Posts by Cassius

Excellent points.

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

it seems to be difficult for some people (Plato et al) to think about there being a "higher-level" pespective and for others (Democritus) to think about there being an "atomic-level" perspective without ending up denying that our "middle-level" persective also exists and is just as real as the other two. In fact it's not "just as real" but for us it's actually more real because it is the level at which our senses function, and as you say the only way we can be sure of anything about the lower or higher levels is by the way we see impacts in our own level.

So that's why it's so important not to let the sensations be disparaged as untrustworthy. As soon as you stop demanding evidence at our own level of sensation then you've set the stage for all the otherworldiness both of religion and of "weird science" which goes with hope or speculation alone and without grounding in evidence that we can confirm.

I personally equate this too with Epicurus' statement about "outlining" in the letter to Herodotus. We have to keep the various levels of truth in our awareness at all times and be able to go back and forth between them without missing a beat.

And yes we'll go back over this in detail in the Sunday Zooms on Lucretius and then when we get back to Lucretius after the current review of the bigger-picture issues Cicero has summarized for us .

That's where I see us at currently. Most all of us need additional grounding in both the details and in the bigger picture. Cicero can show us where Epicurus stacks up (revolts) against the majority consensus. At the same time Lucretius shows us how Epicurus reasoned to his conclusions.

Cicero (On Ends / Tusculan Disputations / Academic Questions) gives us the big picture questions which everyone was asking and to which Epicurus was reacting, but Cicero doesn't give us the backup details of how Epicurus reached his conclusions. Lucretius gives us the backup details that explain how Epicurus reached his conclusions, but Lucetius often doesn't give us the big picture questions which everyone in 50 BC understood.

We need both in order to understand the full picture and what it means for us today.

Everyone should feel free to suggest addition of new "Cards" or rearrangements of items on existing cards. It won't be possible to accommodate all requests, but if you think something should be arranged differently then it's very possible others think the same, and we might not pick it up if someone doesn't suggest the possibility.

One of the main purposes of this format is to help those who access the site on cell phones in a narrow portrait mode. Drop-down menus and sidebars don't work very well on that format, but different people use different formats so if you see something that can be improved let us know.

The sorites question is going to come up again in upcoming podcast episodes so I am posting this as a refresher (Edited from Grok). I suspect there are a lot of people like me who aren't very familiar with this question or its unusual name. However the question it frames (especially in terms o "emergent properties" of atoms coming together into bodies) is very important in understanding how Epicurus differs from Democritus and other Greek philosophers.

The sorites problem (from Greek σωρός, sōros = “heap”) is a famous paradox in philosophy and logic that exposes how vague concepts break down when we try to apply sharp, precise boundaries to them.

Classic formulation (the heap paradox):

1. 1 grain of sand is not a heap.
2. Adding just 1 grain of sand to something that is not a heap can never turn it into a heap.
3. Therefore, even 1,000,000 grains of sand are not a heap.

The reasoning looks perfectly logical, but the conclusion is absurd — we all know a million grains of sand piled up is a heap.Same paradox with other vague concepts:

• Baldness: A man with 100,000 hairs is not bald. Removing one hair can’t make him bald. So removing hairs one by one means even a completely hairless man is not bald.
• Tallness: If 5′0″ is not tall, and adding 1 mm can’t make someone suddenly tall, then no one — not even 7′5″ basketball players — is tall.
• Forest: One tree is not a forest. Adding one tree can’t create a forest. Therefore a million trees do not make a forest. (← this ties directly to your earlier question)

Why it’s a problem

The sorites paradox reveals that many everyday concepts (heap, forest, tall, red, old, rich, conscious, alive, etc.) are vague — they have borderline cases and no precise cutoff point. Classical logic assumes everything is either true or false with a sharp boundary, but vague concepts don’t work that way.

Main attempted solutions (very brief)

1. Deny the premise – There actually is a precise number where it flips from “not a heap” to “heap” … we just don’t know it. (Most people find this unsatisfying.)
2. Fuzzy logic / degree theory – Truth comes in degrees. 1 grain = 0% heap, 10,000 grains = 47% heap, 1,000,000 grains = 99.9% heap, etc.
3. Epistemicism – There is a sharp boundary (e.g., exactly 42,687 grains = the first heap), but it’s unknowable to humans.
4. Supervaluationism – “It is a heap” is true when it’s true in all reasonable ways of making the term precise, false when false in all, and undefined in borderline cases.
5. Reject the concept entirely – Some philosophers say vague terms like “heap” or “forest” are fundamentally defective and shouldn’t be used in serious reasoning.

