Posts by Elayne

Here are some ideas. The atheist one bothers me somewhat, because the current meaning of this is absence of belief in supernatural gods. So here again I feel we are getting into issues of mistranslation into modern English because of attachment to older language. I would prefer that we use the modern meaning of atheist, a label I do apply to myself.

1. Not "the greatest good for the greatest number," but “to all desires must be applied this question: What will be the result for me if the object of this desire is attained and what if it will not?”

2. Not "humanism", “individualism”, “collectivism”, “egoism” or “altruism”, but “the tie of friendship knits itself through reciprocity of favors among those who have come to enjoy pleasures to the full.”

3. Not "hard determinism" but “some things happen from necessity, some from chance, and others through our own choice.” (see paper on Agency)

4. Not "short term hedonism" but “it is to continuous pleasures that I invite you.”

5. Not "absence of pain" as a full statement of the goal of life, but “the Feelings are two, pleasure and pain” and “Pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life.”

6. Not "living unknown" as best way to organize one's life, but “friendship dances around the world summoning us all to awaken to the recognition of happiness.”

7. Not "creation by a supernatural being”, but matter which is uncreatable and indestructible. In modern physics, this takes the form of the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy is neither created not destroyed but only changes form. One form of energy is matter. It seems unlikely Epicurus would disagree.

8. Not "faith" but "constant activity in the study of Nature”

9. Not "individualism" or "collectivism" but (I combined these in 2)

10. Not "egoism" or "altruism" but (combined in #2)

11. Not "idealism" based on reason, but “not even reason can refute the sensations, for reason depends wholly upon them.”
12. Not "atheism" or “supernaturalism”, but a fully material universe with the possibility of continuously happy beings, and “for those men for whom wisdom is possible, and who do seek it, such men may truly live as gods.” My preference would be: Not belief in supernatural gods but... and the rest the same. Leave atheism out of it, and accept that living people who use that word are referring to supernatural gods only.

“The wise man alone will know true gratitude and in respect of his friends, whether present or absent, will be the same throughout the journey of life.” Epicurus, DL, trans. Hicks, 10.118.

Sometimes a post from The Daily Stoic shows up in my newsfeed, and usually I ignore it... but every so often, I check to see what the Stoics are up to. Today’s bit of unwise advice is to distrust your friends, because everybody lies. If they say they are enjoying life, they are probably lying, so no need to ask them how they have accomplished their joy—you can be safe knowing they are just as miserable as you. https://dailystoic.com/assume-everyone-is-lying/

What a miserable way to live! Of course, sometimes people lie—but that does not mean everyone lies all the time, or that there are no deeply honest people—people who say the same thing whether they are with friends or alone in the room. Sometimes people do not broadcast their unhappiness online, but this also does not mean the pleasures they post are not real or that there are no people who are truly having an enjoyable life.

Sometimes, after being betrayed by someone who pretended to be an honest friend but who was not, we may feel like believing we can’t trust anyone at all. But that is a path to a sad, painful life, without the true friendship which is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Let us seek to find friends whom we trust and with whom we will be trustworthy and honest about our lives, so that we may enjoy ourselves together. Parents, I advise you to teach your children from an early age how to recognize honest people and how to be honest themselves, by demonstrating your own honesty in their presence.

In your comments, I invite you to give examples of the pleasures of honesty among friends, from your own lives. If you are a parent, how have you taught your children about this pleasure?

*** This is a potential post in my planned "The Daily Epicurean Parent" website, from which I will eventually construct the book I've discussed earlier. Any editing suggestions are welcome!

I like this idea, and especially focusing on applying the philosophy in everyday life! The most obvious times it comes into play are when we make decisions-- sometimes big life decisions, but also small ones. It seems to me that the small decisions often add up to the most effect in overall happiness. When someone wants to be happier, I think their daily schedule is the first place to start.

