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Marcus Hedahl on the Mind Body Connection (Episode 124)
763 Plays8 months ago
How should modern Stoics understand the relationship between the mind and the body?
In this conversation, Caleb Ontiveros and Marcus Hedahl discuss Stoicism and the mind-body connection. They walk through issues of theory and practice that the tight bond between our minds and bodies brings up.
This episode has both significant practical upshots and takes a few detours into theory on the way. Let us know what you think.
(04:18) The Body Influences the Mind
(11:23) Your Body Is Not Up to You
(13:33) Independence
(36:21) There's No Separation
(46:04) Getting Theoretical About Lekta
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoa Conversations and Guest Marcus Hidal
00:00:00
Speaker
Are you not shamed that you care so much about accumulating money, honors, and reputation with so little concern about wisdom, truth, and the improvement of your soul? It's very easy, especially when we're idealistic young people protected in a college environment to be like, yes, obviously that's what matters. That's the person I want to be.
00:00:22
Speaker
But how we act in different situations demonstrates whether we are actually affirming that value or not.
00:00:31
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Andaneros. And in this conversation, I speak with Professor Marcus Hidal. Marcus is a philosophy professor at the US Naval Academy and a return guest. You should be sure to check out episodes 14 and 50, where we talk about happiness and handling others' non-Stoic behavior.
Mind-Body Connection and Modern Stoicism
00:00:59
Speaker
Today, we're going to be talking about issues that arise with the mind-body connection. But before that, I should always welcome you back. Thanks for being up to chat again. Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me, Caleb. I always love these discussions and learn a lot and enjoy thinking through some of these issues.
00:01:19
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. So we were ping-ponging a few different possible discussion topics for our conversation. We settled on this issue surrounding the mind-body connection. So there's been a lot of new work establishing what the mind-body connection
00:01:40
Speaker
amounts to how to think about how our environment our body different aspects of our body of course influence how we think and the reverse and there's an I think there's an open question, you know, what do Stoics today do with this information? So that's we're going to dive into some of the potential problems potential upshots with the mind-body connection and
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, just go from there, see what we stumble into. I think this is an area both Marcus and I are vividly thinking about and thinking about, you know, how do you make sense of stoicism today with current beliefs, with current findings about things like the mind-body connection.
00:02:22
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely.
Stoicism and Scientific Advancements
00:02:24
Speaker
I like to think about this, so Lawrence Becker has a book called A New Stoicism, where he considers thinking about how stoicism, we can take the tenets of stoicism and think about
00:02:39
Speaker
in a modern world. And he starts the book relatively early on. He has this great quote where he says, it would be interesting to try to imagine what would have happened if Stoicism had had a continuous 2300 year history. If Stoics had to confront Bacon and Descartes, Newton and Locke, Hobbes and Bent, Hugh and Kant, Darwin and Marx, and the vicissitudes of ethics of the 20th century.
00:03:05
Speaker
It's reasonable to suppose that Stoics would have found a way to address the false elements of the doctrine when the scientific consensus did. They would have found ways to hold their own distinct view even as it changed from being plausible given the best scientific knowledge about the world.
00:03:20
Speaker
And so it's interesting for those like you and I, Caleb, who find something admirable about Stoicism, something more than just intellectually interesting, something that we think ought to guide our lives in some ways, to think about how, if at all, a philosophy that was at its fullest, at its richest 2,000 years ago, would have to adapt if we accept certain scientific things as the most likely candidates
00:03:49
Speaker
that are out there. And so I think the mind-body problem is a subset of those issues. Becker actually talks about it as one of the issues that he thinks of modern stoicism and new stoicism would have to embrace. And that seems true to me as well. I'm not sure if I would arrive at quite the same place he does, but I do think that we would have to change in some minor ways stoicism to make sense of that. And I think it can still be distinctly stoic nonetheless.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think let's walk through different ways of stating the mind-body connection or mind-body problem and see where that takes us. So I think first that you can think of as its weakest form. Perhaps you have what you might call the influence thesis. There's this idea that the body influences and shapes our minds.
Stoic Psychology and the Concept of Ascent
00:04:43
Speaker
And here by body, of course, we just mean our organism.
00:04:49
Speaker
And there are different ways to sketch out what influence looks like. But I think at this level of detail, the problem is not so much
00:05:01
Speaker
a challenge for Stoic philosophy as something that, you know, the fact that one should keep in mind when one is aiming to be a good Stoic, as it were. So just to do a little quick blurb about Stoic psychology, according to the Stoics, you're always getting these impressions and then you use your mind, your ability to reflect and assent to those impressions and then the output of
00:05:28
Speaker
your ascent is going to motivate actions, form beliefs, desires, and so on. I think I'll go ahead if you want to add any to that picture. I was going to say, I think that that's important to keep that in mind. In the stoic psychology, in the stoic framework, you're always set with an impression and then you can nod your head, you can ascend to that impression or not, an impression.
