Posts by Cassius

Quote from Don

See, that's my sticking point here in reference to the gods. No one has ever seen a god and yet Epicurus says we have an image of them?

I would say there that we should not presume that what we are thinking of as "a god" is what Epicurus is thinking, so there's no certainty that what we are perceiving as images of the gods are actually what we are expecting. Maybe the perceptions of the gods even through images are just the "feelings" of blissfulness that we get when we contemplate them. As far as I can tell the majority (maybe all?) of the specifics like tall, shaped like men, speak Greek, and stuff like that -- those could all be later interpolations of later Epicureans rather than from Epicurus himself.

So that's what I am trying to drill down on -- we don't know that when Epicurus was referring to clear visions of the gods he was really talking about seeing beings who look like the statue of Zeus or Athena. Until we are absolutely sure that his "clear visions" constitute seeing human-shaped figures, I don't think we should presume that is what he means.

This is one of those areas where we don't have Lucretius giving direct testimony, and where I do think that we have to take the views of Epicureans 200+ years later as not necessarily of the same reliability of Epicurus himself.

So I really do see that as one of the areas where we have to be extremely careful. It is one thing to speculate that the gods look like humans, that they speak Greek, etc. But are those speculations really the "clear visions" that Epicurus was talking about? I don't think we should jump to that conclusion, and I think that (like you are implying) the fact that we today are not seeing such visions is a good indication that Epicurus didn't either.

But what we have is all so fragmentary -- I think that the issue of the speculations about the nature of the gods could well be just speculations, and that those speculations can co-exist compatibly with Epicurus having said that we have clear visions of them -- but that those clear visions are not of their shape or size or things like that, but of their "blissfulness" --- clear "feelings" or "reactions" to them but that fall short of "visions" like you and I and everyone else are expecting to see.

I also want to say for now in this thread too that I have expedited the production of Lucretius Today Episode 117 because although we don't grapple with images very much in this episode, what we do grapple with I think is very closely relevant to what we are discussing here:

Post

RE: Episode One Hundred Seventeen - Letter to Herodotus 06 - The Doctrine of Infinity of Worlds And Its Implications

I am happy to say that I have been successful in expediting the production of Episode 117 of the Lucretius Today Podcast - because it touches on many very profound issues that we are now discussing on the forum. Today we discuss one of the most important doctrines of Epicurus - one which has many significant implications: the Doctrine of Infinity of Worlds!

spreaker.com/episode/49402948

Cassius

April 11, 2022 at 5:29 PM

Quote from Don

Hmm... I can repeatedly think about centaurs and unicorns in substantially similar forms.

You can choose to imagine them, but I think it ought to be pretty apparent (at least in most situations) whether you are perceiving something that is "out there" beyond you, or whether you have chosen to summon the image from memory or from a new construct. At least I don't think I have any trouble distinguishing from constructs of my imagination vs things that I am perceiving due to some otherwise passive confrontation with them.

I am happy to say that I have been successful in expediting the production of Episode 117 of the Lucretius Today Podcast - because it touches on many very profound issues that we are now discussing on the forum. Today we discuss one of the most important doctrines of Epicurus - one which has many significant implications: the Doctrine of Infinity of Worlds!

Thank you Martin that is totally new to me!

Quote from Joshua

That was going to be my main angle into this issue on the podcast, but we didn't get that far yesterday. I've been scooped!

We definitely want to be sure to cover that this coming episode!

Quote from Don

The films/images are entirely consistent with Epicurus's physics. He needed a way to explain sensation and this is what he came up with.

Just a brief comment on this one: In general, I think that there is no reason to dismiss Epicurus' general theory of "images" as totally obsolete. Whether we now consider the moving substance to be particles emanated or photons bouncing or wave interference or whatever, it does seem to me to be fair to say that "something" is traveling outward from the direction of each object to be perceived by entering our eyes (in the case of light) or sound (in the case of hearing).

I think the significant thing is as you stated, Don, the issue is more the direction of travel. The Platonic (?) model implies (at least to me) something more supernatural, while the Epicurean model implies what I would consider to be the more correct view that all of our organs of sense are "receiving" something from the outside. We are constantly bathed in "somethings" contacting us from every direction in our environment.

