Posts by Cassius

Quote from Elayne

I will throw out there, though, that although pleasure is felt at all normal times as a response to a specific experience (as is pain), I think the activity itself is not the pleasure or the pain.

Yes I agree that is an important distinction. The pleasure is the total contextual experience as the same activity can generate pleasure or pain in different contexts.

Quote from Elayne

On absence of pain/fullness of pleasure, I am baffled by your answer-- it seems like you are disagreeing with the synonymous aspect, although you say you aren't, and I can't get a grasp on your train of thought.

I "think" our issue here is this - I am constantly switching contexts between Epicurus making the statement "maximum pleasure is absence of pain" to a student in Athens vs. the same statement being made at a philosophy department class in the world of 2019.

I am thinking that because the Athenian student would have had full access to Epicurus' views and an understanding that "there are only two feelings" and that Epicurus was campaigning in favor of pleasure as ordinarily understood, the Athenian student would never be confused. The Athenian student would know that "we would never know the good without ..." the normal pleasures of action, so he would never consider divorcing the term "pleasure" from "normal active pleasures.

I do not believe that the statement "maximum pleasure is absence of pain" has the same contextual meaning to a 2019 philosophy student. Due to many different factors, 2019 students will most frequently infer that "absence of pain" is a reference to some kind of esoteric/mysterious state intended to mean something similar to nirvana or sensory deprivation or just simple stoic emotionlessness. As a result, I think someone today who says "the highest pleasure is the absence of pain" is probably intending his hearer to understand something very dissimilar, or even the opposite, of what Menoeceus (or any other Athenian of Epicurus' age) would understand.

I see this is very similar to "death is nothing to us." These words in 2019 in English imply flippancy; imply almost a nihilistic message that "LIFE is not important to us." I don't think that the same message would have been heard by an Epicurean Athenian of 200 BC. I think the message was "being dead is a state of nothingness - being dead is being reduced to nothing" due to the absence of sensation. Rather than a message of flippancy I think it is conveying that we have no concerns after we are dead because there is no sensation that would drive a concern. And one of the most important results of "death is nothing to us" properly understand is something very close to "life is everything to us." As I remember DeWitt saying somewhere, pain and pleasure "have meaning only to the living."

Does that explanation help bridge our issue, or make my viewpoint more confusing?

Quote from Elayne

On the size of the cup... I guess this is just me seeing the metaphor differently. I don't see the cup as representing numbers of experiences but the organism's feeling capacity. I don't think it helps to imagine people's cups of different sizes, if the cup represents feelings.

On this issue I am attempting to consider a concern that will present itself to many people to the effect that "it isn't fair" that everyone doesn't have the same size vessel of pleasure. I think this will manifest itself in many ways but maybe most obviously in comparing the life of a person who dies in childhood vs one who dies at 90 years old. Are not the feelings experienced by the 90 year old in some way larger in quantity than those of the child?

I am also concerned about the question I raised as to how we would know that the choice of living in the cave would not produce "the best life" for a human being. The minimalists will argue that by keeping the total experiences small in number, there are fewer pains, and if the pains go to zero we should acknowledge (given our formula) that this is the best life possible. Such a person might be from a background where he or she never thinks about coming out of the cave.

I do see issues in thinking about the vessel being changeable in size, so I want to think about that more, but I suspect I am going to think it best to deal with that issue as a limitation in the model, and a contextual issue, because the "person living in a cave on bread and water" is so dominant a theme in Epicurean academic commentary that I think we almost immediately have to deal with that situation using the vessel analogy in some way. And it might be useful to relate the "size of the vessel" to the part of life that is within our agency / "free will" to influence.

I agree with the vast majority of the article. Here are my initial comments which I will try to organize according to Elayne's sections. I have included reference to Elayne's sections in the underlined headings. Then my comments on each section follow, in italics.