00:05:54
Speaker
entails a proposition, right? There's a certain claim about the world that an impression is supposed to be making. The example I often use in class is, you know, don't think about pink elephants. It turns out it's very difficult once you say that to not think about pink elephants. What you can do is if
00:06:10
Speaker
if there's a notion that there are such things in the world as pink elephants, you don't have to assent to that, right? Even if you have a picture in your mind, right? Whether impressions are pictures best out of his pictures, but they're definitely claims and we can either assent to them or not. I think another thing that's really important when you're thinking about the stoicism, and I think what makes stoicism distinct is that the strength of the assent that matters. And so,
00:06:38
Speaker
If I would say family is more important in money, in the abstract case where you say which do you think is more important, it's very easy to do that and to assent that family is more important than money. In the very real case in which I'm offered a great deal of money and it's going to put me at odds with my family, it might be harder to assent to that impression.
00:07:02
Speaker
And that's part of what makes the stoic framework, I think, so distinct and important. They don't think of knowledge or beliefs as things that are atomic and completely context-independent. Rather, knowing that virtue is good and vice is evil and all else is indifferent,
00:07:21
Speaker
It's how many different contexts. When the philosopher is lexicon, they would say a counterfactual robustness, right? How many different possible situations would you still believe that to be true? Would you still ascend to that impression? I think that's an important bit to say as well. I think that's important to keep in mind when we start thinking about the limits of the mind-body issue.
Belief Strength and Practical Challenges in Stoicism
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the – this idea that you can have stronger or weaker beliefs that are the output basically of patterns of ascent, patterns of reflection is something that Stoics use and use to explain things like weakness of will, for example.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So then I guess we have this idea, of course, what I call the influence thesis, the non-mental world, the body influences and shapes our minds. And you can see how this would work in the sense that, of course, our bodies are going to
00:08:22
Speaker
play a role in what impressions we receive and they're also going to play a role in how we reflect on the world. You know what we bring to bear when we're reflecting on these impressions and all of that is going to be shape how we assent to impressions or not. That doesn't mean
00:08:42
Speaker
They're determining them, but on this weaker idea, the Stoics might say, and this is why you get some practical advice about ensuring that your body is healthy enough so that you can reflect on the world accurately and so on. So I think that at the minimum, of course, the Stoics are going to say,
00:09:07
Speaker
your body's gonna shape your mind because it's part of your ways in which you engage with the world. We are embodied creatures. Certainly, yeah. And the idea that we're creatures that go through death and decay, right, and change from Heraclitus, that's important. I think Marcus really is more than anyone kind of focuses on these notions of we should keep our bodies
00:09:31
Speaker
We should worry about them. He says in book five, number 33, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood. That there's this idea that we should take care of our bodies. He says in book seven, number 60, what the body needs is stability.
00:09:48
Speaker
So there is this idea that we should worry about that influence. And I certainly don't think that the Stoics, it would be really counterintuitive if they didn't think that there could be some influence and probably were lots of influence. You might think that's precisely why the Stoics have all of these
00:10:12
Speaker
reminders and preparations is because they do recognize that there are going to be these influences, both societal and bodily influences, and that we ought to prepare ourselves when times are calm or stiller at the beginning of the day, we ought to remind ourselves that these things will happen. And so thirdly, the influence is something that I think the Stoics recognize, and precisely that's why we have all the
00:10:40
Speaker
all the preparations, right, is precisely because
00:10:43
Speaker
we recognize the limitations of our physical form and our social neighbors. Right. And I suppose we can't say that the Stoics recognize that we are embodied. You know, they think we're there, they were materialists. So they thought the mind ultimately is embodied in some aspect of us, perhaps ancient Stoics thought that was, you know, somewhere in our chest, we had something to do with the breath or something of this sort. But whatever those details, they think they'd be happy to update the philosophy. Yeah, certainly.
00:11:13
Speaker
about the question, where exactly is the mind embodied? I think that before we move on to some of these other versions of the thesis, make the problem a little bit sharper, something that just came to mind is that, of course, Epictetus says in the handbook, think about what's up to you, what's your own, and one of those things that is not your own is the body. And I think that's that reminder that
00:11:36
Speaker
so much of our internal impressions are not up to us. Our bodies themselves are not directly under our control. They're not things we select. They will succeed or fail as fate has it. Absolutely.
Practical Applications of Stoicism through James Stockdale
00:11:53
Speaker
And those are things that the will itself will assent to or not as a harm.
