Posts by Martin

One more important innovation in philosophy to add to my list in comment #6 is Utilitarianism, which attempts to move the goal to pleasure of the many and to make pleasure of the many measurable. It arises out of Bentham, Mill, more recently Stinger, and their followers not understanding how Epicurus' way of claiming pleasure as the goal does not lead to egoism and that Epicurus' philosophy trusts feelings and is not just a logical system within which positions or actions to take can be readily to inferred from a few axioms like a mathematical theory as other philosophers have attempted to present their respective philosophies.

Quote

since the classical authors referenced here lived 2000+ years ago, has anything changed? What, if anything, is new in the philosophy of life (contrasted to these classical perspectives)?

In reply to this question from comment #2, these are the changes / apparently new ideas of which I am currently aware of:

Beliefs in an almighty, all-knowing god have become dominant and although now somewhat on a decline have left their marks, in particular by the false concept of sin, false promise of an afterlife in heaven and association of pleasure with sins.

The program of materialism has worked out extremely well with science now providing explanations with evidence regarding all macroscopic phenomena humans can naturally sense. Increasingly sophisticated instrumentation is needed to find what is still unknown. The advancement of science has enabled pushing back the overbearing religions.
Mathematics has grown from just arithmetic and geometry for accounting and engineering and a speculative toy of idealistic philosophers to a large set of branches which go far beyond numbers and geometry. Especially calculus has been revolutionary and instrumental to develop better scientific theories.

The ancient justifications of slavery are no more accepted. Instead, machinery has made it partially obsolete, and wage slavery has come up and is widely accepted.

The improvement in material conditions have made it more likely that the results of the hedonic calculus of an individual Epicurean goes much more beyond minimalism today than at Epicurus' times.

The term "hedonic treadmill" has been coined and is used in academic philosophy to dismiss all types of hedonism, ignoring that the hedonic calculus prevents a consistent Epicurean from getting trapped on a hedonic treadmill.

Whereas the non-sceptics of the ancient philosophers including Epicurus thought their respective teachings to be true, fitness of a model to its intended purpose has mostly replaced truth. The concern for truth has been reduced to the truthfulness of logical constructs and protocols of events. This in turn facilitates dismissal of religions and grasping pleasure as the goal.

Welcome Cyrano!

Welcome Tariq!

Quote

Quote

Quote from Don Their contention is that if we knew the position of every atom and the physical laws that pertained to them, it would be possible to accurately know what would happen next ad infinitum.

Would that entail that there is no randomness in the system? That every event is perfectly predictable?

Now I want to hear from Martin!

Here is a slightly expanded version of my lost comment from yesterday:

In classical mechanics, there is no principal lower limit to the error with which we can know positions and speeds of bodies like there is in quantum mechanics. However, the error will never be reduced to 0. The residual error will propagate to large errors with time. That means events in the far future are not predictable. Therefore, even the simplistic "billiard board" model does not support hard determinism. E.g. the trajectory of Earth can be predicted some million years ahead (if there is no collision with a huge rogue celestial body) but not hundreds of millions of years:

How far ahead can we predict solar and lunar eclipses?

The solar system is non-integrable and has chaos. The sun-earth-moon three-body system might be chaotic. So, how far into the future can we predict solar…

physics.stackexchange.com

Hard determinism means that even the distant future is entirely determined by what happens now or has happend in the very distant past. That means all information about the future state of an isolated thermodynamic system is contained in the present state. Increase in entropy means increase of the information needed to completely describe the system. If the complete information has already always been there, entropy does not increase, in contradiction to what we observe for sufficiently large isolated systems.

The concept of free will makes sense for a supernatural soul but does not fit well into a materialistic world.

Instead, agency is a better concept. It works whether the materialistic world is deterministic or not. In a deterministic world, any moment of the distant past completely determines the action which an individual takes, but it is still impossible to accurately predict the action because the complete information of the past is impossible to gather, and the consequences are impossible to calculate. Without hard determinism, indeterminacies at the microscopic level add their influence on the present such that the predetermination by the past is weaker the further that past is in the past. The indeterminacies accumulate to increase variation of the outcome the further ahead the future under consideration is. This increases the variation in the observed output and would reduce but not prevent probabilistic success of predictions.

The indeterminacies at the microscopic level do not constitute a kind of materialistic soul as emergent property. My agency is derived from the past and - if there is no hard determinism - by the outcome of ongoing indeterminacies. These indeterminacies may add to the options to choose from and thereby enhance agency.

Anyone can predict that I will eventually get up to eat something, but no one can predict the second in which I will do that, and prediction of my choice of food is possible with only probabilistic success. The more complex the action to be predicted is, the lower are the chances of prediction.

Further progress in the development of artificial intelligence might eventually show whether complexity of a deterministic artificial neural network is enough to produce some kind of consciousness and meaningful pioneering creativity.

My best guess is that intentionally adding indeterminacies to the network enables or at least facilitates the ability to come up with genuinely new ideas.

Quote

the idea that light moves at a consistent speed is only a convention, is this correct?

It is correct in the sense that the equality of the one-way speed of light and the two-way speed of light is a convention as explained in the video linked to in comment #13.

Only the Galileo transformation is compatible with an absolute space. However, electrodynamics proves that instead the Lorentz transformation is correct as explained in the video linked to in comment #14.

The special theory of relativity gets the Lorentz transformation independently. Therefore, electrodynamics is implicitly relativistic.

Different conventions than the equality of one-way speed and two-way speed have the constraint that the result must be compatible with the Lorentz transformation.