We have natural desires, and we have a natural, innate sense of what feels just and what doesn't, based on the evolved tit for tat strategy. Organisms that can't tell if they are getting shortchanged on resources don't survive well! But a desire for justice is not a right until others contract with us to establish such. I think the whole concept of natural rights is a disaster.

Fortunately, zero partnering with other organizations is necessary, because there is no training of ordained ministers required by these online groups. They do include example scripts for weddings, but no one needs training to perform a wedding. If a person is shy about public speaking, that can be overcome through other channels. All one really needs to know is what their state law requires for a marriage. Couples can write their own vows.

I'm ordained through ULC, as well as through the First Church of Atheism and the Church of the Latter Day Dude. ULC was created solely to provide a route for celebrants for couples who otherwise had no options, and they had to meet the definition of a church, to meet state law requirements. Cassius, that is the reason the wording is vague-- it was the mínimum needed to withstand court challenge (which ULC successfully did).

Many states had put a stranglehold on access to marriage. If you couldn't find a minister or a judge to do your ceremony, you were SOL. This was especially true for same sex couples. That was the reason I registered online-- our probate judges refused to perform same sex weddings, and when they were ordered to, they quit doing ANY weddings at all. So atheist couples or "nones" couldn't get married either. I have performed several same sex and atheist weddings. It's super easy and fun!

I agree that it is something to consider. If I ever marry again, it would be to an Epicurean, and how cool would it be to have a database of folks who would perform ceremonies for their fellow Epicureans? I get emails from desperate atheist couples who don't even have an atheist friend or family member to help them. Last fall, I did an entirely secular wedding for a couple in Cullman and their family didn't even realize we had left out god! ?

Oh, yes, I agree that working with the public is often pleasant-- I enjoy meeting most of the families in my practice! And unlike Tolstoy, I find their stories of happiness to be more fascinating and variable than their stories of sadness, which tend for me to be mostly similar.

I think we are in full agreement that there is no strict correlation between skill level as an abstract quality, minus specifics, and pleasure... but what I meant to say is that for certain specific situations, more skill can bring more pleasure. "It depends" is probably my most accurate answer.

Customer service is a great example of a skill that can make one's life significantly more pleasant! Both for the person in the job and the customer. There is an older woman who works at the driver's license photo desk where I live, who always seems to be in a great mood. She goes through this brief routine with every person-- she says "I want you to have a photo you like!" She has them roll their shoulders and neck, take a big breath, relax and smile. This puts everyone in the line in a good mood, so they are easier for her to work with too. I actually enjoy going to update my license photo, because I look forward to the friendliness of that room. I do the same thing with my patients-- I greet them with a big smile, and if I know them, an offer of a quick hug. That changes everything about the rest of the visit, so it is a skill worth getting very good at, for me. No mediocre smiling, lol!

I have the home page bookmarked but I don't look at it-- the red numbers on the top menu by Forum and Gallery, or sometimes at notifications-- that is where I go, to see what I haven't read.

JJ, I would say the pleasure or pain is in the details, and I am hesitant to generalize about specialization, lol.

Which approach works best for pleasure depends on the temperament of the individual, the skill level, and the resources of the social environment. For instance, a one-instrument specialist who achieves remarkable skill, such that he can be sufficiently paid, and who does not get bored with that one instrument and in fact prefers it to something like hog butchering-- that person would be well advised to keep on specializing. He can contract out the generalist work.

But if there are not people around who can cook his food, tile his floor, etc, to the standard he wants done... perhaps he would be happier to put some of those practice hours into a few other skills.

Most people would probably classify me as a generalist, in that I have a wider than typical variety of interests and skills-- I do not have a single-minded passion that I have pursued. However, this has not for me translated to mediocrity of skill level for all of those interests. For some or maybe even most, sure. For instance, I've done competition ballroom but remain very much an amateur-- I did it just for fun, and that attitude was a big part of what made it fun. I had no concern about the outcome, other than not injuring my partner. I don't need to earn money with it. Same with singing-- I can stay on pitch, harmonize, and do solos in my Chorus, but I am not interested in becoming a professional level singer.

