’.

The Roomba does only one thing, but it does it reasonably well: it forages for dust and dirt. Successive generations of Roombas evolve, because consumers want and will pay for upgraded models with fewer problems and more capabilities. It is, however, not a machine that transforms raw materials into energy and work. It does not use the dust and dirt it collects to keep running. Because it can draw on an unlimited supply of electricity from the wall to recharge its batteries, it does not need to be self-sustaining. It is highly dependent on its owner for continuing operation, for it can get stuck under furniture and run out of charge.

Now imagine we want to build a robot that forages for food outdoors on variable terrain, rather than for dust and dirt on flat indoor surfaces, and that it will convert this food into the fuel that powers its movements. It now faces certain dangers, not only from sharp rocks and precipices in its environment, but also from heat, cold and rain that will destroy its electronic components. It must avoid consuming non-food substances. It must be efficient in expending its energy if it is to survive, because the amount of food it can find, consume and metabolise for power is limited. This robot is mortal. It can just wear out, like the Roomba, through friction and corrosion. But it can also ‘die’ if its energy needs exceed the amount of food it is able to find, consume and convert to power, or if it fails to detect a lethal danger. It may also be attacked and killed by another robot that can consume its body for fuel or replacement components, or by an irritated human being.

Using present technologies, this robot will have very complex software. It will need to perceive the difference between food and non-food that closely resembles food. It will need a memory to avoid wasting energy searching in places where no food was found recently, but some such places may become good sources of food in the future, and it will need to remember that. In order to know when to start foraging and when to stop, it will need sensors that monitor its energy needs. It will need a decision mechanism that can make critical choices, such as the choice to continue its food search even when its energy stores are so low that it may ‘die’, or to abandon the search to conserve energy and to wait for food to replenish itself in the environment.

Now let’s imagine that the robot can reproduce. It will build copies of itself that accidentally vary slightly. Either it must build full-size copies of itself or smaller variant copies that will grow as they consume nourishment. If the former, it will expend large amounts of energy; if the latter, new software will be needed to direct growth. A robot that exists among other robots competing for the same food and shelter and competing to be a faster producer of little robots will have to be endowed with better competencies than theirs. If it is a sexually reproducing robot, it will also need to be able to identify potential ‘mates’, and to perform courtship behaviour that is successful in inducing the other robot to cooperate.

By now it should be clear that it may be impossible from an engineering point of view to pack all these competencies into an unconscious machine operating on chips that is only the size of a Roomba, or to pack them into a unit the size of a mouse using only Roomba-type materials and structures. However the mouse is doing all that a Roomba does, it isn’t doing it with Roomba-type materials and structures, and it is probably conscious. The mouse’s ability to have experiences, to see, to recognise places and things, to remember locations, to make decisions, to choose mates, to feel the emotion of fear that enables it to avoid cats and boots, and the emotion of love that moves it to care for its young while they are small will make it an efficient and competitive organism. If evolution can tap into the laws of nature that make consciousness possible, the mouse will not need the fancy electronics and tremendous bulk and complexity that a foraging and reproducing robot would need if built with unconscious technology.

When we look at a human brain, a soft, lobular structure roughly the consistency of oatmeal, it is impossible to imagine it producing experiences and ideas. The case bears no comparison with, for example, looking at the liver, another soft, lobular structure, and wondering how it can produce liver enzymes; someone can no doubt explain this. Yet we know that the patterned excitation of the three trillion neurons in the average brain gives rise to what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls ‘the feeling of what happens’. Perhaps this is accomplished through the classical mechanisms of physics and chemistry, but an emerging trend is to propose that evolution has tapped into quantum mechanics. If organisms can tap into the laws of hydrodynamics to swim and fly efficiently, and the laws of action and reaction to push off from the earth in locomotion; if they can use photons to see, and to organise their circadian rhythms, why should they not be able to tap into quantum mechanics to master some of the challenges of life?