1. The feelings are only two, pleasure and pain—there is no true third state such as neutral, except after death.
   1. Agreed, although after death is probably not a third state, it is non-existence.
2. The cup analogy is not to be taken literally.
   1. Agreed
3. At any given moment we could see a single lifelong movie of this cup.
   1. Agreed
      
4. Only two feelings / no neutral state
   1. Yes there are only two feelings, and there are no neutral feelings. But this does not mean that there is a feeling about everything that comes to our attention. Something can come to our attention without eliciting any responsive "feeling" whatsoever. Feelings serve as the only guide which Nature gave us to determine what to choose and what to avoid, but that does not mean that Nature gave us an indicator to choose or avoid in response to every experience that comes our way.
   2. What is the significance of Epicurus stressing that there are only two feelings?
      1. To start, Epicurus probably considered that there is no such thing as "pleasure" in the abstract. In reality, there are only individual exeriences perceived by individual living things as pleasurable. The concept of "pleasure" is a model which suffers from the same difficiences which are discussed later in this article as a hazard of model-making.
      2. Why articulate "pleasure" as a concept as the goal without constantly listing individual pleasures? Probably because of the logical necessity to be able to talk about the issue, and symbolize pleasures in a single word, and
      3. to divide feeling up into the two conceps of pleasure and pain, so as to deal with the logical arguments (such as presented by Plato in Philebus) that if there were neutral or mixed feelings, it would be necessary for there to be an arbiter to which we would have to look to separate out and rank the choices by some standard other than pleasure or pain. If we admit there is such a need for such an arbiter, then we are impelled toward the conclusion that knowledge of this arbiter is something more important than either pleasure or pain, and this would remove pleasure from is role as the highest good.
5. Because there is no neutral, removing all pain in life is only possible with maximal pleasure.
   1. Once it is accepted (IF it is accepted) that there are only two feelings, then this becomes true by definition. Whether someone understands the implications of this definition, however, is entirely different.
   2. I agree with Elayne that positing "neutrality" as a goal is contrary to experience; I would also say it is absurd.
   3. However the point which we will need to deal is that the majority of commentators read Epicurus as implying (or stating explicitly) that this condition of "absence of pain" is (meaning is equivalent too) "the highest pleasure." The presumption which is planted is that somehow "absence of pain" results in a state of exaltation which is higher and/or more intense and/or more valuable in some way than any normal pleasures of music, food, friends, sex, dance, or any other standard mental or bodily pleasure that one can name. No one can advance any explanation of this pleasure that normal people find satisfactory, but that does not stop them from doing it. The result is Stoicism on steroids.
6. The extent of pleasure can be maximized by making sure to attend to all parts of one’s body, including the brain.
   1. I think this section is well stated and at least at this time I have nothing to add.
7. Happiness is itself a pleasurable feeling, most easily described as the condition of a person who has maximized pleasure in all areas of life.
   1. I would say that happiness if a word that we use to describe a mental experience of pleasures predominating over pains. I do not think I would say that happiness requires maximized pleasures in all areas of life. I think Epicurus described himself as happy on the last day of his life, even though he was suffering excruciating physical pain. From this perspective "happiness" is a concept rather than a particular pleasurable experience or set of pleasurable experience. I would be cautious about considering "happiness" to be an experience which is separate from some combination of otherwise ordinary mental pleasurable feeling/experiences. The further "happiness" is detached from specific pleasurable feelings, the easier it is to slip in to the definition other alleged requirements, such as wisdom or virtue or money or whatever, which other philosophers assert is required to constitute a happy man.
   2. As to variation, I believe Epicurus was not saying that variation is not desirable. Living another to experience more pleasures may simply be variation, but it is desirable in and of itself. I believe the references to variation are again an artefact of responding to Platonic logical objections. Epicurus was probably responding to the argument that pleasure cannot be "the good" because it allegedly has no limit by responding that pleasure does have a limit, when the allegorical vessel is full. This provides a counterargument to the logical argument of Plato, but it does not in itself diminish the desirability of variation.
   3. By not commenting on other aspects of this section I am not implying that I disagree with them; in general I agree with everything I read that I am not specifically commenting on.
8. The capacity for pain is a valuable warning system and should not be disabled except in unusual conditions, but the experience of pain is to be avoided unless it is chosen for the sake of greater pleasure/ lesser pain over the lifespan.
   1. I totally agree with this section.
9. Humans have many shared responses of pain or pleasure to specific experiences, and they also have individual variations.
   1. I totally agree
10. The standard of pleasure in one’s life must be one’s own subjective feelings, not a generic advice.