For other things, it is relatively easy to become highly skilled without all that much time investment. For instance, I have hand-made quilts with 14 even stitches per inch, exactly cut and pieced-- because you can't get more exact to the unaided eye, after a certain point. And because I have done so much cooking, I have a feel for it, and I can out do most restaurant meals for a small group. I'm not saying I'm top chef-- but neither am I anywhere close to mediocre. Getting good at cooking has paid off big time in terms of pleasure, on a daily basis! Along the way, because of curiosity, I have learned to do things like roast my own coffee in my garage, using a drum roaster. That's something you can spend a LOT of time learning, but even a moderate time investment pays off with an amazing jump in pleasure of taste, well beyond mediocre.

In my pediatric work, I am a "general pediatrician"-- but in this case, because the amount of available knowledge is not as much as you might think, and because I am constitutionally curious, I have taken time to learn a lot of depth about many of the body systems. The only things I need to refer to specialists are for procedures I don't know how to do-- I didn't train to do surgery, EEGs, etc. However, the depth of knowledge I can access about the various organ systems is substantial, and I have taken advantage of that... plus, unlike the specialist, I am able to put findings in one system into context with the whole body-- which has led to my occasionally making diagnoses that excellent specialists completely missed.

Sometimes, I have known things that specialists in a field did not know, even in their field-- for instance, when one of my family members had what looked like a low neutrophil count, which was a known side effect of the medication he was taking, his specialist was alarmed. He was going to stop the medication, which was the only thing so far that had helped my family member. However, because of my wide-ranging reading habits, I remembered a phenomenon with this particular medication where the morning blood count can differ from the afternoon, and if the afternoon count is normal there is no need to worry. Pseudoneutropenia. I brought the specialist the articles, he rechecked my family member's lab test in the afternoon, and it was all fine.

If a person is a generalist in several activities with reasonably accessible depth of skill for moderate time investment, it is possible to be as good or nearly as good as a specialist who chooses only one activity. The difference will show up more if it is a specialty where the time needed to excel would rule out many additional activities.

What caught my eye was that pleasures are only "generally good", when it is actually that the pleasures themselves are always good but that sometimes pains come along with certain pleasure-bringing actions and thus those actions are not advisable. It's not the pleasure that's the problem at all-- it's the entire consequences of the action. That might sound like a quibbling distinction but I don't think it is minor. Because sometimes one can modify the results of an action so that the pleasures remain and the pains are lessened or removed.

What I understand JJ to be saying is that slavery would not come under the category "justice" if if does not involve some type of mutual agreement, a contract which is at least implied, between the two parties. I agree completely. The use of force does not qualify as a contract. That is different from classifying it by a universal standard of right and wrong, different from popular concepts of "fairness", and different from an assessment of the consequences in terms of pain/ pleasure-- it's only saying it doesn't meet the definition of contractual justice as Epicurus used that terminology.

There were two people in my Meetup group, out of several who signed up and fewer who actually came, whom I thought might work out... and that would have been ok to start with. Even ONE actual Epicurean in my area would be great, lol! But after we met a few times, it became clear we were not anywhere near to being on the same page, and that they were not willing to spend the time to study on their own between meetings. That wouldn't be so much of an issue if I had a core group to start with, of at least somewhat similar perspectives.

Given the preponderance of competing philosophies, it may be much harder than I had thought to find people who are open to this philosophy, much less people who already get it.

One mistake I made was that the group was not set up in a hierarchical manner. This is mainly because I consider myself a self-led person, but I dislike having followers... I prefer other self-led friends. In the past, when I have done public political things, a crowd of almost groupie-like people tried to glom onto me, and it was quite irritating-- they were more interested in some kind of weird hero worship than they were in doing anything substantial themselves. They didn't treat me like a real person but more of a projection. So I did not set things up where I was clearly the leader of the meetup group--- I wanted it to be more lateral than vertical. But that doesn't work well when the others are so unfamiliar with the subject matter.

