Posts by Joshua

Quote from Cassius

These issues of recognizing more than one level of reality are discussed in similar manner in Sedley's "Epicurus' Refutation of Determinism."

Thank you! I knew you had brought this up before, but I could not recall your source. Here is one relevant passage from Sedley;

Quote

Epicurus' response to this is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of his thought. It was to reject reductionist atomism. Almost uniquely among Greek philosophers he arrived at what is nowadays the unreflective assumption of almost anyone with a smattering of science, that there are truths at the microscopic level of elementary particles, and further very different truths at the phenomenal level; that the former must be capable of explaining the latter; but that neither level of description has a monopoly of truth. (The truth that sugar is sweet is not straightforwardly reducible to the truth that it has such and such a molecular structure, even though the latter truth may be required in order to explain the former). By establishing that cognitive scepticism, the direct outcome of reductionist atomism, is self-refuting and untenable in practice, Epicurus justifies his non-reductionist alternative, according to which sensations are true and there are therefore bona fide truths at the phenomenal level accessible through them.

As part of our ongoing preparation for the podcast's return to Lucretius in late 2025/early 2026, I've been thinking about new ways to explain the core concepts efficiently. This is one recent idea I've been turning over in my head to that end.

Middle World

In a TED Talk delivered in 2005, the evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins explored the ways in which humans understand nature at three different levels; first, at the microscopic level of atoms, and of microorganisms for whom surface tension is a more significant force than gravity. Second, the 'Middle World' that exists for us at the human level; a level in which human sense perception, and the human sense of the passage of time are dominant factors in coloring our impression and understanding of nature. Third, at the grandest scale of galaxies, of fathomless space, and of cosmic timescales.

I think a similar model of the human perception, experience, knowledge, and intimation of nature can be useful in the study of Epicurean physics. In the Epicurean view, this Middle World is defined by the limits of what we can perceive with our senses. When we venture into the lower or higher levels of reality, it becomes apparent that a veil has fallen over our eyes, and that the methods by which we attempt to penetrate that veil must necessarily be limited, too. The procedure is to reason from the known to the unknown, as Lucretius does when he suggests that space is boundless (I, line 968

Quote

Again if for the moment all existing space be held to be bounded, supposing a man runs forward to its outside borders, and stands on the utmost verge and then throws a winged javelin, do you choose that when hurled with vigorous force it shall advance to the point to which it has been sent and fly to a distance, or do you decide that something can get in its way and stop it? For you must admit and adopt one of the two suppositions; either of which shuts you out from all escape and compels you to grant that the universe stretches without end. For whether there is something to get in its way and prevent its coming whither it was sent and placing itself in the point intended, or whether it is carried forward, in either case it has not started from the end. In this way I will go on and, wherever you have placed the outside borders, I will ask what then becomes of the javelin.

And the same procedure is at work in his investigation of the lower level of reality; for how can we be sure that these infinitesimal seeds of things actually exist? The answer is that while the atom itself is not individually perceptible by our senses, the movements of those atoms leave traces all over our Middle World. Exam the traces, and you will find evidence of the atoms (I, line 311

Quote

Nay more, as the sun’s year rolls round again and again, the ring on the finger becomes thin beneath by wearing, the fall of dripping water hollows the stone, the bent iron ploughshare secretly grows smaller in the fields, and we see the paved stone streets worn away by the feet of the multitude; again, by the city-gates the brazen statues reveal that their right hands are wearing thin through the touch of those who greet them ever and again as they pass upon their way. All these things then we see grow less, as they are rubbed away: yet what particles leave them at each moment, the envious nature of our sight has shut us out from seeing.

Gradations Within Middle World

If this middle level of reality is bounded by the limits of what

the envious nature of our sight has shut us out from seeing,

it is nevertheless apparent that not everything in Middle World is equally perceptible to us. And while things immediately to hand can be examined closely, thoroughly, and minutely, other things in Middle World are perceptible only at a glance, or at a far remove. Epicurus describes the problem in his Letter to Pythocles;

Quote

Now all goes on without disturbance as far as regards each of those things which may be explained in several ways so as to harmonize with what we perceive, when one admits, as we are bound to do, probable theories about them. But when one accepts one theory and rejects another which harmonizes as well with the phenomenon, it is obvious that he altogether leaves the path of scientific inquiry and has recourse to myth. Now we can obtain indications of what happens above from some of the phenomena on earth: for we can observe how they come to pass, though we cannot observe the phenomena in the sky: for they may be produced in several ways.

