Posts by Martin

Welcome Ataraktosalexandros!

I have chosen
- pleasure as the goal of my life
- materialism as the adequate attitude toward the world
- the scientific method as the only reliable method to gain fundamental knowledge for understanding the world by iteration of improved models and new observations enabled by the improved models and new tools.
I aim at pleasure by choosing carefully which desires to fulfill, willingly accept temporary pain if it is a side effect of actions (e.g. hard study, hard work, delay of enjoyments) to maximize future pleasure which is worth the endured pain or to minimize future pain, hold up the no-harm principle and trust my reasoning capability and my intuition on love, friendship, compassion and justice to avoid counterproductive egoism and the limits of scientism.
These items of my philosophy of life are identical with corresponding items of Epicurus' philosophy when it is interpreted consistently by resolving apparent contradictions between different quotes of the extant texts instead of being misrepresented as primitive hedonism or ascetic hedonism depending on which subsets of quotes are neglected or misinterpretated as absolute statements.
I differ from Epicurus in at least the following aspects, which are sufficiently minor that I call myself an Epicurean:
- I do not claim that my chosen philosophy of life is true philosophy or that any scientific theory is true because no school of philosophy can reasonably claim truth for itself, and whereas the adequacy or superiority of a theory can be demonstrated, there is no way to prove that it is true, although in the banalities of daily life sufficiently covered by common sense, there might be no obvious difference between adequacy and truth. Truth is fundamentally limited to the validity of logical constructs and truthfulness of protocols of events.
- Scientific progress has made parts of his metaphysics obsolete and has in particular refuted his physics of the gods and the images the brain would receive from them.
In other interpretations of Epicurus than the one which is typically supported at epicureanfriends.com, additional differences might be:
- I may do things to extremes without moderation.
- I aim for ecstatic pleasure occasionally.
- I claim that romantic love is conducive to and potentially a required ingredient for maximized pleasure.
- I found marriage to be consistent with Epicurus' philosophy but probably I do not qualify as a sage, so the statement of Epicurus against marriage for Epicurean sages in typical cases might not be applicable to me anyway.
- I do not do gluttony for extended periods.
- I can do asceticism but usually, I am not ascetic.

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... the LHC’s failures to lend much support for the standard model ...

in comment #20 is wrong. Everything the LHC has found so far confirms the standard model. So far, the LHC has failed to find new physics beyond the standard model, and calling that "failure" is odd.

Calling fields "fluids", "fluid-like substances" or just "substances" appears to be misleading. Other than that, David Tong's presentation is well done.

In my case it was the other way round. I did not decide to become an Epicurean but eventually found out that I was an Epicurean without knowing it:
Since adolescence, I explored many kinds of books for wisdom, especially plays and novels, and thought a lot on my own. Since ditching Christianism as a young adult, I read philosophical texts occasionally but without much learning from them at first. I developed my own ideas as I saw fit for the present and near future with acknowledgement of history and the epistemology of science in mind. Rather by chance, I read Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" and found in there a lead to Epicurus for a personal issue on which I was undecided and which seemed not to have much to do with philosophy. This lead prompted me to read translations of Epicurus' extant texts. I discovered that what I had thought was my own eclectic mixture on how to understand the world and live in it was much more systematically and coherently included in Epicurus' philosophy. I had implicitly and unknowingly been an Epicurean for decades. E.g. I had developed hedonic calculus (without knowing that term at that time) as an adolescent on my own (or possibly just without recognizing from where I got the ideas for it) and had always used it to make major decisions since then.
After reading Epicurus' extant texts, I searched for discussion groups to dig deeper into Epicurus' philosophy and found and joined Cassius' groups on Facebook and here.

There are other scientists (e.g. physicist and nobel prize winner Weinberger) who think that science is progressing toward Truth. I am not among them. Even if that Truth existed, we would not know whether we have found it. Older theories of physics have rather been abandoned than refuted in all possible variants. E.g., the theories around "phlogiston" and the "ether" appear to be wrong but only from the perspective of the more fruitful theories which have replaced them. It appears unlikely, but further advanced theories might revive one of them.

The only criticism of Cicero in "On Ends" which was substantial at his time and not just a strawman argument was:
"Epicurus says the atoms swerve without a cause, — yet this is the capital offence in a natural philosopher, to speak of something taking place uncaused."
This objection was shattered when physicists came up with quantum indeterminacy. There is a strong analogy between Epicurus' swerve and quantum indeterminacy. The swerve is the most spectacular anticipation of modern physics by Epicurus. However, if in another twist, the hard determinists among today's physicists find a way the measure their pilot waves or other means of saving determinism, this would again take a dramatic turn. At no point along this line of development could we be sure that we found the "Truth".

