Within Reason - #154 Happiness: Epicurus' Ancient Guide - Jonny Thomson

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Jonny Thomson is a philosopher and the founder of PhilosophyMinis . He is on the Executive Board for the British Philosophy Association and is a staff writer at Big Think.Get Jonny's upcoming book, The Art of Enough: The Ancient Epicurean Philosophy of Finding – and Keeping – HappinessTIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Are Epicureans Selfish?05:30 - Why Epicureanism?10:31 - Who Was Epicurus?16:42 - Godless But Not Atheistic23:21 - Epicurus’ Metaphysics27:24 - Why Focus on Pleasure?35:29 - Epicureanism vs Utilitarianism48:59 - What About Immoral Pleasures?53:02 - Could AI be Epicurean?01:00:50 - The Experience Machine01:10:59 - Why Epicurus Didn’t Like Sex01:16:21 - Are Influencers Watering Down Ancient Philosophy?01:20:06 - Are You In Control of Your Happiness?01:26:33 - Epicureanism vs Stoicism01:32:36 - Epicurus on Death01:36:42 - Do We Have a Happiness Crisis? - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comSOCIAL LINKS:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkepticThe Within Reason Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168 - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

Johnny Thompson, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alex, for having me. I'm excited to talk, great you. Why are you so selfish? I'm not a selfish person. I think I am quite other-regarding, actually. I think I'm quite sociable. I think I'm quite friendly.

I have many friends, and I care for them deeply. I have family. I care for them deeply as well. And so I think, yeah, other people are very important to my happiness and my own individual pleasure. See, I think so too. You've always struck me as a very friendly and personal person. Personable person.

There's my celebrated literary wit. And yet, you are ascribed to a philosophical school, Epicureanism, of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, which is known for being about seeking one's individual pleasure and avoiding pain, and that being the singular barometer by which you judge whether you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing. And so I just wondered if you could give us a sketch of how that works. Well, it's one of the many misrepresentations of Epicureanism throughout history as being a very kind of naval-gazing, self-obsessed, egoistic philosophy. And it's not that at all.

I mean, before we even dive into the philosophy, if you look at the biography of Epicureans, let alone Epicurism. They were hugely friendly people. And they lived in this thing called The Garden, which was the name of their school. And it was the closest thing you could probably come to some kind of egalitarian community back in the ancient world. They were slaves, there were foreigners, they were women. And of course, they were Athenian citizens as well. It was the closest thing to some kind of commune, really. And the Epicureans, even by their critics, were recognized as being very friendly people.

Augustine, for example, talks out as being very genial. and Cicero and talking about being very, very nice people, because they placed friendship as being one of the greatest things in life. They said that, Epicureus says that, of all of the things that nature provides to make us truly happy, the greatest is friendship. Because friends were deeply important to them, and they were called the Friends of Epicurus. It was kind of like their collective noun, really, the friends. So, yeah, that's the biographical interesting thing about, biographically interesting thing about Epicureanism, but philosophically, no, they're not, they're not selfish because this, so nowadays we tend to make this very neat delineation

between selfish, selfless, egoistic, altruistic. But back in the ancient world, and I think it's obviously true today, because philosophy, I think, is timeless in this respect. That, that division would have been nonsense, seen as nonsense. It's there in Plato where he said, you know, a distinction between me as an individual and the polis, the city, the community or the culture in which I was raised would be nonsense. So, we might dig into it later on. EpiCunism is about pleasure and it's about minimizing pain. And so both of those matter when it comes to other people. That when we're minimizing pain, I think most people have a sense of a conscience and they are in some kind of anxiety.

I mean, I should say that when Epicureans are talking about pain, they're talking about mostly mental pain, what we might now call anxiety, distress, disturbance, and depression, what they're called tarrake, which literally means disturbance. And I think seeing somebody else in pain causes disturbance to most people, I think. So there's what we call a conscience today.

Of course, in ancient Greece, they want to call it a conscience, although you do see embryonic versions of the idea in Epicureanism. Right. when he talks about emotion as being important in terms of how we interact with other people. So I think there is an element of pain when people are suffering, particularly those who you love. So your close friends, if you, for example, bent over with a crippling stomach ache, that would also cause me pain.

Probably not the same degree of pain as you, for some kind of indigestive issue. But, you know, that would cause me distress. It would be terribly awkward. It would be awkward. You'd have to take over this whole episode. Yeah, I would say, guys, can we help out, please? but that alleviates my pain. It causes me distress to see you in distress.

And so I'll fix it that way. And then, of course, there's a pleasure with friendship. There's two kinds of pleasure. We can get into it later on. Epicure and there's what's called moving pleasures or kinetic pleasures and catastrophic pleasures or settled pleasures. And both kinds of pleasures are true of friends. We enjoy being with our friends.

We get drunk with our friends. We go to the football. We go running. We join book clubs. We go to weddings. We go on the dance floor, whatever. There's that kind of moving pleasure to friendship. But also, there's the catarralralia.

But also there's the catastrophic pleasure or the settled pleasure, which is just that you know that your friends will be there. You know that your friends are there to support you. And you know that when you're in the company of friends or family, although the division between the two is kind of blurred in Epicureanism, that there is a certain peace which comes of being on the sofa or around the table with your friends. I am at peace now being around with you, one of my friends, my philosophical. friends. Platonic friends. Yes, just to be clear.

You know, the Reddit can go crazy. Yes. Sometimes. We're kind of diving in at the deep end here to give people a picture of what we're talking about. And I'm always a bit unsure to what degree people are familiar with Epicureanism, even in like the caricatured version, because some people just might not have heard of it at all. But to give people a point of reference, epicureanism.

Epicurus is an ancient Greek philosopher and his thought is associated with pleasure. Like if you are somebody who's a bit of a glutton, who just live for yourself, who like drink and this all the time, somebody might call you an Epicurean. That's a very Epicurean way of living. But as with so many sort of popular, so much popular brandishing of ancient philosophical terms, it's not quite accurate, right? And so what we're going to do today is hopefully dispel some of this, but also give people a picture of what Epicurus is all about. So question one, you do philosophy minis on like Instagram and social media and it's going exceptionally well. Thank you very much. You work with Big Think.

You've got a book about Epicurus coming out. You talk about all kinds of philosophical ideas on your channel and people just love hearing you explain stuff from all over the place. Thank you very much. Why Epicurus as the book project rather than something else? It's a good question. The ancient Greeks have always been my area. I've always loved Aristotle and Plato and Stoicism as well. And Epicure has always been there floating in the background.

And then I've been kind of, you know how you end up in a certain destination? Just the career or your life just seems to push you somewhere. And I find myself talking more and more about happiness. I mean, kind of two reasons really. One is I find it interesting. And two, when you are a content creator, happiness does very well. I'm sure you found it yourself. if you do something about happiness or self-helpy stuff, you know, does very well.

So kind of like my careers force me here and also my kind of personal interest in the topic. And then I, you know, I've done lots of videos and talked about happiness and written about happiness a lot. And I kept feeling as though there was something big being missed. And that's the fact that happiness needs to feel good, that you need to, that happiness is something that we want, that we like. And I don't think that's talked about enough that, if anything, so there's this kind of slightly, cliched line which is rattled out by philosophers and psychologists often, which is that people when they talk about happiness often think it's about pleasure and happiness or feeling good, and they don't talk about the eudaimonic happiness, which is like flourishing and growth

and things. But I don't actually think that's true. I think, particularly in philosophy, I think we've gone too far the other way. We obsess too much on eudaimonic happiness and this idea of happiness over the course of a lifetime, happiness that is only recognized in hindsight, happiness, which is something which you only know about when you're dying at the end of your life. And I think happiness needs to feel good. And secondly, I think happiness needs to be something that we are aiming towards and that we are in control of. That's why I think the Antigreeks are very good. I think they said that we can find happiness and we can keep happiness. And so I was drawn to Epicureanism because it resolves both of those issues in my mind. It accepts that

happiness should feel good. It's associated with pleasure under Epicureanism. And you, are in control of your own happiness, which I don't think you see it much in the other Greek schools at the time, Stoicism, Platonism, cynicism, skepticism. And you definitely don't feel it in the Christian tradition, because in the Christian tradition, beatitude, is the idea that you find happiness in God and happiness is dependent upon God that you might get it or might not get it. So that's what would draw me to Epicureanism. But you're right.

Epicureanism is a term that people will have heard. In fact, we were wrangling with the title for the book because you have two problems, really. One is that you used to word Epicureus, you think you're going to get a cookbook and learn how to read, how to how to make a stir fry. But then, of course, the other problem is if you used the word pleasure in the title, like the pleasure principle or how to find pleasure or get the most pleasure out of life, you think, you know, you should be in the roped off section of the bookshop. It's a book of smut. Well, I think there should be a roped off section of the philosophy section where people like Apakiris should be because, you know, their ideas are so dangerous. Well, that's exactly what the Christians and the Stoics thought, because the other reason I think people, particularly following your channel, might have heard of Epicurus, is to do with religion. Because the word Epicurean is used twice in the religious context.

One is the Epicurean hypothesis, which is the idea that the world is just a cosmic accident made up of material particles. Atoms colliding, creating the universe, what we now might call a materialistic scientific worldview. And the second reason is the problem of evil. Epicurus is one of the first to articulate the problem of evil in the way we can understand it today. If evil exists, God is either doesn't know about it. He is unable to fix it or doesn't want to fix it. Or the gods, of course, back in the Greek world. So that's when your channel I'd have heard of Epicureus, but of course both are wrong.

Yeah. So Epicurus, we said he's ancient Greek. That's quite a broad category. Like when are we talking? Where does he fit into the story? philosophy. So third century BC, do you use BC or BC on your channel? I say BC because I'm a traditionalist and I say AD as well. Like I just accept it. It's like if we're going to have a problem, I get why people want to say like common era instead of like anodominy or whatever because

we're not Christian anymore. But like what are we just going to start like auditing our language and removing any sort of etymological like religious roots? Good luck saying anything ever. And also in some ways, it kind of makes a problem even worse, because by saying that the BC AD is the common era, it's kind of like you're normalizing and standardizing the Christian, you know, is it Bede? Yeah. You're doing the Tom Holland thing where you like so thoroughly assimilated Christianity that it's just like assumed as normal, which I think is more insulting to non-Christians than just to say that we're using a Christian measurement.

I mean, I'm not that upset about the, you know, the Gregorian calendar or the Julian calendar. I have no particular, you know, allegiance to any ruler or pope or anything. So it's fine. Well, that's the Roman alternative, isn't it, to have, you listed by emperors, like, you know, the second year of a certain emperor. Yeah, I suppose so. So imagine in the UK that would be, you know, this is the second year of the Blair government or the second year of the Starma government.

That's where you couldn't it be. I guess you'd know your politics bit better, wouldn't you? Perhaps, and to avoid confusion, we should just say that Epicurus lived in, what would it be like the ninth century before? Muhammad's flight to Medina? Yeah, exactly. On the Islamic calendar calendar. Nine centuries before Muhammad,

three centuries before Christ and in the century after Alexander the Great died, which is actually very relevant because Alexander the Great's empire, obviously it wasn't great for those he conquered and those who killed, but also it did bring a certain stability to those who lived under his empire. Empires tend to bring a bit of stability, which allows trade and allows philosophy to kind of flourish. In the years after Alexander the Great, there was great turmoil. war, conflicts, sieges, and, you know, people didn't know what was going on. And Epicurus and all of these, what we call now Eudaimonic schools, Epicureanism, Stoicism, cynicism, and skepticism,

are born in this very feebile age. Lots going on. In fact, Epicurus himself knew a lot of that kind of distress. You know, he was a colonist, he was an Athenian colonist. His family were on the island of Samos. And he went back to Athens when he was 16 to claim his citizenship and also to do his military service. when he was there, his parents were booted out of the island. And then he did various tours around different islands and places,

and he was kicked out of this place, kicked out of that place. And when he was in Athens, he was sieged by a person called Demetrius Polyocrites in 287 BCE. And, yeah, there was this horrible famine. There's a dreadful famine. There's a story where a dad and a son were in a warehouse and a dead rat fell from the roof. And the dad and the son fought each other for this dead rat. because it was so awful. But in this, there is a tale that the Epicurean garden survived by rationing their beans.

