Posts by Elayne

Hiram, I don't have time for a long reply, since I am spending time with my daughter this weekend. There is a history here that is not being directly confronted. You recently published a very cutting and misleading article that you admitted was directed at this group, and you've been dismissive of me and others in our private group messages. You've made multiple public comments that were covertly aggressive, towards Cassius, Elli, and me. It doesn't really work to "nicely" insult people as you have. So I think it is disingenuous to say all this.

I am being straightforward here. I know nothing about you personally, so I am not making a personal insult. But your direction in philosophy is _not_ consistent with science. It has a strong thread of idealism for which there is no basis in reality. I do think Epicurus' ethics was consistent with his physics. It does upset me that you are using your public platform to put Epicurus' name on a version that doesn't fit the physics. I think it hurts our chances of spreading a reality-based philosophy that leads to pleasure. I and others have tried to persuade you away from this course, but it has not worked. We have tried the friendly approach to no avail.

Epicurus was straightforward about his opponents. He called them names, like Plato "The Golden." I am not a name-caller, but I am not going to be fake with you. As long as you pursue the course you've chosen, I'm going to say I think you are making a tragic mistake. And I hope you change your mind.

Because idealism is so popular and familiar, you will have an easier time attracting fame and followers than someone who promotes the non-idealistic perspective. It sells, big time, because it's already the trend. You will have the appearance of speaking for Epicurus. This seems an utter disaster to me.

Speaking plainly about what I see you doing is not meant as a jibe at you. It is meant for the benefit of people who may be learning on this site, in hopes that they will choose a life of real pleasure instead of the idealism you are promoting. If I am not plain about it, they may miss the differences, simply because reality based philosophy is so radically unusual.

This is why Epicurus kept saying, again and again, to study nature. His philosophy comes from that starting point. If people skip that or think they understand it when they really don't, then they will likely misunderstand everything else he said.

Whereas if you start from the basics about the universe, you will read the rest and it will fall into place for you like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle, where everything fits together. You will see clearly where other philosophies have erred and why.

Sure, Cassius-- proof-texting is applied to the Bible but also to the kind of examination and discussion of documents that we are doing. It is when someone takes a quote out of context of the whole. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prooftext

I don't actually agree that there is more than one overall way to interpret the high level view-- every mistake I have seen violates the most basic facts about reality, and generally even the people like Hiram who develop conflicting opinions don't disagree about the high level view, so far as I can see.

Hiram and Wilson agree there is only material reality, for instance-- no ideal realm, no concept- land. Well, the features of this strictly material reality can _only_ support the conclusion that there can't be absolute morality, and that only subjective experience is possible. Those are not separate ideas-- they are inescapable consequences of reality. Epicurus did not list any part of the Canon that isn't subjective, and he clearly said there was no absolute morality. This is not vague. But it's also the only possible conclusion c/w physics.

But then people like Hiram proceed to violate those truths, while trying to pretend they are not. That is not a different understanding of Epicurus. It is simply incompatible with Epicurean Philosophy, and incompatible with reality.

Every error I have seen is similar. Conclusions drawn from one quote must always be looked at in light of the nature of reality. DeWitt did a great job with this, but anyone who fully grasps the basics of material reality and the implications of it should be immediately be able to tell when mistakes are made, ******_even without having read Epicurus_******. That's a bold statement, right? I believe it is true.

I can say it because I understand the full implications of the science. So did Epicurus and that is why he doesn't make that kind of error. If he had, we would need to say he was wrong. He would have violated his own philosophy.

Cassius, I agree completely. The utilitarian position, IMO, is cold and unfeeling. I will not say it is "wrong", but I personally avoid hanging out with folks who think of humans as interchangeable. They could be more likely to be psychopaths. http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/PDF/Ba…izarro.2011.pdf

That is one of the primary reasons (among others) that I love this philosophy.

I do not manipulate my feelings about and actions towards other people based on some non-specific golden rule. I let my feelings, observations, and pattern recognition guide me-- who is a friend? Who is not? And choose accordingly.

If you go around manipulating your feelings instead of feeling them, you have lost one of your key pieces of information about reality. Feelings are to guide you towards actions that lead to pleasure. Muck around with them, and who knows what you will choose. It's like deciding to wear rose-colored glasses, so then you don't know what color things really are.

Epicureans use feelings as a guide to act for pleasure-- Stoics change their attitudes instead of their circumstances.

My friends can be secure in knowing my love for them is based on reality, not abstract concepts.

Hiram, this is the major pitfall of proof-texting Epicurus. If you take things out of context, you can make it appear that Epicurus was a utilitarian, but if you look at the whole picture, he clearly was not. That would not be consistent with his Canon or physics. It would be internally inconsistent.

The same thing happens when you go picking "effortless pleasure " out of Philodemus despite over and over again Epicurus saying pleasure, unmodified, is the goal. If he had meant his goal was only effortless pleasure, he would have said it every time.

Because concepts are inherently unable to encapsulate all of the reality they indicate, every philosophy based on concepts will have inevitable internal contradictions and paradoxes. Epicurus avoided that, because his method of truth relies on primary subjective information, not conceptual ideas. You can't have a paradox about the color you see, the sounds you hear, your feelings of pain or pleasure, or your intuitive pattern recognition.