The maybe most spectacular example of multiple twists in the development of physical theories is the cosmological constant: Epicurus and Einstein both assumed that the universe is essentially static. When Einstein applied his general theory of relativity to cosmology, he needed to arbitrarily introduce the cosmological constant into the equation to obtain a static universe. A few years later, the expansion of the universe was discovered. As a consequence, Einstein himself declared the introduction of that constant as his biggest stupidity ("Eselei"). Subsequent models of cosmology typically did not use the cosmological constant, i.e. set it to 0. A few decades ago, the accelerated expansion of the universe was discovered. As a consequence, the cosmological constant reappeared as a necessary ingredient but with the opposite sign expected by Einstein.
However, there is Milgrom's theory, which does away with the apparent expansion, big bang, dark matter and dark energy and returns to the static universe. The catch is that it is only an ad-hoc theory. However, if eventually experiments confirm that the law of gravity is actually of the form assumed by Milgrom, his theory would become fashionable.
Again, at no point along this line of development could we be sure that we found the "Truth".

Anything more on Truth than "the way things are" according to our best models requires a considerable leap of faith and has an unknown date of expiry.

Pleasure is not limited to immediate pleasure. More often than not, the Epicurean way means taking action which involves direct pain and results only much later in increased pleasure as compared to not have taken that action.

In Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet, there are apparent traces of Epicurus' philosophy, but in King Lear, there are none obvious to me. Please let us know where to find the article after it has been published.

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"So, it is my personal perspective that we are running up against the limits of the human brain. We evolved for a very different life circumstance and we are failing to intellectually keep up with the perspectives applicable to today."

This is an interesting perspective that I don't think that I've heard before in this context.

I found this perspective expressed similarly e.g. in an opinion piece of physics professor Michael Dueren in the 2023 August/September issue of the German language "Physik Journal" at https://pro-physik.de/zeitschriften/download/21453

"Our brains are not trained for apocalyptic climate change."
(Google translation of "Unser Gehirn ist auf den apokalyptischen Klimawandel nicht trainiert.")

"The human brain dates back to prehistoric times - instinctive processes in our neural networks in the brain displace deliberative logical thought processes in many situations. In critical situations, they ensure our survival through archaic, instinctive decision-making patterns. Unfortunately, our instinctive gut feeling doesn't work when it comes to apocalyptic climate change because, as a singular event, it wasn't part of human evolution and couldn't be mentally trained."
(Google translation of "Das menschliche Gehirn stammt aus prähistorischer Zeit – instinktive Prozesse unserer neuronalen Netze im Gehirn verdrängen in vielen Situationen abwägende logische Denkprozesse. In kritischen Situationen sichern sie unser Überleben durch archaische, instinktive Entscheidungsmuster. Leider funktioniert unser instinktives Bauchgefühl nicht beim apokalyptischen Klimawandel, da es als singuläres Ereignis nicht Teil der menschlichen Evolution war, sich also auch nicht mental trainieren ließ.")

I guess this perspective is quite common among scientists now.

One more important innovation in philosophy to add to my list in comment #6 is Utilitarianism, which attempts to move the goal to pleasure of the many and to make pleasure of the many measurable. It arises out of Bentham, Mill, more recently Stinger, and their followers not understanding how Epicurus' way of claiming pleasure as the goal does not lead to egoism and that Epicurus' philosophy trusts feelings and is not just a logical system within which positions or actions to take can be readily to inferred from a few axioms like a mathematical theory as other philosophers have attempted to present their respective philosophies.

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since the classical authors referenced here lived 2000+ years ago, has anything changed? What, if anything, is new in the philosophy of life (contrasted to these classical perspectives)?

In reply to this question from comment #2, these are the changes / apparently new ideas of which I am currently aware of:

Beliefs in an almighty, all-knowing god have become dominant and although now somewhat on a decline have left their marks, in particular by the false concept of sin, false promise of an afterlife in heaven and association of pleasure with sins.

The program of materialism has worked out extremely well with science now providing explanations with evidence regarding all macroscopic phenomena humans can naturally sense. Increasingly sophisticated instrumentation is needed to find what is still unknown. The advancement of science has enabled pushing back the overbearing religions.
Mathematics has grown from just arithmetic and geometry for accounting and engineering and a speculative toy of idealistic philosophers to a large set of branches which go far beyond numbers and geometry. Especially calculus has been revolutionary and instrumental to develop better scientific theories.

The ancient justifications of slavery are no more accepted. Instead, machinery has made it partially obsolete, and wage slavery has come up and is widely accepted.

The improvement in material conditions have made it more likely that the results of the hedonic calculus of an individual Epicurean goes much more beyond minimalism today than at Epicurus' times.

The term "hedonic treadmill" has been coined and is used in academic philosophy to dismiss all types of hedonism, ignoring that the hedonic calculus prevents a consistent Epicurean from getting trapped on a hedonic treadmill.

Whereas the non-sceptics of the ancient philosophers including Epicurus thought their respective teachings to be true, fitness of a model to its intended purpose has mostly replaced truth. The concern for truth has been reduced to the truthfulness of logical constructs and protocols of events. This in turn facilitates dismissal of religions and grasping pleasure as the goal.