Notice the old procedure at work again; even though the phenomena that appear in the sky do exist to our senses, we cannot take them in hand and scrutinize them closely. So we must once again reason from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. However, Epicurus also adds a second procedure here, which he calls the 'method of manifold causes', and to which he opposes the faulty and unreliable 'method of the single cause'. When we do not know the cause of a given phenomena, like lightning for example, it would be wrong to pretend that we do know it. The method of manifold causes is a tool of Epistemological restraint; we can speculate about one or more possible causes, but we do not assert a thing to be the cause where we do not have knowledge.

In Reality?

Epicurus was not at all the first to notice these varying levels of perception, experience, knowledge, and understanding. But he was innovative in assigning reality as such to all levels. Some of his predecessors and contemporaries rejected sense perception entirely, some complained of the troublesome flux of matter through space and time and thought that such constant change made knowledge impossible, and some held that both time and motion were themselves illusory.

For Socrates, Middle World was a distortion and a lie, and the object of philosophy was to mentally transcend the world of the flickering shadows of the lie and achieve perfect clarity of understanding in the realm of pure being, where only the forms themselves were real and eternal. In a surviving fragment, Democritus seems to have dreamt not of an ascent but of a descent, down to the level of the atoms;

By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; in reality, atoms and void.

Cyril Bailey summarizes the contrasting Epicurean view in his book The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, page 293;

Quote

But this was by no means Epicurus’ view: the compound body to him was not a mere aggregate, but a new entity, an ‘organism’ almost (σύστημα), or, as Lucretius calls it again and again, a concilium. In the organism of the whole the atoms did collectively acquire new properties and characteristics which as detached individuals they could never possess: no number of independent atoms could have colour, but unite them in the new entity of the whole, and it acquired colour. The idea is important and fruitful and we shall meet it again in the Epicurean kinetics and psychology. Moreover this whole is a reality, not a delusion: its reality for sense is as great as the reality of the atoms for thought: it is directly grasped by sense-perception, as the atoms are by ‘mental apprehension’. And this carries with it the reality of its qualities: indeed, it is by the perception of its qualities that a thing’s existence is known. To argue then that no quality which is not possessed by the individual atoms is ‘real’ in the compound, is to misunderstand fundamentally the Epicurean position. There are two worlds, or rather two departments of the same world, the one known by sense, the other by ‘mental apprehension’; both are equally real, and in passing from the one to the other, matter acquires new qualities.

In the third chapter of this book, Greenblatt relates an anecdote which it has taken me ages to track down;

Quote

By the first century CE there were distinctive signs of the emergence of what we think of as a “literary culture.” At the games in the Colosseum one day, the historian Tacitus had a conversation on literature with a perfect stranger who turned out to have read his works. Culture was no longer located in close-knit circles of friends and acquaintances; Tacitus was encountering his “public” in the form of someone who had bought his book at a stall in the Forum or read it in a library. This broad commitment to reading, with its roots in the everyday lives of the Roman elite over many generations, explains why a pleasure palace like the Villa of the Papyri had a well-stocked library.

Looking at the print edition, I notice that he does include an endnote; 63 At the games in the Colosseum: Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 237.

I didn't look up that citation (one of the pitfalls of preferring audiobooks), but I did finally find the ancient source of this anecdote, which appears in the letters of Pliny the Younger, book 9, letter 23 (To Maximus);

Quote

When I have been pleading, it has often happened that the centumviri, after strictly preserving for a long time their judicial dignity and gravity, have suddenly leaped to their feet en masse and applauded me, as if they could not help themselves but were obliged to do so. I have often again left the senate-house with just as much glory as I had hoped to obtain, but I never felt greater gratification than I did a little while ago at something which Cornelius Tacitus told me in conversation. He said that he was sitting by the side of a certain individual at the last Circensian games, and that, after they had had a long and learned talk on a variety of subjects, his acquaintance said to him:

"Are you from Italy or the provinces?" Tacitus replied:

"You know me quite well, and that from the books of mine you have read."

"Then," said the man, "you are either Tacitus or Pliny."

