Posts by Cassius

This morning I was thinking about the passages excerpted below from Philebus, especially the last one I have underlined. In these passages, Plato has Socrates talking as if the battle of identifying the greatest good was between specific patron gods and goddesses. In these passages the patron god(dess) of pleasure is clearly Aprhrodite / Venus, and we can see that identification carried on by the Epicureans at least through Lucretius.

However I am unclear as to who stands as the patron god for Socrates' position, especially if we conclude that Socrates' position comes down to "reason" or "rationality" or "wisdom" or "logic."

Was there a particular Greek god who symbolized those characteristics distinctly more than any other? If not, does the absence of such a distinctive figure play into why Socrates talked about being influenced by his "daemon" rather than being talked to by a particular god?

I ask this question in the context of triangulating on the Epicureans' use of the very broad term "Pleasure" as the goal of life without spending a lot of time identifying the particular pleasures being referenced. It seems to me that part of this terminology is that Epicurus was responding to the ongoing philosophic debates that distilled the ultimate goals down into high-level concepts such as "virtue" or "the good" or "reason" or "wisdom." Given a culture in which people were being asked to choose their allegiance among and between such high-level words, then "pleasure" seems to correspond nicely to that level of discussion. So therefore in that context, I am wondering if in identifying pleasure with Venus/Aphrodite that the Epicureans were facing one or more corresponding patron god(s) from the Academy / Pertipatetics / or later, the Stoics.

So at this time the specific question is: Was there a patron god or goddess identifed with Socrates' position, from which we can infer the same as to Plato? If that answer is somewhere else in Philebus I seem to be overlooking it.

Here are the excerpts from Philebus:

Quote

SOCRATES: Then let us begin with the goddess herself, of whom Philebus says that she is called Aphrodite, but that her real name is Pleasure.

PROTARCHUS: Very good.

SOCRATES: The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human—it exceeds all other fears. And now I would not sin against Aphrodite by naming her amiss; let her be called what she pleases. But Pleasure I know to be manifold, and with her, as I was just now saying, we must begin, and consider what her nature is. She has one name, and therefore you would imagine that she is one; and yet surely she takes the most varied and even unlike forms. For do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance,—that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? and how foolish would any one be who affirmed that all these opposite pleasures are severally alike!

......

SOCRATES: And now have I not sufficiently shown that Philebus’ goddess is not to be regarded as identical with the good?

PHILEBUS: Neither is your ‘mind’ the good, Socrates, for that will be open to the same objections.

....

SOCRATES: Nor would pain, Philebus, be perfectly evil. And therefore the infinite cannot be that element which imparts to pleasure some degree of good. But now—admitting, if you like, that pleasure is of the nature of the infinite—in which of the aforesaid classes, O Protarchus and Philebus, can we without irreverence place wisdom and knowledge and mind? And let us be careful, for I think that the danger will be very serious if we err on this point.

PHILEBUS: You magnify, Socrates, the importance of your favourite god.

SOCRATES: And you, my friend, are also magnifying your favourite goddess; but still I must beg you to answer the question.

....

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Quote from Don

Our bodies want to be in equilibrium, to have our budgets in balance.

How does "equilibrium" square with: "For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good."

Is talk about "equilibrium" going to carry one down the road to "tranquility" - or even Buddhism - instead of to "pleasure?"

Quote from Godfrey

The only thing that I would add to this is that if understanding the mechanism in more detail helps us to increase pleasure, then it is worthwhile to do so to the degree that it does so.

Agreed, with the question always being "Does this increase detail in understanding actually produce that result?"

What I am not sure about, since I haven't gone as far into the details of LFB as you guys have, is whether the result increases confidence in resisting rationalism and idealism in thinking, or the reverse. I think there is a constant tension in the pursuit of any "detail" or "tool" that we not get so consumed in the detail that we lose sight of the reason we are pursuing the detail. We are never interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge; the issue is whether it contributes to living happily. And the obstacle to living happily is only sometimes the lack of knowledge (such as might be the case when we need knowledge to diagnose and cure a disease, for example). Someone who gets a disease profits tremendously from drugs that treat that disease, and if we haven't pursued the knowledge to develop the drug, then we have a problem.

But there's also the constant issue that I think is present in Epicurean teaching that the disease we are treating and inoculating against is not a something that stems purely from lack of knowledge, but from an affirmative warped way of thinking that actually has a constituency behind it pushing its malevolent influence on unsuspecting people.