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Quote from Don Their contention is that if we knew the position of every atom and the physical laws that pertained to them, it would be possible to accurately know what would happen next ad infinitum.

Would that entail that there is no randomness in the system? That every event is perfectly predictable?

Now I want to hear from Martin!

Here is a slightly expanded version of my lost comment from yesterday:

In classical mechanics, there is no principal lower limit to the error with which we can know positions and speeds of bodies like there is in quantum mechanics. However, the error will never be reduced to 0. The residual error will propagate to large errors with time. That means events in the far future are not predictable. Therefore, even the simplistic "billiard board" model does not support hard determinism. E.g. the trajectory of Earth can be predicted some million years ahead (if there is no collision with a huge rogue celestial body) but not hundreds of millions of years:

How far ahead can we predict solar and lunar eclipses?

The solar system is non-integrable and has chaos. The sun-earth-moon three-body system might be chaotic. So, how far into the future can we predict solar…

physics.stackexchange.com

Hard determinism means that even the distant future is entirely determined by what happens now or has happend in the very distant past. That means all information about the future state of an isolated thermodynamic system is contained in the present state. Increase in entropy means increase of the information needed to completely describe the system. If the complete information has already always been there, entropy does not increase, in contradiction to what we observe for sufficiently large isolated systems.

The concept of free will makes sense for a supernatural soul but does not fit well into a materialistic world.

Instead, agency is a better concept. It works whether the materialistic world is deterministic or not. In a deterministic world, any moment of the distant past completely determines the action which an individual takes, but it is still impossible to accurately predict the action because the complete information of the past is impossible to gather, and the consequences are impossible to calculate. Without hard determinism, indeterminacies at the microscopic level add their influence on the present such that the predetermination by the past is weaker the further that past is in the past. The indeterminacies accumulate to increase variation of the outcome the further ahead the future under consideration is. This increases the variation in the observed output and would reduce but not prevent probabilistic success of predictions.

The indeterminacies at the microscopic level do not constitute a kind of materialistic soul as emergent property. My agency is derived from the past and - if there is no hard determinism - by the outcome of ongoing indeterminacies. These indeterminacies may add to the options to choose from and thereby enhance agency.

Anyone can predict that I will eventually get up to eat something, but no one can predict the second in which I will do that, and prediction of my choice of food is possible with only probabilistic success. The more complex the action to be predicted is, the lower are the chances of prediction.

Further progress in the development of artificial intelligence might eventually show whether complexity of a deterministic artificial neural network is enough to produce some kind of consciousness and meaningful pioneering creativity.

My best guess is that intentionally adding indeterminacies to the network enables or at least facilitates the ability to come up with genuinely new ideas.

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the idea that light moves at a consistent speed is only a convention, is this correct?

It is correct in the sense that the equality of the one-way speed of light and the two-way speed of light is a convention as explained in the video linked to in comment #13.

Only the Galileo transformation is compatible with an absolute space. However, electrodynamics proves that instead the Lorentz transformation is correct as explained in the video linked to in comment #14.

The special theory of relativity gets the Lorentz transformation independently. Therefore, electrodynamics is implicitly relativistic.

Different conventions than the equality of one-way speed and two-way speed have the constraint that the result must be compatible with the Lorentz transformation.

Therefore, a different convention might somewhat modify the special theory of relativity but not in a way which would show different experimental results.

None of the possible different conventions would save the absolute space.

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Can we interpret Einstein in way that leaves the void untouched and unaffected, but only the host of forces/matter?

The speed of the measured object in the reference system of the observer, a gravitational field or an accelerated reference system affects the "void" such that results of dimensional measurements in the "void" depend on that speed, the gravitational field or the acceleration. This is the only way how the "void" is affected, not more and not less. As a consequence, the absolute space which was conceivable in classical mechanics is lost. I guess it is that counter-interintuitive loss which is disturbing with the theories of relativity. I felt this disturbance, too. When I was an undergraduate student of physics, homework included calculations with the special theory of relativity. These calculations helped to make my intuition catch up with the rational understanding. Solving partial differential equations with boundary conditions can help with sharpening the intuition, too.

Alternatively, we might consider the existence of a not affected master space, which we identify with the "void", within which the geometric space is deformed by speed differences, the gravitational field and acceleration. However, that master space would have no empirical base. But if it helps to wrap our mind around the quirks of the theories of relativity, it might be a useful auxiliary construct.

What is quoted in comment #3 from Lawson's "The Special and General Theory" refers only to classical mechanics. It does not throw away the void.

The theories of relativity do not throw away the void either. Epicurus made no effort to establish coordinate systems for a quantitative description of the movement of bodies. Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is barely affected by the theories of relativity. To account for modern physics, Epicureans need to accept that the void can be filled with force fields. The sole function of the void in Epicurus' philosophy (to provide space for movement of bodies) is not affected. Epicurus' philosophy and the theories of relativity are compatible.