    1. I totally agree, even though I think Elayne thinks I disagree here. I will try to explain that in connection with my "Epicurean Worksheet." The major point comes down in my mind to the issue of turning feelings into abstract numbers. I agree that that is impossible. However I think that conditioning in the modern world has led most people to think that it is valid to rank feelings on some kind of "objective" or "absolute" scale. They have bought into this ranking system, even if they do not appreciate the implications of it. I think that this is a problem similar to the Platonic attacks on pleasure. Epicuris likely thought they were ridiculous, but he was surrounded by philosophy students in Athens who had heard the arguments and likely presumed them to be correct. I believe that is why he came up with the "limits of pleasure" argument in he first place, to show how the Platonic attacks could be defeated on logical grounds. Likewise I think is is necessary for some people to hear a response to attacks on feelings that defends feelings on at least somewhat "logical" terms, even though feelings cannot be reduced to logical representations (numbers). The goal of the Epicurean worksheet (which it may well not reach) is to illustrate the logical absurdity which would occur if "minimal pain" were actually adopted as the explicit goal of life.)
11. There are many pitfalls to avoid if one desires a happy, pleasure-filled life, such as a false belief in a neutral state, practices which attempt to disable the normal capacity to feel pleasure and pain, and failure to consider the long-term pains and pleasures resulting from actions.
    1. The part I would comment on again here is the "neutrality" part. It now occurs to me that Elayne may have more experience with eastern viewpoints than I do, and that she may be right to consider that some people really do aim at neutrality, a viewpoint I find so absurd as to not take it seriously. She may be right to aim more fire at neutrality. My difference in emphasis is that I do not believe the "conventional academic epicureans" are aiming at neutrality. I believe they are aiming at asceticism / pain / obedience / regimentation as a control mechanism over other people who, for whatever reason, they deem need to be controlled.
12. In discussing pain and pleasure, Epicureans stick to real life situations, not hypothetical philosophical puzzles.
    1. I agree with all of this!
13. "Ok, that's the last of it. The differences between my perspective and Cassius, as I understand it, are:"
    1. "Cassius does not think absence of pain in a living person is synonymous with fullness of pleasure. IMO this would require a third state, neutral, which I do not believe actually exists."
       1. I do not consider this to be an accurate statement of my position. From my viewpoint, my position is ""absence of pain" as a term is not ***sufficient*** to describe any condition worthy of being called "fullness of pleasure. In my viewpoint, this terminology has been intentionally adopted by opponents of pleasure to imply that pleasure, or fullness of pleasure, is not an "experience." It is my view that "absence of pain" was used by Epicurus as a reference to quantity, and under the system of having only two feelings, the presence of one is by definition the absence of the other. So from the perspective of quantity, yes absence of pain is sufficient to equate to fullness of pleasure. But quantity is only one aspect of the experience of pleasure, and a full definition would require much more detail to describe the full experience. Added to that is the observation that I think Elayne makes here too, that it is essentially impossible to describe a feeling via concepts / words. We can make the effort and attempt it, but no map of the real world is the equivalent of the real world itself.
    2. Cassius proposes that the cup itself can be enlarged to admit more pleasures. I would take the position I understand meant by Epicurus saying that once the cup is full, it only admits variations.
       1. I believe the cup analogy was developed to illustrate the limit of pleasure, which is itself a logical device intended to explain how pleasure can have a limit. That limit is that the human experience, at any one moment, or over a lifetime, can have only a limited quantity of experiences.
       2. As referenced above I believe that Epicurus held variation to be desirable in itself, because that is just another word for additional pleasure. The point in this context is not that more pleasure is not desirable, but that our human makeup only allows us to experience so much of it, and no more, within our living experience.
       3. As to the question of whether the cup can be enlarged, that is a reference my interpretation of the argument by Okeefe and others that the real goal of Epicurus was moderate asceticism, and my argument that if we indeed set the focus of life as "minimizing pain" then the logical course to achieve that would be (1) suicide, and (2) failing suicide, living in a cave as a hermit on bread and water. What I am saying about a variable size cup is that we as humans do have some control over the figurative "size of the vessel" of our lives. We can commit suicide at age 20, which results in a figuratively smaller vessel than someone who lives to age 40. We can choose to live in a dark cave on bread and water staring into a flame, and in my view that does result in a figuratively smaller vessel of experiences than that of a vessel representing the life of a world adventurer of the same age. It is probably also valid to consider that the size of the allegorical vessel differs based on the mental and physical capacities or disabilities of the person involved. The word "human" is an abstraction - there are only individual living people. There is no allegorical "human vessel" which is the same for all individuals. This is another limitation of the use of conceptual analogies which we have to keep in mind. In discussing an allegorical "vessel of life" that vessel is not going to be of the same type for evey individual, and I think it is useful also to consider that the vessel of our total experiences can enlarge or diminish based on our life choices. Once again, I think the limit of pleasure argument and the limit of pleasure issue was introduced for the limited purpose of dealing with pesky academic logical traps, and was never intended (nor could it serve) as a completely accurate summary of all aspects of pleasure. The full vessel analogy supplies us with a logical response to those who argue that the highest goal of life must have a defined "limit." The vessel analogy does not even begin to communicate the nature of the individual pleasurable and painful experiences which it must contain in order to be useful.