We tend to think of consciousness as all or nothing. We suppose that either a conscious organism experiences the world just as I do or that it is just an insensate machine. But this must be wrong. There must be forms and degrees of consciousness that are only somewhat or hardly at all like mine, as well as forms that are very like mine. If the nervous system first evolved to co-ordinate movement, we can imagine that a side effect of having just a little bit of conscious awareness – perhaps for pain or scent – could give an early organism an advantage and that nature continued to add on as new ways of gathering information from the environment through light or sound or scent were invented and new perceptual and emotional motivations assisted with the tasks of living.

Philosophers and neuroscientists continue to debate whether consciousness is accidental or intrinsically useful, whether it extends to invertebrates like the bee or the oyster, and whether it is only present in animals with brains of a certain complexity. The Epicurean can only follow these debates with interest, never doubting that the mind is, at any rate, a natural thing whose existence is dependent on the smallest particles and subtlest forces of the physical world.

4

The Story of Humanity (#litres_trial_promo)

The human beings who lived on earth in those early days were far tougher than we are … [T]hey were not easily affected by heat or cold or unaccustomed food, or any physical malady. During many lustres of the sun revolving through the sky, they lived random-roving lives like wild beasts … What the sun and rains had given them, what the earth had spontaneously produced, were gifts rich enough to content their hearts.

Lucretius

Although they belonged to the highly developed civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Epicureans were fascinated by the recognition that human beings had not always lived in cities or practised farming, industry and commerce. They were aware that their ancestors had formerly lived in families and tribes with little political organisation. They understood that they had only later come together into federations, empowered kings and magistrates, and enacted laws and systems of punishment for offences and crimes. Relying on the manuscripts of Epicurus, as well as on the knowledge of his contemporaries about the distant past, Lucretius thought deeply about the origins of civilisation, and in the fifth book of On the Nature of Things he narrated the story of humanity, drawing important conclusions about technological progress, human happiness and political oppression that deserve our continued attention.

The State of Nature and the Rise of Civilisation (#litres_trial_promo)

Lucretius describes the earliest phase of human life as dangerous but in many ways attractive. Adults lived as solitary foraging animals (presumably carrying or followed by their children). Many were ‘caught by wild beasts and provided them with living food for their teeth to tear’, while others died of their wounds ‘as no one knew anything of medicine’. But, says Lucretius pointedly, ‘Never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many thousands of men marching beneath military standards; never did the boisterous billows of the ocean dash ships and sailors upon the rocks.’ People died of famine, but not of surfeit; they got poisoned accidentally from eating the wrong thing, whereas ‘nowadays they make away with themselves more expertly’.

Fire was not stolen from the gods, as the Greek myth of Prometheus had it, nor was it a divine gift. Rather, Lucretius explains, forest fires were frequent in those early days, caused by lightning or the friction of tree branches rubbing against one another. People figured out how to capture, control and preserve fire, and this marked a turning point. They grew used to warmth and drew together to live as families in huts. They learned to cook their food, and living with women and children made men gentler and more obliging. Human language, which Lucretius saw as just another form of animal language, was invented, along with crafts such as plaiting and weaving. Although they fought with stones and clubs, early humans could not do each other much damage. There was relative equality and relative freedom without priests and judges to lay down the laws and threaten punishment.

Lucretius’s reconstruction has been largely validated by archaeologists and students of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Anthropologists have noted the ‘preference for equality’ in small and simple societies and the resentment of anyone who begins to act in an aggressive manner. There may be a headman in larger tribal societies, but his main function is to negotiate with outsiders, not to make rules for insiders, and he does not normally distinguish himself in dwelling or dress. How, then, did human beings make the transition from living in small, relatively egalitarian groups to oligarchies and imperial bureaucracies? In these political structures, wealth and power are concentrated in a small number of hands, and a very few rulers make decisions affecting the experiences and even the survival of millions of their subjects. For, as Lucretius emphasises, though he perhaps exaggerates the uninterrupted harmony of archaic life, warfare was unknown. All motivation to attack the neighbours was lacking, as well as effective weapons for doing so.

Lucretius is vague about how this happened. He supposes that ‘those endowed with exceptional talents and mental power’ invented new and admired practices and that kings appeared who rewarded their favourites and built cities. The invention of money brought in a new political era. ‘Later, wealth was invented and gold discovered, [which] robbed the strong and handsome of their prestige; for as a general rule … people … follow in the train of the rich.’

