Posts by Cassius

Quote from Bryan

but it can be a bit confusing when those explanations are also in Greek!

Very good point - thank you!

Elli posted this link in the thread for this article at FB:

Original Post Link

Quantum Entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where two or more particles become interconnected in such a way that the state of one particle directly depends on the state of the other, regardless of the distance separating them.

Key Characteristics of Quantum Entanglement:

1. Non-locality: Changes in the state of one particle directly affect the state of the other, even if they are far apart.

2. Superposition of States: Entangled particles are in a superposition, meaning they can be in multiple states simultaneously until measured. For example, if two photons are entangled and we measure the polarization of one, the polarization of the other will be immediately determined, regardless of the distance between them. This phenomenon has been experimentally confirmed and is one of the most impressive demonstrations of quantum mechanics.

Applications: Quantum entanglement is fundamental for the development of quantum computers, quantum communications, quantum cryptography etc.

From Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus, Paragraph 47 we read : «… ότι τα είδωλα ταις λεπτότησιν ανυπερβλήτοις κέχρηνται [ατόμοις], ουδέν αντιμαρτυρεί των φαινομένων· όθεν και τάχη ανυπέρβλητα έχει (ως άνω κινούνται ισοταχώς και κατά παρέγκλισιν) πάντα πόρον σύμμετρον έχοντα …»

«Nothing contradicts the phenomena that the images (in the atoms) are extremely fine (which) move with unsurpassable speed (and as above said move at equal speed and by swerve), always maintaining every of their path symmetrical ...»

Artificial Intelligence said: "The idea of Epicurus described in the above excerpt can be paralleled to the concept of quantum entanglement to some extent. In quantum entanglement, two or more particles become interconnected in such a way that the state of one directly affects the state of the other, regardless of the distance separating them".

And of course, if Plato heard this, his face would turn green and Aristotle's hair would stand on end (see photo)... because only with their methodology of dialectics and endless verbosity, we Greeks would have become the laughingstock of the ecumene (as the Great Democritus says in the photo)!

Because nothing contradicts the phenomena that the Titan Epicurus, in his letter to Herodotus, was the first to conceive in a seminal/fruitful way (even before it was experimentally confirmed) the uniform-equal speed (of light) as well as the two most important principles of quantum theory, namely:

With the swerve of atoms is meant the superposition (see today Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) of which? The finest of atoms (see today photons) that are ALWAYS maintaining to each other a symmetrical path (see today the quantum entanglement).

"I recommend constant activity in the study of nature; and this way more than any other I enjoy calm to my life." (Epicurus letter to Herodotus)

----------------------------------------------------------------

[…Many years ago, I had the pleasure of a chance meeting with Werner Heisenberg. It was during an evening in the Beethoven-Saal in Bonn. July of 1972. In front of me stood an old man of 71 years. His eyes were light-coloured. They had a brilliance that was slightly suppressed by the rough weather, the tiredness and deep contemplation. An expression of treasured attentiveness.

Average in terms of height, attired in the subdued skin of the senior ages, yet standing straight, he emanated the impression of a forgotten cheerfulness. His movements were peaceful. His characteristics heavily set. In his expression you could almost perceive the reflection of a long victorious campaign in foreign lands. It was roosting there for all to see, like an evening owl. A feeling of serenity enveloped him. I approached, he held out his hand.

- “Oh! video hominem”, I said.

- “Ὁρῶ τὸν ἄνδρα. Ja, ich verstehe das Lateinische und antworte griechisch” (Yes, I understand Latin and respond in Greek), he replied.

Among the millions of the Agora of my century I saw, for a single instant, a man - and I had no need for a lantern in midday like the ancient Diogenes. On my way out I was floating with eyes closed, like Karajan conducting Beethoven's Pastoral. Hovering somewhere in between the stormy weather on the one side, and a pastoral song of simplicity on the other. Between the Gewitter-Sturm and the Hirtengesang…]

(the above excerpt is by Dimitris Liantinis from his book “Gemma” - translated from Greek into English by our friend Yiannis Tsapras).