Maybe another issue we could add to the mix is the current controversy over "5G" towers. Originally I dismissed all that talk as largely nonsense, and maybe I still should, but I am no longer confident. (Have their not been recent reports about airplanes being affected?) I still get irritated every time I get on an airplane and have to turn off my cell phone. The line between real problems and kook problems can often be blurry. Even the EU seems to think there is an issue?

Is 5G bad for your health? It’s complicated, say researchers

ec.europa.eu

Not to get us off on 5G at all, because I still tend to dismiss those concerns. But the issue of how to separate the kooky from the potentially legitimate isn't always easy!

Also -- one aspect of what I think Don and Joshua are talking about that we ought to discuss is the whole issue of "action at a distance." How can one thing influence another without any perceptible (to the senses) means of touching? We know that Lucretius / Epicurus specifically dealt with magnetism and/or perhaps static electricity even in their time, and of course this would seem to be an important element of refuting supernaturalism.

And just to be sure this is part of the discussion, it does seem to me to be intuitive to suspect that the objects around you can influence you regardless of whether you are looking at them or listening for them. Maybe the basic point is that one would suspect that whatever is moving between those objects and yourself doesn't stop moving just because you turn your eyes and look in another direction. Since Epicurus was focused on explaining the world in material "atomic" terms, it would seem natural (at least to me) to think about the effects of those atoms (which are postulated to keep their shape as the means of transmitting the qualities of the object) going forward through space regardless of whether we are looking for or listening for them. If it is true that certain birds are evolved to be able to work with magnetic fields, there may be other similar faculties which we have not yet discovered.

I see this discussion as very different from the discussion of "woo" which is centered on supernaturalist views. To keep open the possibility that phenomena exists which has not been discovered does not require that we consider that phenomena to be supernatural. We don't define what is natural and "supernatural," only nature determines what can exist, regardless of our speculations.

Does a tree falling in a forest with no person there to hear it make sound? Of course it does, and the movements of particles from place to place deserves a lot of consideration in natural science very much apart from whether and how a particular human interprets them.

Quote from Don

Now, this one has me genuinely stumped: How do images in our minds of the gods differ from images of unicorns and centaurs? Why would the former be considered real and the latter false and a combination of images colliding in the air?

I would say there that once they get to our minds they appear the same to us, and so it is up to our minds to be able to judge whether they reflect something real or something that results from those random combinations arising through "chance." I suspect Epicurus would say that the primary and even relatively "easy" method of distinguishing (or judge the faithfulness of to the facts) images that reflect real objects and images that reflect random combinations would be their "repeatability." You would generally expect that images coming from real objects will be observed over time and in varying conditions and are thus repeatable, while images arising from random combinations would be unlikely to be repeated in substantially similar form.

At least that would be the starting point of the way I would approach it, which is similar to the way we should approach all sorts of distortions and illusions, as discussed at length in Lucretius Book 4.

It would be a joke to suggest that what Epicurus meant about not being able to receive the images of the gods without harm was that he foresaw "Don't go near cosmic rays without radiation shielding!"..... But before we consider that the whole field of "spectres" is nonsense I think it would be prudent to retrace the reasoning steps and recognize that our knowledge of physics even today has a very long way to go. Is it really unreasonable to suspect that predictions that might admittedly be based on overly simplistic views of "atoms flying through space" might still in the end lead to fruitful discoveries? Maybe Epicurus was "sensing" and describing in too rudimentsry a form a mechanism that exists, but that we are misinterpreting because we are trying to force it to fit within the "supernatural religion," paradigm which Epicurus never suggested (and indeed denied) was his framework.