In Lucretius’s account, archaic society came to an end with a chance discovery, the discovery of the metals: copper, gold, iron, silver and lead. People observed how, in the immediate aftermath of a forest fire, metals oozed and ran out of rocks and solidified in new shapes. Here was a material that was far harder and more durable than wood and that, unlike stone, could be formed as one wished. Human ingenuity took over, and with metal technology came agricultural slavery, class divisions and brutal conquest. ‘With bronze they tilled the soil, and with bronze they embroiled the billows of war, broadcast wide gaping wounds; and plundered flocks and fields; for everything unarmed and defenceless readily yielded to the armed.’

Contemporary archaeology bears out Lucretius’s view that cities, trade and warfare evolved rapidly with the introduction of metal technology. With the plough and draft animals, human beings could now till vast fields and grow, store and trade grain, the new staple of the diet of the poor. With saws and hammers they could build houses, walls and fences to keep people indoors and livestock segregated. Carts for trade and travel could be furnished with wheels and drawn by domesticated animals. Tools applied to mining brought up precious metals and gems. With the new abundance of food wrested from the soil, populations grew and markets expanded. The art of shipbuilding made long-distance travel possible. A vast gap began to open up between rich and poor. The rich were those who persuaded or forced others to work for them in the fields, to manufacture tools and ornaments, to build dwellings for them and to fight their battles. The poor were those who had no choice but to enslave themselves to the rich.

This process involved gains and losses. Life became safer in some ways, and the countryside was beautified, ‘attractively dotted with sweet fruit trees and enclosed with luxuriant plantations’. Village life remained idyllic, Lucretius thought. People would lie in the grass in friendly company and ‘there would be jokes, talk and peals of pleasant laughter’. Bedecked with garlands of flowers, they amused one another with simple, rather clumsy dances. Singing was a good remedy for insomnia.

At the same time, everything got worse in other respects. Shipbuilding made long-distance warfare possible. Iron spears were far deadlier than Stone Age weapons, and there was now more to fight for. In the cities, the rich began to vie among themselves for wealth and power, and a period of bloodshed and chaos ensued. ‘[T]he situation sank to the lowest dregs of anarchy, with all seeking sovereignty and supremacy for themselves. At length some of them taught the others to create magistracies and established laws … The reason why people were sick and tired of a life of violence was that each individual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly than is now allowed by equitable laws.’ If humans had not invented law and bureaucracy, that would have been an end to our species. But they did. Criminality was suppressed, enabling wealthy civilisations to advance further with the building of roads, the erection of palaces and the creation of artworks.

As we now know, ancient artisanship produced objects of utility and beauty for trade and domestic use, but only by making use of slave labour in huge urban workshops. The concentration of settled populations fostered learning in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other sciences, as well as the great feats of ancient engineering. It also produced a parasitic upper class that lived from the hard labour of others, enjoying their rents, tax revenues and inheritances, but at the same time gnawed by anxiety over managing and retaining their wealth. Whether rich or poor, Lucretius observed, ‘human beings never cease to labour vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares, evidently because they have not learned the proper limit to possession, and the extent to which real pleasure can increase’. Ambition, aggression and corruption render societies that appear externally to be flourishing internally rotten.

Authority and Inequality (#litres_trial_promo)

There are two especially important features of Epicurean prehistory. First, the Epicurean account invites us to reflect on the nature of power and political authority. Second, Lucretius’s account of the gains and losses of civilisation will resonate with anyone concerned about the effects of technological progress and development on human well-being and the well-being of the rest of life on our planet.

Political authority, in the Epicurean view, does not belong to nature. It exists ‘by convention’. That is to say, there are many forms of government, all of which depend on some form of human acquiescence, and what we define as criminal behaviour and what penalties we impose on lawbreakers are matters of human decision. Rules such as ‘an eye for an eye’ do not constitute natural justice; they rather reflect good or bad decisions about appropriate punishment. Penalties such as a certain number of years in prison for kidnapping, murder or fraud do not fit the crime in any objective sense. They have simply been deemed appropriate by lawmakers, sometimes for no good reason.