I cannot express to you how pleased I am that our names are, so to speak, the property of literature, that they are literary titles rather than the names of two men, and that both of us are familiar by our writings to persons who would otherwise know nothing of us. A similar incident happened a day or two before. That excellent man, Fadius Rufinus, was dining with me on the same couch, and next above him was a fellow-townsman of his who had just that day come to town for the first time. Rufinus, pointing me out to this man, said, "Do you see my friend here?" Then they spoke at length about my literary work, and the stranger remarked, "Surely, he is Pliny." I don't mind confessing that I think I am well repaid for my work, and if Demosthenes was justified in being pleased when an old woman of Attica recognised him with the words, "Why, here is Demosthenes,"¹ ought not I too to be glad that my name is so widely known? As a matter of fact, I am glad and I say so, for I am not afraid of being considered boastful, when it is not my opinion about myself but that of others which I put forward, and especially when you are my confidant - you who grudge no one his fair praise, and are constantly doing what you can to increase my fame. Farewell.

¹See Cicero, Tusc. v. (36)103.

Display More

Quote

would you want to add the word "bodily"?

I'm not sure, but perhaps not? I might consider friendship to be a necessary desire, and loneliness to be the contrary pain, for example. In fact, now that I look at it I notice that the two Principal Doctrines on friendship are sandwiched between Epicurus' commentary on the desires.

Here is a sample of the relevant texts:

Quote

PD26. Of desires, all that do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not satisfied, are not necessary, but involve a craving which is easily dispelled when the object is hard to procure, or they seem likely to produce harm.

PD29. Among desires, some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination.

PD30. Wherever, in the case of desires which are physical, but do not lead to a sense of pain if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense, such pleasures are due to idle imagination; and it is not owing to their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the empty imaginings of the man.

Men. 127. We must consider that of desires some are natural, others vain, and of the natural some are necessary and others merely natural; and of the necessary some are necessary for happiness, others for the repose of the body, and others for very life.

Diog. Oen Fr. 32. Each (virtue?) therefore ............... means of (?) ... just as if a mother for whatever reasons sees that the possessing nature has been summoned there, it then being necessary to allow the court to asked what each (virtue?) is doing and for whom .................................... [We must show] both which of the desires are natural and which are not; and in general all things that [are included] in the [former category are easily attained] .....

Diog. Oen Fr. 34. Let us first discuss states, keeping an eye on the point that, when the emotions which disturb the soul are removed, those which produce pleasure enter into it to take their place.

Well, what are the disturbing emotions? [They are] fears —of the gods, of death, and of [pains]— and, besides [these], desires that [outrun] the limits fixed by nature. These are the roots of all evils, and, [unless] we cut them off, [a multitude] of evils will grow [upon] us.

Diog. Oen NF 131 = YF 189. Vain desires, like those for fame and such things, are not only vain, but, as well as being vain, also difficult to fulfil. It is not unlike drinking much, yet always being thirsty. To be master of Pella, but [to have troubles for company, is vain].

Diog. Oen Fr. 153. Of the desires some are vain, others natural. Now those that are natural seek after such things as [are necessary] for our nature’s enjoyment, [while those that are vain] ................................................................................... What [need to mention the] fabulous treasures of Croesus and his gold ingots or the rivers running with gold for him? What [benefit], father Zeus, [did he derive] from these [richness]?

DRN Book IV, ~1084. For therein there is hope that from the same body, whence comes the source of their flame, the fire may in turn be quenched. Yet nature protests that all this happens just the other way; and this is the one thing, whereof the more and more we have, the more does our heart burn with the cursed desire. For meat and drink are taken within the limbs; and since they are able to take up their abode in certain parts, thereby the desire for water and bread is easily sated. But from the face and beauteous bloom of man nothing passes into the body to be enjoyed save delicate images; and often this love-sick hope is scattered to the winds.

Display More

And here is how I would synthesize all of this information;

The test of whether a desire is necessary is in determining whether a feeling of pain results if that desire is not satisfied. If pain results, the desire is necessary. If pain does not result, the desire is unnecessary.

The test of whether a desire is natural is in determining whether there is a fixed limit in nature to which the object of desire is subjected. If there is a fixed limit in nature, the desire is natural. If there is not a fixed limit in nature, the desire is unnatural. Cassius is fond of quoting the dictum that hard cases make bad law, and we should probably be cautious when we approach the boundary between natural and unnatural desires. Remember, the purpose of this exercise is not to achieve a perfect score, or to make the grade, or to get on Santa's (or St. Peter's) nice list; the purpose is to secure a life of pleasure and to minimize, so far as it's reasonable to do so, the presence of pain.

