Posts by Martin

  • Thomas More and his "Utopia"

    Thomas More was a statesman, theologian, humanist, friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He opposed Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church. After refusing to take an oath acknowledging the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England, More was convicted of treason and executed in 1535.

    His book "Utopia" was first printed in 1516, well before the industrial revolution.
    The quotes are taken from the edition of Henry Morley, most recently updated on April 7, 2021 at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2130
    The book describes the fictitious island state Utopia, which is organized as a pre-industrial communist society. (That Thomas More was a Catholic scholar corroborates that there is a Christian base for communism.)
    The Utopians' justifications for conquest of land are similar to the pretexts given for the upcoming European colonialism, the seizure of land of American Indians and Hitler's invasion of Eastern Europe.

    The Utopians share some of their main stream ideas with Epicurus' philosophy:
    "They seem, indeed, more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part, of a man’s happiness in pleasure;"
    “Thus, upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all our actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight, a pleasure."
    “They reckon up several sorts of pleasures, which they call true ones; some belong to the body, and others to the mind."
    "... they almost universally agree that health is the greatest of all bodily pleasures; and that as there is a pain in sickness which is as opposite in its nature to pleasure as sickness itself is to health, so they hold that health is accompanied with pleasure."

    Reasons are given that health is not just a neutral state but a pleasure:
    E.g. "What is the pleasure of eating, but that a man’s health, which had been weakened, does, with the assistance of food, drive away hunger, and so recruiting itself, recovers its former vigour? And being thus refreshed it finds a pleasure in that conflict; and if the conflict is pleasure, the victory must yet breed a greater pleasure, except we fancy that it becomes stupid as soon as it has obtained that which it pursued, and so neither knows nor rejoices in its own welfare."

    Other main stream ideas of the Utopians are opposite to Epicurus' philosophy:
    “These are their religious principles:—That the soul of man is immortal, and that God of His goodness has designed that it should be happy; and that He has, therefore, appointed rewards for good and virtuous actions, and punishments for vice, to be distributed after this life."
    Regarding those who do not believe in an immortal soul and rewards and punishments in the afterlife, the Utopians "never raise any that hold these maxims, either to honours or offices, nor employ them in any public trust, but despise them, as men of base and sordid minds. Yet they do not punish them, because they lay this down as a maxim, that a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases; nor do they drive any to dissemble their thoughts by threatenings, so that men are not tempted to lie or disguise their opinions; which being a sort of fraud, is abhorred by the Utopians: they take care indeed to prevent their disputing in defence of these opinions, especially before the common people: but they suffer, and even encourage them to dispute concerning them in private with their priest, and other grave men, being confident that they will be cured of those mad opinions by having reason laid before them."

  • Thomas More and his "Utopia"

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    socialist state in Utopia

    That state is communist rather than socialist. In Utopia, there is no money and no private property (of land, houses, other major items), and everybody takes what he needs from the markets, which is easy because Utopia produces more than enough and exports surplus (different from the actual socialist states in 20th century with their frequent shortages of basic necessicities).
    Other than that, I agree with Joshuas comments.

    My next comment is what I wrote in another group recently. The content is similar to but more compressed than what Joshua wrote here.

  • How SMART Fitness Goals Keep You On Track

    Concentration during exercising at the gym is a must at stations where lack of concentration constitutes a safety hazard, e.g. when working out with heavy weights or when making movements close to others in a densely packed gym.
    On the other hand, concentration can be an obstacle for endurance training on a running machine. While I concentrate on the running, I am fully aware of the exertion and tend to switch to walking much earlier than when I let my mind wander or even daydream, which greatly reduces awareness of the exertion and the amount of time still to run to meet a goal. Letting my thoughts generate some anger may even help with boosting performance.

  • Relationship between AI/LLMs and prolepsis

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    @Martin do you have any input on the comparison between prolepsis and LLM's?

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    I don't even think LLMs are analogous to ancient Epicurean prolepseis.

    I do see an analogy between prolepsis and LLMs. In both cases, pattern recognition built on past input is applied to new input to generate a response. This analogy may be weaker for ancient Epicurean prolepsis than for what prolepsis updated with respect to current knowledge of the brain may mean today. In all three cases (LLMs, ancient Epicurean prolepsis, modern meaning of prolepsis), the mechanisms are mutually so different, that there is apparently no other insight to gain from the comparison than details on the differences.

  • Have PD35 and Vatican Saying 7 been straw-manned?

    That might or might not be the case. I thought about this in analogy to my own experience with math. Probably, most people do not like to solve math problems. Math nerds may get pleasure out of the struggle to solve a math problem. I know that because I used to be one in my youth. In the (rare) case of not finding the solution, there was no euphoria, but the attempt was nevertheless pleasurable.

  • Have PD35 and Vatican Saying 7 been straw-manned?

    I agree with most of what Wbernys writes in comment #10. It seems most politicians in top government positions are psychopaths. They have no empathy, neither for their future selves, nor for anyone else, and appear to lack the ability of having a bad conscience. That should limit their fear and the impact on their happiness. Most of the struggle to maintain their power seems to be pleasurable to them. They become paranoid about losing their power when they lose the stamina to keep up the struggle in old age if they still want to stay at the top.

  • Discussion of Blog Post: The Continuing Vitality of Epicurean Physics

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    We still cannot say with certainty, even with our modern instruments that have measured it with extraordinary precision, because the question of the sun’s “true” size is entangled with questions about the physical definition of the sun’s boundary that even twenty-first-century solar physics has not fully resolved. Epicurus did not know the number. Neither, in some sense, do we.

    This is nonsense.
    Every measurement of a continuous variable has an uncertainty but that does not make the measurement untrue.
    Our senses indicate that the Sun has a well-defined size. At times when it is reasonably safe to observe the Sun, we can easily see it as a sphere (apparent circle when using no other information) that is sharp within the resolution which our eyes provide. That means there is a way to define what the size of the Sun means and how to measure it.
    The radius of the Sun has been measured to be 696,342 km with an uncertainty of 65 km, at the time of the measurements.

    Other than that, I found no obvious error in the text.
    The text seems to be based more on Stenger than anyone else.