Epicurus himself, you know, opened up his kitchen and he gave every member of the friends the same amount of beans, regardless of who they were. Of course, anyone knows their Pythagoras would find that quite, well philosophically amusing because the Pythagorean were terrified of beans. They were scared of beans. It's one of their weird, culty things. They were scared of beans. Yes. Yeah. I don't know why.

People have lots of theories that it might represent, you know, the womb, the female body and things, and they were just scared of beans. In fact, there was a story that I think this Pythagoras himself was being chased by someone. I don't know who it was. And he, you know, they had swords out there about to kill him. And then he came to a field of beans. And so he couldn't run through the beans. And therefore he was captured or killed by these people because he was so terrified at the beans. Yeah, I mean, the Pythagorean said all sorts of very strange things.

You couldn't eat food which had been dropped. You couldn't, I think. That sounds like a good one. Well, yeah, I don't know. I've got young children and, you know, we're fairly loose with that rule. Fair enough. Depends upon how delicious the food is, I would argue. Yeah, sure.

And also how visible the germs are in my mind and whether how resistant to blowing. Yeah, I mean, that's the scientific approach, isn't it? There's always something weird going on with these guys. Did Epicurus have any weird stuff? No, but the garden, I mean, this is one of my problems with Epicurus. you know, I think you should have some certain problems. You shouldn't adopt a system philosophy wholesale, otherwise it just becomes, you know, a cult member, is that he did run his garden like a cult.

Right. It was, he insists on having, all of students would carry like some kind of image of Epicura, so they'd have the bust in their, in their rooms, they'd have to recite the teachings every day. And they would have rituals, lots of rituals every month, which is on the 20th, called the Icas in Greek. They would have a ritual meal. They would get together, which actually,

you know, I think it's a really useful thing to do. But they would also recite the lives of their friends. And he was the only one who was considered to be the wise master. And everyone else was below him and yet to work your way up to kind of get towards it and things. So there were cultish elements to the garden. And as I talk about in the book, though, while I don't believe that we should all live in cultish communes, I do see why he did it.

And that figures as I talk about in the book that ritual, habits, knowing where you have to be at what time. They are good for you. People like to know where they stand and they make you happy and they also release pain. They're stressed. So I see why he did it, particularly given that it was a godless religion. It wasn't atheistic religion, but it was a godless philosophy, I should say. Yeah.

around and doing some crosses and stuff now and again. You know, that kind of stuff is, you know, it's a, you know, aid memoir. Yeah, I think that's true. And people say that about religion all of the time. A couple of interesting things just jumped out at me. One is that, you know, Epicureanism is a godless but not atheistic philosophy. So they were essentially deists. They believe that the gods existed, but as irrelevant, self-obsessed things.

in the same way that you probably don't care about what the ants are doing across the road under a rock. The gods just have other things that they want to get on with. Yeah, that's fair enough. But then I'm also intrigued at the, I don't really understand exactly how the ancient Greeks conceptualized their gods. There's some famous paper or book that was written, you know, do the Greeks believe in their gods? And I can't remember who that's by now, but I'm sort of, I'm a little bit unclear on this. Like when we say that the Greeks had their gods, to what degree do you think they really believed in these like powerful entities

that were battling with each other? From what I understand, it's quite similar to today, that there is the god of the philosophers, there's the god of the theologians, which is what the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics would have talked about. But then there was also the god of the laymen. Why that's interesting for Epicurus is that we don't know entirely because it could have been slightly slanderous,

have not been, but his mother, from what we gather, was some kind of shaman, some kind of magical amulet seller. She would go around people's houses, you know, the regular people's houses and sell potions and things. And the rumor was, the story was, Epicurus would accompany her. And it was during that upbringing that he came to realize that religion was a source of anxiety and misery and suffering from most people. He thought it offered false consolation. It gave people, the fear of the afterlife, and the very real possibility that God could pop into the room right now and just say, Alex, you're completely wrong, change your ways or I'm going to kill you kind of thing. And in fact, there are even texts about how to recognise gods in your midst.

Like apparently they smell very differently to everybody else. Really? God has a certain smell. I didn't sniff you as we came in. No, no. Were I to sniff you, I could gauge your divinity. I wonder if it would be like pungent at night. though, that you wouldn't have to get up too close if you had a sort of godly smell.

I'd like to know... Zeus probably. How they figured that out, like, whether that's just sort of passed down. Yes, I don't know. I mean, folk stories, I mean, there's always a difference in there between how people actually live their religion, and practice their religion, how the philosophers and theologians actually understand it. Because to me, I sort of, I can't imagine that, you know, the average Greek would believe that there really were, like God sat at the top of a mountain.

From what I understand, yes, they did. But like actually, because you could just, surely you could kind of just go up the mountain. So did anyone try and like? I mean, you know as well as I do about how cults managed to change the,

or shift the goalposts when anything gets changed. I just always wondered if when I hear people talk about the gods, they are literally just, because these pantheons of gods, like the Greek gods, they're all gods of something. You know, you've got the gods of the god of,

thunder and God of justice and God of prudence and all this kind of stuff. And I just wonder the extent to which these are just personifications in the way that we might talk about Lady Luck or something like that. And we're just so used to it as a cultural touch point that if some historian thousands of years from now dug up a, you know, a gambler's diary and he was constantly writing. And then Lady Luck, you know, pushed the roulette wheel and gave me a 15. You might interpret that as the belief that there is this entity. I mean, ultimately, we'll never know, will we, because, you know, the layman probably didn't write many treaties about their actual belief. But I imagine, in my mind, it's quite similar to how it is today.

In the same way that many people who call themselves Christian talk about love, God is love, I'm actually quite similar in that respect, that God exists as a divinity, but also, you know, God is in the room kind of thing, you know. God is working through me. I'm on God's path. You know, there's a kind of mixing, isn't there, of divinity and every day. But anyway, yeah, so in the ancient Greek world, and also, of course, Socrates had been put to death about a hundred years or so before Epicurus of writing. And that was, you know, as it is today in, well, not today. I doubt most people are talking about Epicurious, Socrates's death today.

But in the ancient world, you know, people would have been talking about that, you know, a man who was put to death for ostensibly heresy. Yeah, for not believing in the right kind of gods. So, as with Descartes and the meditations, I've always been a little bit suspicious about whether Descartes just kind of shoehorned God in because he didn't want to be excommunicated or executed. I often wonder about Epicurus whether the gods actually featured because he was a little bit worried. Yeah, I've seen this discussion, especially because Epicurus talks about the gods as distant and unconcerned, it's like, yeah, they're there, but they might as well not be. That does sound like a way to sort of safely say, I don't believe in them. that we might as well just take that box.

I mean, the only thing, the only reason why they might be important in his philosophy is that they do almost represent the idealized version of us. Because they are just so carefree, they are just so uninterested or disinterested in the world that that's how we should try to get by really. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, we live in a world of information overload. And it can be difficult to trust the sources of our news. Bias, in particular, is something that will never go away, but by using today's sponsor Ground News,

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dedicated blind spot tap, which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. So cut through media bias and get a better understanding of what's actually going on in the world by going to ground.com news forward slash AlexoC or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. So what extent do you think that this kind of stuff is relevant to understanding Epicureanism? I just did an episode on stoicism with John Sellers. And the thing that's interesting about that to me is that people always act as though stoicism is just an ethical philosophy. If you ask somebody what it means to be a stoic, they're going

to say, it means that you stand firm in the face of adversity. They're not going to say, oh, it means you believe in a materialistic, eternally regenerating universe and, you know, that the Logos is the fundamental actor of all that. But there is this whole metaphysical world view, which is really interesting. Epicurus has got his metaphysical views. You've already said he was an atomist. He believed that the universe was made out of tiny little sort of packets of the same kind of stuff. You know, the word atom means indivisible. It's a bit unfortunate that now we have split atoms and they are divisible.

just going mad everywhere. But he believing in like a literal atom. Of course, he didn't know what was really down there exactly. You can't see it. But so he's sort of got these metaphysical views and he's got these views about gods and stuff. Is any of that like relevant to getting us to the point where we can talk about happiness and living a fulfilling life? Or do you think those are kind of just separable things. No, absolutely do.

In fact, that's probably one of the reasons why I wouldn't call myself a stoic actually is because you're right. With stoicism, because stoicism is such a broad, sophisticated, complex system philosophy. that it's really hard to say whose stoicism we're talking about, really. Because if we're looking at Xeno, Cleanthes, or Marcus Aurelius, there is a degree of theology, underpinning it, I think.

I call it theology in the sense that, you know, kind of divinity, and they talk about this, you know, the great conflagration, which is the rebirth of, you know, all of our souls, essentially, and this fiery Numa, which makes up the Logos kind of thing.

It gets pretty religiously pretty quickly. But then if you look at Epicetus, and then if you look at modern Stoics, like Tim Ferriss and Rahn Holiday and who's, John Sellers. John Sellers. Although I don't think he calls himself a stoic. I see. Well, yeah, modern stoats, I don't think would buy into all of that kind of stuff.

And, you know, Stoism does survive, I think, without it, but I wouldn't call it stowicism. I'd call it probably just more psychology, maybe. Epicureanism is different because you're right. It does have a metaphysics in a sense that it's almost like a physics, that it's very similar, it's very much aligned with how we view or the scientific worldview we have today. But when you take out the afterlife out of the issue, that's when it becomes relevant to Epicureanism, because suddenly this world takes on a far more important role. Because I've always thought, if your philosophy or your religion says that there is, A, an afterlife which you could potentially have, whether it's good or bad regardless, there's something else. Or B, if that afterlife is going to be considerably better than this life, then of course this one is going to look like a saying that's going to pay a limitation to that.

So that's where it fits into Epicureanism in that respect. And also with Stoicism, the problem I find with Stoicism is, you know, if the greatest good for them is virtue, but virtue is, as I understand it, tied into the Logos, this idea of this all, you know, pervading cosmic entity called the Logos. And so we are, so do virtue to align yourself with that Logos. In my mind, it makes sense within that system. but the question for a stork without that is why be virtuous? Why do virtuous things? The epicurean answers that.

The epicurean answers that by saying you be virtuous because it makes you happy and it brings you pleasure. Whereas, as I understand it, happiness is almost like an accidental byproduct of virtue for stowa system. You don't aim it. It might be a preferred indifferent, but you don't intentionally aim towards happiness. It just comes along with being virtuous. And that epigorous would agree with, you know, it has a famous quote, I'm not famous. He has a quotation where he says that it is impossible to be happy without being just and kind and compassionate and things like that. But virtue is instrumentally valuable for the

Epicurean rather than the sum and bonham, the greatest good. So why is it that Epicurus thinks you should just sort of value your own pleasure and the avoidance of pain? In a way, it's a bit of a silly question because why wouldn't you? But the history of philosophy is like, a lot of ethical worldviews are just defined by trying to overcome this desire for pleasure and your own sense of satisfaction to do virtuous things, to do the just thing, to help other people, that happiness is almost like your own pleasure is like an obstacle in the way of that. What makes Epicurus say this is the focus of our ethics? Good, yes. I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, you're right that a lot of the history of philosophy

and the history of religion has taken a dim view of pleasure. That's because we often understand pleasure in the sense of what they call these moving pleasures, which are these peaks of feeling good, you know, drinking beer or partying and stuff. But even it could be on a small thing like, you know, even to watch in a sunrise, could be a nice pleasure. It's a kind of moving pleasure in that sense. And those kind of pleasures, even the Epicureans would agree are, can be problematic. But so they would actually say that the greatest pleasure is more,

what we now call peace or contentment or finding peace and being pain-free and stuff or being what's called Ataraxia, which is called peace of mind. But the question is why do they think pleasure is good and pain is bad? And, well, two reasons really. One is that Epicurus agreed with Aristotle that he thought, if we're to discuss human happiness, we have to talk about what we are aiming towards, what we are going towards. So he says that if the good in life has to satisfy two criteria. one, it has to be available to us right from the start, right at the start of being a human being.

