Posts by Kalosyni

I just been contemplating how a subtle discontent is actually a motivating force for action. And another motivator is curiousity.

And in the Letter to Menoeceus (as Don pointed out) that the sweet life is brought forth by self-controlled reasoning...as it says in the letter:

"searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance"

So these two things motivate action:

• discontent (physical pain or mental discontent/subtle fear)
• curiousity (wanting to try out a physical sensation or learn something)

Any others?

This post and the one following (by Don) have been copied over from a different thread...to start a discussion on motivation for action.

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Quote from Rolf

That said, sitting on a sun lounger at a resort sipping piña coladas for the rest of my days sounds absolutely awful and would certainly not leave me content.

Letter to Menoeceus:

[132] "For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit."

Quote from Rolf

I forget who on here said it, but this reminds me a bit of something along the lines of “the perfect/best life is for the gods”. Us mortals are always going to have to compromise like this, and while we can live like the gods for certain periods, we must expect that pains will arise.

From Diogenes Laertius, "wise man sayings" section:

"They say also that there are two ideas of happiness, complete happiness, such as belongs to a god, which admits of no increase, and the happiness which is concerned with the addition and subtraction of pleasures."

Quote from Rolf

That said, sitting on a sun lounger at a resort sipping piña coladas for the rest of my days sounds absolutely awful and would certainly not leave me content.

Letter to Menoeceus:

[132] "For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit."

Quote from Rolf

I forget who on here said it, but this reminds me a bit of something along the lines of “the perfect/best life is for the gods”. Us mortals are always going to have to compromise like this, and while we can live like the gods for certain periods, we must expect that pains will arise.

From Diogenes Laertius, "wise man sayings" section:

"They say also that there are two ideas of happiness, complete happiness, such as belongs to a god, which admits of no increase, and the happiness which is concerned with the addition and subtraction of pleasures."

From the Letter to Pythocles:

Quote

[95] For on earth too we see many things shining with their own, and many with reflected light. Nor is any celestial phenomenon against these explanations, if one always remembers the method of manifold causes and investigates hypotheses and explanations consistent with them, and does not look to inconsistent notions and emphasize them without cause and so fall back in different ways on different occasions on the method of the single cause.

Epicurus' Letter to Pythocles - Epicureanfriends.com

www.epicureanfriends.com

Welcome to the forum O2x Ohio !

Quote from Don

Quote from Rolf

All in all, rather unsettling.

Took the words right out of my mouth ... so to speak (pun unintentionally intended now that I wrote that )

I also found it unsettling.

Coming up this next Monday evening, on Sept. 1st, at 8pm ET...

...Calling all new members (Level 2) who are interested in attending a meet and greet Zoom!

This meeting will also provide an opportunity to ask questions about the forum and Epicurean philosophy.

Level 2 members: please let us know here in this thread if you would like to attend (and we will get the link to you by private message).

Please note: the meeting will only take place if there are one or more new members who wish to attend, so if you are new and wish to attend then please RSVP.

***

For Level 3 members and above, please take note that you are welcome to attend (if the meeting is held) but the meeting will now be oriented toward new members. Level 3 members we hope to see you on Sunday or Wednesday Zooms.

We will do an update on the status of this meeting the day before (to let you know if the meeting will be happening).

This line from Horace:

Quote from Cassius

Unless the vessel be sweet, whatever you pour into it turns sour.

...reminds me of Lucretius:

Thread

The Vessel Analogy At The Opening of Lucretius Book Six

I'd like to ask for input on this question about the opening of book six of Lucretius involving the "vessel" analogy. The text is below, but here's the question:

It appears that Lucretius is separating out two aspects of the defects in the "jar" - (1) the jar is leaking and cannot be filled due to leaks caused by the holes, and (2) that the jar tainted all that it took in as with a foul odor.

As to (1) It seems to me that the leaks can be pretty well identified with the analogy of the Danaides,…

Cassius

September 13, 2023 at 7:06 PM

Another way to investigate all of this is to plug it into real life experiences.

It is all about personal subjective experiences, and determining how far you want to go with it (how deep you want to go into investigating your internal mental experiences and physical sensations).

