Updated FAQ Entry: Why Should I Care About Epicurean Physics When So Much Science Has Changed In The Last 2000 Years?

Quote from Don

Quote from Peter Konstans

No philosophy, no advice, no magic formula made up of a string of words can bring down the iron walls of the environment and the brain. Someone's environment is what it is and someone's brain is what it is. This fixes human behavior in full.

Now, the absence of moral agency doesn't mean humans can't influence other humans. This is trivially easy to do by means of manipulating the circuits of human neurobiology that govern pleasure and pain. This technique is morally neutral and people use it as they please both to benefit others and to do harm.

I'm honestly trying to understand how both these can be true.

How can our behavior be determined fully by brain physics and environment BUT we can still influence other humans. If all is determined by physics, doesn't that mean even the influencers are not responsible for their "influence" but merely acting out their predetermined behaviors which those influenced are just the next step in the chain of determinism?

These ideas have also been expounded by Sipolsky and others, but I'm not entirely convinced by their arguments. I'll try to dig up some alternative perspectives at some point.

The sense that this is a contradiction is an illusion. To resolve the contradiction we have to do two things.

First, we have to explore what motivates people to try to influence other people in general. The answer is: to extract a desired reaction from them. In the case of influencers the desired reaction is likes, views, subscriptions etc. Why are those reactions desired? Because those reactions bring them money. And why do people want money? For the same reason they want energy. Money is effectively a form of energy as it can be converted to actual material goods and services. And why do people seek energy? Well, they have evolved to aggressively seek it. Why did they evolve to seek it? Because natural selection in humans favored strongly acquisitive behavior. Why is natural selection the way life works? Eventually the answers will lead us to see reality for what it is: arrangements of quantum fields, everything else being an illusion that reflects our cognitive limitations as human beings.

Next, we have to explore what makes influencing the behavior of people possible. Obviously, this is possible. If it wasn't possible people wouldn't be motivated to try it so often, so intensely and so instinctively. Criticism is an extremely stubborn human behavior aimed at influencing the behavior of others through inducing feelings of shame. Although criticism doesn't actually work in changing behavior (except in children because their brains haven't fully developed yet) most people can't help themselves from constantly engaging in criticism over and over again over the same issues. Natural selection has selected for the constant drive to influence others and we stubbornly apply that instinct even when the evidence shows it doesn't work. Hell, we even apply it to our gadgets and machines when we curse and hit them for not cooperating with us.

Influencing people only works reliably when we convince them we have access to something useful for biological fitness that they lack. The more useful and delectable that something is thought to be, the greater the influence. Influencers sell magic recipes for prosperity and likeability (what used to be called charms). And since most people have unrealistic notions of prosperity and life satisfaction they will always come back for more magic formulas. That's essentially the business plan of influencers. It works because people have evolved to share information that enhances fitness . In the modern environment most of that information is bullshit.

Since a significant chunk of society's economic output comes from selling frivolous, useless or harmful products there's less money for the serious things, like science and the production of non-frivolous products, skills and services. Although many people know something about this state of affairs, magical thinking in the form of the sacred word 'freedom' prevents them from doing anything to stop it. Talk has been tried and it doesn't work.

Quote from Peter Konstans

First, we have to explore what motivates people to try to influence other people in general.

1. The answer is: to extract a desired reaction from them. In the case of influencers the desired reaction is likes, views, subscriptions etc.
2. Why are those reactions desired?
   1. Because those reactions bring them money.
3. And why do people want money?
   1. For the same reason they want energy. Money is effectively a form of energy as it can be converted to actual material goods and services.
4. And why do people seek energy?
   1. Well, they have evolved to aggressively seek it.
5. Why did they evolve to seek it?
   1. Because natural selection in humans favored strongly acquisitive behavior.
6. Why is natural selection the way life works?
   1. Eventually the answers will lead us to see reality for what it is: arrangements of quantum fields, everything else being an illusion that reflects our cognitive limitations as human beings.

[Etc...]

This whole digression into online "influencers" misses my point. I was using "influence" in the broad sense of simply getting people to do what you'd like them to do, from changing one's trivial opinions on where they'd like to go to supper to more serious matters like how they live their life.

The money issue seems to also be a tangent and one I'm not entirely sold on (pun intended). The only reason money can be exchanged for material goods is that we as a society have agreed to this shared social construct. "Money" is also a way that people try to signify their importance by concepts such as millionaire and billionaire. That money will never be able to purchase all possible material goods. It serves as a symbolic social status identifier. It also doesn't confer security as one has to be anxious about keeping it safe and other concerns.

There are a number of leaps in those bullet points and the rest of the post that I'm not willing to concede. I also don't see thatn last post resolving the contradiction about which I inquired. This has also taken this thread far afield from the pertinent discussion on determinism, fatalism, and Epicurean philosophy.

I'll agree that our choices are not entirely free of all constraints. We have general tendencies, dispositions, self-imposed and externally-imposed social constraints, etc. Even Epicurus states "some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some by our own power." Some will argue fervently that it can only be necessity OR chance, that there is nothing we do that's "by our own power." I'm open to having my opinion influenced, but I'm not willing to entirely concede to not having anything determined "by my own power" for now.