And second, it has to be something that everything aims towards, that we want. That again, I mentioned earlier that it confused me that no one was talking enough about how happiness needs to feel good. And Epicureism is saying that, you know, all humans, possibly all complex animals and, you know, who knows below that, aim towards pleasure and we recoil from pain. That's the basic kind of pull and push of biology, really, and physiology, let alone psychology. We want pleasure and we want to avoid pain. And so when we're talking about the good, it makes sense to Epicurus and to me that to define the good has to be something that you want. And as far, everyone I've ever met in my life has said they don't want pain and they do want to feel good.

Pleasure. So that's the answer to that question. So when we talk about pleasure being the motivating factor of ethics, would the Epicurean say, you ought to value your own pleasure? Or is it more like you just do value your own pleasure? Like, is there this prescriptive element of like, this is how you ought to order your values? Or are they just describing how human psychology works? Good, yes.

So the word ought is a very, it's tied up with dentology, is tied up with duty and things. And so that would not have existed in the ancient world. and definitely not in Epicureanism. So when we're talking about the good, so pleasure is the good, it's more in terms of a value rather than an ethical value, rather than ethical statements as, you know, that was a good thing to do. It's more like good, it's good to have, we want it. So good is almost tied up synonymously with what we want.

So what you're talking about there, the aught and ethics, is what Epicurists have probably talked about as justice. And so I talk about this in the final chapter of the book. and Epicureanism does see justice as a local matter, what we now call contractarianism, which is the idea that you form a contract with someone else to mutually agree not to harm them. And then justice exists within those kind of social contracts. So it's kind of social contract theory, which is very different, of course, to the Stoics, who were the first cosmopolitans, who believe that we do have a degree of ethical responsibility

to everybody in the world. And their title of virtue applies to everyone, everything. Epicureanism says that virtue, again, is instrumentally valuable to our own happiness, but also that justice exists within the contract between two parties of contract. What do you call people who sign up to a contract? Contractees, maybe? Signes. Yeah.

There's something, there's a word. It's already in the comment. Somebody is. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, the ancient Greek philosophers, you know, like Alistair Macinty's book, after virtue, which makes this big song and dance about the fact that our ethical terminology just kind of means something different to what these guys are talking about. And so we have these concepts of like should and ought and you might say, well, why should I value my pleasure?

The ancient Greek might just be like, I mean, Aristotle opens his Nicomacian ethics by saying, like, you know, all men aim at the good, you know, and women presumably too. That that's just what people aim at. And so let's find out what the good is. It doesn't have this undertone of like, there is this spooky element of the world called duty. And here's what I think it is and how it should sort of bind you. It's like, there's just this fact that things aim at other things. Humans aim at this thing which we call the good. So let's figure out what that is. And for Aristotle, he thought the good was this thing called eudaimonia, which is roughly translated in English. a lot of the time to something like pleasure or more accurately maybe like flourishing.

Is this the same kind of concept that Epicurus is talking about? Like could you say that Epicurious's pleasure is what he would call eudaimonia, or do you think these are distinct? Very broadly, yes. I mean, these are all called the eudaimonic schools. So Aristotle, as you mentioned rightly, started it. And then Epicureanism, Stoicism, cynicism, skepticism, these are all the eudaimonic schools in that they are trying to sell happiness.

again, I think we almost get too hung up on the idea of euda monies being a flourishing thing. I think happiness is a perfectly good translation of eudamonia. Yeah, people don't like it because people associate eudaimonia with pleasure or happiness. But I don't think we today understand happiness as being just entirely pleasure-based. Like if your mum or a therapist or somebody said to you, are you happy? You know, I don't think you'd mean am I in pleasure right now. you'd take the meaning of the question to be some kind of, you know, existential happiness, which is what they meant in ancient Greece as well.

So Epicurious, when he talks about, he doesn't talk about eudaimony in that sense. In fact, he doesn't really talk about it that much at all. He talks about pleasure more than that. But he does, Epicureanism works in the assumption that we have to be far more intentional about our happiness. So, as I mentioned earlier, pleasure is not just these peaks of, you know, chemicals in the brain, dopamine, endorphins. whatever and stuff of that.

Pleasure is settled. It is contented. It's being pain-free. And so, Epicunism, so you mentioned the Logos earlier, which is very big in all of the Greek philosophies. Epicunism refers to use the word logismos, which is not reason in any kind of divine sense. It's more what we might call deliberation or weighing up. And humans do it very well, but of course, all animals do this.

I'll talk about in the book about hermit crabs. They do it as well. They have these nice shells, and they might be scared by a predator or they experience a of pain and they have got to weigh up whether they would stay in these shells or whether they would leave it. Humans are doing exactly the same thing all of the time. So we need to weigh up and we need to be more deliberate about thinking about pleasure, but also more importantly for the Epicureans about thinking about how to remove pain. And by pain, I mean anxiety. So we need to think about what things are causing me to be anxious, stressed and distressed, and how can I

remove that? How can I be better? How can I feel better? And that's what Epicureanism is saying. That's what happiness comes down to. We have to take ownership of that and just think it through a bit more. In the 19th century, utilitarianism sort of burst onto the scene and became incredibly popular. And the idea was quite simple that, you know, people desire pleasurable experiences and the avoidance of pain. And the best thing we can do for the good of all people is to maximize that pleasure and minimize that. and minimise that pain from what we've heard so far at least

that sounds exceptionally similar to Epicureanism what's the difference because people might sort of have that as a useful touchstone most people know what utilitarianism kind of is all about so what's the difference in?

No, no and you're right so when Bentham talked about the two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain I tend to use that language I think I use it in the book as well because I like it's a good visual I mean the major difference is they try to turn it into a political

and ethical system, which, you know, has worked. We still, essentially, most governments, democratic, liberal government, work under a form of utilitarianism. We have to maximize utility and pleasure for the most in a democratic system. And in ethics, they do the same thing. So, as I mentioned earlier, Epicureus doesn't really talk about ethics in that sense, or none of the Greeks talk about ethics in the sense we use it today in making up a kind of ethical system. It's more about virtue. It's more about living everyday life. So Epicureanism, sorry, Utilitarianism talks about maximizing pleasure for everybody. Epicureanism is about my pleasure and about me as an animal.

How can I get the most pleasure and how can avoid the most pain? At the most extreme of utilitarianism, you have the likes of Peter Singer, who are saying that we have almost an equal duty to maximize the pleasure for a faraway child in a distant country or minimize the pain of a faraway country as we do as my own children or those around me. Epicureanism is pushing the dial right back to the other extreme. It's what we call localism. It will kind of say that what I can do with my own hands, what is in front of me matters more. And it's about my own pleasure and my own pain, which will inevitably be my own loved ones, my own friend and my small pocket of the world.

So that's the major difference. Which not a lot of people, which I should say that some people won't get on board with. They don't like the idea. They might like the idea. we do have an equal duty to every human in the world, regardless of who they are, where they are, what state of life they're in. But epigramism says no.

They weren't talking in terms of duties, but they definitely say that, you know, justice for a start is between signatories of the contract, but also my pleasure will always be found in my local pocket of the universe. You know, that's easy to say, isn't it? You know, like I feel like it's a bit of a get out of jail free card for head and a head and a... egoists, the kind of people who say, well, you know, I justify my ethical worldview by just my

own self-interest. And somebody says, well, shouldn't you care for other people? And they go, well, I do. Yeah, good news. I do care for other people. So problem solved. Except not everybody does, right? And Epicureans are surely as familiar as the rest of us with the psychopath or the sadist. Yeah, yeah. who genuinely just take pleasure in harming other people. And as with utilitarianism, there is this question of like, if you are not just saying that it's permissible to be happy, but that is the thing to strive for,

to the detriment of everybody else, you know, they can all go to hell. The thing that matters is that I feel good. If I'm just of a psychological constitution, such that I just take pleasure in the destruction of everybody else's happiness, ought I not do that? And does the Epicurean see that as a problem? No, it's a good issue, yeah. The problems of Slade is a sadistic guard, you know, and Mill had to face it as well. And the Epicureans obviously deal with a different way, because Mill came up with this, you know, the higher and lower pleasures, kind of like a hierarchy of what you should and should not enjoy in life, which is, I think most people agree, fairly snobbish. Yeah, and beginning to just approximate not being a utilitarian anymore. Yeah, exactly. And just saying that there are some things that are better than others. Yeah, exactly. Gave up the idea. Epicureanism has a few different ways out, really. The first is to, I would probably challenge an idea that you could be a perfectly level-headed, happy,

psychopath and sadists. It seems bizarre to me that we could have this happy conversation. You know, we'll have a laugh afterwards. We might get a drink later on and stuff. And then you go home on your own as torture a cat at an evening. But that's because you're not a psychopath. Well, I think there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that people who are psychopaths and sadists and have those kind of issues are also very distressed and unhappy in other respects. To be very level-headed and settled in your pleasure while also being a sadist, from what I understand from the evidence, would be contradictory. The second thing is, as I mentioned earlier, that Epicureans say you should be very deliberate

about our happiness, that if a sadist, for example, enjoys a pleasure of torturing a cat, let's say, I didn't like cats growing up, I don't know, I picked them. I never picked dogs in my examples, I always choose cats. It doesn't mean I should, I'm probably going to be cancelled by half the internet here, for dog people might still support me, but. I'm sure you'll be just fine. I always use cats. Maybe I should choose some other example, you know, some aliens or something like that. More cancel things have probably been said in this podcast. Okay, right. Okay, so let's say you torture a cat, you're a sadist, and it gives you a spike of pleasure in that moment, okay? That's what, A, that's what they call a moving pleasure, and those are the lesser pleasures. And as with all pleasures in life, you've got to be careful you don't become addicted to it. So be careful you don't become addicted to torturing cats. But also, be aware that you live under the certain laws of the land. So by doing that, you're exposing yourselves to two future pains. The first is the constant pain that you're going to be caught. You're going to be found out. And that is an anxiety that, that, that's, gnaws at you. In fact, in crime and punishment, we have this example of someone who basically

becomes insane over the course of a book because this paranoia, this anxiety of being caught and being recognized as being the murderer, really gnaws. And the third issue with that is that, of course, you will get caught eventually. And then things really go south. You end up in the company of other sadists and other criminals. And, you know, nowadays we have a relative, well, at least in our country and most liberal democracy, we have relatively humane prison systems. back in Epicurious's time and throughout most of human history, and still true for a lot of the world, if you are caught as a criminal, your existence becomes desperately painful after that. I mentioned dossiercy again, you know, in the House of the Dead, he talks about the prison house there,

where people, you know, shaved heads, tattooed faces, you know, stinking, barely any rations, people shiving each other in the night because they got a nicer blanket than somebody else. That's the reality that if you are a sadist, if you are a criminal, if you are vicious in the sense of like you indulge your vices, you will find yourself surrounded by those other people. So you'll find yourself surrounded by other cat torturers. You've already told me, though, that that's not how things work anymore. I mean, the thing is, I understand this. And this conversation has had in the context of all of these ethical philosophies. It's like, there are loads of practical considerations. It's like, well, if you're a utilitarian, why don't you just kill an innocent person to steal their organs?