00:12:03
Speaker
Certainly at the Naval Academy, the quote that we refer to most frequently is, lameness is an impediment of the leg, but not the will, and remind yourself of this with respect to everything. In large part, that is because that quote is etched on the base of the statue of Atmos Stockdale, who
00:12:21
Speaker
probably one of the more famous proponents of stoicism in the 20th century and what he was famously lame after ejecting from his plane during the Vietnam War and when he crashed to the ground and he never got proper medical treatment. So he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. The first time I actually taught a stoicism class at the Naval Academy,
00:12:51
Speaker
66% of the class had ACL surgery that semester. So that was also our unofficial motto that semester. So absolutely that's helpful to point out that while we're talking about this influence, we do need to recognize that the Stoics would very clearly say that the part of you that ascents or doesn't to whether something is let's say a harm or has value.
00:13:14
Speaker
is taken to be, in some ways, independent of the body. We don't need to get into the distinctions of property dualism to say it's dependent upon, but distinct from the body, I think, is probably captures, I think, what the Stoics had in mind. Right, right. Yeah, so I think there's a whole conversation about what's the practical upshot about this influence idea? How do Stoics manage it? But I think something that we want to
00:13:44
Speaker
get on to tackle here is, how can you make this problem perhaps even sharper for the Stoics? And something I think that I've been asked before is just this question about independence. So you have this famous line, usually paraphrase of Viktor Frankl, that I think captures the Stoic attitude well. You know, you have there between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause is where we find our freedom. And I think that maps onto the Stoic philosophy pretty well. But there's this question
00:14:13
Speaker
Do you always have that pause? Do you always have the ability to respond? And here's where we have an idea.
00:14:22
Speaker
You could call it the independence thesis. The ability to ascend to an impression is not dictated or determined by the body. And this is perhaps something that many would argue is a thesis that we now know is mistaken. And if that's true, there's a question. What is stoicism amount to then? What's the practical import for stoics today? Do you want to say more about that problem?
00:14:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's very well said. I mean, one of my favorite Panko quotes that captures that same kind of difference is that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of human freedoms, right? The ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances to choose one's own way, right? And the Stoics do seem to have that idea that you always have that choice to assent or not, to say that I've been harmed or not.
00:15:18
Speaker
And perhaps if we think that there isn't this complete independence from the body and the mind, right? Our body can influence our ability to do that in let's say some kinds, sometimes, then that's kind of, that starts to get to some of the problem. I mean, the first thing I like to point out as I'm walking through what seems to me a little bit of a problem is to point out that it's actually probably less a problem than we think.
00:15:46
Speaker
You know, the limits are often to our ability to choose, right? When our body just gives out is probably farther than you think.
00:15:59
Speaker
one of the goals of all kind of military training, but particularly kind of extreme military training and special forces is to point out that you can hang on and do much more than you probably think you can. I think anyone that's gone through basic training would say, yeah, I could go further than I thought. The modern kind of
00:16:24
Speaker
cognitive behavior therapy, which is becoming more and more kind of important is in many ways, based on a simple kind of a similar kind of idea that, that we can change our behavior in much more radical ways, even in kind of very ingrained patterns, right? So long as we do it in a way that is follows a certain procedure, right? Our bodies actually don't make all of our decisions for us, even when we have very ingrained kinds of issues.
00:16:59
Speaker
Sometimes I worry about putting too much stock in it because it isn't a fully scientific study. It was just meant to be more like a one of kind of interesting kind of aspect. And that was, there was, they took a small group of people, eight men in their seventies in 1981. And it was a psychologist named Ellen Langer. And she just made them for a couple of weeks act as if they were much younger. So she took out all the mirrors
00:17:13
Speaker
One of the kind of most extreme cases of this
00:17:28
Speaker
So they were, they were reminiscing about earlier eras. They played Ed Sullivan on the TV, right?
Mind-Body Influence and Ellen Langer's Experiment
00:17:33
Speaker
They only played the Beatles. That's all they could do. You know, they talked about Johnny Unitas and Will Chamberlain, right, as current events at the, at the, at the table each night. And, and what's fascinating is after a few weeks of this, you know, they showed metal, greater metal dexterity. They sat taller, right there. And the weirdest one of all is that their site actually improved.
00:17:57
Speaker
And that seems kind of odd to me, but it turns out that, I mean, it wasn't like they had to network glasses anymore, but their site had actually improved over a couple of weeks of acting this way. So I think that we should recognize that the limits of this influence are actually probably farther than we often think, but certainly they exist. And I think we know that. And I think the
00:18:21
Speaker
I think Stockdale actually offers us perhaps the greatest notion of that when he says, like, I recognize how useful the Stoics were, but I recognize that they were limitations. And so he has one of my favorite quotes in his book, Reflections of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, where he talks about
00:18:42
Speaker
when you feel yourself sinking into a funk, right? When you feel like you're no good, when you feel like you're responsible for all of this, you have to force yourself to acknowledge the reality of your current situation, right? That you were tortured. And he means, actually, he's talking here about people who did things, who said things that they didn't wanna say, right? People who voluntarily took on torture rather than do certain activities, right?
