Episode 202 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 10 - The Animality Argument

    Quote from Cassius

    Waterholic going further with your comment, are you speculating that pleasure and pain can indeed be reduced to fungible units?

    I sometimes got that impression from DeWitt's "unity of pleasure" chapter but not sure he stated that explicitly.

    Cassius i don't believe it can, at least not with our limited understanding of our biology. I rather use it as a "model" to think about how pleasure and pain have emerged as chemical instruments of evolution to guide ALL living organism (including animals).

    Quote from Cassius

    We crossposted but you see my prior comment. I *do* think exploring this in mathematical terms is helpful. If we reach a limit to its usefulness then identifying that limit will itself be useful. So please continue

    In that case, this could be a very entertaining weekend project: derive a simple mathematical model and visualisation of how pleasure and pain components contribute to our life from the Epicurean perspective :)

    Quote from waterholic

    This also explains the statement that pleasure and pain cannot be mixed. Additionally, this removes the uneasy breakdown of "types of pleasure". There are no types of pleasure, there are different activities and stimuli, each contributing "atomic units" of pleasure and pain.

    Yes I can see that would be one of the implications - a further terminology change in the meaning of "pleasure" -- especially if pleasure includes "health" and "normality" and everything that is not a pain unit.

    We presumably will run into the issues that the Utilitarians did as to dolors etc, but I have not read into that well enough to comment. Probably that's relevant and needs to be included eventually. I don't even know if they considered that to be problematic themselves, or only their enemies did. I can see how "greatest good for the greatest number" fails because these units aren't transferable in measure from person to person.

    But as a model of how a SINGLE person can view the issue within themselves, I've never really seen the big problem. As long as you keep firmly focused on how subjective the issue is, and how the same acitivity can change from pleasure to pain and back by time, place, etc. then I think the analysis is helpful.

    What it REALLY needs to help with is making clear that:

    1. You don't have to get rid of ALL pain in order to experience ANY pleasure
    2. There's nothing "magic" that happens when you move from 99.9% to 100% -- 100% is not a different transcendent "type" of pleasure different from 99.9%. But's that's the inference that I think far too many people are drawing from "absence of pain is the height of pleasure." The correct implications need to be clearly separated from the incorrect implications.

  • Cassius December 26, 2023 at 10:38 AM

    Changed the title of the thread from “Episode 202 - The Epicurean Arguments In Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 10 - The Animality Argument” to “Episode 202 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 10 - The Animality Argument”.