Yes, Godek, compare your list with my list of considerations at the bottom of the current version of the spreadsheet.

I am a big fan of outlining and I am constantly shifting the items in the list to indicate priority, so yes any format that is easily shiftable would be good.

I do think making a Google spreadsheet with one consideration per line would make it easy to re-order the items to fit the current situation.

Once it is on Google docs then someone could download it and use for themselves locally (or copy to their individual google doc folder)

Another possibility for this list: "Not minimal total pain, but maximal net pleasure."

That is google docs as well, Godek.

List of potential revisions:

(1) It would not be correct to assume that an activity which has a +5 pleasure score and also a -5 pain score results in a "neutral state."

Nor would it be correct to presume that totally offsetting pain and pleasure scores that resulted in a final score of 0 would represent a neutral state. This is a limitation of the abstraction of reality to numbers, and I will clarify the diagram to warn against that implication, probably as part of the caution that pleasure and pain cannot be reduced to numbers anyway.

PD3. The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.

I think this is a statement that pleasure and pain are discrete - a sensation of pleasure is very different from a sensation of pain. In total their quantities can be compared, but they do not blend together - they are like oil and water and stay separate.z

But an activity can and generally will generate some pleasure and some pain as different aspects of a single activity.

(2) It is possible that the "intensity / extent" column should be eliminated as this aspect is likely already incorporated in the present/future bodily/mental pleasure columns

The Okeefe answer would be "But "absence of pain" is the highest pleasure, so if you simply breathe air, eat bread, and drink water, there will be no pain on the right side of the ledger, and the left side will be all 10's in every column!"

Maybe some people can rationalize that as what Epicurus meant - but I haven't been able to do so, nor do I think most people of normal sensibilities would do so. And since I think that the Greco-Roman world of Epicurus and Lucretius was populated with pretty much the same kind of people alive today, I don't think that Epicurus' philosophy would ever have become popular if "minimal total pain" is what he really taught.

CLARIFICATIONS:

The point of "As a practical matter the two goals are not the same" is to emphasize this distinction:

If one's overriding goal were truly minimizing the number of painful experiences in life, then one would never choose any activity (getting a shot from a doctor; going to the gym; fighting to protect oneself) which involved any element of pain whatsoever.

The true goal is not avoiding pain at all cost, but maximum net pleasure, which is why Epicurus described the reasoning this way:

Quote

And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but will often pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And often we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure. While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is should be chosen, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good.

And it is important to emphasize the limitation stated in the heading: There Are No Absolute Scores, and Nature Provides No Authority Higher Than Your Own Feelings To Assign A Relative Score To Each Item

Feelings cannot be reduced to numbers. A Worksheet can only serve as a primitive method of conceptualizing the relationships between them for our own personal reflection. There is no target maximum number of "maximum net pleasure" applicable to everyone. To the extent that thinking about feelings in terms of numbers is helpful at all, it is only to the extent that ranking their values to us might be of some help in organizing our activities to emphasize the ones that will in the end bring us the largest net benefit.

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.

There are a couple of lines of thought in this thread so i will break off the "spreadsheet" into a thread of its own

An Epicurean Pleasure Maximization Spreadsheet

It occurs to me that there is another reason why I like the "spreadsheet" model. Because when you focus on fitting your activities into and you think about the pains and pleasures that come from them, you're going to list your activities and the natural results and in doing so you naturally realize that "absence of pain" is not an ACTIVITY. You're never going to even consider starting a line with "absence of pain." Absence of pain is something that is an "attribute" of engaging in pleasures that drive out pains, but it's not an activity in itself.