00:19:12
Speaker
He found that they would break at some, that they all would break, that there was no one in there that never broke after physical torture. There is a point at which the mind just can't hang on and you will do lots of different things to make the pain stop.
00:19:32
Speaker
But he says, you must recognize as well the truth that can also be exaggerated into fantasy and followed off another cliff. When you cite denying any personal responsibility, you're on the opposite mudslide to self-destruction. In that case, you know in your harder parts, it could have done better. That there is no magic point when you are suddenly transformed from a person of free will to a blameless victim of outside forces. Would that life were so simple?
00:19:57
Speaker
And so I think the real upshot of this is the Stoics don't need to deny this idea that at some point that kind of space that Franco was talking about, where you can choose, might be taken away because of impacts on your body. But that space is probably pretty far. And even in that case,
00:20:22
Speaker
So long as there's some sort of choosing going on, then there's something that you can strive to do better at, right? Unless it is literally
00:20:32
Speaker
using you mechanistically, right? The way we would if, you know, I put someone's head in front of your foot and hit the end of your knee like the little, like the doctor does when they check your reflexes, right? And so maybe there is a point at which you can do that with your brain, right? Neurosciences developing, there may be certain things we can do. And if we can do that, we literally can treat you objectively and take out any choice.
00:21:02
Speaker
then there's probably nothing that we can say, but there's also probably nothing we can say about your moral responsibility or having to do better, right? I think what makes psoasism interesting in a modern sense, once you accept this, is that you then have to start asking, well, okay, well, even then, right, in all these cases where it's short of it,
00:21:25
Speaker
I still might be able to do better and there might actually be a place for a kind of stoic ideal still,
Modern Stoic Sage and Scientific Influence
00:21:33
Speaker
right? That I should still hang on and do better, that I should still do these, try to do the best that I can. It does maybe mean that we have to give up on the possibility of a stoic sage.
00:21:52
Speaker
It definitely means that we have to give up on the stability of a stoic sage. So even a sage would have to worry about losing their facilities and remaining perfect, or having their body manipulated in such a way that they would no longer make all their decisions perfectly.
00:22:15
Speaker
But I think if we get back to Becker's original kind of charge, that still seems something distinctly stoic to me. I think it allows you to, I think it's actually a more interesting picture because it's not a simple all or nothing, you can always choose it, right? If I think about things like great pain,
00:22:41
Speaker
or rewiring your brain through some sort of addiction.
00:22:49
Speaker
What we need to recognize is actually that much as Stockdale said, would that life were so simple, right? Absolutely, we should probably treat those issues as medical conditions, not failures of determination or grit or resilience. But at the same point, we ought to recognize
00:23:15
Speaker
that there is still choices involved, right? And that we need to specifically recognize that or we will fail to treat the person fully. If I act badly out of great pain and you just cure my pain and you don't talk to me about how to make amends for the way I behaved badly,
00:23:42
Speaker
or at least if I don't go to the people that I wronged and give them the opportunity to forgive me, then I'm probably not helping me in the way that I need to be helped. And so that I think is what is at stake here is that it brings in this complexity that I think actually makes
00:24:07
Speaker
makes the philosophy more interesting rather than less and more tenable rather than less. Yeah, that's interesting. So I think it's almost looking to me like this is more of a practical problem than a philosophical one. But let me see. I'm not sure if you'll agree yet. So we start with this idea. We have this independent thesis. The ability to ascend to an impression isn't dictated or determined by the body.
Determinism and Virtue in Stoic Philosophy
00:24:35
Speaker
which initially looks like a problem, but then there's also this point, well, the stomachs are a determinist generally, so why would they, and they have their solutions to that problem, so why would they care whether you're determined by the body or something external? What matters is that you take an Epictetus's language responsibility, or what's your own, your ability to reflect, sense,
00:24:58
Speaker
And they agree that sometimes the sage, they're gonna be overpowered by impressions, or they're going to react in a certain way. There's that famous story about the sage who felt fright, that immediate reaction when they thought their ship was about to sink, and then people poke at him and say, you know, so much for being a stoic. And he says, look, this is just like an input-output type response.
00:25:26
Speaker
So maybe this is not exactly, I'm curious if you agree with this claim. It seems like maybe the core problem is captured in your story of Stockdale. It's really how much can you transform yourself? Or is there just gonna be a limit set by the body or the world? Yeah, I mean, so that's a good question about whether it's a practical problem or a philosophical one.