Welcome to Episode 247 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread to discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

Today we are continuing to review Cicero's "On the Nature of The Gods," which began with the Epicurean spokesman Velleius defending the Epicurean point of view. This week will continue into Section 27 as Cotta, the Academic Skeptic, continues to insist that gods are supernatural and not at all similar to humans. We will, in turn, respond to Cotta's particular and general arguments.

For the main text we are using primarily the Yonge translation, available here at Archive.org. The text which we include in these posts is available here. We will also refer to the public domain version of the Loeb series, which contains both Latin and English, as translated by H. Rackham.

Additional versions can be found here:

• Frances Brooks 1896 translation at Online Library of Liberty
• Lacus Curtius Edition (Rackham)
• PDF Of Loeb Edition at Archive.org by Rackham
• Gutenberg.org version by CD Yonge 

A list of arguments presented will eventually be put together here.

Today's Text

XXXII. ...Nor can I conceive why Epicurus should rather say the Gods are like men than that men are like the Gods. You ask what is the difference; for, say you, if this is like that, that is like this. I grant it; but this I assert, that the Gods could not take their form from men; for the Gods always existed, and never had a beginning, if they are to exist eternally; but men had a beginning: therefore that form, of which the immortal Gods are, must have had existence before mankind; consequently, the Gods should not be said to be of human form, but our form should be called divine. However, let this be as you will. I now inquire how this extraordinary good fortune came about; for you deny that reason had any share in the formation of things. But still, what was this extraordinary fortune? Whence proceeded that happy concourse of atoms which gave so sudden a rise to men in the form of Gods? Are we to suppose the divine seed fell from heaven upon earth, and that men sprung up in the likeness of their celestial sires? I wish you would assert it; for I should not be unwilling to acknowledge my relation to the Gods. But you say nothing like it; no, our resemblance to the Gods, it seems, was by chance. Must I now seek for arguments to refute this doctrine seriously? I wish I could as easily discover what is true as I can overthrow what is false.

XXXIII. You have enumerated with so ready a memory, and so copiously, the opinions of philosophers, from Thales the Milesian, concerning the nature of the Gods, that I am surprised to see so much learning in a Roman. But do you think they were all madmen who thought that a Deity could by some possibility exist without hands and feet? Does not even this consideration have weight with you when you consider what is the use and advantage of limbs in men, and lead you to admit that the Gods have no need of them? What necessity can there be of feet, without walking; or of hands, if there is nothing to be grasped? The same may be asked of the other parts of the body, in which nothing is vain, nothing useless, nothing superfluous; therefore we may infer that no art can imitate the skill of nature. Shall the Deity, then, have a tongue, and not speak—teeth, palate, and jaws, though he will have no use for them? Shall the members which nature has given to the body for the sake of generation be useless to the Deity? Nor would the internal parts be less superfluous than the external. What comeliness is there in the heart, the lungs, the liver, and the rest of them, abstracted from their use? I mention these because you place them in the Deity on account of the beauty of the human form.

Depending on these dreams, not only Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermachus declaimed against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but that little harlot Leontium presumed to write against Theophrastus: indeed, she had a neat Attic style; but yet, to think of her arguing against Theophrastus! So much did the garden of Epicurus abound with these liberties, and, indeed, you are always complaining against them. Zeno wrangled. Why need I mention Albutius? Nothing could be more elegant or humane than Phædrus; yet a sharp expression would disgust the old man. Epicurus treated Aristotle with great contumely. He foully slandered Phædo, the disciple of Socrates. He pelted Timocrates, the brother of his companion Metrodorus, with whole volumes, because he disagreed with him in some trifling point of philosophy. He was ungrateful even to Democritus, whose follower he was; and his master Nausiphanes, from whom he learned nothing, had no better treatment from him.