Even if you want to say "meditate" or "Take time to reflect on your blessings" those are activities no different in principle from any other mental activity like reading a book or listening to music.

I just noticed this and I want to comment:

Quote from Godfrey

I use natural and necessary or unnecessary as a first step to evaluate a given desire, then I think about whether the various costs involved (pain) will add up to more or less than the resultant pleasure.

I agree that the natural or necessary analysis is a good first step in the analysis, but it's good to remember that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the pleasures in either of these multiple categories, but because these categories are thumbnail rules for helping us predict the amount of pain that is going to come from the choice, as explained by Torquatus in On Ends.

The point of my posting is to emphasize that this is the starting point of the analysis, not the end point, and not a substitute in itself for the issue of "what will happen" and the eventual result of whether the end is net positive or net negative as to the pleasure/pain balance.

Thumbnail rules are highly useful, but they exist in a larger context that can sometimes be dramatically violated. The goal is to keep your eye on the END, which is pleasure, and never to let any tool (like virtue, or even this system of categories) to take the place of it.

Maybe some kind of "legend" at the bottom of the spreadsheet would be needed to highlight the nuances of the factors that are listed in the columns. Those are probably some of what Godek listed in his initial list. Another consideration that jumps out at me is that somehow the entries need to consider that your personal pleasure in each category also incorporates the reflected pleasure that you would take in observing your friends' take pleasure in the results of your activity.

There are FAR too many considerations to list, but even starting the list (and making clear that the list is not complete) might be a good aide to thinking about the problem.

Godek to save you time here is an editable version too: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…dit?usp=sharing

I recommend that anyone who plays with it downloads a backup copy to their local computer just in case someone in the future defaces / destroys it.

I would really like to turn the column headings to an angle so we could get more entries in, and have them readable, but I am not enough of a spreadsheet expert to do that.

Also Godek, I would keep in mind that if anyone were actually to use such a spreadsheet/diagram, the use would be a constantly moving target. A ranking would change from day to day or moment to moment.

So if you were thinking of how to commit such a project to software, be sure to keep each activity on a single line, and hopefully incorporate some way to sort the lines "continuously."

In other words make it easy to use the software to both sort and drag and drop to rearrange the lines. Because if you were trying to list all your daily activities on the chart in order to help choose from among them, (which is sort of a presumption of what we are doing? ) and keep them sorted to maximize pleasure, the sorting is going to change almost moment by moment.

But just that kind of sorting is pretty much exactly what I think Epicurus was talking about doing - constantly.

EXCELLENT Point Elayne. That "might" be the same as intensity, but probably not.

I think the "vessel" analogy is always useful so we're talking about something that indicates "how much of the vessel is occupied" by the activity.

The trick will be somehow creating enough columns and labelling them sufficiently to accommodate all of the factors that you want someone to think about.

Thanks Godek. Are you good with Google docs and spreadsheets? Why don't we go ahead and actually setup a spreadsheet format as Hiram initially suggested? Your list of considerations is certainly a good start, but probably in terms of visualizing the final result setting up an actual spreadsheet divided into columns would be better.

Maybe Hiram pictures it differently but I am picturing a spreadsheet generally divided into two columns. And it's important to decide whether we are making a spreadsheet to analyze a single activity, or a list of activities that would then be ranked according to score. I am thinking the obvious choice is a LIST of activities, ranked by score.

Down the left in the margin would be column for the description of the activity. Then the left side would be taken up with a series of entries for ranking the elements. Sort of like this:

Godek could you also set up a "view only" link? I tried to view it but it is wanting me to sign in. I may be able to do that but not sure. If you set a view only link that should allow anyone in.

For example, in listing any pleasure, such as for example 'dinner on the town' I would thinks someone would need to consider --

- the duration of the pleasurable experience while it is ongoing

- the expected future physical pleasure (or pain) from the experience

- the expected future mental pleasure (or pain) from remembering the experience or from other longer-term ramifications of the dinner

- the "intensity" of the pleasurable experience (some kind of personal ranking system of intensity)?

- the repeatability of the experience (can it be done again in the future? how often?)

but those are just general categories and each one breaks down much further. It's probably also not possible even to come up with firm categories. But by listing the possibilities it opens up the issue to visualization.