00:25:56
Speaker
probably more practical than philosophical, but I would take it to be philosophical in the sense that it does change what we think of in terms of a sage. So the famous story about fear or seasickness and how what the sage felt was a proto emotion, right? So it was given the impression
00:26:20
Speaker
that death would be a harm, or he was presented with an impression that to be lost at sea would be something that would be disvaluable, but didn't actually assent to it, right? Was just presented with the impression, right? Everyone's going to be presented with an impression. The example I often give my students is if someone puts an ax in your back, even the sage is going to momentarily
00:26:48
Speaker
be presented with the impression that what has happened to them is a harm, right? Or is wrong or is disvalue or is brought, is to be more than merely disperferred, right? Is wrong and harmful. And losing something of value. I think that the mind body problem does at least push back a little bit on that. And it does say that perhaps
00:27:15
Speaker
that even the ascent can be problem, right? That even the ascent might be controlled in a certain way. If I know that there are ways that I can externally modify the way that you form beliefs or think about value,
00:27:34
Speaker
by manipulating your body, then that might start to seem like more of a philosophical problem. Now, perhaps in the real world, those kinds of extreme cases aren't likely, or even Stockdale is a pretty extreme case, right? And even military training for many people is a pretty extreme case, the kinds of cases that they'll go through.
00:27:57
Speaker
But severe pain is not. Most of us at some point in our life are going to experience pretty significant pain in a way that doesn't just present you with the impression, but may, well, not just make it harder, but may at some point make it impossible to assent to certain impressions about this not being a harm.
00:28:23
Speaker
And so in some ways it's not that different, because as we say, none of us are sages here, right? Even those that think that the sage is possible, Seneca said famously a sage is as frequent as a phoenix. If we think that phoenixes actually never occur, which I think most of us do, then maybe that isn't such a big change. But it does make us, it would change the way we think about our bodies, especially with more of us living
00:28:54
Speaker
into ages in which our mental capacities are severely degraded. And it does make us think more about the kinds of protections we might need to have for ourselves, both physical and emotional and frankly, character kinds of thing. I might view my problematic
00:29:20
Speaker
thoughts about those who live near me more significantly if I recognize there may be a point at which I won't have the same kind of filter, right? So I might think that those kinds of beliefs about my neighbor who always encroaches on my yard are even worse, right? They're already bad, I shouldn't have them.
00:29:49
Speaker
their unvirtuous, their blatant value on things that they aren't. But if I recognize they'll come a point at which I'm not just merely mildly troubled inside and able to quickly calm myself and not say anything to my neighbor, that I will just spout off. That might also change my attitudes about now. So
00:30:12
Speaker
Is it practical? Is it philosophical? I mean, it is still, I think, and we haven't talked yet about your MITS thesis, but I think it is philosophical in that sense. And I think it's philosophical in the sense of,
00:30:29
Speaker
whether the sage is a possibility that's really, really hard and we're determinist and maybe I'm never gonna be a sage, or whether the sage is actually an asymptotic ideal that no one's met, not Socrates, not Cato, and they just came much closer.
00:30:47
Speaker
I think that that's a distinction. And if I have to worry about my body in the future, in part because I recognize not only that these things might make my ascent more or less likely, but might not make it possible. That might also make both a practical and a philosophical. I don't know if that answers the question, but I think the good question is probably more practical than philosophical. No, yeah. I suppose to say that it's a philosophical theoretical problem, I think you did have
00:31:17
Speaker
at least Diogeny Solaris, I think, reports that there's this debate between the Cleanthes and Chrysippus. And Chrysippus held the view that, if my notes about from Graver are correct, held the view that virtue can, in fact, be lost, either in cases of severe, what they would call melancholia, which we would probably
00:31:45
Speaker
label as a severe mental disorder or drunkenness. And then the thought, but Clanthys did not think this was so, and Clanthys is generally considered to be closer to the traditional study view, if you will, on this picture. Yeah, I will have to go back and look at that. Yeah, so I mean, part of the issue here too, so maybe this is part of it, how much it's a philosophical
00:32:14
Speaker
So we often act as if there is a canonical view, but as you point out, right, especially when you're talking about, the interesting thing about the bait between Clint and Crispus is they were both heads of the school, right? So it's not merely like Aristotle that became kind of a heretical view, right? And that the Stoics kind of moved past and isn't considered a paradigmatic Stoic view.
00:32:41
Speaker
But both of them were able to speak for the school. So even though there was one school in Athens, there were different heads. And obviously, the view changed from Zeno to Cliantes to Crispus to further heads. It got modified based on what seemed reasonable, the way it was pushed by other theories. And of course, by the time you get to Roman stoicism, there's no even central figure. And so saying that there's a distinctive stoic view is perhaps a mistake. And I'm falling into that too.
00:33:12
Speaker
But I think perhaps one of the things the mind body problem can do is maybe settle those disputes in a way, or at least perhaps make one of them much more likely, or much more in line with what we think about the way that the mind and body interact based on the best science of today, right? And so maybe we wouldn't continue to have that debate about whether or not you could lose virtue. Maybe we just have to say, yeah, you can lose virtue.
