Feeling Epicurious

This is not another post about consciousness and reality, though it does start off that way.

Even though for all sorts of reasons I think materialism is quite silly, that doesn't mean I don't find any value in it. Actually I agree with a very great deal of it; I think there is something out there, I just think that that is demonstrably different from what's in here. But in many ways I think maybe just simply agreeing that it's not all consciousness-all-the-way-down may be the more important point. Let's all gang up on idealists ! :P

Anyway, I much enjoyed this BBC article on the Epicureans. I don't know much about Epicurean philosophy at all (I don't seem to get a good impression of it from popular media) but I might have to address that. 

The Epicureans believed that even the contents of our minds – our thoughts and perceptions – are comprised of very fine atoms of a certain kind. On this basis they asserted that all perceptions are equally real – even dreams and optical illusions are real, in the sense that they are made of actual, material stuff just like anything else...  it reminds us that the contents of our screens, like the contents of our minds, are not less real than the external sense objects we perceive, just different. As the philosopher David Chalmers puts it, in two helpful phrases : "information is physical", and "virtual reality is genuine reality".

I certainly agree with Chalmers that VR can constitute something "meaningful" in the emotive sense. The medium doesn't much matter for this (with some caveats I'll return to at the end). Whether we receive information via a book, a letter, a trained parrot, television, braille... none of this has any bearing on the emotional implications. And I would agree that VR has some level of existence : it must do, because we can't respond to something that doesn't exist. But :

These bits are physical things – in early computing they were housed in sequences on punched cards, now they are embodied as voltages on tiny transistors. Different sequences of bits (ones and zeroes), different digital information. Different shapes and arrangements of atoms, different bodies.

Here I don't think it can be said that information itself is qualitatively the same as physical objects. Information (VR or whatever) is something mental. It's only when a person reads a book that information arises. Without a mind to read it, there's nothing but atoms of text; digital information can be instantaneously summoned, dismissed, manipulated in ways impossible for physical media – and mental imagery is vastly more flexible. I won't dwell on my preference for a dualist interpretation here except to note that you can view in this in either a very weak or much stronger way :

• The weak interpretation is that things have different aspects which might be ultimately no more fundamental than labels. A table is one collection of atoms, a hedgehog is another. From our everyday perspective it makes sense to say that these are qualitatively different, even though at a very fundamental level they're basically the same. 
• The strong interpretation is that this means mind and matter are utterly irreconcilable and have totally different modes of existence. Arguably this makes it impossible for them to interact by definition.

I think it's on very safe ground to say that minds certainly show qualitatively different behaviour to atoms in the weak sense, thus leaving open the possibility that they could be unified with matter in some unknown, possibly unknowable, "neutral monism" way. As to the strong interpretation I remain deeply conflicted. On the one hand, I reject the need to insist that fundamentally different things can't interact (for reasons given at length here and here), but I also don't necessarily see that we must absolutely insist that because things appear to be qualitatively different then they really must be so at the most fundamental level.

In short, I don't know what the nature of reality is. And I get a bit worried about those who do.

Nevertheless, to return to the BBC article, the Epicurean approach of treating all perceptions as having, let's say, equal validity rather than equal modes of existence, has a lot going for it.

Epicurus believed everything reduces to atoms and void – including our mind (psyche) – and so rejected the conception of the immortal soul, which had been central to prior religious and philosophical thought. The gods, he held, may exist – but even if they do, they have nothing to do with us, and hence give us no moral obligations, no divine law, and no higher purpose. Therefore, the best thing you can do, and in fact the highest good, is to pursue a life of "pleasure" [my quotation marks].

Despite how that sounds, the Epicureans did not feel that this consisted in a life of sex, drugs and dithyrambic poetry (Dionysiac party songs). Rather, they felt, the pursuit of pleasure would be best effectuated by a simple life... For pleasure, as they conceived it, is not something you add up, cumulatively – rather, it is defined negatively, as the absence of pain. The term for this freedom from pain was ataraxia — literally, a state of not-being-shaken-up, a freedom from turbulence.

Preserving your ataraxia was a matter of balance. Should you drink some wine? Sure! – a little. Should you have sex? Yes! – some. If resisting these urges disturbs your mind, then satisfy them with moderation – there's no moral superstructure barring you from doing so. But don't overdo it, for it will shake you up, disrupting your ataraxia.

Which closely aligns with my own practise of "moderation squared". Do everything in moderation including moderation itself. It's fine if you occasionally go to excess, in fact if you don't do this you're missing out on the full range of experiences. And of course the more extreme the activity, the less you should ever do it. Likewise, it's generally a good idea to try anything once, but it doesn't make sense when you've got an extremely high confidence that you won't enjoy it or find it worthwhile.

This brings in the article's main point, which is about how we should behave digitally. The Epicurean view of reality may have led to their approaches to life, but quite honestly, I don't think this actually matters. What matters is not the nature of stuff but how it affects us. Whether it's all solid physicality or idealistic fog, the important thing is how we respond.