Bottom line

The sorites paradox shows that the world is full of genuinely fuzzy boundaries, and our crisp yes/no logic isn’t always equipped to handle them cleanly. It’s why the question — “Does a forest exist apart from its trees?” — is so slippery: there’s no single tree whose addition magically creates “a forest,” yet somehow the forest is undeniably real once enough trees are present.In short: the sorites problem is the philosophical land-mine hiding inside every vague word we use every day.

Example: Does a forest exist apart from its trees?

Yes — but only in certain ways, and no in others. It depends on what you mean by “exist.”

1. The forest exists as a real, emergent thing that is more than the sum of its trees.
   • It has properties none of the individual trees have: a microclimate, a canopy layer, a soil ecosystem, migratory bird corridors, wildfire behavior, carbon sequestration at scale, a distinct smell and soundscape, an aesthetic impact that makes you feel small.
   • Remove one tree? Still a forest.
   • Remove every tree one by one? At some point the forest objectively ceases to exist, even if the last tree is still standing.
     So the forest is real, but it is not a separate material object floating above the trees. It’s an emergent pattern that arises from the trees + their relationships + time + space.
2. The forest also exists as a concept in your mind.
   • You can burn every tree to the ground and the idea of “Black Forest” or “Amazon Rainforest” still exists in culture, maps, satellite photos, memories, legal codes, and carbon-credit markets.
   • In that sense, the forest can outlive its trees entirely.
3. But if you’re a strict reductionist (“only atoms and the void”), then no, the forest does not “exist apart” from its trees — it’s just a convenient label we slap on a large collection of trees that happen to be near each other.

Most useful answer:

The forest is real the same way a marriage is real, or a city is real, or a song is real.
It cannot be reduced to the individual components without losing something essential, yet it has no existence completely independent of them either.So:
A forest both is, and is not, its trees — depending on whether you’re wearing the hat of a poet, an ecologist, a philosopher, or a chainsaw salesman.

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.

Joshua is right to point to this one, which is relatively clear. And I think he's right to say that the test is not limited to "bodily" - unless someone is speaking in the sense that everything is "bodily" in the end - but that's not the sense being discussed as far as I can tell.

I think Torquatus makes clear and there's no reason to doubt him that mental pains and pleasures can often be more significant to us that bodily pains and pleasures. Dying for a friend would be an extreme decision but one that seems to clearly involve mental over bodily considerations.

And in the end I don't think that's even a close issue. While maintenance of the body is necessary in order for us to do anything, most of the biggest decisions that have the most affect our course of life are not primarily for the sake of the "body" at all.

Quote from Joshua

You have to do the math yourself, for yourself!

.... because only YOU can measure the pain or pleasure that results from any action.

It is exactly wrong to do what the Benthamites tried to do and reduce the calculation purely to mathemetics.

However, so long as you realize that the mathematics is only an aid, and cannot be applied as the final factor, I would say that lining things up statistically does make some sense as a tool of analysis.

So I'd still maintain that in any difficult decision it probably does make sense to sit down and try to enumerate the options as a spreadsheet. If you don't, you're not making your best effort to think things though. But you have to remember that the assignment of units of pain and pleasure is entirely relative to you.

Therefore I would not say "don't even try to add them up because it can't be done."

i would say "plotting out the possibilities in detail is the only rational way to proceed, but you have to remember that there is no "necessity" in ethical decisionmaking. You can't treat your projection as applicable to anyone else or even to yourself at a later time. A moment by moment analysis is all that is possible,

Post

A Draft Epicurean Pleasure Maximization Worksheet

Feelings cannot be reduced to numbers, and there are important limitations in the use of a "worksheet" as an aid in evaluating choices and avoidances. However it may be helpful to some people to visualize an illustration of the weighing process that some term the "hedonic calculus." Here is a draft example for your consideration and comment. Scores included here are of course fictional and for example only. A version of the spreadsheet in xlsx format is attached for downloading.

…

Cassius

July 11, 2019 at 10:25 PM

Welcome to Episode 310 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
   
We'll pick up this week at Section 14 of Part 5 of Tusculan Disputations, continuing to look at how the Stoic/Platonic philosophers use logic to deduce that since only virtue is within our control, happiness comes from exclusively relying on virtue, excluding all else from being considered to be truly good.