XXXIV. Zeno gave abusive language not only to those who were then living, as Apollodorus, Syllus, and the rest, but he called Socrates, who was the father of philosophy, the Attic buffoon, using the Latin word Scurra. He never called Chrysippus by any name but Chesippus. And you yourself a little before, when you were numbering up a senate, as we may call them, of philosophers, scrupled not to say that the most eminent men talked like foolish, visionary dotards. Certainly, therefore, if they have all erred in regard to the nature of the Gods, it is to be feared there are no such beings. What you deliver on that head are all whimsical notions, and not worthy the consideration even of old women. For you do not seem to be in the least aware what a task you draw on yourselves, if you should prevail on us to grant that the same form is common to Gods and men. The Deity would then require the same trouble in dressing, and the same care of the body, that mankind does. He must walk, run, lie down, lean, sit, hold, speak, and discourse. You need not be told the consequence of making the Gods male and female.

Therefore I cannot sufficiently wonder how this chief of yours came to entertain these strange opinions. But you constantly insist on the certainty of this tenet, that the Deity is both happy and immortal. Supposing he is so, would his happiness be less perfect if he had not two feet? Or cannot that blessedness or beatitude—call it which you will (they are both harsh terms, but we must mollify them by use)—can it not, I say, exist in that sun, or in this world, or in some eternal mind that has not human shape or limbs? All you say against it is, that you never saw any happiness in the sun or the world. What, then? Did you ever see any world but this? No, you will say. Why, therefore, do you presume to assert that there are not only six hundred thousand worlds, but that they are innumerable? Reason tells you so. Will not reason tell you likewise that as, in our inquiries into the most excellent nature, we find none but the divine nature can be happy and eternal, so the same divine nature surpasses us in excellence of mind; and as in mind, so in body? Why, therefore, as we are inferior in all other respects, should we be equal in form? For human virtue approaches nearer to the divinity than human form.

Quote from Eric

since, for me, making sex worth

I think that's always the framework. People are different and always at different points in their lives and have different priorities. The best choices are always a matter of evaluating your own personal circumstances.

Yes that is helpful, thank you!

Because it's not limited to "gods" I think it's worth spelling out the reasoning issue. As I see it:

1. Cotta is alleging that Epicurus said that in order to understand something, you have to have seen a prior example and understood the prior example. Implicitly the point is "you have to have examined it here on earth in your own experience and understood it before you can apply the generalization to a new example."

2. Cotta alleges that there is nothing like the sun, moon, or stars here on earth, so Epicurus has had no examples to examine.

3. Cotta alleges that since Epicurus had no examples, and under Epicurus's rules that we require examples on which to reason, we cannot make any reliable statements about the sun moon or stars. But Cotta knows that Epicurus DOES claim to know that the sun and stars and planets are not gods.

4. Cotta says this position that the suns and stars and planets are not gods is contradictory. Since Epicurus has had no examples of suns or moons or planet to examine, Epicurus (allegedly under his own rules) should not be making any representations about the sun and stars and planets at all. Cotta thinks he has Epicurus in a trap, so he says "Epicurus if you are willing without evidence reach the conclusion that sun stars and planets are not gods, why don't you go ahead and admit without evidence the sun stars and planets are gods, and that gods can exist in other than human form?"

So I see Cotta as trying to take advantage of the argument that we also see in Lucretius, where Lucretius says "the gods could not have made the universe because they had no pattern to go by." It was apparently understood that the Epicureans argued regularly that you must have a pattern from experience in order to understand something and work with it.

Any skeptic who thinks that Epicureans demand examples before they believe in something will attack any Epicurean position on the sun moon and stars by saying : "Under your own theory of reasoning, you can't say anything at all about something unless you have seen a prior example of it, so you shouldn't be talking at all about the sun moon or stars."

