Posts by Martin

  • What's the consensus on transhumanism/brain uploading?

    Further improving bodies with implants, exoskeletons, brain interfaces and the like and extending lifespans is likely to happen. Full transhumanism by leaving the body/uploading something to machinery is a delusion. What can be uploaded is a reductionist copy of some aspects. I would not consider that as continuation of my existence. Transhumanism is an idea motivated by fear of death. Getting rid of the fear of death in accordance with Epicurus' philosophy and modern science and eventually embracing death when it happens (or suicide when pain permanently outweighs pleasure) makes more sense to me.

  • Epicurean strategies for dealing with bad habits and urges.

    Here are examples of what has worked for me:

    Chocolate mousse:
    In the past, I splurged on chocolate mousse at a buffet restaurent where I ate about once per week. Eating a lot of chocolate mousse was certainly a bad habit because of the high sugar content.
    When the restaurant changed from a big bowl, from which I would take several portions per meal, to prefilled small cups, this helped in providing a simple way to measure and limit the consumption.
    I found that 3 cups provided already the maximum pleasure of the moment and more would go into saturation. Later on, I took only two cups and partially compensated the loss of pleasure by eating other tasty food with no sugar added.
    After a while of keeping to the temporary habit of eating only two cups, the urge for a third cup/lack of the related pleasure disappeared. So, I limited the intake to one cup per meal, whereby I chose the cup which appeared to be filled the most.
    After a while, the craving for a second cup disappeared. Then, I chose the cup which appeared to be filled the least.
    After a while, the craving for that small amount disappeared. I did not take any more chocolate mousse and no other sweetened dessert. I watched my colleagues eating multiple cups of chocolate mousse and other sweetened desserts, without that I would crave again for the chocolate mousse.

    Alcohol:
    As a young adult, I rarely drank alcohol but when I did, I sometimes did binge-drinking. Each hangover made me dislike the particular type of alcoholic drink for an increasingly longer period, and eventually the dislike became permanent. In this way, I lost the taste for lager beer, which was bad because it has been the most common social drink in my circles. I felt that losing the taste for an increasing number of alcoholic drinks was bad.
    At middle age, I started to drink spirits moderately in the evening during the cool season and almost none during the hot seasons in Thailand. I used a measuring cup to measure the alcohol intake per occasion, observed up to what dose the aftereffects were acceptable and limited the intake to that dose.
    Eventually, I got hypertonia, about 5 years ahead of my age group. I measured that at the established limit of alcohol intake, there was a slight but significant increase in blood pressure in the morning.
    So, I reduced the limit to half of what I had established before. At that level, it still gave me a little bit of a kick, so there was no big loss in pleasure.
    Eventually, I went to a doctor, who prescribed blood pressure medicine, encouraged me to record my blood pressure daily, and answered "No" to my question whether I should discontinue drinking alcohol.
    After preliminary retirement, my sleep deprivation disappeared because I could take naps at daytime. In turn, I could no longer fall asleep easily in the evening. I noticed that drinking spirits about half an hour before going to bed helped most of the time with falling asleep. As I monitor my blood pressure and treat it with medicine, I increased the alcohol intake to the limit which I had established in middle age. The further plan is to try to decrease the limit again as long as I can still easily fall asleep at bedtime.

    In conclusion, measuring a "bad" habit accurately, observing the effects of dose variation and gradually establishing a healthier habit for better long-term pleasure (health) has worked well while keeping short-term pleasure high.

  • Specific Methods of Resistance Against Our Coming AI Overlords

    Below is an example of what happens in other groups, in this case "Philosophy matters" on Facebook as quoted from maybe two months ago. (I thought, I had posted it here already in September but saw only today that it was still an unsent draft):

    Quote

    INTERESTING PHENOMENON: yesterday we posted three pieces about Spinoza, and shockingly no one called us a crazed spinozist or godless pantheist. There were barely any comments at all, and none of them were extraordinary. Imagine if we had posted thrice about Marx instead. Two days prior to that, we posted one article about feminism and subsequently noticed a curiously large uptick in followers, most of whom had fewer than 20 friends, and who apparently came here just to make incredibly nasty comments about women and feminism (all of which we hid from public view during our troll patrol); the next day, seeing that they got no traction, they all “left”. The botnets are working hard to create dissensus communis. If they’re targeting us, a rinky-dink page dedicated to philosophy, for use of keywords like “marx” or “feminism” (or critical race theory or queer theory or trans philosophy, or any other number of words that the regime does not like), then imagine what they’re doing to other bigger pages with gazillions of followers, who are not as brilliant and discerning as ours.