00:33:38
Speaker
Right. Um, but that's a good point that I really like that. That's nice. Yeah. I suppose the way that.
Virtue and Agency in Extreme Conditions
00:33:44
Speaker
Chris has thought this would happen is essentially, and he would say that in these cases, the sage would stop becoming a rational agent. That's because of the extent of their condition. So in that sense, they could lose.
00:34:01
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. I mean, well, so the easy case is anyone in a persisted vegetative state could lose their virtue, but they are not making any choices anymore. I think what dementia, I think what severe mental degradation does is it pushes us into recognizing, as Stockdale says, that it isn't just a simple
00:34:28
Speaker
There isn't a simple off switch from fully virtuous, fully rational human being to not making any choices anymore. And in fact, one of the things I find fascinating in bioethics kind of tied to that is a recognition that we shouldn't treat patients as competent
00:34:49
Speaker
all in or not, that we should recognize that they may still well have all kinds of ability to make choices about their day and their life and what kind of physical therapy they would prefer, even if they don't lack the mental capacity to make all of their mental decisions, for example.
00:35:08
Speaker
And while legally that can be problematic, you're either transferring that power to another agent or not. It's all in. You can still operate as if that person has the kind of ability to make all kinds of choices. So flossed running Brock makes that case in a book called Deciding for Others, which I think is true. It's one of the ways that we think about that kind of
00:35:34
Speaker
loss of agency, that it isn't all or nothing. It's the same thing with kids with gaining agency, right? It isn't all or nothing. The same thing maybe for all of us at all stages in our lives.
00:35:47
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. I suppose that brings our attention back to the practical questions that you mentioned, how do you handle those cases where you think you'll be in a middle condition as it were, less rational, less function. Yeah. Well, is there anything else you want to say about the independence thesis?
00:36:13
Speaker
I don't think there's anything else I want to say about the independence thesis. I think you're, do we want to move on and talk a little bit about the myth, which I really like your
Myth Thesis and Mind-Body Unity Challenge
00:36:22
Speaker
thoughts on the myth. So one other potential problem I've been thinking through for some time is
00:36:28
Speaker
I've called here the myth thesis. The idea is there's no deep separation between our mind and body. The ways of thoughts that put up a barrier between the two take us away from reality in some way.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I think you can see this in the work of this fellow named Matthew Crawford, a modern philosopher. Some Buddhist thinkers seem to have this kind of view, and then there are a few different thinkers, maybe in the continental tradition. You have Martin Heidegger, and then also some direct realists, you think.
00:37:03
Speaker
this distinction between mind and body is an illusion and perhaps worse than mere fanciful illusion in some way takes us away from the real world. And to try and make this
00:37:18
Speaker
more relevant for the Stoics. The Stoics have this view that your mind is always being presented with impressions and you're always managing impressions instead of, and this might be the argument that you'd get from someone like Matthew.
00:37:36
Speaker
Crawford, instead of directly engaging with the world in a tactile way, almost a non-propositional way, the kind of way in which you think about the world in a more intuitive, physical sense. Probably you can think about athletes or craft, people practicing their craft. Just interact with the world, not thinking so much, thinking about, I do something, there's an impression, is this impression true or not? Should I ascend to it? And then moving on, which almost suggests that you can interact with the world
00:38:05
Speaker
like it's a computer like you know you're just presented with these different icons that represent parts of the world and you interact with those icons but never directly make contact with it so I suppose there are two parts of the Smith thesis first that there's is no deep separation between ourselves and the world you can engage with it directly but also these ways of thought perhaps stoicism can
00:38:31
Speaker
can make it, you know, they're mythical in a sense and that's bad. They can take us away from directly interacting with the world and thinking too much at the verbal level, at the analytical level, what have you. Yeah, I think there's something really to that and I think what it does is, and this is a really philosophical, deep issue because it points to one of the central differences between Stoicism and Buddhism.
00:39:00
Speaker
So the way I often frame it is that the Stoics are trying to eliminate all desires beyond things within my control. That is for my own virtue and choosing well. And the Buddhists want to do away with all desires at all, including that. In fact, in the Buddhist framework, the last desire is often the desire for enlightenment, right?
00:39:24
Speaker
One of the quotes from one of the most famous sutras is right before the Great Enlightenment. He says, this is a good place to sit for a striver intent on striving, right? That it's all about he's trying to become this thing, and it is only when he gives away that striving that he can reach enlightenment itself.