And you say, oh, because we live in a society and people would be scared and stuff. But for me, it seems trivially easy to just control the thought experiment, to get rid of those factors, to just be like, you know, suppose you just know that it's not going to be a problem. I suppose that you find yourself in a society where you have become the supreme dictator and you're above the law and you don't need to worry it. The only thing you need to worry about is like maybe like uprisings. But maybe the people who, you know, the majority of the people really enjoy the fact that you've got this privilege. And, you know, like there were societies that used to get by on human sacrifice. They used to sort of rally together and just like and just sacrifice humans because they thought that's what the gods wanted. If you woke up tomorrow and you traveled back in time and you were a shaman in one of these ancient cultures and you thought, yes, come on.

Now I can, you know, put someone in a wicker man and burn them to death. and nobody's going to come after me for it. And, you know, now, great, I'm going to take pleasure in that. If you then just go about your happy business, burning that human alive, taking great, you know, pleasure in it, knowing nothing's going to come of it, are you the Epicurean hero? Or would Epicurest still say something's offering? I mean, first, you're absolutely right. The Epicureus has agreed with you about the shaman, and this is one of the biggest reason why Epicurus really did not like religion for that reason. The second you start saying that the afterlife or the divinities are more important than what I have.

have here, then yes, it becomes very dangerous. It becomes very unhappy. And then this is why Eric Gras said, you know, religion's a bad thing in that sense. But does it become unhappy? But then then, again, does it become unhappy for you? I mean, well, because, well, then this other thing, you would have to imagine, like, if, I'm being, I'm putting in my cant here, like, if we are to universalize this, would you want to live in the society where human sacrifice is normalized, where, let's say you go to bed one night, you wake up, can I have your son? I've got a five-year-old son at home, you know, he's been selected for the human sacrifice this weekend. You know, would I like to live in that society? No, that would be horrible and distressing

for me. So religion is anxious inducing in itself, according to Epicureus, but also living in that kind of society would be bad. Now, to the dictator question, again, this is where the rubber hits the floor a little bit, or rubber hits the road, I should say, that the thought experiments will run up against the reality here at some point. I can't imagine a situation where a dictator is not constantly anxious looking over their shoulders. In fact, if you look through a history, you know, most dictators have a pretty sad life or end up pretty bad at the end, badly at the end. Yes. An epicurus recommended not getting involved in politics. He did because of the sheer anxiety of it. Yes. I can understand that, but then at the same time, I still, I sort of think to myself, you know,

okay, so I want to get a bit sort of weird here because I want to say something like, okay, well, imagine you just live, in a society where your child, maybe it's like a, maybe it's like racially based or tribe based or something and you just know that that's not going to happen to your child. You just know for a fact because this is the other line that I think people take as they say, well, is that the kind of society you wish to live in? Well, okay, so let's universalize the rule, but let's be very specific about what the rule is. You know, everybody in this society has to act so as Johnny Thompson is allowed to sacrifice children. Would you be okay living in a society like that?

Well, if you're a sadist, sure, why not? I talk about it. So in chapter six of the book, I talk about Ursula Le Guin's short story about the ones who walk away from homilers, which is exactly this idea that,

you know, let's say my society depends upon the, I mean, that story, there's a torture of a child locked in a basement somewhere, you know, fed scraps and stuff. But you're,

I mean, you're expanding it to being more like the, I think Shirley, I forget the surname, wrote the lottery. something, maybe we can add that under show notes which is basically this idea. It's like some kind of black mirror

horror movie where somebody has to be a sacrifice everyone against us. Again, religion is the only probably reason for why that would be the case and epicunism is about friendship, about community and about recognizing your local pocket of the world as being important to your happiness. Let's say we lived in the same village.

We know we get on. we have a good time. We talk about movies. We read books. We go jogging. We run through fields. We have a botanic friendship. You know, in that, in that situation, would I then be happy if I'm sorry Alex had been dragged away this weekend because he's been selected for the purge, the murder, whatever? No, of course I wouldn't. I, so this is, in the book, I talk about Martha Nussbaum's idea of capability approach. Yeah. And this is, I mentioned that, you know, apricurianism, as you say, as you rightly say, is a political philosophy. That is possibly the way I could see it being politicize. Better than more than

utilitarianism, I should say. Because that essentially says that there are certain base requirements that all human beings need if they are to be happy. It's kind of like a politicized version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And into that, I would put a base thing that all humans need to be happy is the recognition that I or my friends will not be dragged away in the night to be sacrificed to Baal,

the final. I think that was important to my happiness or anxiety. I don't. I don't. don't think I could be ataractic and anxiety free living in those kind of societies. Unless, of course, we say we just create a strictly racially hierarchical society. And we socialize you to believe that friendship with people of other races is just not desirable. So you've got absolutely no interest in their interests. And they're the only people who ever are subject to sacrifice. So you have all of your friends and you live very happily and the people that you're not friends with, you have no interest in being friends with.

And then you occasionally get together in order to sort of purge the society of its sort of vested up anger and hatred, we just sort of pick a human sacrifice and we all take a great deal of pleasure in that. In fact, it doesn't even matter if everyone else is taking pleasure in it. It's just as long as you do, as long as you take pleasure in that kind of thing in a way that guarantees it's not going to come back to bite you in the butt. But you can understand what I'm asking, which is, okay, maybe in practice there would always be some kind of anxiety or something that would come back. But in principle, if there just were a situation where somebody did something which seemed trivially immoral but only brought them pleasure. Yeah. Can the Epicurean, do they have a sort of imprinsible approach to say that is still wrong? This is why I mentioned earlier that you see within Epicureanism the first embryonic ideas of what we now would call a conscience.

that I think that what you're talking about there would be some kind of intentional kind of dystopian erasure of your conscience. Right. Because that is you know, it's not a small thing. I think having a bad conscience,

having a guilty conscience is a great source of anxiety. So if you live in society where these horrible things were happening and by which you did nothing or you didn't care at all, that would be where your conscience has been kind of lobotomized from you and stuff. And you're right. In the science fiction thought experiment,

I can imagine that. it's hard to imagine a society where which is where you erase people's conscience in that sense while people are also enjoying the kind of pleasure to epicureanism is talking about and of course I talk about in the book there there are some people who live such lives which are very hard lives that they do have to harden themselves

to the realities of the world and what we might call a conscience is a luxury of living in a time of luxury that some people might be willing to let people die and get all of their life because they recognize they've got to get on with what they have over here. But still, looking at the broader picture, those people are not happy in the sense that we want to talk about here.

That is not a happy society. And if you are a member of that society, you will not also be happy as well. So does that answer the question, the idea of a conscience? And if you're lobotomizing someone's conscience, yeah, fine. But you can get away of all. That's true of any ethical system, isn't it? You're essentially saying that there's a creative thought experiment here

where you don't care about the good. In fact, Emmanuel Can talks about this. Imagine a situation. He says, people naturally want to do the good. We might have a misunderstanding about what the good is, but that is a natural impulsion of humans. And you're saying now, let's imagine a situation where people don't. I am for two reasons.

One is that I'm not sure that is true of all ethical philosophies. For example, like, if goodness is externally imposed, if we're like divine command theorists, you know, what is good is just whatever God commands, right? and somebody just loses their conscience, they just don't have a sense of right and wrong, you might still be able to say that even though you don't recognize it, this thing's still wrong because God says that it's wrong, you know, there are theories that will just say that that's the case, or maybe if you've got a view of human rights where it's the people who possess the rights

that's really where the truth and falsity of the ethical system lies, such that even if you have no concern for their rights, doesn't mean they don't have them, any more than not believing in gravity means you're going to be able to fly, you know, whereas a world view like Epicureanism seems to require the belief in gravity for gravity to work, if you know what I mean. Like, if you stop finding happiness, then it no longer becomes the desirable thing. No, because the Epicurean philosophy is wired into the biology of being a human being. Sure. The pleasure principle is, obviously, we're talking two and a half thousand years before Darwin,

but I've often thought that if Epicurus read on the origin of the species, he'd be like, this is amazing. I think that it's very much wired into who we are as a species. And I think that's why, while I'm not cosmopolitan, I think when Epicurus is talking about, he's talking about the human condition as close as we can come to it. I think all humans are like this. No, the analogy of what you mentioned there, with divine command theory or with human rights idea, would be to say, let's say somebody thought that a god saying something is right or wrong,

but then actively didn't care about that. We've brainwashed them to not care about their God. that's what you're saying and yeah that that is plausible that could exist in that world yeah sure um so yeah yeah i i think the other thing that crossed my mind and i promise we will move on after this but this is this is probably the main sticking point for epicureanism right this is like the main thing that people come up against i'm wondering it might seem like a tangent and it's such a podcast question to ask do you think this isn't a trick question just like probability where you're sat do you think AI will ever become conscious. Do you think there's the possibility of AI consciousness?

I mean, I agree with Anil Seth on this. The Beast Machine Theory, I agree with what he said. All examples of consciousness that we know of have existed within some kind of organic framework. So you think probably not then? Well, I mean, I was talking, you know, I was researching the other day for some an article about the different types of intelligence. Yeah. You know, the Sternberg, different types of intelligence. And I do agree that we are very, we like to ascribe consciousness, intentionality and personality to things because they mimic certain types of intelligence and the one intelligence that we place the most on us on

is communication and literacy and what happens to LLM seemed to do very well. There are all sorts of other intelligences. Now it might be a bit wishy-washy how far you go down the list. But I think a lot of people these days that some kind of emotion intelligence is important, some kind of even playful intelligence,

people talk about playful intelligence. And, you know, AI doesn't have that. So I don't think that AI has consciousness, as we would understand it, it's just very good at, you know, communicating. The reason I ask is because I don't know if you believe it ever will or will ever be able to, forget like the AI that we have today, if we'll ever be able to artificially construct an intelligence made out of silicon,

the reason I think that's interesting is because, and I actually agree with you, I'm kind of suspicious. I mean, maybe it's conscious to the extent that everything's conscious, you know, but I don't think it's going to have this brain-like. But then I see no reason, like, along with someone like, David Chalmers, if you just build a one-to-one correspondence between the brain and a silicon electrical circuit, I see no reason why the same thing shouldn't happen, as mysterious as it may be. But the reason I ask is because if AI ever did become conscious, we could just program an

AI system that takes pleasure in all kinds of horrible, terrible things, or that takes pleasure in a totally different way to human beings, such that Epicureanism is very rooted in the like human psychology. But if we like woke up this Frankensteinian AI monster who was just programmed to take pleasure in like, I mean, I think if we just programmed it to take pleasure in gardening, then the Epicurean would probably go like, okay, so as long as that's a conscious being that has thoughts and feelings and it takes pleasure in gardening, it should garden, according to Epicureanism. And yet if I programmed it to take pleasure in like murdering people on the streets, and you said,

ah, but, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, try to try to stop it. And I say, great, because I've also programmed it to just, it just can't wait to be martyred or it can't wait to, you know, and you could, and no longer would you be able to say, well,

that's just not human psychology. That's just not how the brain works. I think the Epicurean would either have to say, my ethical worldview only applies to human beings, which, fair enough, but then you would have this problem of how to ethically govern, artificial intelligence. Or they have to say that actually for that AI robot, that's just the right

thing for them to do. And it's our pleasure versus theirs and see who wins out. Yes. I mean, it's a really interesting thought experiment actually, and I've not been opposed it before. And the reason why it's interesting, because Epicureanism does say that pleasure is the only good and pain is the only bad. Now, the question is, do they mean is good or are good and bad in that context, objective values which exist outside of humans? Yes, because I think I and I think Epicureans are willing to admit that pleasure exists within other animals. I think the pleasure principle is true for humans, but it's also true of primates, of higher mammals, fish, turtles, whatever and stuff.