And that sounds like a reasonable argument against someone who is alleging you can only reason based on analogy from sensory experience. But it's not a persuasive argument against Epicurus, because the Epicurus' position is not that you reason based ONLY on past experience, your reason can also be based on reasonable inferences from circumstantial evidence. In that way it is permissible to make conclusions about things you haven't seen, because you can infer new possibilities that you haven't seen based on other examples of what we have seen.

This is how the difference plays out in court:

If a judge in court only allows "direct evidence," then he will allow into evidence a witness who says "I saw Tom Jones strangle Sally Smith in the jail cell."

If a court allows only direct evidence, the judge will EXCLUDE the testimony of a witness who says: "I saw Tom Jones and Sally Smith alone in the jail cell, and then I left, and ten minutes later I came back and Sally Smith was dead with red marks around her neck, and no one had disturbed the lock on the cell."

The latter testimony is not "direct" evidence" but "circumstantial evidence." Circumstantial evidence is controversial and has to be treated carefully. But our legal system has decided that it is reasonable to ally juries to consider circumstantial evidence in court, because sometimes direct evidence is not available but circumstantial evidence is very strong.

The answer to Cotta is that Epicurean philosophy doesn't require direct evidence all the time, such as in the case of the existence of atoms or what happens to self-consciousness after death. Epicurean philosophy allows inference based on circumstantial evidence, and it considers the conclusions of persuasive amounts of circumstantial evidence to be as worthy of reliance, even in life-and-death decisionmaking, as evidence from that which has been observed directly.

Therefore I see it as essential to point out that Cotta's is wrong to allege that Epicurus requires direct evidence to support decisionmaking. After that, we also need to take the next step of discussing the proper use of circumstantial evidence, so we can explain how he's misrepresenting Epicurus, because that's not obvious to everyone.

And it's also worth pointing out another inconsistency in Cotta:

Why, Cotta, if you are a skeptic and don't think anything is knowable, do you agree with Velleius that gods are happy, and gods have virtue, and gods use reason? Where do you come by that knowledge?

In fact we need to ask that question of both Cotta and Epicurus in order to understand the big picture of how their reasoning differs. If we just stop and say "this topic is about gods and I don't care about gods" then we will cut ourselves off from major aspects of how Epicurean reasoning works on everything, not just gods.

Quote from Bryan

Yes, Cicero is forgetting that, per Epicurus, a consideration is true -- both "if it is not contradicted " by evidence as well as "if it is affirmed." (51c)

Thanks Bryan. Also: We have PD24 for a similar point:

Quote

PD24. If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.

But I'd like to make clear from our existing quotes something to the effect that the opinion, in order to be suggested in the first place, must pass an initial threshold of being based on some kind of existing evidence. In other words it isn't sufficient to say "I can imagine an omnipotent god....."

I'd like to see what we can do to come up with a pithy statement of the ultimate point. Something first has to get the opinion started as reasonable based on existing evidence.

What's the best way to take something like "Reasoning about the nature of the imperceptible must be based on and consistent with the nature of the perceptible" and modify it to a form in which you would teach a child?

Quote from Eric

I'm sure that's true. Could you elaborate what you mean?

Well mostly what I was referring to is just the way people typically "slow down" or develop chonic disease conditions with age. I'm personally at the point now (over 60!) that I just don't have the energy to do the things I used to do in whole range of areas. That makes diet and exercise even more important over time, I guess!

Outstanding post Nate thank you. Very well worded on a whole series of key points on religion and morality and death.

I don't necessarily want to derail this thread with another discussion with fine points on "the gods," but is it your view at this point that you do not think Epicurus held the gods to have any physical existence whatsoever ("....though, those deities are simply inspiring mental objects") or am I misreading your intent there?

Not sure how we could work it, but maybe we need a "My Current Thoughts On _____" section of the forum or in our user profiles to have a way to keep track of evolving thoughts. But that's another topic too. Maybe someone will have a suggestion on how we could implement such a thing. I know my own opinions on difficult topics is subject to change so that might be helpful. The other alternative that we already follow to avoid thread derailment is that if a series of posts goes too far off from the main point, we move those to a new thread. So your choice as to whether to respond on that point here, somewhere else, or not at all.

