Posts by Martin

Thanks to both of you for this excellent discussion!

La Jouissance does not match the description by Blanning. The assigned year is different, too.

I checked the 41 poems from Frederick which are published at

https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/gedichte-5321

but none of them matches the description. Some of them do touch on Epicurean topics.

"his father had Frederick's "best friend" executed for trying to help him escape" actually happened. They both deserted together, and the friend got sentenced in compliance with the penal code to death by a court (not the King) and executed but Frederick was not because the judges declared themselves unfit to judge over the crown prince. So, his father forced him to watch the execution of his friend as a penalty. The father was such a dick that one historian who started to write his biography gave up in disgust.

Let me take some time (quite some time actually) to dig up something. From about 1985 to about 2016, I have mostly ignored popularized physics because I found it too diluted and misleading in my study. Meanwhile, I have read a few popular physics books written by physicists but not yet Stenger. He is on my path because of the recommendation by Alex.

If our equivalent to the work of Otto Warburg is the work of Norman Dewitt, I very much hope that we are not the equivalent of Thomas Seyfried.

I see no reason to doubt the validity of the lab work done by him and his team and those whose work he references. However, out of his passion to help cancer patients, he resorts to conclusions and recommendations which are exaggarated, misleading, overly general, premature.

He implies that the aspects of cancer as a genetic disease and as a metabolioc disease are mutually exclusive. This is nonsense. They go hand in hand. Main stream oncological research has followed up with a lot of work on Warburg's results.

Those gross professional mistakes and associating himself with known quacks certainly has damaged Seyfried's reputation among scientists and increased his popularity with conspiracy theorists.

So, he is rather an example of how not to proceed to promote a philosophy.

Low-carb diets are probably OK to try out. I see a good chance that they may help with diabetes and maybe even slow down the growth of some types of cancer cells. However, for most types of cancers, they are probably irrelevant. Even those types which are slowed down are unlikely to get cured by the low-carb diets because the body maintains a considerable level of glucose in the blood to prevent death from extreme hypoglycemia.

Happy 20th!

"... that we love the person so much that without them life is not worth living ..." does not make sense because this would accept suicide out of mourning, which is not Epicurean because we have coping techniques to get over the mourning.

The way this passes hedonic calculus is rather that we love the person so much that we take great risks of losing our own life to avoid the pain of not having tried to save the friend.

Moreover, if the action is spontaneous, it is rather out of a strong feeling to help the friend urgently than to contemplate hedonic calculus first.

The relationship between EP and utilitarianism is touched upon in this quote from John Stuart Mill's book "Utilitarianism", Chapter 2:

"The multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitarian ethics, the object of virtue: the occasions on which any person (except one in a thousand) has it in his power to do this on an extended scale, in other words to be a public benefactor, are but exceptional; and on these occasions alone is he called on to consider public utility; in every other case, private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is all he has to attend to."

This statement seems to indicate that it is fine if the vast majority of people sticks to Epicurus' philosophy, and that utilitarianism provides guidance primarily for those with power/influence/expendable wealth.

However, Mill's interpretation of EP seems to be quite different from the interpretation which we have worked out here and on the related FB pages. Unfortunately, Mill's writing style is often rather hiding than clarifying what he means. So, I might not add a lot to this thread but I look forward to comments of others who read his book.

So far, I could not find sufficient sources within EP on how an Epicurean politician should make diffcult decisions. The quote above might suggest that for Epicureans, voting for a utilitarian party might be the best choice in a state with many more people than fit in one Epicurean community.

That is because if an Epicurean candidate from outside my inner circle told me he would just follow his feelings moderated by his private hedonic calculus, I would not vote for her/him but rather a utilitarian competitor.

This is unsatisfactory because it would indicate that a nation with a mix of an Epicurean majority and utilitarian leaders would probably produce greater net pleasure for me than a homogeneous nation of Epicureans with Epicurean leaders.

Welcome Dubitator314!

Welcome, Ed!

Yes, geometry is a part of math. The continuous extrapolation to infinitely small dimensions of geometric forms does not imply anything for reality.

I suggest that we do not use the oxymoron "speculative math". It is an obsolete term for pure math. The way I learned math from mathematicians, math is essentially built on logic, is not a science as often falsely stated and does not make any claim on reality although whole branches of math are inspired by the success of modelling reality with the assistance of math.

What you probably mean is "speculative physics", e.g. creating physical theories for which we have not yet any empirical base.

Happy Twentieth!

Happy Twentieth!

Elayne, after reading the second draft once, the content appears again fully agreeable to me.

I found 2 mistakes in language:

"I could say that I am honest to avoid the painful anxiety lies coming from lies ..."

should be:

"I could say that I am honest to avoid the painful anxiety coming from lies ..."

"grabbing a hot pain on the stove"

should be:

"grabbing a hot pan on the stove"

Elayne, after reading the draft once, the content appears already fully agreeable to me except that I think that it might be possible to meaningfully quantify feelings and hedonic calculus. (I may or may not get more into this after looking at Godek's/Cassius' spread sheet.)

The major new thing for me is a clearer understanding where the limit of pleasure actually comes from. I always had problems with the cup analogy and may still have some but no more with respect to the limit. The optimum of stimulation based on the physiology of feeling pleasure explains the existence of the limit well. I was not consciously aware of that before.

I found only one mistake in language:

"The conditions for pleasure are not absence environmental input and action."

should be:

"The conditions for pleasure are not absence of environmental input and action."

This podcast and the voice are excellent. The project is good.

I am a visual learner, especially from diagrams and text, less from photos (unless they are evidence for my work in failure analysis), so I rather avoid listening to podcasts. Even video clips are usually rather a diluted distraction than useful for me. Nevertheless, I will be happy to occasionally contribute again a podcast to Epicurean Radio.

1. The differences seem too small that I could find a short statement to characterize them.

2. The Canon instead of just reason, which is "downgraded" to an essential tool for sanity checks, the hedonic calculus, work and communication

3. Long-term pleasure, which includes action upon compassion for people and animals in the inner circles with disregard for self-interest

4. Democracy with strongly regulated capitalism and influenced by regional culture (as exemplified in some European countries and Japan, whereby none of them is already close to an "ideal" state)

Near-death experiences are often misrepresented as evidence for an afterlife or even an omnipotent and omnipresent god (e.g. https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-die…-161046083.html).

They are the closest to evidence believers in an afterlife might have. So, it is important to nix the validity of the interpretation of near-death experiences as such evidence.

I remember one article with a simple explanation by a medical researcher who attributed the symptoms to lack of oxygen in the brain. It seems I did not save that article because the phenomenon itself is not of much interest for me.

We should have an easy to find position statement with a summary of and references to the research.

That position statement could be the outcome of collaborative effort in this thread. If there is not much input, I would contribute to this thread from time to time to eventually create the position statement even though the topic is far outside my field of expertise.