But then the other way, I would actually fudge it a little bit. This is fresh off the back, this is straight off my head. I would say that what an AI, an artificial silicon would feeling as pleasure, we need a new word for that. I think that wouldn't be pleasure in the sense of organic pleasure. It's almost mirrors my attitude to consciousness generally to be able. that I think all instances of pleasure we have exist within an evolutionary system. And I think Epicureanism exists within an evolutionary system.

And when we're talking about happiness, we have to take stock of the fact that we are animals on a line, which are programmed by DNA, to exist within the world as we have grown up in it. I think if what would pleasure look like for an artificial intelligence, it wouldn't be that. It would be something where, well, on one hand, it would be just what we've, the same thing as we have. but also it wouldn't be embodied. It wouldn't be that kind of beast machine theory. So I've kind of fudged it off the hoof. No, but I think that's fair enough. And, yeah, Anil wrote this prize-winning essay.

He's about to occupy the seat that you're sat in, and I'll ask him about this. I don't like, you know, so many, when people record multiple episodes in a day, they go through great pains to make it seem like they haven't done that. Yeah, yeah. You know when somebody, you know, people that often change their clothes between. Do they?

And they do this on TV as well. Like if they'll be like, oh, like, you know, we'll be back next week and then they go and change clothes because the episode's not going to wear till next week. Yeah. I once asked a Tomist friend of mine who thinks that lying is always wrong. I was like, if I'm filming a podcast with Johnny Thompson and then we cut. And then exactly, that's what he said. And then I go and change into a different color shirt to record my next episode with Anil Seth. So it kind of maybe seems like it's a different.

Am I, is that, am I lying? You know, does that count as a lie? Yeah. I think it's an area of. I do it, though. I do it as well. I batch film my stuff and I'll change a jumper. But why do you do that? Yeah, because I get a lot of comments on my jumpers. And it's become part of my IP, really.

And if I wore the same thing for seven episodes, seven films in a row, then I think people would try it. But yeah, no, I mean. That's fair enough. So you're not trying to convince people that you actually filmed it on. Well, I am, of course, yeah, by doing it and letting them think that it's a different day. Isn't that kind of lying? Yes, but nothing's wrong with lying. Yeah, I guess you're an epicurean. Yeah, exactly. And you feel the same.

I'm sure you've, I mean, I mean, You've lied today many times. I'm sure I... I'm sure I never lie. Okay, but back to Annal. Annal wrote this essay about why he thinks AI probably won't be conscious, or at least that we're thinking about it in the wrong way. And one of the things he points out, for example, I'm going to fudge this,

is that there's like a particular kind of neuron or neuronal activity, which is specifically related to, like, metabolism. which means that if we wanted to actually replicate a human brain with silicon, we'd also kind of have to house it in a physical entity that metabolizes, which is just not the kind of thing that silicon can really do. And so if you actually were to, I imagine there's probably lots of that kind of thing going on, like the brain being very well integrated with the rest of the physical goings on of the body to the extent that if you wanted to fully mechanize it,

you'd essentially have to build a biological body. And at that point, you're kind of just... Exactly. And also, I mean, doing the same thing. You just say... Even before modern neuroscience, you know, whose cell was talking about. Consciousness is intentional as well. It's a tool by which we have, by which we operate the world. And I think pleasure is also like that.

Pleasure is also intentional. It's wild into the universe as we have it. It's a tool by which we can operate around the world. And I think that's why it's also talked about in the book. It's why it's also very important and we should be very conscious of born for a better word, or we should be very much aware of our pleasures and our pains because they are very good, you mentioned earlier, barometers, they are very good heuristics or data points by which we can navigate the complexities of being a human being.

So in the 20th century, Robert Nozik, the great American political philosopher, you know, I saw the, I saw it, it washed over your eyes, you're like, oh, here we go, here we go, criticize utilitarianism with this idea of the experience machine. He imagined this kind of machine that you could step into and have experiences, would you believe it, in which it will start simulating pleasurable experiences. It's a bit like going into the Matrix, right? So, I don't know, you hook up your brain and you just live in this illusory world. You wake up and you believe that everything is real.

We could be in the experience machine right now with all of the pleasure that we're having with this conversation. Money back. Exactly, yeah. I can't quite imagine what it would be like, but even if you just took how our life is right now and just turn the pleasurable experiences up by like, you know, 5%. It's still better than the real world.

And crucially, you wouldn't know that you're living an illusion. You'd be like properly plugged into the Matrix. And Nozick's point is to say that most people will say they wouldn't want this. Most people will say I would not get in the experience machine. But if what you should care about is the maximisation of your pleasure, it seems to be the most reasonable thing to do. And actually, you've also pointed out, I think, the problem with the pleasure machine generally, as you've articulated it. Because in my view, there are two versions of the experience machine. The first is, yes, as you mentioned, we are entirely ignorance of the fact that we are in the pleasure machine, like the Matrix, that we just don't know this is the pleasure machine.

and the second version is what we do know about it and that we're still in there enjoying ourselves but also in the back of our minds we recognise that this is all illusionary it's it's fake now in that one yes the epicureans have a problem with that because you know people don't like being deceived and being duped is a source of anxiety and the source of pain but also each epicurean among us

and viewers watching who I've converted to epicureanism have to make that decision for themselves they have to say to what extent does the tarrake, the distress or the anxiety of living in the machine, outweigh the pleasure I'm getting from being in the experience machine? And you, I think, put your finger on the problem with the questionnaire where people are asked about this. Would you rather live in this machine? You can't ask that question without them knowing it's a machine. So does that make sense?

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean because like when you're making the decision. Yes, you already, you know that it's a, but then if you were being rational, you could say, that I am just convinced rationally that what I should do is what will maximize my pleasure and right now I'm uncomfortable at the thought of being duped but I'm only going to be uncomfortable for the next 10 seconds because once I press that button I'll forget all about it

although I am a bit uncomfortable now in the same way that like if I go to the gym I might be like oh I'm going to be uncomfortable for an hour but I just put up with the discomfort because I know that it will be worth it in the long run because I'm being rational and if I'm rational about the experience machine

yeah right now I'm kind of uncomfortable at the thought of being dused 10 seconds, I'll press the button and then it'll go away. There's always two points here. I mean, so the first point is that Epicureanism and Epicurious is very careful to say that happiness is something that we create and we find by use of our logismos. I mentioned that it's deliberation and stuff. So it has to be an element of me appreciating the world and recognizing and being grateful

for what I have that if you depend upon any externality for your happiness, eventually, you know, you are becoming dependent upon that, you become addicted to that and that ends up being caused of unhappiness. but let's play the game and let's imagine that in this world I press the button and in that world it is exactly like this

I think that my Logitamos is in charge and I'm choosing gratitude and choosing happiness and accepting stuff yeah I don't see why that would be a problem for Epicure and but then that would be

right now that could be right now but would you now now we're playing the Cartesian game that could be literally right now when we walked in this room you and I might have been met by Zeus who smells very lovely and came over to say guys

got an option for you don't press a button you know I'm going to give you the same opportunity but you won't know about it but 5% more pleasure. And it is quite pleasurable, actually. Yeah.

Would you press it? Maybe we did. Maybe we did. We both pressed the green and we're right here right now. Well, would you predict that you, like, would you press the button if I gave you that option now? Would you? What, the exact same world? Well, it's all.

No, I wouldn't mind now because in the now, I would know it's a dupe and therefore I wouldn't want to do that because that caused me the pain. Yeah, but now you're not being an Epicurean because the Epicurean would say, like, if I have an opportunity to expend a little bit of discomfort now for great, deal of happiness in the future, that's what's best for me. But I think that I'm happening in that moment because it also incorporates, I'd lose, it depends. If it's the same world, the same people within it, my friends and everything, then yeah, I probably wouldn't do that.

No, no, it's a different world. They're fake. So what are they? My kids, for example. Say it's like some kind of brain in a vat type situation, you know, like you just sort of attach a wire to your brain. Because the distress of pressing that button in the now would outweigh, I think, any... You think it would be that bad?

I think it would be that bad. Because you basically asked me to kill my kids and my wife. That's what you were saying. No, no, no. You know, just yourself, kind of, to them. But you won't care about that. And, of course, like, most people would say, no, but I care about, I don't want to upset my wife and my kids. But you're an Epicurean.

You don't care about their suffering only in so far as it makes you feel suffering. Exactly. Which I'm going to take care of. I'm going to get rid of it. So the distress in that moment of pressing that button would outweigh. I think any future opportunity that... So do you think we could do it in steps where

first I'll say, okay, I'm going to give you a button you can press right now, which will make you sort of care a bit less about your wife. And then once we've done that, because you've been like, okay, that would actually make my life a bit better maybe. Then I convince you, okay, now there's a button. And finally we get you to a point where you're like, yeah, yeah, I could press this ultimate button.

Again, I think every step along the way would be an act of distress for me. I don't think I would do that because of the stress. But it would be so minor each time. Given the promise of the experience machine, this wonderful, incredible. But why would I press it? So you'd have to hide from me

all of the future buttons in the future. Yeah, but only to mitigate the sort of unjustified suffering that your emotionally feeling. So the situation is that you'd come up to me right now and say, hi, Johnny, I've got a button here, which means you care about your wife, 1% less. Do you want to press it, mate? Yeah.

And I'll be like, why, Alex? Because I promise you, and you know that I'm telling the truth, that ultimately this will lead to more pleasure in your life. Because obviously, most people don't want to press this button, right? And I'm just trying to point out that, like, the silliness of a circumstance like this is because obviously I'm not going to press a button to care less about my wife but what if you knew that was going to make you more pleasurable?

I like you. I get along with you, but I don't trust you enough. If you came up with a button and said, go on, mate, press this, you'll care about your, I mean, to be honest, I mean, we can make this almost real. You could come up to me and say, you know, do you want a shot or heroin?

Yeah, trust me. And it's a great feeling, have a good time. You won't care about anything in a couple weeks' times. Trust me. And I'll be like, I like you. I don't trust you enough to press minus 1% caring for my wife, I'd say. But yeah, in the thought experiment, that's, I know you're 100%. This is where, yeah, this is where we're kind of like...

Should an Epicurean then take a shot of heroin before they die as a point of obligation? My mum always used to say try everything once. Yeah. But I think heroin, before you die, yeah, I don't see anything wrong with that before you die. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with heroin, no. All pleasure is good if heroin gives you pleasure. But the problem with Epicureanism, and why Epicureanism is quite unique actually is that it says that all pleasures, kinetic pleasure, moon pleasures have a degree of addiction.

Of course, with heroin, we're talking extreme bodily addiction, psychological addiction, as well as, you know, neurochemical addiction of dopamine and adrenaline or whatever. But yeah, I think I would like to try heroin before I die. Yeah. That's your cold open right there. Yeah, yeah. Well, what are you doing after this? I think I think these conversations are very similar to the stuff that you hear with like utilitarianism

these kinds of objections I think there is an extent to which philosophers construct these ridiculous counterfactual worlds to try to disprove a world view where like when I used to be utilitarian people would construct it back in my day I used to sort of, people would say, like, well, what about this scenario? What about, you know, the experience machine or what about this?