Happy Birthday to Tgonzalez3790! Learn more about Tgonzalez3790 and say happy birthday on Tgonzalez3790's timeline: Tgonzalez3790

Thank you Kalosyni and thanks to others such as Raphael Raul who have suggested navigation revisions.

There's always going to be a tradeoff due to vastly different screen sizes. We're currently a little more heavily weighted towards larger screens given our use of the top dropdown menus and the sidebars. Those aren't nearly as useful on a phone or portrait size screen, so this card view look will make it much easier for mobile users to get an overview of the site.

A second draft of how this may look is here:

Navigation - Epicureanfriends.com

www.epicureanfriends.com

This seems like a very close issue as raised in Lucretius Book 3 when he points out that even if our atoms were rearranged later due to the effects of infinite time and space, that would still not be "us" because of the absence of continuous memory.

However I am not sure as I reread that whether Lucretius is making a specific assertion that continued memory is somehow necessarily impossible. He may be relying solely on the objection that we don't remember any past lives, which I gather he is taking as sufficient proof that these rearrangements have already happened. He may well be inferring from the fact that we have no such memories that this is sufficient proof that the break is a matter of fact regardless of the cause.

I tend to think that that is his reasoning and that given the implications of infinite universe/eternal time that the inference is sound.

3-843

And even if the nature of mind and the power of soul has feeling, after it has been rent asunder from our body, yet it is naught to us, who are made one by the mating and marriage of body and soul. Nor, if time should gather together our substance after our decease and bring it back again as it is now placed, if once more the light of life should be vouchsafed to us, yet, even were that done, it would not concern us at all, when once the remembrance of our former selves were snapped in twain. And even now we care not at all for the selves that we once were, not at all are we touched by any torturing pain for them. For when you look back over all the lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our mind’s memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have wandered everywhere far astray from sense.

Quote from Patrikios

I agree with Martin and others that uploading your brain is not a viable alternative. At what age do you upload, before [brain cells start dying ar age 25?)?

I interpret the original question (and most hypotheticals like this) not to refer to now ("...IS a viable alternative") but to whether such a thing will be possible in the future with more advanced technology.

Is there is some theoretical barrier or insuperable obstacle that will always be impossible to overcome no matter what the technology?

"Clinamen Vitae - The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived"

Blog Article

Clinamen Vitae - The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived, by Elli Pensa

Clinamen Vitae — The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived

Between night and day lie twilight and dawn - moments that belong neither to light nor to darkness, yet honor both as complementary shades of our natural, tangible, and shared reality. These moments transcend - or rather, refute- the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, which leads to dilemmas and false necessities. Nature does not operate this way; it does not exclude, does not oppose. It discerns,…

Elli

October 27, 2025 at 10:31 AM

When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed

Blog Article

Duty, Evolution, Neuroscience, Attic Tragedy, and Epicurean Philosophy

Duty, Evolution, Neuroscience, Attic Tragedy, and Epicurean Philosophy.

An Analysis of a Father’s Death Sentence Against His Own Son - Torquatus and the Roman Recasting of Epicurean Philosophy.

Titus Manlius Torquatus, as portrayed in Cicero’s De Finibus, appears as a defender of Epicurean philosophy. Although many of his arguments echo core Epicurean principles, his rhetorical strategy and moral framework reveal a distinctly Roman reinterpretation - shaped by the ethos of duty, authority, and…

Elli

November 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

Blog Article

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his work The Antichrist, denounces Paul as the inventor of Christianity and an enemy of Rome’s grandeur. But perhaps Nietzsche himself misunderstood what Paul truly fought against. Rome may have been the aching tooth, but Greece was its root. And Paul - not as a scientific dentist (for he knew nothing of science, of course) - but more like the last illiterate barber in the neighborhood,…

Elli

November 18, 2025 at 2:39 PM

For those that might have missed them, Elli has posted several lengthy articles in recent weeks. I'm making this point and also setting up discussion threads for each because sometimes it appears our existing users who often rely on the red "update" markers, don't see when blog entries are added. Thanks to Elli for these articles!