Skepticism, nihilism, rationalism, idealism, and on and on are the primary philosophical opponents that we are playing against just as much as we're playing against schizophrenia or other "clinical" conditions. We aren't in the game solely to respond to clinical conditions that developed naturally, though we do want to respond to those too.

I think that the ancient Epicureans diagnosed an example of this problem in the Stoic (and earlier) fixation on "virtue." Pursuing virtue became a tool in the minds of some people that transcended its function in happy living, and became an end in itself, with terribly misleading effects.

Sometimes it is in fact true that "the cure can be worse than the disease." If the pursuit of clinical knowledge ends up for any reason taking our eye off the overall goal, and leaves us open to other harms (because we fail to address them) then in philosophical study too the "cure" (pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge) can be worse than the disease, by leaving us open to more powerful enemies which must at the same time be constantly guarded against.

An example of this occurs I think in our reading of Lucretius or many of the details of Epicurean physics. If we get too caught up in the comparison of Lucretian-age "science" against modern-day "science" then we can easily lose focus on the overall message. And that is something that is tempting to do, because all of us can easily get caught up in appreciating how far "ahead of its time" Epicurean physics turned out to be, as if the point of the discussion was to appreciate "the history of science" or something similar. If we see Lucretius as an exercise in the history of science it's very easy to lose sight of the fact of how the conclusions and philosophical benefits from science have in many ways regressed, rather than progressed, from the ancient Epicurean period. The Epicureans looked at their science and saw in it confirmation of the absence of supernatural gods, of the fact that we have but one life to live, of the fact that pleasure is the goal of life, and the fact that there can be no absolute standards of virtue or justice. If our "science" today isn't sustaining those conclusions with even greater clarity than before, then I think we have to seriously question how much "progress" has really been made.

Also on the topic of "take-aways" I think it's useful to review these couple of paragraphs from DeWitt. As I read it, it's possible that he is right or possible he is wrong about the way he is interpreting the functioning of the anticipations. However I think in his diagnosis of what Epicurus was trying to do, he is almost certainly correct.

If we (Epicurus) want to defeat both rationalism and skepticism, we have to be able to articulate a totally natural (non-abstract-logic-based) process which allows us to have confidence in the conclusions we reach based on our observations. This process cannot rely on abstract logic, or else abstract logic takes over like the proverbial camel with nose under the tent, so it has to be ejected entirely except as a supplemental factor. Likewise we can't let observation alone rule the day, without drawing any conclusions, but that would effectively amount to skepticism and establish the rule that we can never have confidence in anything.

So to some extent this is an issue that is probably like the free agency and the swerve. As with the swerve, we may not be able to describe the mechanism of consciousness with certainty, nor should we really think that we need to (since such a task would be as impossible as asking to view the entire universe in order to see if it has an end). All we really need to do is to articulate in broad terms that there are mechanisms by which we can have confidence in living happily if we eject both skepticism and rationalism in favor of reliance on the faculties that Nature gave us.

Quote from Don

Oh, and I should be clear: Much of the time, I'm thinking out loud when I post so I'm not committed to any of my previous assertions.

Just to make things slightly more difficult for everyone

LOL! Probably that should be a caveat to at least 3/4 of what most everyone (including me!) posts here on the forum!

On the "sequence" issue I think this is probably the key section of DeWitt's view on that question:

With the continual caveat that (1) Epicurus' philosophical perspective might not be the same at all as what modern science is looking at, and (2) we need to be constantly on guard as to the implications of any particular approach.

I believe DeWitt to be correct at least insofar as he is stressing that there is a human functioning process that Nature set up for us to use to determine what to consider to be "true," and that this biological process is not "abstract reason" or "abstract logic." That would be the takeaway of most any version of the whole "canon of truth" discussion.

At this point I don't know what LFB's takeways would be. I did finish listen to the podcast today however, and I agree that we would expect her takeaways to be similar.

Quote from Don

-Sensations

-Pain/Pleasure

-Prolepses

My understanding is that this order is meaningful and now even more so in light of LFB's research (and, I should include, from others):

- the sensations include all of our sensory input

- This input then impacts our "feeling" of pain or pleasure, or as LFB states, pleasure/displeasure.

-and our minds use this to compare our past experience to our current situation.

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This is a point that I think deserves discussion over time. Have you seen a commentator assert that the "order is meaningful," or do you have other reasons for making that deduction? I believe if I recall correctly that DeWitt asserts that they basically go hand in hand, rather than sequentially. I see why it would be tempting to order them in the way that you have, as that would coincide with an order of processing if "prolepses" are equated with "concepts," but again that is probably the ultimate question.