For the sensation of taste, we have a limit which the stomach provides. We must honor the full stomach and not eat when pain arises. This is the natural limit of pleasure regarding taste. You can practice bringing the concept of "the limit of pleasure" into practical application by eating pizza! (Why ruin a good meal by eating so much that you feel pain for the next half hour or hour afterward.)

Lately I've been chewing sugar-free gum (cinnamon and also tropical fruit flavor). But I've decided that I will no longer buy anymore or chew it, because I find it brings up mental annoyance for me - because I don't feel a sense of completion and as soon as the flavor is gone I want to start over with new gum, or I feel a craving to eat something (but I need to watch my calorie intake these days due to a slower metabolism (not getting as much exercise these days).

As for the sensations of vision: beautiful shape/color ...this too can have a limit. I have discovered this limit when looking online at Pinterest AI images (too much becomes painful! )

Reflecting on that chart, and the implication that everything will soon go to "hell in a hand-basket"... I was thinking that as long as everyone maintains their employment and has money, and the money maintains its value, and there is enough food in the grocery stores, then everything goes okay. But if there ever comes a time with widespread unemployment, worthless money, and no food...then that is a big problem.

It often appears that discussions flow from an "either/or" standpoint. Recent discussion anti-natalist vs natalist had some aspects of an "either/or", but it seems that there have been other discussions with dichotomies (and do Cicero & Plutarch use this?)

Wikipedia says:

"A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when, in fact, there could be many." -- Source

Is there anything in the Letter to Pythocles that could be applied? Or what would Epicurus say?

Quote from Don

The philosophy doesn't take a pro or anti stance other than to value existence over non-existence and to evaluate whether to have children in light of acknowledgement of the pleasure and pain involved. It's a very subjective decision.

"Conditional natalism" - it wouldn't be good to bring a child into the world during war and famine. Also, women still do most of the childrearing tasks, so the lives of women with children are subject to massive time constraints - with little spare time to give to philosophy (unless there is enough finances to hire a nanny).

From the article that Godfrey posted (in post 27 above):

Quote

When one user asked it to produce a map of the U.S. with all the states labeled, GPT-5 extruded a fantasyland, including states such as Tonnessee, Mississipo and West Wigina. Another prompted the model for a list of the first 12 presidents, with names and pictures. It only came up with nine, including presidents Gearge Washington, John Quincy Adama and Thomason Jefferson.

Here is a really good video about AI music and the band "Velvet Sundown", and brings up various issues regarding AI music:

@Eikadistes your post got me wondering and so I found this on a Wikipedia site:

Quote

Ancient Greece

Left: Reconstructed Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis, c. 480 BC.
Right: Ganymede, a Trojan youth, rolling a hoop, Attic vase c. 500 BC.

Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating.^{[citation needed]} In the Homeric epics, Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond.^[67] Other light-haired characters in the Homeric poems are Peleus, Achilles, Meleager, Agamede, and Rhadamanthys.^[67] The traces of hair color on Greek korai probably reflect the colors the artists saw in natural hair;^[68] these colors include a broad diversity of shades of blond, red and brown.^[68] The minority of statues with blond hair range from strawberry blond up to platinum blond.^[68]

Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630–570 BC) wrote that purple-colored wraps as headdress were good enough, except if the hair was blond: "...for the girl who has hair that is yellower than a torch [it is better to decorate it] with wreaths of flowers in bloom."^[69] Sappho's contemporary Alcman praised golden hair as one of the most desirable qualities of a beautiful woman,^{[citation needed]} describing in various poems "the girl with the yellow hair" and a girl "with the hair like purest gold".^[70]

In the fifth century BC, the sculptor Pheidias may have depicted the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena's hair using gold in his famous statue of Athena Parthenos, which was displayed inside the Parthenon.^[71] The Greeks thought of the Thracians who lived to the north as having reddish-blond hair.^[72] Because many Greek slaves were captured from Thrace, slaves were stereotyped as blond or red-headed.^[72] "Xanthias" (Ξανθίας), meaning "reddish blond", was a common name for slaves in ancient Greece^[72][73] and a slave by this name appears in many of the comedies of Aristophanes.^[73] Historian and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher asserts that the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great and members of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt had blond hair, such as Arsinoe II and Berenice II.^[74] Additionally, the ancient Greek lyric poet Bacchylides wrote of "the blonde daughters of the Lacedaemonians" (Spartans),^[75] while also noting the light hair of athletes at the Nemean Games.^[76]