We do not seem to be living in an age characterised by "freedom from turbulence". And nowhere is this more evident than in the context of our information culture, and in the chaotic maximalism of our digital experience...  a radically Epicurean course would be to avoid the online world altogether – to completely eschew the extraneous stimulations of the body-mind that come with adding layers to your reality. This would be in keeping with what we're told of Epicurus himself, who spurned the life of the polis (the Greek city-state), with its rhetorical intrigues and social complexities. Instead, he dwelt with his followers in a community called the Garden. 

Well here I start to get a bit more worried. I get that sensory bombardment becomes overwhelming, but this "Garden", particularly given a refusal to participate in the outside world, sounds an awful lot like a commune or even a cult. And that's no good at all, invariably just exchanging one rat race with another. But then the author asks, "how can we go about cultivating Epicurean gardens in our digital spaces? How to dwell online in pleasure and peace?". And this implication of a Garden as a temporary retreat, that I think has much more value.

Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash coined the term "informational hygiene", which has since come to refer to the discipline of keeping your search history, and therefore your mind, clear of digital disinformation. A related concept is technologist Clay Johnson's "information diet". Both of these terms, hygiene and diet, recall Epicurean ethical categories — hygieia (health) and diaita (habit, way of life) – and emphasise the physical-material impact that digital information has on our minds. 

This I like very much. As in, let's say, the analogue world, some interactions are valuable and others are toxic and destructive. You can never avoid this completely, but you can manage it. You can avoid the sewage and stay digitally healthy. Don't avoid digital reality if you don't want to, but treat it just like every other aspect of your life. Live the digital life you want to live. 

As an aside, the idea that we must break down filter bubbles and echo chambers is one I'm increasingly skeptical of. It's a good idea to foster productive discussions, yes, and definitely a good idea to prevent outright violent radicalisation. But we don't go around insisting that everyone in real life actively goes around soliciting discussion from people they really don't like very much. We let this happen naturally. Perhaps something similar would work well for digital hygiene ? That would mean, of course, simply ditching a lot of the algorithms for suggesting people we might like to connect with.

But of course just as books are not phone calls, so digital social media has concerns all of its own compared to town halls and postal letters :

Unlike a regular garden where we simply choose what to include and exclude, the algorithms of online platforms create a feedback loop between our own curatorial choices and what gets presented to us in turn. If choosing to follow someone on Instagram is like selecting and planting a flower that you're consenting to see and smell on a daily basis, on TikTok, the flowers are cast unbidden at your gate, an atomic bombardment at the threshold of your perception. You may think you're the gardener, but it's equally the algorithm, and the garden is you!

This is where the materialist metaphysics of Epicurean thought becomes especially relevant. For, from such a perspective, you are matter experiencing itself, and in the realm of digital experience, you are specifically informational matter experiencing itself. Therefore the digital content you curate, and that which is curated for you, become the actual stuff of your mind – vestigia, as the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius calls the material images that make up consciousness: "footprints" of the perceptions we have encountered, the content we have put into our brains. 

And this is not just one-directional: it is not only a matter of what you put in, but what you put out. Every digital gesture – every comment, post, message – may be conceived as an addition to a garden that is shared. A provocative tweet, for example, may indeed merit a profusion of indignant @replies – but does that make the garden any better, or worse ? There may be individual pleasure in sharing them, but the question would be whether that pleasure is sustainable for the digital environment.

Oooh, I like this. There's clearly a need to vent that must be balanced with the need to cultivate, and that's not at all easy. If I live my life largely online, then not going on a rant from time to time is directly equivalent to keeping stuff bottled up, and that's not healthy. But my need to be angry may cause more damage to other people, and with social media there's at least the potential (albeit hugely unlikely) for this to spread much further than in the analogue world.

The Epicurean ideal would be to make these additions with a maximum of care and intentionality, in order to maintain a minimum of psychic turbulence throughout the digital community. The question is not "online or offline ?" but "community or not-community ?" In other words, are we using digital spaces to connect with one another in the shared project of diminishing pain, or vainly attempting to escape reality and disconnect from ourselves ?

Thinking in this way cultivates a relational understanding that is ultimately ecological, revealing insights into how we can interact healthily not only with other people, but also with the built and natural worlds. It provides the basis for an ecology of information, where we might cultivate collective awareness of the material costs of our information systems (the energy it takes to power the internet), as well as its psychological costs (a consideration which is also ultimately material). 

It's very easy indeed to dehumanise people on text-based media because so much of the human aspect is already stripped away. This unique style has certain advantages (text can be in some ways a far more efficient information delivery mechanism) but of course it entails risks. We feel free to spew more hyperbole when the other guy barely seems real. And we might need to use more hyperbole because we can't convey the same emotions otherwise : we have to compensate for our lack of body language and tone of voice. 

Ultimately remembering that the recipient is every bit as human, every bit as conflicted, flawed and brilliant as anyone we'll ever shake hands with, isn't always easy. But this Epicurean admonition towards digital health and hygiene, treating all realities as equally valid, may at least help.