At this point in my thinking I would interpret this aspect differently, and suggest that the three legs of the canon are not in fact the steps by which concepts are formed, but are the "checks" against which concepts are judged for accuracy. Probably as an example I would suggest that "concepts" can be made up out of whole cloth, with no input whatsoever from the legs of the canon, such as "let A=B" then "let B=D" therefore "A+B = A+D" or whatever you'd want to construct from pure words. Those would be (I think) conceptual constructs formed separately and apart from experience of any kind.

So in fact i would think that considering prolepses to be the equivalent of concepts and considering them to be the result of sensations and feelings, rather than a separate category of experience, would produce a dramatically different result than considering prolepses to be an experience or measurer of its own.

Quote from Don

But it seems to me that there is probably a faculty we're born with but individual prolepses have to come from experience in utero, early in life, or even later. To say we're born with prolepses seems to me to fall into the realm of Plato

In regard to that, I would say that is where it is essential to distguish the faculty from the perceptions it generates.

We are born with eyes, yet not with visions of trees. The mechanism of eyesight, however, is innate.

Presumably if prolepses are an equal leg of the canon, rather than concepts formed after experience, then the "faculty of prolepses" would be innate.

Yes and I want to repeat that I do not mean my comments to derail discussion of details of the LFB book. My main point is that to the extent we devote time to analyzing it under the category of anticipations it would be best if we make clear what view of anticipations we're talking about as we discuss her observations.

I'm not sure how to categorize the two competing alternatives, but they generally fall under something like (1) "anticipations as product of an innate faculty predating experience" vs (2) "anticipations as product of conceptual reasoning based on experience."

With one part of the issue being that those who advocate (2) either ignore (1) or contend that (1) does not exist.

I have no clue yet as to where to fit LBF into that paradigm. Presumably the answer to that comes from determining whether LBF believes that there are innate dispositions predating experience, or whether all mental processing occurs after, and based exclusively on, experience. Also, I really don't know if LBF has a position on what "truth" means.

Quote from Godfrey

LFB is closer to Elayne's term "pattern recognition" as the only thing innate; she calls it "statistical learning."

Also:

I think "pattern recognition" is a very useful term. I would also think "pattern detector" would be good.

Continuing to think again about the words, in "canon of truth" I think we are referring to "canon" in the sense of "measuring device" or "ruler" or "yardstick." The measuring device does nothing but measure, it contains no data about the thing being measured.

We also need to examine "truth" but for now maybe what we're talking about is a conclusion which allows us to make accurate predictions about future repeatable observations (or something like that). We need to rule out "truth" in a divine or universally absolute perspective sense, since our physics would tell us that no god or intelligent being exists which could form such a perspective to which we could compare our own.

In addition to "pattern" I would think we are also talking about "relationships" or "connections."

Using these words, if they prove to be accurate after we examine the texts and what we really think is going on, the faculty of anticipations might be describable variously as:

"pattern detector"

"pattern measuring device"

"connection detector"

"connection measuring device"

"relationship detector"

"relationship measuring device"

I think all these terms would probably be useful in varying degrees to indicate an innate faculty which we have at birth, prior to any experience in the real world, which provides a tool (measuring device) in the field of patterns/connections/relationships just like the eyes provide a measuring tool for light, and the ears for sound, etc.

No doubt Don will sort all of this out for us when he wakes up in a couple of hours! (Except for the fact that this might be a part of the DeWitt book that he didn't finish, so he might have to have more time to check those references. )

"This barrage of sensory input was not random: it had some structure. Regularities. Your little brain began computing probabilities of which sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, and interoceptive sensations go together and which don’t.”

I would see in that sentence the issue of two phenoma:

(1) the sensory input was not random because the sense faculties received and presented their findings in ways influenced by their functional makeup (ears hearing only at certain frequencies, eyes seeing only at certain wavelengths, etc) DeWitt would say that there is in fact an anticipatory faculty as well which is active in helping organize according to the nature of the anticipatory function.

(2) the part as to "your little brain began processing" would be the separate second step of conceptual reasoning - taking the observations and forming them into concepts and then applying those concepts to new observations. DeWitt probably would say that the "which go together and which don't" isn't entirely observational, but that "go together" is at least partly what the anticipatory function recognizes by pre-birth etching. Cats and dogs can observe lots of things that we do, but they never make connections that we as humans do because our minds are wired to see things "go together" that theirs never will, regardless of how much they see and observe.