Therefore, a different convention might somewhat modify the special theory of relativity but not in a way which would show different experimental results.

None of the possible different conventions would save the absolute space.

Quote

Can we interpret Einstein in way that leaves the void untouched and unaffected, but only the host of forces/matter?

The speed of the measured object in the reference system of the observer, a gravitational field or an accelerated reference system affects the "void" such that results of dimensional measurements in the "void" depend on that speed, the gravitational field or the acceleration. This is the only way how the "void" is affected, not more and not less. As a consequence, the absolute space which was conceivable in classical mechanics is lost. I guess it is that counter-interintuitive loss which is disturbing with the theories of relativity. I felt this disturbance, too. When I was an undergraduate student of physics, homework included calculations with the special theory of relativity. These calculations helped to make my intuition catch up with the rational understanding. Solving partial differential equations with boundary conditions can help with sharpening the intuition, too.

Alternatively, we might consider the existence of a not affected master space, which we identify with the "void", within which the geometric space is deformed by speed differences, the gravitational field and acceleration. However, that master space would have no empirical base. But if it helps to wrap our mind around the quirks of the theories of relativity, it might be a useful auxiliary construct.

What is quoted in comment #3 from Lawson's "The Special and General Theory" refers only to classical mechanics. It does not throw away the void.

The theories of relativity do not throw away the void either. Epicurus made no effort to establish coordinate systems for a quantitative description of the movement of bodies. Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is barely affected by the theories of relativity. To account for modern physics, Epicureans need to accept that the void can be filled with force fields. The sole function of the void in Epicurus' philosophy (to provide space for movement of bodies) is not affected. Epicurus' philosophy and the theories of relativity are compatible.

Welcome Kasprowy!

Welcome Smithtim47!

The second photo in comment number 11 in the thread on my visit of the institute is the closest close-up I have. I did not take a straight-on close-up because one side of the nose is missing a piece.

My impression from the visit at the Archaeological Institute in Goettingen is that the Roman copies were usually accurate. In case of the restored statue of Epicurus from the remains of two copies, even the folds of the clothing match. There are multiple copies of the same lost originals.

Quote

Does anybody recall where the phrase "hedonic calculus" was first used?

It seems Plato was the first to present the hedonic calculus (in "Protagoras"), apparently as a strawman to beat down hedonism:

(PDF) Pleasure in Plato's Protagoras and what Aristotle and Epicurus think about it (Hebrew) | Itai Greif - Academia.edu

Welcome John!

Welcome Frank!

Night terror fits what I experienced. At that time, I was about 31 years old and was living alone, so I might not even have remembered those cases when I woke up from a night terror itself as described by Dr. Breus.

Around that time, I had a sleep disorder which made me wake up after just a few hours of sleep, and I could fall asleep again only in the morning, such that the alarm clock or the rising external noise level in Tokyo woke me up during night terrors and made me remember them. Alternative events after the alarm were sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences. Sleep disorder, night terrors, sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences disappeared within a year. I guess reading a book and mental drills with a card-index instead of just waiting for the second sleep helped me to fall asleep again faster and thereby cured the sleep disorder. When I was 46 years old, I developed a similar sleep disorder again but without night terrors, sleep paralysis or out-of-body experiences. This time, reading or studying is again helpful to fall asleep again but total sleep at nighttime is down. Since retirement, I mitigate the sleep deprivation by additional sleep after breakfast or lunch as needed.

Quote

That sounds like it may have been sleep apnea.

It was not sleep apnea because I did not have lack of oxygen. Usually, I woke up because of the alarm clock or other noise. Deep sleep occurs early in a sleep cycle, not towards the end, such that we do not become aware of how much our subconsciousness may go wild during deep sleep if sleep is not interrupted early in its cycle.

Quote

I take it that kind of "calm" is what's being described by Martin ...

No.

Quote

My understanding is that ataraxia has to be worked on, arises from study and reflection, ...

Agreed.

Quote

..., but once you have rooted out those beliefs that cause anxieties, fear, dread and turbulence in the mind, they don't grow back.

This is the case while we are fully conscious with properly functioning mind. However, while we are asleep and therefore our ability to use logic is turned off, they can temporarily come back. In earlier years, I made the following observations: Sometimes while in deep sleep, I experienced extreme fear which took a minute or more to disappear when suddenly waking up from deep sleep, without that I could even tell what caused the fear because deep sleep appears to be dreamless. By contrast, when suddenly waking up from a bad dream, the fear experienced during the dream went away almost instantly.

The way Epicurus states that the wise man does not become unwise allows for a temporary lack of wisdom: "..., he who has once become wise never more assumes the opposite habit, ...".

Being wise includes logic. When awake but extremely tired, our ability to use logic is turned off. In that state, I sometimes acted unwisely by e.g. overwriting or deleting a file which I wanted to keep or save, turning off the computer the wrong way, closing a book without moving the bookmark to the new position, misplacing objects.

Ataraxia can be affected by circumstances if they are extreme . While I am on a zip-line, ataraxia as a goal is temporarily suspended to gain exceptional pleasure from the experience of nearly flying and the spectacular views. While I am on a plane in heavy turbulence, under immediate threat by a violent robber or in a combat situation, ataraxia is suspended until the danger has passed. The temporary disappearance or reduction of ataraxia under extreme circumstances is compatible with all quotes in Don's comment #6. A wise Epicurean will avoid getting into such circumstances most of the time but may not always be able to avoid them.

Welcome Raphael Raul!