But back on topic and my main point here is - that was an excellent post!

Today I've set up a page to keep track of a list of articles or materials that would be particularly helpful to have, but which don't currently exist (at least in the forum we need it at the forum for general reference).

I have seeded the list with three articles, one each for physics, canonics, and ethics, but I would like to expand it to include a wider list that we can keep pinned as a list of suggestions that we'd like to see people write about.

I suspect we have a considerable number of participants and even lurkers who occasionally have time on their hands, and this list would provide food for thought about how they might assist us in preparing general-interest materials about Epicurean topics.

Please feel free to add topics to this discussion thread, and we can incorporate them into a master ongoing list, to which we will link from the front page of the forum.

167

No doubt there are some pithy quotes in "On Signs" that are directly relevant to this discussion.

Here's our discussion of two articles on knowledge and signs by David Sedley

And here's a transcript of the text of the DeLacey edition of Philodemus.

I would say that this issue of evidence - based reasoning is what is being referred to very near the beginning of Lucretius' poem, and its position here as one of Epicurus' great accomplishments reflects its importance. Epicurus points to the method for unraveling "what can be, and what cannot - in what way each thing has its power limited - its deep-set boundary mark"

Quote from Lucretius Book One

[62] When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, ’twas a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her: him neither the stories of the gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of nature. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed on far beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole; whence in victory he brings us tidings what can come to be and what cannot, yea and in what way each thing has its power limited, and its deepset boundary-stone. And so religion in revenge is cast beneath men’s feet and trampled, and victory raises us to heaven.

1. Don - The first upload was deleted. it may show up twice but only the first is usable.

2. Joshua - Let me check. I don't rememember anything egregiously off.

Lucretius Today Episode 246 is now available: "Examining Epicurean Evidence-Based Reasoning" Transcript

Here's a prior thread on the letter to Marcella: We've discussed this before as the source of the "vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal...." and that the letter is not represented to be a direct quote from Epicurus. I've come around to a somewhat more favorable opinion of it lately, but there's no doubt in my mind that it is mashup of Stoic and Epicurean and may simply Porphyry's own views, so in my view it has to be taken with caution. I agree with your reservations on this part Kalosyni. I think that a close reading of *exactly* what it is saying largely rescues it from sounding Stoic, and for that reason it's useful for discussion. But a too-superficial reading of it can definitely be made to sound like a recommendation to being indifferent to pleasure and pain, which I don't think is accurate Epicureanism.

Thread

Porphyry - Letter to Marcella -"Vain Is the Word of the Philosopher..."

I was talking to @EricR this morning and trying to remember the source of this quote. In tracking it down it seems to come from Porphyry's letter to Marcella -- but do we really know this is attributable to Epicurus? Usener seems to think so, but why? Anyone recall?

U221

Porphyry, Letter to Marcella, 31, [p. 209, 23 Nauck]: Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body,…

Cassius

June 12, 2023 at 11:34 AM

Second thread, same general reservations:

Thread

Article on the "Letter to Marcella" by Porphyry

Thanks to Takis Panagiatopolis of the Athens Garden for this link:

http://www.epicuros.gr/pages/en/Tempe…us_Porphyry.pdf

! It seems clear that this writer was referencing Epicurean ideas while also combining them with elements that are absolutely irreconcilable. It is interesting to reflect on which are which.

"27. So then, first you must grasp the law of Nature and from it ascend to the divine law which also established the law of Nature."

epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/345/

…

Cassius

April 17, 2019 at 6:40 AM

See also in particular this part for discussion that Porphyry seems to be recommending abstinence from food and sex:

Post

RE: Article on the "Letter to Marcella" by Porphyry

Weren't we talking recently somewhere about someone recently interested in this letter to Marcella? I still to this day have not spent much time with it, but it seems to me very dangerous to consider this an Epicurean work as it seems to have lots of unEpicurean thought mixed into it.