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

Blog Article

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

“When Science Returns to the Hellenic Worldview: Empathy and Consciousness Redeemed”

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his work The Antichrist, denounces Paul as the inventor of Christianity and an enemy of Rome’s grandeur. But perhaps Nietzsche himself misunderstood what Paul truly fought against. Rome may have been the aching tooth, but Greece was its root. And Paul - not as a scientific dentist (for he knew nothing of science, of course) - but more like the last illiterate barber in the neighborhood,…

Elli

November 18, 2025 at 2:39 PM

Duty, Evolution, Neuroscience, Attic Tragedy, and Epicurean Philosophy

Blog Article

Duty, Evolution, Neuroscience, Attic Tragedy, and Epicurean Philosophy

Duty, Evolution, Neuroscience, Attic Tragedy, and Epicurean Philosophy.

An Analysis of a Father’s Death Sentence Against His Own Son - Torquatus and the Roman Recasting of Epicurean Philosophy.

Titus Manlius Torquatus, as portrayed in Cicero’s De Finibus, appears as a defender of Epicurean philosophy. Although many of his arguments echo core Epicurean principles, his rhetorical strategy and moral framework reveal a distinctly Roman reinterpretation - shaped by the ethos of duty, authority, and…

Elli

November 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM

Clinamen Vitae - The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived, by Elli Pensa

Blog Article

Clinamen Vitae - The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived, by Elli Pensa

Clinamen Vitae — The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived

Between night and day lie twilight and dawn - moments that belong neither to light nor to darkness, yet honor both as complementary shades of our natural, tangible, and shared reality. These moments transcend - or rather, refute- the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, which leads to dilemmas and false necessities. Nature does not operate this way; it does not exclude, does not oppose. It discerns,…

Elli

October 27, 2025 at 10:31 AM

Happy Thanksgiving Don!

Episode 309 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "The Error of Basing Happiness On The Alleged Divinity of The Human Mind"

Another note: In the first half of this episode, we take up Cicero's gross contradiction - which he calls out himself (!) between what he wrote in "On Ends' and what he is advocating here in "Tusculoan Disputations."

The basic point is this:

- In On Ends, Cicero had taken the position that while the Stoics might say that only virtue is good and vice is evil, they also admitted that there were other things to be preferred (health) and not preferred (sickness). Here in On Ends Cicero defends Aristotle's school for saying that health is a good other than virtue, and sickness is an evil, because in the end their disagreement is only a matter of words, and they ultimately agree as to substance.

- Here in Tusculan Disputations Cicero is for some reason taking the *opposite* position, and he is siding with the Stoics that the Artistotelians are making a fatal error by admitting that anything is good other than virtue and anything evil other than vice.

Cicero makes no real effort to explain his inconsistency other than to say that he himself (Cicero) is a skeptic, and he can change his position from day to day according to whatever he thinks is probable.

CIcero doesn't see any problem with his change in positions, and in one thing he does remain absolutely consistent:- No matter what you think of the word-game dispute between Aristotle and Zeno, everyone agrees that Epicurus is a reprobate.

This episode will be out later today or at the latest tomorrow. Editing is almost complete and i want to particularly commend Joshua's windup on the main topic of this episode, starting around the 38 minute mark.

Quote from Don

If we accept "direct" quotes from Cicero, should we not probably accept "direct" quotes from Plutarch?

This is an interesting topic in itself, but depending on the context I would definitely trust Cicero before I trusted Plutarch, depending on two factors that stand out to me:

- If Cicero is letting an Epicurean speaker go on at length, I'd give it more deference. Plutarch seems to rarely if ever do that. Plutarch's always on the attack and does not profess any degree of neutrality.

- We know Cicero was living at a time when he was talking to strong and dedicated Epicureans and he was in fact depending on Cassius Longinus for all his political hopes, so he had strong motivations to stay in line. I'm not aware that there's any reason to think Plutarch had any motivation to be fair to Epicureans at all.

- But the main issue would be whether the alleged statement has analogs in the core texts, and I just don't see that in this case. In fact, when Epicurus speaks so strongly of a simple diet and also the pleasures of philosophy and study of nature as to his primary sources of happiness, it appears to me that those contradict any assertion that the physical pleasures of the stomach outweigh all others. If he had been going down the road of looking to essentials, you're going to die a lot sooner if you miss water or air than missing "food" (which seems more at issue in referring to the "stomach," though I can see water being included in the stomach).

I see that that specific phrase "Their god is the belly" is from Philippians and not directly tied to Epicureans, though it wouldn't be surprising if they were the intended target

Philippians 3:19

King James Bible
Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)