And I would say, well, but in reality, this is how it would work. And they go, well, let's just control for that. Let's say that, you know, it's the homeless person that has no friends and no family. Oh, and I'm also going to remove your conscience. Oh, and I'm also going to do that. It got to a point where I was kind of willing to be like, okay, in that case, yes, in your extremely convoluted scenario, that would just be the right thing to do. But I don't have to worry about that because we actually live in a real world. I do like following them. I absolutely agree with you. So actually, at any point, I potentially

could have said, right, let's just talk about the reality of being an embodied, evolutionary, higher primate, whatever. You could push the thought experiment so far that I say, like, hypothetically, if it were the right thing to do to murder someone, should you do it? And at some point, you kind of had, just have to go, well, yes, because you've made it trivially the right thing to do. But I do like following the thought experiments because I enjoy it. And also, it's a bugbearer of mind that people seem to comment on my videos all the time, you know, of course there's no trolley, you know, why can't you get off the track? What kind of lever?

What I do? Pull a lever. Just at the right moment, so the trolley spins and doesn't hit anyone at all. Yeah, that's really not the point is it. Nice one. Yeah, that's great. It's spoken like an engineer. People do hate thought experiments. Exactly. But I get it. I understand why, you know, intuition pumps. You know, I appreciate

why we have them. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the trolley problem and all that kind of stuff. And the idea, it's not supposed to actually be training yourself for a situation where you might have to decide where to send a trolley. It's quite clearly doing something else. And we're stress testing. But then this is also good what you've done today as well.

You've also stress tested Epicureanism. And of course, every, I should also say that I don't think Epicureanism is the perfect dogma. I'm not a disciple. As I mentioned earlier, I think there are quite a few areas where he gets it wrong. His cult like following in the garden, classic example. He also mentions, for example, about sex as basically being a source of all misery. that he can't see any reason why anyone would, would A, have sex and B, have kids at any point.

Of course, I've got two kids, which means I've had sex at least twice in my life. Congratulations. Thank you very much. You know, we have a diary. Why did he not like sex? Because, and I kind of agree why he's saying it, is because the point he's making is that the consequences,

the impact of having sex with the wrong person at the wrong time, can be bad. And also, as all Greeks, there is a certain irrationality which comes on when your libido kicks in. Robin Williams,

the late Robin Williams has his great quotient which I use in the book, which is that the good law or God gave men two heads and you can only think with one at any time.

And I think, you know, there's a degree of truth to that, that people who are lost in the, you know, carnal throes of lust do tend to

to not think about the long-term games. I'm sure anyone who's watching this who's been three pints deep in Ibiza with some friends hasn't been thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions. Yeah, that's fair enough, actually. But that said, I enjoy sex.

Yeah, I know, I enjoy sex. Yeah, I wonder the extent to which, like, like, not releasing that libido would actually make things. Because if what you're saying is the problem is that like lust sort of cloud your thoughts. Yes.

And the best thing you can do is get rid of that. You're right. Sadly, lots of Epicurean documents are lost to us. So his masturbation diaries were lost to history. But we can only assume that maybe he did release his libido at some point. We don't know what hidden materials

he was reliant. It might be the case that, you know, use it or lose it. I think that is a case that people who don't seem to indulge her libido or do tend to wank need to carry on wanking. But other people,

swear by, like, controlling, like, sort of keeping it in, as it were. There's a Reddit about it, isn't there? No fap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like the whole, like, sort of, if you, if you just, like, store up your energy, then you can, like, redirect it into this and, this and that. And so maybe Epicurus was on that train. I came here on the tube today. There's obviously some testosterone companies, massively paying for all of the billboards or the posters around. Maybe it increases your testosterone. I mean, I'm sure the comment. when sexual will be alive with people on either side of the debate.

I have had sex. I have masturbated. I will take heroin one day. Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know the science of it. Maybe it will internalize some kind of testosterone and make you better overall. But the important point is that we're having a discussion in some way that, you know,

we are taking happiness seriously. That should be part of the deliberation. That if somebody is anxious and unhappy when they are wanking a lot, then maybe they need to sit down and say, well, maybe my wanking is causing me to be unhappy. And that's an important part of the liberation. On the other hand, if you've stopped wanking for, let's say, four or five months, enough to, you know, measure it as a kind of like an experiment and you are measurably less happy, then perhaps it's not for you. And this is true of, I interview some called Richard Byers, and neuroscientists about cold plunging as well. That I think most people

agreed to say that cold plunging is physiologically good for most people who have no underlying health conditions. But for some people, it can make it worse. It can make them worse. And also just the anxiety of waking up in the morning to get in a cold bath in the morning outweighs the physiological benefits of it. So you just got to sit down and make up that deliberation yourself. Well, that's the interesting thing.

And Epicurean is some Epicureanism is, is caricatured as like, oh, just do the pleasurable thing in the sense that like, oh, you want to have the McDonald's, oh, you want to have a wink, you know, do your thing. Whereas the epicurean has to believe that if. it becomes apparent that this is not sort of prolonging a long-term happiness, that it just becomes the wrong thing to be doing. And that also involves, of course, taking stock of your feelings. And you need to check in with your emotions. And this is why I think therapy is incredibly useful. And I think we should do more of it, not necessarily with clinical therapists, but with friends and

with yourself in the diary or with philosophers. You know, you should do this checking in on your emotions and recognizing, well, actually, hang on, that was a wrong turn. And actually, I'm worse off now. I feel more anxious. Or inversely, I feel happier. I really enjoy talking to Alex O'Connor, so I'm going to do this every week. Yeah, man, I try so hard on this show not to do the podcast thing. I'm not like other podcasts.

Oh, yeah. But we've done AI consciousness. We're talking about no fat. We're talking about testosterone levels. I fear that soon I will be too far down the rabbit hole. What else is on the, you know, people want to talk about choices, how to make better decisions, you know, relationship with advice. Yeah, how to like fix your life in 12 easy steps and that kind of stuff.

Exactly. Which, you know, fair enough, maybe that is what Epicureanism is kind of offering people, though. A lot of the ancient Greek schools are co-opted by the modern self-help. I actually, when, like, because I knew I was going to be speaking to you, I was in a bookshop yesterday. Oh, well done. I remember like going into like waterstones and seeing basically this big sort of shelf of books. And I took a picture because I was just staring at these books and it was like it had like the atomic habits thing. And then it's got all the like Ryan Holiday's books and then it's got Robert Green and it's all things like, you know, like the power of positive thinking and dare to lead and discipline is destiny.

That's a Ryan Holiday one. And, you know, like, the happy index is another one here. Yeah. And you are a badass and, like, this kind of stuff, how to talk to anyone. And it's like, there's this publishing phenomenon where, like, everybody, but you could be writing a book about, like, ancient Greek metaphysics. And the publisher will go, how about we turn it into, like, how this ancient thinker can make you better at friendship? Yeah. Yeah, it's all about sort of, it's being kind of co-opted, right?

I wonder what you think about the extent to which as social media influencers, we risk playing into this watering down a philosophy by being like, let's talk about Epicurious, but let's do it in a way where I can call this episode, you know, how to be happy. I am highly censored to that. I'm highly centred to that. I'll be reducing it. But I've kind of made peace of it in two ways, really. the first way is I always see myself as the gateway drug.

To which one? To read in the Nike and Mickey and Ethics. Yeah. I think what we're doing now, hopefully people will go away and they'll Google or they'll probably use Gemini or chat DBT to, you know, whatever. So I like to think that they will go away and do a bit of further research. Sure.

And the second thing is, I just mentioned that, you know, we have these lost books of Aristotle and of all of the old of the Greek philosophers that I like to think that what they were actually doing in the school, most of the day, was this kind of. stuff. Whanking, yeah,

wanking during heroin and also talking about philosophy in an accessible normal human way that the books that we get handed down to us from antiquity are their condensed and highly philosophical stuff that they would have been doing that all of the time. They would have just been chatting and shooting the breeze,

the philosophical breeze. Yeah. And so I think we are the equivalent of the ancient Greek schools of philosophy. Yeah. I'm obviously the garden. I don't know where you'd feel most at home, the stoer.

The academy, you've always been a bit of a math said. Maybe more, yeah, the academy, yeah, I think so. You say a math said? Yeah, they had to study math for 10 years. Yeah, no, I can't. I used to be into, like, analytic philosophy, but I could never really do maths. I think I've got that. What's dyslexia for numbers?

Like, I'm really, like, extremely bad at, like, addition and stuff, like, mental math. Well, Beto would have wrestled you out of the academy. It would have been on. It would have literally wrestled. Ressled me. But do you know where you would have found a home? The garden. In the garden, with everybody else.

Everybody, slaves, the foreigners, the women, whoever, even Alex O'Connor is. Even Alex O'Connor is welcome in the garden. We would share some bread and some cheese. In fact, Epicure has got this quotation. We wrote to a friend saying, please send me a wheel of cheese, so I may feast every day. So when they talk about the Epicurean feasts, you know, the Stoics and the Christians, imagined it's being some kind of like gluttonous binge, ice-wide shut kind of orgy. But actually, it's just them slicing off a cheese and some bread and giving it to some friends.

I don't know. I'm like, what did Groucho Marx say? I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member. I sort of feel that way about this maybe. Although I'd love to try it out. But I would, if I were there, I think I would want to speak to the man in charge. And I'd want to ask him a few questions. I don't want to ask him about the experience machine.

I'd want to ask him about AI consciousness. But I'd also want to ask him about something else, which actually ties into this whole self-help type stuff, right? Like those books. And no offence to those authors, by the way. Like, I hope that they're all selling well. My book will join the library of stuff. Great. you know, do you think, but there's a level to which there's this kind of optimism where every book has to be about like how to fix your life.

There can't be any just like read this interesting thing or here's a thing that will just be maybe marginally useful. Like, you know, here are like 20 tips to like moderately adapting certain specific areas of your life, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. But there's so much of this optimism, how to change your life, how to do this. And so much of it is about agency. It's like, here's how like by changing. the way you think you can find happiness. Here's how you can make more money. Here's how you can invest properly. Here's how to, you know, use the gym to fix your mental health and stuff.

And Epicureanism is very in line with this in the sense that it believes that you are essentially in control of your happiness and your sadness. Now, I think that's a bit easy to say. Right. And another important critique of the Epicurean is that they downplay the extent to which you are not in control of the factors that make you happy or sad. Whereas the same, the Stoics will say, yeah, I'm not in control of that, but I just say that whatever happens, I just do the virtuous thing of remaining steadfast. Whereas the Epicureans are searching for pleasure. Some people just don't get it.

And yet Epicureus is pretty insistent that you can control us. This is where I think Stoicism and Epicureanism are actually more aligned. Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, you know, apart from a few philosophical differences, I think if you put an Epicurean next to a Stoic, next to a Benedictian monk, they would look and behave well probably not look but they would behave pretty similar I imagine

and in this regard exactly the same I mean Epicurus has these quotations where he says you know have to prepare for the future essentially you know that but if you do the hard work now preparing then whatever the future brings you will be better off which is I mean the Stoics

occasionally lifts a lot of stuff from Epicurus and rebadged it as their own but and it's an ancient Greek virtue called autarky which is self-sufficiency and it looks a bit differently across Stoicism and Epicureanism. Stoicism talked about indifference, that we need to be indifferent to these things,

because when catastrophe inevitably comes along, my family will die, I'll lose my job, I'll get a leg cut off in an industrial accent, I'm ready for it. I'm indifferent to these things. And Epicureanism would approve of that, in the sense that, you know, they see virtue as a kind of insurance policy,

that things like resilience and autarky and wisdom are necessary so that when life throws, throws a wobbly at you or throws a spanner in the works for the American audience. I think wobbly is a cricket analogy, maybe. I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. Don't play cricket? No, don't even watch it.