Greek prostitutes frequently dyed their hair blond using saffron dyes or colored powders.^[77] Blond dye was highly expensive, took great effort to apply, and smelled repugnant,^[77] but none of these factors inhibited Greek prostitutes from dying their hair.^[77] As a result of this and the natural rarity of blond hair in the Mediterranean region, by the fourth century BC, blond hair was inextricably associated with prostitutes.^[77] The comic playwright Menander (c. 342/41–c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow".^[77] At another point, he deplores blond hair dye as dangerous: "What can we women do wise or brilliant, who sit with hair dyed yellow, outraging the character of gentlewomen, causing the overthrow of houses, the ruin of nuptials, and accusations on the part of children?"

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blond

Perhaps then this, from the Wikipedia:

"The comic playwright Menander (c. 342/41–c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow".^[77]

...so then she definitely looks like a hetaira.

...and I probably had to specifically ask the AI to make her hair blond.

As an artist who always struggled with drawing proper proportions, I've done lots of experimentation with AI art (but only with using free programs). It seems lately that I am not able to get as good results as I did in the past, so now I mainly have been doing collaging with Canva.

But just for fun, here is an AI picture from last year (the prompt that I likely used was something like: beautiful ancient Greek woman wearing white and reading scroll in a beautiful garden, but likely was much more detailed than that):

And would name this "Leontion in the Garden".

Quote from Don

Honestly, it would probably be more accurate for Alexa to be masquerading as an Epicurean student but actually to be listening to only report back EVERYTHING to its Stoic or Academic manufacturers so the info can be used against the Garden.

......

I just found this interesting article:

If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy

AI "alignment" is a buzzword, not a feasible safety goal.

www.livescience.com

Quote

Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven't developers been able to solve these problems? My recent peer-reviewed paper in AI & Society shows that AI alignment is a fool's errand: AI safety researchers are attempting the impossible.

And this article:

AI could soon think in ways we don't even understand — evading our efforts to keep it aligned — top AI scientists warn

Researchers at Google and OpenAI, among other companies, have warned that we may not be able to monitor AI's decision-making process for much longer.

www.livescience.com

And lots of other articles on AI at the livescience website.

I just found this recipe, but finding good and fresh sesame seeds in my neck of the woods might not be easy. (Could probably find them at a health food store, next time I go into a big city).

This seems like a celebratory type of food...perhaps something which could be served at a Twentieth feast:

Pasteli | Ancient Greek Honey Sesame Bar | Lemon & Olives | Exploring Greece and Beyond: Mediterranean Diet Tips & Recipes for Wellness, Nutrition, and Healthy Living

This classic Ancient Greek recipe is for what is know as the world's first energy bar. Made with sesame seeds and honey, give ancient greek pasteli a try

www.lemonandolives.com

Ingredients:

Quote

• 1 cup sesame seeds
• 1/3 cup pistachios optional, cut in halves
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1 inch lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1/4 cup sugar optional

Happy Twentieth to all Epicurean philosophy readers, students, forum members, and advocates!

Quote from Matteng

Thanks, I often worry

that the topic sometimes fades into the background because rivals to Epicurean philosophy often define virtue as the highest good instead of Pleasure.

One must be careful not to create a false dichotomy like virtue vs. pleasure. In Epicureanism, virtue and pleasure grow together, but virtue gets its value from pleasure, not the other way around. Virtue is the greatest but instrumental good. Therefore, many people (as I used to) unconsciously believe that Stoics, for example, are generally more virtuous than Epicureans, which is nonsense. The path to pleasure/eudaimonia always leads via virtue. I see the biggest difference (virtue or pleasure as the core of eudaimonia/life goal) in that eudaimonia, the good self or inner spirit, is defined by the Stoics as "doing good" while Epicureans define it as "experiencing good."

Very well said Matteng

This section of the Letter to Menoeceus points toward choosing actions which are non-harming:

"He therefore thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason. For it is better in a man’s actions that what is well chosen (should fail, rather than that what is ill chosen) should be successful owing to chance."

Choosing actions which do not harm others will often (but not every single time) create the best outcome.