00:39:46
Speaker
And that seems true to me, and that seems a real challenge. And I can see why that would push some people towards the Buddhist path. I will say for myself personally, I love Crawford's work, particularly, you know, Shop Class of Soulcraft, where he talks about how we engage with the world the way we need to do this. And they're probably,
00:40:15
Speaker
aren't that many places where I need to assent or not. And we as philosophers, and particularly philosophers educated and trained in the Western tradition coming from Greece and Athens,
00:40:31
Speaker
I've probably been corrupted in ways that the Stoics would caution against, focusing so much on propositional knowledge, focusing so much on knowledge of particular facts, and thinking that that's what's going on. I still think that there can be places where we really do need to either assent or not.
00:40:56
Speaker
And it really is the way that we interact with the world is through acting on what has value and deciding what has value, what matters, what is meaningful if we want to get back to Frankel.
00:41:12
Speaker
the sox would talk less about meaning, but they would certainly talk about harms and values. And I think that they would say that those are the places where these kinds of ascents are the most important.
00:41:27
Speaker
and precisely why, getting back to what I said at the beginning about the strength of the ascent, precisely why that matters is because these are the kinds of things that are very easy to say and assent to in the calmness of the classroom, that you ought not care about money, reputation, and power, but rather care about
00:41:55
Speaker
the state of your soul and the kind of person that you are. Socrates has that famous bit in the Apology where he says, you sir are an Athenian, a citizen, the greatest and mightiest city in the world.
Socratic Wisdom and Stoic Values in Practice
00:42:08
Speaker
Are you not shamed that you care so much about accumulating money, honors, and reputation with so little concern about wisdom, truth, and the improvement of your soul?
00:42:16
Speaker
It's very easy, especially, you know, when we're idealistic, young people protected in a college environment to be like, yes, obviously that's what matters, right? That's the person I want to be. But how we act in different situations demonstrates whether we are actually affirming that value or not. And I certainly don't affirm that value all the time.
00:42:43
Speaker
I don't know anyone that does, but I think that in those cases is where the stoic picture makes more sense, right? In kind of the everyday crafting the world, right? Engaging with the world, building things, taking things, right? Viewing things differently then.
00:43:02
Speaker
maybe kind of an overly intellectual, even viewing it as having propositional content at all, right? When I'm walking along the beach and thinking that I'm presented with propositions might be a really alienating way to experience the world. There are at least some claims about what has value and what doesn't, what matters and what doesn't, what can harm us and what doesn't. And I think those are the ones
00:43:31
Speaker
that where the stoic framework and picture matter so much. So there might be actually very few things that we can know in the stoic framework. And the stoics would say we only know things when we are sent to that impression in all possible situations.
00:43:46
Speaker
So it might only be that virtue is good and vice is evil and all else is indifferent, right? It might only be, you know, things like justice more than money, right? It might only be, there might only be a small handful of claims we can make. It's really then about the practical problem. And they might even be so obvious in general that everybody would agree to them.
00:44:12
Speaker
Without even much debate, justice matters more than money, all things being equal. Well, then how does that apply to this case? Well, then we might have lots of fights and things like that. But it's really about being able to endorse that in all cases, even when there's a great deal of money for me and a small bit of injustice for someone else on the line.
00:44:36
Speaker
that matters. And so I think that is a real challenge for stoicism. I think it's worth thinking about a lot. I can see why some people are going to say, yeah, and that's why I'm a Buddhist or a Taoist might be Crawford might be more in the Taoist camp, but I think there's probably some subset of value where there is something propositional underneath and our actions do demonstrate
00:45:02
Speaker
how we endorse what has value and what has meaning and what is virtuous.
Mind-Body Unity and Emotional Experience in Stoicism
00:45:08
Speaker
Right. Yeah. There's a sense in which the Stoics do agree there's no deep separation between the mind and body. The mind is
00:45:20
Speaker
embodied and they just think the mind is so much larger than some other philosophers would have it. It's involved in emotion. It's involved in actions. Our decisions themselves are endorsements of propositions.
00:45:36
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe that's a good point, Caleb. Maybe that's a point where I might be more willing to question because they think all of our actions are based on impulses, which are based on a same kind of like when I reach the example Tad Brandon gives is when I reach for the coffee cup, it's based on a belief that there's coffee in the cup and that the impulse, the actual move is based on
00:46:03
Speaker
those two propositional contents and acknowledge them even when I'm not aware of it. And maybe there's a lot of action in the world that isn't of that form.
00:46:20
Speaker
Yeah, I have to think more about that. That the idea that all of our actions is based on impulses, which are a kind of belief, is something maybe I'm less comfortable with. And maybe it's why I push to these things that really seem belief-driven and really seem ethical for the stoic framework, because that's where it seems to have a lot more cachet. That's a really interesting question about whether all actions have that same sort of duality and involve that kind of
00:46:51
Speaker
involve our mind in any way. Sometimes they might just, well, embody in a much deeper way. Right.
