Posts by Cassius

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.

Display More

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.

Quote from Godfrey

how often reason is used to justify pain

As long as reason is being used to justify pain so that greater pleasure can be obtained then tat would presumably be correct reasoning.

I get the feeling that our error is often not so much "listening to reason" vs "listening to the feeling of pleasure" so much as it is that we lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of reasoning is to achieve pleasure (even if temporarily through pursuit of pain).

Definitely it's hard to know how to succeed in the face of many types of challenges and that kind of practical learning is required in addition to the raw philosophy.

Just a preliminary word before we have our session: This is one of the most beautifully written chapters in the whole book. If it isn't Wright's very best explanation of what Epicurus is about, it's one of her best.

The book review from last week should be posted soon. I want to apologize to everyone in advance for the poor audio quality - apparently I had the wrong feed selected on my audio, and my audio quality is poor throughout. Will do better next week!

Quote from Don

Remove" strikes me as a little milquetoast.

And if there is anything we need to purge from Epicurean philosophy and from our lives it is milquetoastism!

Quote from Matt

So Epicurean wisdom must be lived. There is a danger of only receiving Epicurean philosophy in an intellectual or stoicized manner and still live in a state of anesthesia without pleasure.

DEFINITELY!

The never-ending nature of the dispute kind of makes you sympathize with the frustration that Diogenes of Oinoanda must have felt, but the response is not to get frustrated but to pick up a megaphone, per Elli's graphic:

A lot of it seems to come down to something like Plato was arguing in Philebus:

If you split hairs with words and divide up "types of pleasure" so that you can argue that one type is better than another, then you think you arrive at the conclusion that knowledge about types of pleasure ("knowledge") is more important than pleasure itself. You then start putting "knowledge" on a pedestal instead of "pleasure," and you become a pointy-headed intellectual ivory-tower elitist and you sell admission to the "in-crowd" for a living.

If you in the other hand with Epicurus you honestly and with candor acknowledge that pleasurable feeling (whatever name you want to give it) is the only end result that is desirable in itself, then you end up in the position of the boy who points out to the world that the "emperor has no clothes" and that the "in-crowd" is taking everyone else for a ride.

The choice to go with Epicurus is not only "true" and has many good effects, but it also tends to make the "in-crowd" extremely unhappy, and their unhappiness makes you the perpetual target for ridicule from places like The Atlantic trying to convince you Epicurus was wrong.

Which is why there will also always be a crying need for EpicureanFriends.com and "Pleasure is Not A Four Letter Word" and innumerable other similar responses.

We need to be as organized and energetic as they are.

Just a note before we record this episode:

The next topic is "infinity of worlds" which is a great topic, but it is unfortunately very short here. Maybe we can look for the corresponding section in Lucretius.

But what follows that is a long discussion of "images" - which at this point in our discussions of Epicurus I think we see more as a discussion of epistemology and what goes on inside the brain than we do as a question of cosmic rays or the like. Unfortunately it's a long section so maybe what we can do is discuss it mostly in terms of "pattern matching" so we can get something more out of it, especially since the last thought of the section is:

"[52] Therefore we must do our best to keep this doctrine in mind, in order that on the one hand the standards of judgment dependent on the clear visions may not be undermined, and on the other error may not be as firmly established as truth and so throw all into confusion."