Plus - We always seem to go back to the complicated issues of "methods of inference" and which theories are rational to entertain and which are not. That's probably where OUR personal contribution can come, rather than through study of migratory birds or cosmic rays (since we personally are probably not in those occupations).

in addition to the magnetism example, I would include the following in a similar category:

Central Nervous System Responses to Simulated Galactic Cosmic Rays

In preparation for lunar and Mars missions it is essential to consider the challenges to human health that are posed by long-duration deep space habitation via…

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

New evidence for a human magnetic sense that lets your brain detect the Earth's magnetic field

Your brain’s sensory talents go way beyond those traditional five senses. A team of geoscientists and neurobiologists explored how the human brain monitors and…

theconversation.com

(PDF) Neurological Effects of Space Radiation

PDF | In this brief review, several aspects of radiation effects on the central nervous system are considered. Low to moderate levels (~ 1 to 2 Gy) of... |…

www.researchgate.net

Study: Cell Phone Radiation Linked to Overeating More Calories Higher Carbs - Environmental Health Trust

A new study Mobile Phone Radiation Deflects Brain Energy Homeostasis and Prompts Human Food Ingestion published in the journal Nutrients finds cell phone…

ehtrust.org

Here is an example of a phenomena which I think would be relevant for discussion of circumstantial evidence in this topic:

How birds can detect Earth's magnetic field

Researchers have made a key discovery about the internal magnetic compass of birds. Biologists have identified a single protein without which birds probably…

www.sciencedaily.com

Quote

Normally they regulate the biological clock, but have also been considered significant for the magnetic sense. With this study, we now know which of the birds' cryptochromes do what.

"Cry4 is an ideal magnetoreceptor as the level of the protein in the eyes is constant. This is something we expect from a receptor that is used regardless of the time of day," explains Atticus Pinzón-Rodríguez, one of the researchers behind the study.

The conclusion is thus that this specific protein helps the magnetic sense to function, while other cryptochromes, whose levels in the body vary at different times of the day, take care of the biological clock instead.

Last year, Atticus Pinzón-Rodríguez and his colleagues noted that not only migratory birds navigate using a magnetic compass. Even resident birds that do not migrate in the spring and autumn have a magnetic sense and navigate using their internal magnetic compass. He now takes this one step further:

"This and last year's results indicate that other animals, perhaps all of them, have magnetic receptors and can pick up on magnetic fields."

A lot of research remains in order to map in detail how animals discover and use the Earth's magnetic field. What is clear is that it involves chemical reactions that interact with magnetic fields. According to Atticus Pinzón-Rodríguez, this knowledge may be of use when developing new navigation systems.

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Absolutely nothing mystical about it, yet something that science is seeming to validate as data being perceived by means other than the conventional senses.

(No doubt there is lots of dispute about even a topic like this, but I am mentioning it only as a potential example of how to approach the investigation of whether information can be perceived directly through other than the conventional senses.)

Don:. The key additional text regarding the images, where it is stated that they flow TO the gods, is the Velleius section of On the nature of the gods, so that needs review in this context.

Godfrey: just to be clear in terms of images I think the foundational observations about them is that images was a theory about *everything* and how we perceive them. So the first step in the process is to discuss the theory about things directly in from of us, not starting with gods long distances away.

Also I am not yet sure I find the "attestation" framework more helpful than confusing. The use of parenthetical explanations helps but I don't find those explanations clear enough at this point to be comfortable. Maybe the word "attestation" seems unnecessarily confusing. Does it add something more than the word "evidence?". Because just as in law and in dealing with atoms we are going to need to consider not only direct evidence but also circumstantial evidence, and "attestation" may appear to some to refer only to direct evidence. I think we would all agree that Epicurus embraces reasoning from circumstantial evidence, or else there would be no way to establish the existence of atoms. So it would be important not to let the "attestation" word obscure the complexities of evidence issues. (Maybe that is another way of saying "We really need to do a study of the surviving texts on Epicurean Reasoning so we can bring these issues out into the open - "before our eyes!"

Or maybe I should just say that I don't think item one in the second list to be established for a number of reasons, primarily because I am not sure we have established what the "this" even is which is under discussion. Do we have even any specific examples of a description of an Epicurean observation of a god with which to agree or disagree?

Quote from Godfrey

Sitting here in 2022, the idea that we get images of the gods "from their holy bodies" is what makes the gods so problematic.