No, do I, but I know about that. Okay, anyway, they throw a ball at you, which is bad. You're ready for it. And whereas the Epicureans would say, what we should do is consciously get our insurance policies in line now. And this is where friendship is really important. Right. That, yes, they are very well aware.

In fact, Epicureus himself was racked with terrible pain of the cross of his life. We talked about you bending over with his stomach pains earlier. He had some kind of digestive issue. We think it might have been Crohn's. I say commentators have pointed out that it might be grown. In your medical opinion. In my medical opinion.

And he died from kidney stones, which I generally recognised to be one of the most painful things. In fact, he had the letter at the end where he talked to his friend saying, I haven't been able to pee for like three days. I'm dying, friends. And he says in that letter, he says the only thing which has given me pleasure right now is remembering our conversations that we.

once had. So, you know, he knew pain. And all it, and I said, in the post-Alexander the Great world, it was a time of strife and danger and famine and starvation. And so there was a lot of pain. And so the best way we can prevent or at least prepare for that is to have good friends at our back, Epicurus would say. So, you know, the Stoics also say this. They take friendship very seriously, but they are more indifferent, indifference towards friendships, whereas Epicureans would say we really need to nurture friendship as much as possible because there will come a time when we might need to call them and we might need to be picked up by them. But yes, I think in this regard, Epicureanism and Stoicism are actually pretty aligned because it doesn't depend on virtue

in that case. In fact, virtue is useful for both of them, resilience, wisdom, autarchy. But in, like as a historical fact, they kind of hated each other, right, the Epicureans and the Stoists. Well, this depends who you speak to. Right. I mean, when I say speak, who you read. So the Stoics played the Epicureans. Epicureans played the Stoics. The Epicureans say Cricypus started. He threw the first stone. He was basically, he took, from the right from the off, they were slightly scowling at each other.

They were slightly unfriendly cousins. And then the argument is that Cresippus really took it up at a level. But then, of course, the Stoics argued Epicureans did it as well, and which I believe, because Epicureus was quite sharp-tonged in his writings and stuff. but by and large they in my opinion the differences yes they were philosophical but they were minor enough

that I think the differences were more catalyzed by the fact they were trying to appeal to the same people they were rival businesses basically they were trying to get students in the same way the university system these days sort of doing wrong with sleeves down by it I just think about editing

or whatever rival school systems university these days they need students to get money to pay the professors stuff the same was true about then the schools needed students for prestige and also for money and I think they were rivals in that respect. And then later on with Christianity, of course, Epicureanism isn't good because it offers the

opposite of what they are. Yeah. Christianity is a salvationist religion which says that you need God to be happy and to basically go to heaven and Epicureanism says, no, that you are in control of your happiness and you are in control of your life. So you don't need a God. Yeah. This is also why the Stoics didn't like it.

if I'm on this, some of the Stoics, Klianthes, you mentioned, Chrysippus, and Zeno would have been a bit earlier, but, and Marks really still like him. That's not Zeno of paradox fame. No, of Scyteum, who's the founder of the Stoicism as a movement. You know, they did have a religion. I've said it before. I think they do have some kind of theology to what they're saying. So they object to the fact that Epicureanism is saying you don't need the Logos. You don't need this thing.

And is that, so what would you say? It's clear to see what the difference between Epicureanism and. and Christianity is. But stoicism and Epicureanism, what would you say is like the defining? Three major differences. I mean, the first, as I mentioned, is the religious one. The ancient Stoics, Logos, this cosmic numah, the great conflagration, this rebirth,

reincarnation, a certain degree of immortality to the soul. Although, again, it depends of who you read. Are you talking about Cleanthes? You're talking about Marcus, Pheris, talking about Tim Ferriss. It's very different. But we can disregard that because I do think you can at least build the kind of Stoicism without that. The other two problems or differences, I should say, are virtue as to sum and bonham.

So Stoicism says that virtue is the greatest good, is to tell us that we're aiming towards. And happiness is a preferred indifferent, but it's kind of on the way on the ladder towards it, whereas Epicureanism is saying that no, virtue is on the way to happiness or pleasure. And the third difference is more modern, and that's, I think, stoicism places an unrealistic expectation on some kind of detached sense. of reason and rationality. That is free of emotions. And Stoist kind of

had this idea that emotions happen to us, almost like sensations. They pop into our understanding, and then we have this detached logos, which can look at the emotions to decide whether they are worthy or not. And if they're worthy, they become good feelings,

take them on, enjoy them as much you want. If they're bad feelings, discard them as being bad. I don't think that's how the human judgment, how human judgment works. It is naturally flavoured by emotions and by our moods, for example. In fact, Antonio DiCardt's era talks about this as well. There is no mind, heart distinction.

They are wired together. You know, our emotions are framing how we even experienced the world, let alone how we judge it. So I don't think you can have this view from nowhere, which I think the whole, you know, our thinking makes it good or bad depends upon. Stoicism is having a bit of a cultural moment. It's like the in thing, especially in the thing. especially in the podcast space, self-help, like lots of books being influenced by it figures like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday.

Epicureanism isn't really undergoing the same kind of thing. Do you think we're Jew? Well, yes, I mean, available in all good bookshops soon. I believe that, you know, I want to spearhead the Epicure movement. But, you know, there's a few reasons for that, really. One is, yes, this concerted anti-epicurean propaganda, which existed throughout Stoicism and Christianity. But then it hasn't gone away. And that's interesting.

And despite this, it pops up again and again. You mentioned the utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, Erasmus liked it as well. You know, there are lots of examples of Epicureanism throughout history. Gorniloh, I want to say, liked it as well. Really? Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, it pops up.

Yeah. And the other reason, I think, what were we saying? The reason of due to a research. Yeah, like, we do an Epicurean moment in the same way that Stoicism is. Yeah. And the other reason, so I was saying. saying is that stoicism has been far more documented throughout time. Yeah, it's like why is...

It goes hand in turn. So we've lost a lot of Epicure's documents. In fact, I was talking to Simon Critchley, is a philosopher, David Day. He's great. He's a really nice guy. If you haven't had them, which is so knowledgeable.

The kind of person you can sit down, he'll just drop in on the side, which is like that alone is a... Yeah. It's content to do. And he was talking about they found these lost scrolls. I think Herculanean maybe? Are these the ones...

Which they can't open, that they're reading with like... Yeah. Yeah. And some, in that is Epsum Epicure. in documents, they think, and we haven't got the technology yet to read them without destroying them. I've seen this in, they've got one in, they were showing one in display at the Bodleian in Oxford. Yeah.

In the Western Library, they had a sort of display of artifacts, all kinds of stuff. And they had, yeah, this burnt scroll. Yeah. I think it was, it might have been from, like, it might have been from Pompeii or something. Yeah, it might not be heard of anything, but yeah. And whatever this one was. And it was just like, the little descriptor just said, like, oh, this is like the child remained of a scroll, like, that would, you can't open it without damaging it. And then it just sort of casually said,

oh, but like with, you know, imaging technology, we're beginning to finally read it, like, with sort of, and it includes things like one of the lost works at the ancient philosopher, XYZ. And I was just like, my jaw hit the floor. I was like, this is unbelievable. And I said to him, like, wouldn't it be great? Because we've only got a few select books from, even Aristotle, you know, someone who's meant to be like this, you know, one of the fathers of philosophy, Plato even. There's this lost book of Plato way he talks about Atlantis apparently. Yeah. Now, wouldn't it be great if you found these books and they just talk absolutely.

Yeah, they're just, and they're just talking about aliens. They're talking about, you know, you should always eat, you know, whatever, coal. Yeah, yeah, that would be quite funny. And our complete judgment often changes as a result of this ridiculous kind of side projects they had at the day. Yeah, it would be like when Isaac Newton's, like, private writings and diaries were, like, bought. Yeah. And everyone's waiting for these wonderful, like, you know, underappreciated scientific discoveries. And it turns out he was just like this frantic boardline, like, schizophrenic approach to biblical studies of trying to do numerology and finding out when the world was going to win.

And an alchemist as well, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it wouldn't surprise me. But then that didn't harness his reputation. We still think Newton is one of the, you know, in fact, a few articles written about he is. An unbelievable genius. But then his reputation as a person, I'm not sure I would have wanted to meet the guy. No, but that's true of most geniuses, I'm.

imagine actually. Maybe, which is why we get on so well. We get on so well. Yeah, we're not genius. Just fine to be around. Yeah. I'd like to imagine like a role-playing game. You know, I used to play the fallout games. Should you ever play the fallout games? I never played in my name. Well, you get a few stats at the stars. And you know, strength, dexterity, yeah. Intelligence, one of them, charisma. And you can only put a few points into one of them. So you've got to pick your character, the starting character at the start and things. I think I obviously have quite a lot of charisma and strength. You have intelligence. So put us together. Put us together.

We're an unstoponic friendship. Exactly. My final question for you is, gosh, it seems a bit morbid, but I want to know how the Epicureans deal with death. Yeah, well, this is, again, we mentioned only about areas where I'm not entirely on board of Epicure. So Epicureanism, or Epicurus is on the record, are saying that we should not fear death. Because while we are alive, death is not here.

And when we are dead, we won't be around to care anyway, essentially. Yeah. The reason why he says that, as all philosophers actually, you know, I think it Cicero said that the art of philosophy is learning how to die. Yes. Is, you know, I get that because if you take away the fear of death, suddenly no matter what the world throws at you, it's slightly put into perspective. And also, if you don't fear death, you've always got a plan B. You're probably going to have to edit this out because that went past the YouTube. You know, I'm not endorsing suicide.

But what philosophers seem to be saying is that if you don't fear death, then the worst comes to worse, it's not actually that bad. Epicure is saying the same thing that we shouldn't fear death because the hold it has over our decisions it makes us anxious. But I just don't think, for somebody who is so attuned to our natural evolutionary psychology, I don't think you can philosophize your way out of the fear of death. Now, some people possibly have. You hear stories, people who have actually made peace with that, but I think fearing death is quite universal. Are you scared of death?

I just don't spend enough. People ask that, like, and I just, I think I just don't spend enough time thinking about it to, to answer properly, because I kind of want to say no, but that might be, firstly, for want of thinking about it. Secondly, because I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the self is an illusion and that I'm just this sort of bundle of complex consciousness that will not cease to exist at any point, you know, so, like, I'm, I'm pretty content, like, with my agnosticism.

Like, I sort of, I think because I just don't know, and I've, I've heard so many wacky ideas about the nature of selves and consciousness and where it'll comes from that I'm just like, we'll find out when we get there. But that is a little bit Epicurean of me, this kind of, well, right now I've got no idea, so I'm not going to worry about it. And when I get there, I'll find out. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

And I also get the philosophy, the consistency of what Epicureanism is saying. Actually, the fear is that pain at the end of, let's say I'm on my deathbed, I'm high on my heroin. And I'm thinking, like, yeah, as I'm like, McDonald's as well. and being and torturing a cat you know I'm thinking what am I scared of? I'm scared of really in that moment I

my philosophy tells me that the death afterwards is going to be the same as my life was before I was born you know Cleopatra or the dinosaurs whatever there nothing to me it'll be that like that afterwards yeah what I'm scared of is leaving behind my children leave I'm a wife and leaving behind the pleasure of the world but then it's also true

that the moment that my eyes shut and I breathe my last that you know I won't care about But that doesn't make me any less scared of it, of the pain of it. Yeah. Well, you know, fear is an emotion. And emotions are not the kinds of things that people typically try to rationalise. And so when we ask, like, should you fear death?