No amount of additional observation will ever move a cat or a dog to a human level of processing of abstract ideas because the initial wiring to make those connections is simply not "etched" there from the beginning. As I read between the lines it is this etching which Dewitt aserts Epicurus held to be the faculty of anticipation, with "an anticipation" being a connection drawn that would not and could not have been drawn without that pre-existent etching. Which is not to say that the connection drawn will be any more accurate to the full facts than a single perception of an eye or an ear, but is to say that the connection would not come to our attention to consider as a criteria of the "truth" of our eventual opinions if we did not have and exercise the faculty.

And further, it is to say that the existence of this faculty amounts to something that Nature has provided in order to make available to us these very connections, just like Nature provides eyes that see and ears that hear. And would not the implication of that observation be that to ignore the results of the anticipatory faculty would be as unwise (or as contrary to Nature) as would be ignoring the perceptions of the eyes or the ears?

Yes I agree - the "faculty of pattern recognition" is something that would appear to exist at birth, prior to ANY experience with a thing under consideration. To that extent, the existence of such an innate faculty, and how it would unfold over a lifetime, is where DeWitt is going but which Bailey et al exclude.

DeWitt is saying I think that there is affirmative input that results from the way pattern recognition faculty works, just like there is input from the way the eyes work or the ears work, regardless of what the eyes are seeing or the ears are hearing.

One of the issues here is that we can dig deeply into the details of LFB's analysis, conclude that what she is saying does (or does not) make sense, and yet that conclusion may not necessarily move us one iota closer to having addressed the Velleius / PRE-conception material. If in fact DeWitt is right to allege that Velleius points to something that is going on before all experience of the thing under consideration, then all the analysis in the world about the processing of experiences will never address or illuminate the "innate process" analysis.

Animals through instinct do things regularly that they have never observed themselves or observed their parents do, even though there is much that they do that is indeed influenced by their parents and their own experience. BOTH phenomena can be going on without one ruling out the other, meaning that there are two separate phenomena.

The position of DeWitt/Velleius in no way rules out the process of learning from experiences, so from the Velleius perspective there are two separate phenomena. But the position of Bailey and others is to refuse to acknowledge even the possible existence of their being two separate phenomena, so they collapse all the issues into one single phenomena.

Regardless of whether DeWitt/Velleius are correct from a physiologcal / brain function point of view, it makes sense to me to suspect that from a philosophical point of view Epicurus would not want "concepts formed through experience" anywhere near his "canon of truth." Otherwise Epicurus built a feedback loop of "opinion" right into the "canon" which he was apparently erecting for the purpose of avoiding the influence of opinion. You would never be able to say that your canon was your unbiased measuring stick, because your measuring stick incorporated your opinion. Or at least that reasoning is what I think impels someone of DeWitt's persuasion to his conclusion.

Godfrey we crossposted again!

This quote from you I think highlights the issue. Your first sentence is the contention of Bailey and others, and that is NOT the contention of DeWitt. Dewitt argues based on his references that anticipations are in fact "innate" and programmed from birth, not by "early in life" experiences that we have forgotten. Whether one agrees with Dewitt or not, it's important to address what Velleius was saying about etching and so forth and wrestle with the question of "innateness" - referencing PRIOR to experience and PRE-the type of concept -formation based on experience. If you were Bailey, you would say "concept-formation based on experience is the only process we have!" DeWitt would differ, and say that Velleius is clearly stating something that comes BEFORE any experience at all. I think before we can finish our analysis we have to wrestle with Velleius and DeWitt's other references.

Quote from Godfrey

Something like "the gods" or "justice," as I understand this, is a preconception not because it is innate but because we are exposed to it so early in life that we don't remember ever not knowing it. But that brings up the point that a sense of fairness is often observed in very young children: is this a preconception of justice? I would posit that it is an example of a prediction loop involved in the process of keeping the child's body budget balanced.

For ease of reference here is the section on anticipations from DeWitt If someone needs the rest and doesn't have it, let me know. This doesn't necessary help with understanding LFB's points at all, but it will help with the higher-level issue of whether the mechanisms she is talking about are the same category of phenomena as what Epicurus was talking about, or a separate category of phenomena.

As I see it, the crux of the issue is in this paragraph as circled - are we talking about something that is truly prior to any experience with instances of a thing (DeWitt's position focusing on Velleius) or or we talking about the manipulation of concepts after experience with one of more instances of a thing (the majority modern commentator view). Again, whichever position you take doesnt necessarily mean that LFB is right or wrong, because they could be talking about entirely separate things.

Sorry Godfrey when you posted I had not finished my item three -- it is finished now!

1 - Godfrey those last quotes about essentialism are from LFB?

2. - Thank you for all the effort in those posts!