It would take almost a line-by-line analysis to go through it but I see this as an example which appears to me directly UNEpicurean, because if the gods have decided to give up food and sex for themselves, then…

Cassius

January 31, 2020 at 2:45 PM

I think a lot of people miss why this is so important.

The point is that the other philosophers, typified by Plato with his cave, allege that the senses "lie" to you and that they are therefore unreliable sources of information about how to live. If the senses lie, then you need to look for some other faculties that you *can* rely on to replace them.

If you're Plato, you come up with geometry or dialectic or some other way of symbolic "logic." If you're more into straight religion you come up with some kind of prayer or divine revelation. No doubt there are other substitutes as well but (1) rationalism/logic and (2) mysticism are the big ones.

Epicurus rejects both of those and says that we rely on the senses that nature gave us, and we don't have to invent imaginary substitutes. He further points out that in addition to the five senses, there are two other categories of natural faculties (1 - the feelings of pleasure and pain, and 2 - the "prolepsis") which are also natural mechanisms that report "truly" without their own opinions. That's why these three categories are "canonical" - they don't give us any opinions of their own about what to do, but they are natural "straight edges" or "rulers" that we can reliably use to test our own individual contexts. They operate naturally, so when held up to situation after situation they give us reliable data that we can then act upon. No need for divine revelation or circular rationalism.

Quote from Kalosyni

This gave me some difficulty in the past, so I want to see if I can finally get it. Can we say that the senses are the mechanics of how the mind collects "data"? Then just like a microscope may have a scratch on the lense, the eye could have a defect which slightly alters the incoming data?

Yes. The microscope does not "tell" the doctor or scientist what he is looking at - the microscope simply collects and magnifies light and passes it on to the eyepiece. It's up to the observer to make an accurate assessment of what he sees.

If a lense has a scratch, then the light transmitted to the eyepiece is affected to greater or lesser degree by the scratch. But that doesn't affect the "truthfulness" of the microscrope, because at no time is the microscope "telling" anyone anything.

We're separating the "collection of data" from the "assessment of data." The collection isn't "true" or "false" - the collection function simply is what it is.

That's why it is possible to say that the senses always report "accurately" or "truthfully" -- they are not injecting their own "opinion" about what they are displaying. They aren't reaching any conclusions at all. The observer has to account for any scratches on a lens the same way you account for the lens being out of focus, or not having enough light to see what you're looking at.

It's "opinions" that are right or wrong or accurate or inaccurate.

So it's essential, if you're going to make any sense of Epicurean canonics at all, to "get the point" that tools like the eyes or ears are never "accurate" or "inaccurate" in the way that they report. They report what they report, and it's the interpretation of the data in the mind that is accurate or inaccurate.

"Accurate" or "inaccurate" applies to saying that the tower at a distance is round or square. When someone says "all senses are true" or "all sensations are true," they aren't talking about the conclusion about whether the tower is square or round. They are saying that the senses report "truly" in the sense of "honestly without any added opinion of their own."

Quote from Eric

Perceptions and interpretations can be false on all stages of processing as can be demonstrated via experienceable examples such as optical illusions (initial processing) or delusions (later processing).

This would be another comment similar to Godfrey's as to shades of meaning, but most of the time I don't think we see "perceptions" and "interpretations" linked as similar concepts that can be right or wrong. I generally see "perceptions" as used to refer to individual "sights" or "sounds" rather than the labeling of them. At any rate, it's important to be clear that the senses are not right or wrong themselves, it is the interpretations we draw from the senses that can be right or wrong.

From the article:

"Despite periodic re-examination of the concept, tired light has not been supported by observational tests and remains a fringe topic in astrophysics.^[4]"

Article on same topic: "Shamir study supports century-old tired light theory, challenging big bang"

https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Shamir_study_supports_century_old_tired_light_theory_challenging_big_bang_999.html