Epicurus typically defines these terms in the negative, as in Principal Doctrine 26, and his advice to students on ethical questions is also offered in negative terms, as it is in Vatican Saying 51;

Quote

VS51. You tell me that the stimulus of the flesh makes you too prone to the pleasures of love. Provided that you do not break the laws, or good customs, and do not distress any of your neighbors, or do harm to your body, or squander your pittance, you may indulge your inclination as you please. Yet it is impossible not to come up against one or other of these barriers, for the pleasures of love never profited a man and he is lucky if they do him no harm.

You have to do the math yourself, for yourself!

I quoted from Montaigne's essays, here is the relevant passage;

Quote

Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they did not in time reconcile themselves to his favor: “Why, you pitiful fellow,” replied he, “what can they suffer who do not fear to die?” It being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free? “Why,” said he, “by despising death.” These, and a thousand other sayings to the same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself. Witness the Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by his master commanded to some base employment: “Thou shalt see,” says the boy, “whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty,” and having so said, threw himself from the top of the house. Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians, that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of his: “If thou threatenest us with more than death,” replied they, “we shall the more willingly die”; and to Philip, having written them word that he would frustrate all their enterprises: “What, wilt thou also hinder us from dying?” This is the meaning of the sentence, “That the wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all color of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out. We may be straitened for earth to live upon, but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus answered the Romans.” Why dost thou complain of this world? it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

Yes, that fragment is remarkably well-attested:

Quote

[06] They say that he wrote to many other women of pleasure and particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also in love; and that in the treatise On the End of Life he wrote, ‘I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight.’

-Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers Bailey Translation

Quote

Thus you speak: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain.” And these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted.

-Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Yonge Translation

Quote

I do not suppose, Velleius, that you are like some of the Epicureans, who are ashamed of those expressions of Epicurus, in which he openly avows that he has no idea of any good separate from wanton and obscene pleasures, which, without a blush, he names distinctly.

-Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Yonge Translation

Quote

For Epicurus says, without any concealment, but speaking with a loud voice, as it were, "For I am not able to distinguish what is good if you once take away the pleasure arising from sweet flavours, and if you also take away amatory pleasures." For this wise man thinks that even the life of the intemperate man is an unimpeachable one, if he enjoys an immunity from fear, and also mirth. On which account also the comic poets, running down the Epicureans, attack them as mere servants and ministers of pleasure and intemperance.

-Athenaeus, The Banquet of the Learned, Yonge Translation

Thank you all!

I dislike it when other people speculate about my motives in an attempt to prove a point, and I try--not always successfully--to refrain from doing this myself.

"You only left Christianity because you were hurt by people at church...You only deny God because you want to justify a life of sin...You only act morally because God's laws are written on your heart..."

Well, no. If they really wanted to know the answers to these questions, they could always ask. Be curious, as the man says:

Edit; yeesh, I forgot there's some strong language in that clip!

Don is right to mention the classical festivals of the dead, but it is worth noting that when Lucretius makes references to these practices (the feasts of Feralia, Parentalia, and Lemuria in Rome) it is generally to reveal the fear, foolishness, or hypocrisy of the people taking part. This is from Bailey's translation of the proem to Book three:

Quote

For, although men often declare that disease and a life of disgrace are more to be feared than the lower realm of death, and that they know that the soul’s nature is of blood, or else of wind, if by chance their whim so wills it, and that so they have no need at all of our philosophy, you may be sure by this that all is idly vaunted to win praise, and not because the truth is itself accepted. These same men, exiled from their country and banished far from the sight of men, stained with some foul crime, beset with every kind of care, live on all the same, and, spite of all, to whatever place they come in their misery, they make sacrifice to the dead [parentant], and slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the gods of the dead [manibus divis], and in their bitter plight far more keenly turn their hearts to religion. Wherefore it is more fitting to watch a man in doubt and danger, and to learn of what manner he is in adversity; for then at last a real cry is wrung from the bottom of his heart: the mask is torn off, and the truth remains behind.

Bailey's translation of section 123 of the Letter to Menoeceus is not to be relied upon, and I will always recommend reviewing Don's translation and commentary starting on page 29:

Quote

θεὸν is transliterated theon and is where English gets theology and atheist. τὸν θεὸν is singular, but, singular or plural, this can refer to a god, the gods, or the divine in general.