Propositional vs. Intuitive Actions in Stoicism
00:47:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that suggests that
00:47:06
Speaker
a potential modification or a clarification of stoicism would be to allow impressions that are not these verbal, analytic-type things and ways of thinking, ways of thought that are not necessarily, sometimes it's called left brain literally, involving literal thought, literal representation and so on, but making back reviewers.
00:47:34
Speaker
And part of that too, and I have to think more about this, I mean, and here I'll just admit to my own limitation and knowledge of the Stoics in terms of their logic and as much in their psychology about whether it's propositional in the sense that in which all beliefs and actions are propositional in the sense in which let's say 20th century philosophers view it to be propositional.
00:48:04
Speaker
Because that does start to seem to be a bit much, but I just don't know enough about if they would somehow parse that slightly differently. That while it might not actually be propositional, it could be expressed propositionally or something like that. That even though I'm not acting on those beliefs, we could express your actions via those beliefs. He must believe that there's coffee in the cup and have
00:48:33
Speaker
some sort of desire for coffee. But even there, I think that those kind of examples push that a little bit because there are certainly times when I know for certain, well, not in a stoic sense, but it seems like I know that there isn't any liquid in the cup because I just reached for it a few minutes ago. And there are certainly times when I reach, even when I don't have a desire anymore and just purely out of
00:49:00
Speaker
I don't know, I'm taking a breath or the cup is there. It's an affordance of some kind. And so there probably are certainly, there probably are some limitations in the stoic philosophy of action that might be worth thinking about.
00:49:15
Speaker
Yeah, my impression is that aesthetics are generally very explicit. You have terms that signify, there's something signified and that's signified via the lekta, right? And that lekta is generally interpreted as a propositional matter, which is why they thought animals weren't rational and so on, because they didn't have that we're necessarily for.
00:49:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that makes sense, right? Given the idea that that kind of abstraction is going to be necessary for both their logic and their thinking of what makes us distinctly rational and what makes us distinctly able to value in the same way. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. That's worth, yeah. Hmm.
00:50:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's maybe some interesting, an interesting suggestion around whether lectin needs to be propositional or not, or if you can have conceptual content without language. And there's this source of debate, which might, I think could rescue parts of the stoic picture.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's another distinction though. Yeah, so how much of that, I'm just playing on my own mind, how much are those two problems related, right? So how much is our embodied nature and kind of maybe that this kind of distinction between the mind and body is not as significant as maybe the Stoics would make and how much of the idea that what's really going on is deeply propositional.
00:50:54
Speaker
How much are those influence each other? It doesn't surprise me that they go together, right? Especially given all the other things that Stoics say about reason, about what makes us who we are, about animals.
00:51:12
Speaker
Um, I'm not sure if they, how, how linked they are. Got it. Got it. That's an interesting question too. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you could think I grabbed the coffee cup. It's not, doesn't have anything to do with perception as such, rather at least not understood in this, uh, propositional or perhaps non-conceptual type way. Uh, but instead have to do with desires, reflexes in a particular way, a kind of.
00:51:39
Speaker
uh, embodied life that's just not captured by stoicism yet. Yeah. Cause I see it as a thing to be drunk from, right? Almost like I see the world more like Alice in Wonderland. You're right. You know, it's just, I see the world with certain kinds of like very least suggestions, right? Grab me. I see stone. I mean, I'm a Midwest kid, so I see certain stones that call out to be skipped. Right.
00:52:08
Speaker
And not all stones, very specific subset of stones that are, whose telos is skipping, right? Yeah, there's a very certain subset of bull mascot that is meant to be, not most of them, but. Nice, nice.
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think from the comment about the focus, especially on values and that needing to be the kind of thing where you reflect on them, assent to them, or not thinking about what harms you, what benefits you, is an important one, I think important. Both Phil saw theoretical and practical response to this idea of the myth. Whether or not it ultimately ends up being a myth, that's where the focus
00:52:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's at least the highest ground on which to defend it, right? This idea that, you know, as Cicero says, I have to decide what kind of life I want to lead, what kind of person I want to be, that turns to be the most difficult question of all, right? And so if those kinds of questions about the kind of person I want to be, what kind of life I live in, what I think has value, about what I want to devote my heart beats to,
00:53:23
Speaker
what I want to sacrifice for. Those are things that seem to require the kind of reflection and the kind of endorsement that makes the picture make much more sense than kind of everyday action.
00:53:43
Speaker
And those are the kinds of things where I personally will hold out for the Stoic view over the Buddhist view, that there is something valuable in deciding well about what has value, in deciding well about what we ought to prioritize. Excellent. Well, I think that's a good spot to end. Thanks for coming again, Marcus.
00:54:14
Speaker
Oh, thanks Caleb. It's great as always, and I learned a lot from these and they're always fascinating to reflect on. So thanks. Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the app store or play store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more
00:54:41
Speaker
Stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.