Bradley, when I get farther along (which may be slow due to my other activities), I would be interested in interviewing you! I hope, as Cassius suggested, that you will also post on this forum how your philosophy affects your interactions with your children! I will not quote anything without permission.

VS 76 sounds like one of those sayings where the specific context matters, so I would just be guessing. When I read DeWitt, I realized how important the contexts were. For myself personally, when I study for my own pleasure, that automatically includes wanting the pleasure of those I'm close to. Not a whole country. But on the other hand, I suspect that if a substantial number of citizens in my country decided to practice EP, the outcome would likely increase my freedom of choice and thus my options for pleasure.

Beautiful! This exactly!

Hi JJ-- cool info about Whitman!

I read a few years ago that Whitman was interested in phrenology-- a popular idea in his time that one could discern character from bumps on the skull. And that this is where some of the language in his poetic self description originated. Phrenology was discredited, but I still love what he did with all that. You may already know this-- here's a link in case not.

I mention that because I have noticed that there is a wide range of inquiry in that general field of embodied consciousness-- some credible and some woowoo. It's a fascinating subject!

https://whitmanarchive.org/archive1/class…ntroduction.htm

Cassius, I will likely need your help when I get to the point of including some of the historical documents/ translations-- I think my main focus will be on how the basic structure of the philosophy applies to raising children, but it will be stronger if I include specific historical references. Most likely I will write initially from my pediatric knowledge/ experience, which agrees with EP in full-- and then add in the history as part of background. So when I post chapters, I will be glad to revise them to incorporate historical material.

For anyone who is substantially involved in the book, I will certainly want to list them as co-authors.

Hiram, thank you for those ideas! I do need to include objectivism. I tend to forget it, because I don't see it all that much where I live, but I know it is a popular thing. Because of my schedule, it might take quite a while for me to finish... so I think I should get some sections at least in a draft before contacting a publisher. But when the time comes, that would be great!

The concept of parental leadership out of respect, not fear, is one of the major things I will cover-- that is what I have taught my whole career! I agree completely. When I was on faculty at UAB, I taught the med students their discipline lecture. I always stressed that discipline comes from the Latin word for teaching/ learning-- not for whacking them on the butt. The AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) calls that type of leadership "authoritative" parenting, as opposed to authoritarian parenting. There was a time when this was popular-- Dr. Ginot, for example, and Dr. Thomas Gordon-- and lately the pendulum has swung in what to me is a micromanaging, behavioral modification direction with lots of rewards and punishments that tend to backfire and are largely ineffective.

Martin, pediatrics used to be just younger children... but my training-- and I have been in practice for 23 years-- was to care for newborns through adolescence. There is some debate on the age to end pediatric care-- most offices I know turn them over to the family docs at 18, but some at 21. I am comfortable doing their medical care, including family relationships and basic psychiatric care, through age 21.

So my book will definitely include teens! I will think about how to include a scenario such as you describe. I haven't run into that exact one, but it is very common for parents to have differing perspectives on a wide variety of issues, and that would be a good aspect to cover. It might come under a broad heading of teaching children to cope with conflict, by example.

Godfrey-- when I include biological research in Physics, of course we are using our sensations (and the instruments which are tools to extend our sensations) to perform the research. Just as we use our sensations to observe the results of a physics experiment. However, physics-- the movements and interactions of particles-- is at the root of biology, since we are material creatures. So what I meant is that in the study of the brain, we are studying events and structures that occur as the result of physical interactions in matter/ energy. And when we talk about the results of biological experiments, rather than the methods used, we are in the realm of physics.

(by including abstract reasoning under perception of reality, I will not be including it in the Canon-- I mean that I will review ways in which children interpret sensory data, etc-- and I will give examples of why abstract reasoning is NOT in the Canon and why the senses are