I think the question is really like, just do you fear death? And if you do or don't, are there some rational considerations that might affect your emotion? But it's just something that you either feel or you don't. And I don't know, maybe I'll do a deep dive on this. Maybe I can have someone on the show to do an episode on death. I meant to make a video about death for a long time, just the different philosophical ideas, like, around it. Yeah, I mean, some emotions you can rationalize not a way, or you can change the shift or the tone of them, can you. You can adapt to them, yeah.

You certainly can. But it's like you're not actually changing the emotion, you're changing the facts which inspire emotions. Like, if you were really upset because it was going to rain on your wedding day, if you were just, like, distraught, if I just told you a fact about the world, it's actually going to be sunny. suddenly you'd be happy rather than sad, but not because I've changed your emotional response to a circumstance. You know what? You sound more epicure

and the more I'm talking to you. Yeah, exactly. You're placing yourself in the position where you're feeling these emotional responses. Yeah. And yeah, I think that's, that's probably. I thought, you know, people, I'm going to do the podcast thing again

and talk about the meaning crisis. But I'm just asking you in brief in closing here, because I've heard you say that people always talk about the meaning crisis. Yeah. I'm suspicious as to whether that is a thing that is like typical of our age.

Yeah. I think there is a meaning crisis and it's called the human condition and everybody who suffers with it no matter when they're born. You think that's true. But you've said that we don't have a meaning crisis so much as we have a happiness crisis. Yeah, or even the connection crisis. Yeah. I mean, I should, you know, cite our sources.

We were at a mutual event a couple of weeks ago where our mutual friend, Joe Foley, was on stage before me. Yes. This was Elliot, Elliot Buick's event. And he stole my line because he actually did say this before I did. And so it sounds as if I'd plagiarized him, but it is in my book before he said it on stage. I should say that. But yes, I think that the meaning question is part of the meaning industry.

And I like, I quote it the meaning industry because I feel as a people asking the question about meaning often have an agenda in the same way that somebody is trying to sell you something. In my own experience, I was being interviewed by some very nice man on the West Coast of America. It was a nice kind of chatty conversation. Admittedly, we weren't talking about whanking heroin, but it was nice enough as it was. Anyway, at one point he kept saying, you know, have you got meaning in life? I was like, yeah, yeah, he said, what gives you meaning? I said, well, my kids. He said, but, you know, they won't live forever.

I said, well, okay, what really gives you meaning? And on it went to the point where it was obviously clear that he wanted me to give an answer and the only answer was God. Right. That the only answer that was satisfied this meaning question was God. Yeah. Now, I don't think that's true of all the questions about meaning, but I do think that a vast majority of the questions are framed within the Judeo-Christian or religious understanding

of meaning. That the only answer that can satisfy meaning is God. I don't even think that answers that satisfies it just push it

to question back a few steps you know, why does that, if God came down and says the meaning of your life is to you know,

I don't know, count blades of grass. Count blades of grass. You know, would that make it in life? No. So I think there are answers

I can give in my life which I think would satisfy the meaning question, but they become more empirical and more measurable and more understandable because, for example,

I think, you know, when I'm playing with my children, my children love miniature steam trains. If I'm sitting on the back of a miniature steam train with my child, at no point I'm thinking, what is the meaning of this? I'm just in that moment. So I think it's a pleasure crisis, a happiness crisis, but also I think it's a connection crisis. Yeah. That I think we are so bunkered down into these kind of atomized units in society that I think

there's a lot of kind of what is the meaning of this or what is the point of this. And I think when you are in groups, when you're with people, when you feel like you're belonging somewhere, the meaning question evaporates. You don't start to ask that. Yes. I don't think. Emil Durkheim, a sociologist, talks about it as being an omit, this disconnection unwired from the world. And I think that's where we're at the moment. But I think the meaning question, what answer is a kind of culpoperian answer to it? Ask them what answer would satisfy you right now? And if the only answer is God, then yes, I'm sorry, I'm not going to answer your question because I don't believe in that God.

Yeah. Do you agree? What gives you meaning? Do I believe in God? Yeah. Well, of course it was kept it. I don't know. I just did a lengthy interview with Big Think about nihilism and meaning and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I think that meaning is, there are two ways you can sort of look at the question. There's either literally what gives you meaning. So I think meaning and purpose are synonymous. So it would be like whatever your reason for acting is or reason for being is. But again, that becomes measurable, doesn't it? It might ask your value system, isn't it? Yeah.

And so I think that whatever, in a sort of Petersonian sense or a sumum bonum sense, whatever is just in fact the principal motivator of like all of your behaviours is literally speaking your purpose. The question is people want to ground that purpose, so they say. They want to sort of have it bottom out somewhere that's like self-justifying. So I think what people mean by meaning is something like a non-contingent reason to act or be that is just necessarily self-justifying. and ontologically, whatever, I'm suspicious as to whether that will ever be found. But for each individual person in practice, you can just discover where it is because you'll say to somebody like, you know, why are you here? Well, you know, because I want to promote my book. Okay, why do you want to do that?

I'm not just here for that. I'm here because I'm here because I love to come. You might be like, oh, I want to. You might be like, oh, why am I at work? Because I want to make some money. And for some people, they'll look at you and go like, what do you, what do you mean? I obviously want to make money. But if they're a bit more thoughtful, they might go, oh, well, I want to make money so I can buy a nice home. It's like, why do you want to do that? Well, so I can provide for my children. Why do you want my children to be happy? And if you ask, why do you want your children to be happy? They would look at you and go.

And what's the bottom of that ladder? What are you talking about? God, of course. Pleasure. Right. See. God. Consciousness. So what is your reason to get out of bed in the morning? Well, today it was because, you know, I had to come and come and come and come and come and do this. But yeah, I, in one sense, I kind of want to say that the meaning of life is to stop asking what the meaning of life is. If you just get out of bed and it doesn't go.

Like you said, when you said yourself, when you're sat on the train with your children, at the moment you start thinking, what is the meaning of this? It kind of ruins it, right? And like, on those days where if you are literally waking up and your first thought is like, should I get out of bed, what's the point? It probably means you're like, depressed. Yes, yeah, yeah.

And maybe that's just the appropriate response to this veil of tears is to just be depressed all the time. But I strive to be in a situation, not that I wake up in the morning, think to myself, what's the meaning in all of this? Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what it is. And then get up. I just want to get up.

But most talks about this. He calls it as conatus. This is natural drive to just be, to live. And, again, he's talking pre-Darwin, but he's the evolutionary, isn't it? No, our genes are wired to carry on. I should repeat. Any biologist listening after we're twitching at the use of programming and why. I've done it twice now, but you know, that's how I use it in layman terms.

I mean, I do agree with the Epicurean that, that I think I'm probably like a psychological hedonist, meaning that I think that in fact people always, like, pursue their own pleasure. And by pleasure, I mean very broadly, like, experiences that are wanted when experienced. I kind of think that's what pleasure means. Yes. And pain broadly defined as experiences or an experience that is not wanted when experienced. And I think it's fairly clear to me that people, people just seek after their own pleasure. And again, for me, I can kind of take this slightly

more classical philosophical approach, like of the Greeks, in sidestepping the question of what you ought to do or ought to care about or what ought be your meaning and just say that, in fact, that is what motivates people, that is what they're behaving in accordance with. And so, for most intents and purposes, you can just have a rational discussion as to whether that goal is being achieved. And then you can extrapolate the two virtues and friendships and communities, as well by saying, you know, what is the kind of world I want to create by which I can maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain? And actually, I think you'd probably come quite similar, close to what we have right now. You know, I couldn't imagine this moment being

better. Oh, thanks. You know, and I think sometimes people ask, you know, that meaning, and because I'm a philosophy channel, they're like, well, so what's meaning? It's like, I don't think you're going to find, like, I'd be lucky if I found it for myself, but if I found some transferable sense of meaning, if you're listening to a 26-year-old sort of atheist YouTuber agnostic YouTuber Pan-Sychist YouTuber I'm not just a YouTuber now I think you're like a speaker writer

a social media conductor writer all around entertainer yeah musician Renaissance man that is true you were tinkling oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah watch watch this space people there's there's more to come in that regard

but I 26 year old yeah I think if if you believe that that I'm going to have an answer to that question that's going to be like satisfying. We're going to go, oh yeah, cool, nice, awesome. Then you're delusional. Like, we're not going to be able to work that out. But you mentioned earlier also about do I feel like, you know, a sense of kind of what we're doing is good or bad as philosophers or as philosophy.

But also I think what we are doing as well is we do expose people to the sheer variety of answers that are out there. And I'm hoping that one, someone will watch your video or watch one of my videos and I'll be like, yes, that idea absolutely. grips me, absolutely possesses me. And for me, the stuff about, like a lot of stuff about consciousness has, in a way that I can't, I couldn't put it into words, but it's just, it's just consoled me. Like I said earlier, when you're talking about death, I'm like, the weirdness that I'm sort of discovering with how the brain works and split brains and centers of consciousness and stuff, and all Seth's probably the other side of that door, so I better speak quietly in case he bursts in

and starts trying to debunk me. I find, like, I'm a bit like, in a way, I can't quite describe. I'm just consoled by it. And I'm hoping at some point to really figure out why I think that's helping and try to put it into words for other people who might find it useful. See, I'm almost going the other way with consciousness. Yeah. That consciousness is turning me more woo-woo.

Yeah. That I interviewed Rupert Sheldrake. Oh, really? Yeah. And, you know, I think he had a really good point that, you know, he was talking about dark matter and dark energy as well. Yeah, yeah. But then he also said about consciousness, like a scientific model,

which cannot adequately accommodate to that. Not just that, we're not, In the future, we need better technology, because technology won't be able to find something subjective. You know, it's a heart problem. Surely is not fit for purpose. And I'm starting, you know, he, neither he nor I have an alternative model to work on. And it's the best thing you have able to. But I do feel as though consciousness is a vastly important phenomenon.

And to then just call it an accident or a mistake or, you know, is wrong. Hogwash. Yeah, hogwash. But then I don't think Annie will cause it that. I think he, he, he, I think he's a. A hopeful physicalist, isn't he? Where he beats that one day, some answers will be resolved.

I don't, I don't know. We should, I'll ask him in, I'll ask him in a minute. Get him on camera. I don't have the meaning of life. But ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to discover it for yourself, you will find it in the forthcoming book, what's it called? It's going to be called the happiness potion, 12 easy steps to fixing your, it's going to be there.

It's going to be called the art of enough. That works. The ancient epicurean art of finding and keeping happiness. I like it. Sounds great. And we'll put the links in the description. I'm not sure exactly when it's coming out, but it'll be available to pre-order. And I'm going to interview you soon.

All of that good stuff. Yeah, yeah, one hopes. I'm always happy to do this again. Well, Johnny Thompson, I'm glad we could finally sit down and do this. I've known you for a little while now. And, you know, love the content that you put out. I think it's so easily digestible and it's popular for a reason. Philosophy Minis is the channel.

I'll put it in the description alongside the book. Thanks for your time. Thanks very much. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, we are mirroring. the ancient Greek schools. You know, we're in the same lane. Some way competing, but also we're friends, aren't we? We meet in our feasts.

I like to think so. I keep bumping into you at philosophy festivals. That's right. And of course, I know that our friendship for you is only out of concern for your own pleasure. For what it's worth, I care about you intrinsically as a person in yourself. Yeah. Which I think makes me the better friend. Well, there might be a day.

Might not be tomorrow. Might not be in a couple of months. But, you know, you'll be sitting down and sover watching yourself on YouTube, as I know you tend to do. And there'll be a, there'll be a, and you're going to open the door and there, hi, Alex, it's Johnny. Have you got a sofa that on? And you'll say, I'll say, why not that?

Yeah, and then we'll snuggle up on the sofa. Yeah. And replay to it together. Exactly. Wow. What a beautiful place to end. Thanks for your time today, John. Thanks, Alex.