  • Stoic view of passions / patheia vs the Epicurean view

    Quote

    When I understood Philodemus right, I think the Epicurean view would only match with the Stoic view when the Emotion

    1) has harmful consequences ( pleasure then is not choiceworthy for example )
    2) is irrational, based on empty believe
    3) is based on unnecessary desire

    There seems to be a mix-up of two different usages of "irrational":
    The usage in the quote seems to indicate that "irrational" is something "bad", against reason, to be avoided.
    The other usage is neutral and refers to sensations, emotions, feelings being fundamentally, by definition, irrational, in contrast to something we have obtained with reasoning.

    In cases 1) and 3) from the quote, the hedonic calculus may justify pursuing the concerned desire:
    1) We sometimes willfully risk pain/harm to obtain greater pleasure or less pain in the future.
    3) Epicurus' philosophy does not make us reject all unnecessary desires. Instead, we pursue some of the unnecessary desires when they are natural.

    It seems that the Stoic and Epicurean views match far less than what the quote indicates. The Stoic vocabulary in the Wikipedia article is misleading from an Epicurean perspective.

  • What Are Some Epicurean Tips to Deal With Anxiety Over Painful Scenarios?

    What I observed and found confirmed in Philodemus' writings is that an initial sting of anger is unavoidable/normal/desirable/good and we should address it consciously and acknowledge it. We should anticipate that the interaction of the mind ruminating toward how bad the issue is with glands churning out biochemicals for a fight-or-flight reaction might turn the sting into a rage. By repeated practice of the awareness of the inner escalation and consciously nurturing the desire to stop the escalation, we can prevent the sting from spiraling into a rage. The initial sting is enough to drive us to effective action; the rage would be bad for our health and might propel us to do stupid things.

    My turning point was about 26 years ago when I hit something with my fist in a fit of anger in public, luckily without any adverse consequences. Subsequently, I have put effort into intercepting the spiral toward rage, and this prevention of the escalation from sting to rage has become natural for me.

  • Welcome Wbernys!

    Quote

    I would also like to ask a question for those who don't mind on "atoms and void". From what i can tell science tells us that the space between atoms is not really "empty space" but more like energy (electromagnetic, gravitational energy, quantum waves) which provided no friction and has no form, thus allowing movement. Do you all consider this to be a kind of "Epicurean void" or do you still believe in the classical void that there's empty space in-between?

    Quote

    Martin maybe you can give a good answer to the question in the above post.

    Don gave already a good answer, but OK, here is my answer:
    The space with properties (field) is a kind of "Epicurean void", and there is space in-between particles, which is empty almost everywhere most of the time under typical circumstances on Earth.

    There is a fundamental difference between Epicurus and the Kantian philosophy of science adhered to by the majority of modern scientists, of whom I am a dumbed down specimen.
    After careful consideration, Epicurus came to the conclusion that he found the truth about reality and called his philosophy "true philosophy". "True" referred to materialism, his metaphysics, his ethics and his pre-scientific methodology, not the description of particular phenomena, for which he typically offered multiple materialistic explanations and suspended judgement on which one is true. Today, the majority of scientists think that reality/truth is fundamentally unknowable, but we can create models which describe the phenomena very well. So, when scientists talk like quoted above, they do not mean that this is true for reality but true within the chosen model.

    For Newton and Coulomb, masses and charges, respectively, interact at a distance, with the space in between remaining like Epicurus' void.
    Faraday changed this. He let mass and charge give properties to the space around them and called that space with properties field. The field affects other masses or charges in that field, and the contributions of these other masses or charges to the field affect the first mass or charge. This was a major progress because it removed the spooky interaction at a distance in Newton's theory of gravity. Field theory was consequently applied to the more recently discoverd other fundamental forces. Except for virtual particles occasionally popping up as part of the description of interactions, the space is empty. The field adds something fundamentally new to Epicurus' plain void and enables that coming into existence of virtual particles. Again, this is all talk about properties of a model, not reality. However, there are some scientists, even excellent ones, who believe that science has been approaching the truth and who might claim that they talk about reality and its truth and not just a model of it but ultimately, they can neither know nor prove this.

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