This seems relevant:

Quote from Metrodorus (in Plutarch, Reply to Colotese)

Some, through an abundance of vanity and arrogance, have so deep an insight into the business of [the state], that in treating about the precepts of good life and virtue, they suffer themselves to be carried away with the very same desires as were Lycurgus and Solon.

...

It is then very well beseeming a free-born gentleman to laugh heartily, as at other men, so especially at these Solons and Lycurguses.

Epicurus is right that some things happen by chance but chance works on the basis of mathematical probability and probability works on the basis of determinism. If I have a fair six-sided die and throw it my result will be a number from 1 to 6. It will never be a 7. If I throw the die 100 times in a row my chance of getting the same number is one in a few thousands of the number of atoms in the observable universe and there's no way to alter that chance as long as the die is fair. If some way to increase the odds with a fair die existed then that would be clear evidence of the supernatural.

If, as all the evidence suggests, the supernatural doesn't exist, then we must conclude by logical necessity that the physical facts fix all the facts. The universe is just fermions and bosons, and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or 'fix' all the other facts about reality and whatever exists in this universe or any other universe if, as physics may end up showing, there are other universes.

Another way of expressing this fact-fixing by
physics is to say that all the other facts—the chemical, biological, psychological, social,
economic, political, cultural facts supervene on the physical facts and are ultimately explained
by them.

Unless we posit that there is an immortal soul or something, humans are just natural objects, in other words physical scum (or physical foam if 'scum' sounds politically incorrect and scary). In this case whatever humans can and can't do is fixed by physics. So Epicurus is right that some things happen because of 'us' but 'we' are just physics and we can't do something that physics doesn't allow. The physics of our bodies allow some unlucky people to get cancer even if they avoid all the possible environmental risks of cancer. So cancer and many other bad things happen because of 'us' and indeed they 'must' happen simply because physics allow them to happen and whatever physics allow 'must' occur by statistical necessity.

Money is not something we agreed on. Agreement is only possible when there are workable alternatives to choose from which aren't chosen. Unless one thinks that barter exchange is how a complex society can conduct its business then money is a political and economic factum brutum that we absolutely require. It is political in the sense that you need political power to issue it and it's economic in the sense that no complex society can possibly exist without it.

What money can buy depends on the current property relations which in turn depend on the level of technology. In a society like Afghanistan which is just a patchwork of tribal affiliations money can and does exist because the patchwork is complex enough. But the primitive arrangement of the current property relations there means that money can't buy you everything that is in high demand. For example sex isn't for sale. Either you have to break the 'law', meaning the tribal customs, to get it (and then die) or you have to buy or sell your way into 'marriage' (which in Afghanistan usually just means having a slave-wife, the same as the pallakidai of Epicurus' time) instead.

In the stone age no money is possible because the level of technology doesn't allow complex societies at all. In the far more complex agrarian societies (made gradually more complex as the advent of metallurgy, wheeled transport and horse riding enabled the easy subjugation of small communities and villages) money was not yet strictly necessary for biological survival but it was quite necessary for buying the political right not to be bullied. Everyone had to find some good money to pay their taxes (used to be called tribute) and if you couldn't meet your obligations you were either converted into some form of alienable property in the form of enslavement or you had to join the ranks of outcasts such as the late Roman bagaudae to survive for as long as you could, which was usually not very long.

In industrialized societies money is strictly necessary for biological survival as you can't find any decent food and shelter at all without it. Since eating from trash cans, doing cheap drugs, sleeping on benches and getting beaten by the cops is not a workable lifestyle alternative (it's more of a deathstyle than a lifestyle), you need to secure a steady source of liquidity to buy groceries and also to buy your rights to use a shelter by paying mortgages. Those who occupy themselves with having enough liquidity to make ends meet are poor and those who occupy themselves with the exercise and management of their property rights are rich. That's how the physics of society work and that's the only way they can work under the current arrangements (which of course weren't chosen).

So money is not a status symbol, it's the physical force that makes the world (meaning human affairs) go around. In terms of liquidity even the nominally richest people are poorer than they seem. Elon Musk is on paper the richest person in the world but he couldn't convert his nominal wealth into cash if he wanted to without immediately seeing his wealth evaporate. That's because wealth actually comes from holding property rights, which are just legal papers that are only as strong as the willingness and ability of the state apparatus to guarantee and enforce them, not from holding money.

If you had one billion in cash stashed under your bed you would be holding money. But if you did nothing to convert that money into property rights you wouldn't truly be rich in a social sense, your wealth wouldn't be secure and you wouldn't gain any significant social status.

Of course, social status should not be confused with power. Having social status means you enjoy broad esteem (people love giving you compliments) but having broad esteem, doesn't mean you have any meaningful power. In the late Republic many Roman senators (nominally the rulers of the universe) belatedly realized to their horror that their life and property, even their beloved dutiful wives, weren't secure at all.

Power is the practically uncontested ability to alter energy flows (meaning the arrangement and combination of human bodies and socially useful things) at will. Governments can freeze the assets of people they don't like at will. That's true power. In societies with highly complex property relations, 'power' is not embodied in persons but diffused in institutions. That's why it's possible to publicly mock nominal rulers like prime ministers and presidents, and even make a career out of it, without suffering any harm.