However, David Sedley in his paper "Epicurus' Theological Innatism" places significance on the singular construction. Sedley proposed each person creates their own "god" which is why he stressed the importance of the singular form. Sedley's paper is recommended reading. So, where the word is singular, I will try to translate it as such as to not obscure the semantics.

So I would amend Bailey's translation for clarity in the following way;

Quote

First of all believe that [a] god is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a god is engraved on men’s minds, and do not assign to him [such a being] anything alien to his [its] immortality or ill-suited to his [its] blessedness: but believe about him [such a being] everything that can uphold his [its] blessedness and immortality.

Now, why does Epicurus use the singular here, and the plural subsequently? As Don points out, Dr. Sedley has a paper speaking to this question that I need to review. For now, I think we can look to the Letter to Herodotus for an answer:

Quote

First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words, in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning.

[38] For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation, if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. And besides we must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accord with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.

The"first mental image" of a god is of 'a being blessed and incorruptible', and that image is a type, according to one definition of that word:

Quote

2. a person or thing symbolizing or exemplifying the ideal or defining characteristics of something.

Now that we have this image in our minds, we can hold other claims, descriptors, delimiters, and representations up to it, to test whether they hold good or not. A jealous, petty, angry, vindictive god does not accord with the mental image of blessedness, and so we can disregard such a view of the gods.

Note, though, that the 'first mental image' of a thing is NOT an ideal platonic form of the class of things it represents, and it has no being outside of our minds. There is no perfect and unchanging realm of pure being. And our souls do not innately possess knowledge of these mental images to be 'recollected' through the study of logic and geometry; these mental images are formed as impressions by repeated exposure. They are a distillation of experience, and not something external and eternal that precedes experience.

If I've made a mistake here, I trust that Don and Bryan will correct me!

The christian apologist Lactantius attributed the formulation of the paradox to Epicurus in the late third or early fourth century AD. Nothing like it survives in any of the extant writings of Epicurus, and the earliest source is in the works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus of the second century, who does not attribute it to him. It probably has its origin in ancient Skepticism.

Welcome!

Regarding the gods, the size of the sun, and the findings of modern physics, these are questions of perennial interest around here.

My own view is this: if I am going to hold forth as an Epicurean, I have an obligation to try to understand his system of thought to the best of my ability. When I am trying to explain Epicureanism to others, I try to explain it the way I think Epicurus himself understood it. I don't always succeed in presenting it well, or accurately, but I try never to intentionally misrepresent.

That being said, I do not feel obligated to agree with the ancients on every point; and when I am stating my own views, I try to make it clear that that's what I'm doing.

To quote Thoreau, the cart before the horse is neither useful nor beautiful. The philosophy of Epicurus is not best understood as a set of pass/fail litmus tests.

Quote

XIII. Those who place the Chief Good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name, and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues; but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but for its conduciveness to health; the art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also Wisdom, which must be considered as the art of living, if it effected no result would not be desired; but as it is, it is desired, because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.

-Torquatus, Cicero's On Ends

I wrote this reply yesterday in response to the article but decided not to post it. But it saved as a draft, and someone might find it interesting, so here it is:

________________________

From the article:

Quote

But this says nothing about the origins of such life, either here or elsewhere. The salient question: is it physically or chemically possible for living, self-replicating organisms with internal metabolic processes to come about through entirely naturalistic processes unaided by intelligence?

The evidence seems to say, resoundingly, No.

The evidence is inconclusive. To say that the evidence is inconclusive is not at all the same as saying that the evidence suggests (resoundingly or otherwise) that abiogenesis is impossible.

A relevant example of this principle can be found in astronomy. When in the 16th century Tycho Brahe critiqued the Copernican model of the solar system, his objection was grounded in (among other things) the fact that stellar parallax had never been observed. Attempts to observe this hypothetical parallax had been made, and in the event would go on being made for nearly three hundred years before the phenomena was finally and conclusively measured scientifically by Henderson, Struve, and Bessel in independent experiments in the 1830s.

If Yates were writing in the 1820s, would he have confidently pronounced (resoundingly!) that the measurement of stellar parallax in our cosmos was impossible? Perhaps not. Well, then he shouldn't say it or imply it here. Inconclusive does not mean impossible; it just means inconclusive.