I agree with you. However in the back of my mind there are these gnawing doubts probably caused by too much science fiction, but which appears to me to be reasonable enough not to dismiss totally out of hand: That just like there are an innumerable number of television and radio waves (containing lots of intelligent information) passing through us at any moment, but which we are not equipped by nature to decode, it seems reasonable to me to have entertained that whatever travels between the objects we look at (through our eyes) and travels to our eyes, is also something that is traveling at all times in all directions outward from that object, traveling through the air to distances we may not think of as possible, but which might be decodable given the right "technology."

And to be clear, I am thinking in terms of how light from our planet travels long distances (like the lights we see in our telescopes from other planets) such that over long distances we are actually looking at something that is now in the past at the location of that planet or star.

Again I am not advocating that such things really do happen, and I admit our science has advanced an awful lot without finding the ability to decode much information from those lights traveling from so far away. But is it impossible to think that new technologies in the distant future can't decode more than we can now? I would say no, but primarily what I would say is that I don't think it was unreasonable for the ancient Epicureans to think in those terms, and it would probably be something that our scientists continue to work on to improve the resolution of out existing telescopes.

I have to stop now, but I haven't even addressed whether it is possible for such waves to exist above or beyond our spectrum of visible light.

But the important thing is to update our views to be consistent with what we know now, without being so rigid as to think that our current technology is the "last word." So I would say that what we have to insist is impossible is that those beings are supernatural - on the other hand there is not in my view grounds to insist that it is impossible that we will ever detect the existence of other beings through radio or other waves that reasonably may exist.

There are many points we are going to need to discuss for this podcast and I will probably move the "images" posts to that thread when it is set up.

For now I want to mark another topic which hits near the end of the episode: We were discussing something like: "To what extent was the "Nihilism" viewpoint (as we think of it today) represented in a school or segment or philosopher in the ancient world?"

I will probably set up a separate thread for that too over time but feel free to make comments on that here. We need to discuss what "nihilism" really means in order to unpack that too. Martin came up with the name of Russian philosopher (I will make no cultural cracks that he was Russian ; more seriously the problem is very deep across the entire modern world.) whose name I had never heard of as one of the earliest prominent names associated with nihilism - I will have to come back to add that here.

On the issue of "meaningfulness" I happened to see a sentence in which the terms "meaningful" and "significant" were equated, in the context of measurement.

I think that's the right perspective - we have to have a context for the word to have any "meaning" to us, and all meaning must come through "significance" and for some reason it is easier for me to see that "significance" requires that whatever is under discussion needs to be "perceived" by us.

And what standard of perception is there to us other than feeling which to me broadly speaking includes the feeling of pain and pleasure?

In fact I wonder if PD02 is not aimed at this larger sense of "feeling" rather than just at the five senses(?). Don ?

PD02. Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Ok having just completed the podcast recording I am "proud" to say that we have spent the ENTIRE episode on a single passage!

Quote from Cassius

Furthermore, there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number, as was proved already, are borne on far out into space. For those atoms, which are of such nature that a world could be created out of them or made by them, have not been used up either on one world or on a limited number of worlds, nor again on all the worlds which are alike, or on those which are different from these. So that there nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of the worlds.

However even though we didn't move fast I think this is going to prove one of our more important and beneficial episodes, because we got into a lot of important issues about the implications of it.

Get ready for a discussion of nihilism, meaningfulness, and even "eternal recurrence!"

We'll move to "images" next week.

Quote from Matt

and I am thinking about the sword of Damocles that will always fall on me from various corners of my life

Now that part at least sounds like a job for Epicurean philosophy!

Here is the recording of our Zoom Book review of Chapter Nine. Once again, sorry for my poor audio quality.

Don and I crossposted. I am not familiar with Bloom, but what I am coming to in agreeing with Don's criticism is that the term "meaning" ought to be translated (as many of these commentators are using it) as "those types of pleasure of which I (the commentator) approve!

The more I hear "meaning" used as a rhetorical weapon against pleasure the more I am driven to that conclusion.