3. - I am going to have to reflect for a while on what you wrote, but as usual I have this starting point:

It looks to me like we are going to run into the usual danger here: Are we talking about "concepts" and "conceptual thinking" or are we talking about "preconcepts"?

In other words, in the broader discussion everyone seems to agree that there is such a thing as "conceptual thinking." Whether we call that "logic" or some form of "abstract reasoning" or whatever, there is a human proceses wherein we define terms (eg "capitalism" or "communism") and then we use those terms as markers by which to evaluate the objects of our concern at a particular moment. I would argue that this covers as well the examples of Diogenes Laertius, in that we form a concept of a cow, and use that to judge new animals that we see, and we form a concept of Socrates, and use that to determine if the person we meet is in fact Socrates. These examples are "conceptual reasoning" and no one - surely not Epicurus - would deny that they exist.

But is this process of conceptual reasoning the same thing that is referred to as "PRECONCEPTIONS" or "ANTICIPATIONS" in Epicurean theory? I tend to think that it is NOT the same thing, and that we are talking about two distinct mechanisms and products of that mechanism.

It does not seem likely to me that Epicurus would have held that CONCEPTIONS (the product of definition and logical analysis) would be considered to be a criteria of truth, for the reason that the process of logical reasoning and definition which forms conceptions is inherently a matter of "opinion" and not something that occurs by nature WITHOUT opinion, which appears to be a criteria of something being considered a part of the canon of truth.

So in our discussion I think we need to be careful to be clear that the part of the canon of truth that we would like to examine is the "preconceptions / anticipations" and that these are not simply the mind's definition of a certain number of objects to which it has been exposed in the past.

Everyone is of course free to agree or disagree with the comments I have made here, but I think for maximum clarity we ought to be evaluating modern research in light of this distinction so that we can be sure we are talking about the canon of truth vs something very different.

Well it would probably be worth some of us doing it at some point, since this is such as recurring issue, and that's why I posted it so we could add to the "database." But I totally agree that we have a lot more important things to do.

I think maybe the most important use for something like this is to be able to cite it as an example of what this slippery slope leads to, because it takes a while before you see the end game.

A LOT of people get exposed to this paradigm as their first exposure to Epicurus:

(1) Epicurus said the goal of life is pleasure, but

(2) Epicurus redefined pleasure as absence of pain.

(3) That redefinition really doesn't make sense, so there must be some brilliant insight behind it we'd better go looking for.

(4) The brilliant insight is alleged to be that there is a really important difference between katastematic/kinetic pleasure. (And at this step it's really more effective for the proponent to leave katastematic/kinetic untranslated, rather than call it static/active, because the Greek words are much sexier, and the mystery makes the assertion much easier to swallow.)

(5) Calling the ultimate good a "resting" pleasure ("katastematic"! "ataraxia"! ) sort of brings back the discussion into the realm of the intelligible, because even though these words are very ambiguous in themselves, and they contradict everyday conceptions of what pleasure is all about, "everyone knows" the major Greek philosophers were into "reason" and "thinking" and "the mind" rather than coarse and ignoble things like having fun and being active and experiencing joy and delight.

(6) So we arrive at the point intended by these proponents: Epicurus was really ahead of his time, and he was advocating asceticism, but his word-play needed to be straightened out by the Stoics, who identified that the kind of resting pleasure that we all need is the contemplation of virtue and the divine fire, in and of itself, and for no reward other than itself.

(7) And thus we see that Epicurus blends nicely into the mainstream of Greek thought, and we can put his books safely back on the shelf, content that we fully understand everything of significance Epicurus had to say.

[I hope my sarcasm or feeble attempt at humor in these steps is apparent, but just in case I'll add this note to make it clear. This analysis flies in the face of what I believe Epicurean philosophy to be all about, and it serves as a tremendous obstacle to the wider understanding and acceptance of Epicurean philosophy. I am 100% convinced that if the ancients had understood Epicurus to have been teaching this kind of analysis, Epicurean philosophy would never have seen widespread adoption, and the name of Epicurus would have been lost to history a long time ago.]

It's hard for me to get past that first sentence. The "most dominant terms in Epicurus' theory of the pleasures"?

You can read the authentic Epicurean texts over and over again without coming across those words, and yet they are "the most dominant terms"?

Yes, they do dominate modern discussion, but that is because of the need for something like them to rescue the nonsense that arises when you ignore everything else that Epicurus said in order to elevate the "absence of pain" passage in the letter into a paradigm of asceticism that the Stoics would have blushed to assert.

It is amazing how much turns on how one chooses to interpret that one section of the letter to Menoeceus.