He then delivers himself of the opinion that abiogenesis cannot be tested, on the grounds that the men and women performing the test would themselves be intelligent. Therefore, any proto-organism or self-replicating molecule produced in a laboratory experiment by those men and women would, by definition, have been created by one or more intelligent beings. By this logic we should disregard all laboratory experiments. That legumes fix nitrogen into the soil they grow in in a laboratory experiment would tell us nothing about the nitrogen cycle in nature, but ONLY if we are foolish enough to insist that the cause of their fixing nitrogen is to be found in the intelligence of the researcher and not in the biochemistry of the legume. The researcher arranges the conditions in which nitrogen is fixed, but he does not fix the nitrogen. Likewise with abiogenesis. Arranging the conditions in which life emerges from non-life would not be an act of intelligent creation.

Quote

The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock, are usually devoid of
visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable
microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the
spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of
estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When
the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in
his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a
swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral
existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the
pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before,
making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that
moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after
week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening—we can imagine
—for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust
above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if
not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a
burden on the wind.
Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It’s a
strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night,
after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see
the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies
immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky
counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under
the frog’s chin swells like a bubble, then collapses.
Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat
apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing
outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night
with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak,
dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may
nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only
to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also
out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of
the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their
own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common
life.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect
that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick
extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and
without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the
toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don’t, that the
sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail
cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene
of their happiness.
What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their
metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher
animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of
the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here
and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest
survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The
rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And
again.

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Display More

Welcome O2x Ohio !

Regarding your interest in the Epicurean understanding of light, I can be of some help when it comes to the secondary literature. Well, primarily the secondary literature on Lucretius. The tradition of commentary on the school of Epicurus has been fraught since very near the beginning, which is why I would ordinarily echo Dewitt's exhortation to return to the texts! However, I think you may find this essay by Edward Neville Andrade (1887-1971) of University College, London to be of some interest. It was published as an introductory essay to the second volume of H. A. J. Munro's three volume text (I), commentary (II), and translation (III) of De Rerum Natura. The essay is titled The Scientific Significance of Lucretius, and, though the scientific perspective of the author is now a century and a half out of date, he is much more thorough than other sources we have. Einstein for example wrote a forward to a German translation of Lucretius, but it is no more than superficial regarding the actual ideas presented by the poet. That's why Andrade's essay is useful--he goes much deeper.

Here is the text at the Internet Archive. I hope you find it helpful.

And here is another interesting scientific appraisal of Epicureanism, this one in the form of a popular lecture by the Irish physicist John Tyndall--a lecture that caused great controversy when it was delivered in 1874.

There is another consideration to note here, and that is that not all imagineable boundless and eternal universes are the same.

Imagine a universe that is boundless and eternal, but where a particular force in that universe like gravity peaks at an epicenter in space and asymptotically approaches zero on every infinite line radiating away from that epicenter. I can imagine a rim around the core of that peak beyond which star formation becomes impossible. If the same universe had a similar peak in time rather than space, toward which the speed of light would eternally accelerate and away from which it would infinitely decelerate. Such a universe would be infinite and eternal, but might only be fit for life in a finite and temporary zone around the correlation of both peaks in spacetime. If somewhere in the infinite number of digits behind the decimal in Pi we eventually encounter an endless string of nines, we've reached the Borg and the end of all variety.

Quote

I also recall that one of the analogies or issues you have quoted before is something to do with the ability to infer or predict all the possibilities of various oceans from knowing the characteristics of s a single drop of water. Do you recall the source for that one?

"From a drop of water,' said the writer, 'a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it."

-A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (from the Sherlock Holmes stories)

Quote

Should we conclude that after a thing has happened once, that in an infinite and eternal universe it will happen an infinite number of times, but that it is impossible and in fact improper to predict with any confidence after huge numbers of monkeys are born that there will ever be any more intelligent beings born anywhere in the universe?

Oh, I was only speaking about this Earth. In an infinite and eternal cosmos anything that is possible within that cosmos should be expected to exist an infinite number of times. If you assign each letter in the Latin alphabet to a number (a->1, b->2, etc) somewhere in the infinity of digits behind the decimal point in the number Pi one would expect to find a sequence of numbers that happens to spell out the collected works of William Shakespeare. This particular supposition is currently theoretical, and awaiting formal proof.

Q: Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?

Mathematician: As it turns out, mathematicians do not yet know whether the digits of pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers. That being said, many…

www.askamathematician.com

Quote

There is no necessity either way in a particular circumstance, but is not a process with has been observed to be in operation is limited by nature rather than by necessity (?)

You may have to rewrite that last clause for me....