It grieves me to see people missing some of the most radical and pleasure-giving truths Epicurus gave us.

On 12, regarding the gods, I would not agree that idealist interpretations are coherent with Epicurean Philosophy. He was opposed to that kind of thing.

I would take him at his word, that he intuited the existence of material beings who experienced maximum pleasure.

For myself, here is my innovation, which I do not consider incoherent with the philosophy. I don't think whether those beings exist as he described or not is a structural pillar. If he had never said it, I don't think any of the rest would be damaged. I think it is sufficient to say that not having to worry about supernatural beings at all prevents me from worrying about the stuff people worried about in his time. I am not closed to the possibility of there being some ETs out there who live as he described-- I don't see what would make it impossible, and no supernatural magic would be necessary.

However, for me, the most important part is the reminder that the degree of pleasure of our lives is on a spectrum, and right in front of me I can see that some are more skilled than others at getting it. So the part about "living as gods among men" is the most relevant, and it is pragmatically achievable right here on our planet.

If I wrote any Tenet about it, it would be not to insult Epicurus by saying he might have been lying about the gods or that he meant something different than what he said. And I would not require any member to believe in the gods as he described them, despite that being a difference with Epicurus, but I would not allow the substitution of an ideal or a metaphor. The same as we now know more about the sun-- there's no need to say he was lying about that or using a metaphor-- he was incorrect. I don't know that he was incorrect about his gods, but he might be, and I think that is acceptable to say.

Yes, I know, but the Tenets do not make it clear that advantage means pleasure the way the whole of the writings does. I don't suppose I'll restate that if you don't see my point, though.

When reading the texts, I think it is critical to take everything in context of the whole. I have no sense that Epicurus meant that "advantages" could be anything other than related to pleasure, since there is no other definition of good. It does make it hard for someone to grasp, if they don't get a feel for the whole philosophy. So I strongly recommend that any brief list of Tenets should stick closely to language of pleasure and not create confusion. I don't think Epicurus' words are confusing when read in the context of his whole work, but there are definitely some problems with proof-texting out of context. If you decide to leave these in, I think a reminder that there is no other standard but pleasure as the good is very important-- that you are never replacing it with these alternative concepts. Otherwise you are unnecessarily complicating something that is ultimately very simple and straightforward.

Well, I hope they just leave it alone, then! Maybe they'll put you in the "prayers of the faithful", lol. I think you are right about political clustering and increased religiosity.

When I am in other groups and a prayer comes up, my response varies. Sometimes I just don't care one way or the other, and I just bow my head as if I am praying. But if I'm feeling more adventurous, I keep my head up and my eyes open, and I look around to see who else is. I've met some fellow non-believers that way. I wink at them.

It comes up for me in board meetings, student graduation ceremonies, political forums... our City Council always opens with a prayer, and they put the atheists, Wiccans, etc into the rotation so they can get away with it. Here is a local atheist doing an invocation. Ha! That was ok with them because it was idealistic. But I might make 'em faint if I did an invocation to pleasure!

There are essential things I believe you have omitted from the Tenets that make your group susceptible to intrusion by stoics and various idealists, such as our Not NeoEpicurean but Epicurean list. Your choice, but as I mentioned earlier, those elements are not coherent with EP, nor are they internally consistent.

16 is harmed by the inclusion of advantage and disadvantage, as if there can be any standard other than pleasure and pain

17 introduces 3 goals-- life, happiness, and health. And since (according to our prior group PMs) you define happiness as being something different from pleasure, you have left pleasure entirely out of the picture of the chief goods. Although safety, friendship, autarky, etc, are conditions most typical humans will find pleasurable, they are not goods in themselves nor do they become absolute goods-- there will be exceptions, and there will be times when these conditions come into conflict with each other. So it is not true that anything you do to get one of these conditions will bring you pleasure. It will depend on the specifics of the situation, and pleasure is the deciding factor. This statement has made autarchy and the rest an absolute.

18 is also too absolute. If an unplanned life is pleasurable, it is certainly worth living to the person living it. It is only that freedom and planning increase our chances of success at gaining pleasure, so it is _wise_ to plan.

19/ 20-- you revert again to the term happiness here, and since I don't agree with your definition of it as something other than pleasure (or of anything but pleasure as a goal), I can't agree. I would say friendship is essential (for almost all of us) for pleasure. But you have quoted the justice PDs instead of the friendship PDs, and they are related but not the same. I would like to see you quote "All friendship is desirable in itself, though it starts from the need of help"-- and we know that if anything is desirable in itself, that means it is a _pleasure_-- friendship is a pleasure. I think you need to include the feelings here. It is not a cold calculation. It might help to have some kind of more clear introduction where you say something like "anytime I use the word advantage or benefit, I am talking about pleasure alone." Someone very familiar with Epicurus would know that, but I think it helps to make it clear to newcomers.

14 is fine

15-- I am not sure what you mean by this. It is unclear, and it seems to leave the door open for Stoicism. Again you link to your own writing, which does contain original quotes this time, and you end with this "Consistent with what’s been said before, in Fragment 112 Diogenes states that the “sum of happiness is our disposition, of which we are masters”, by which he argues against choosing a career in military service–which produces dangers to our lives and health–or public speaking–which produces nervousness and insecurity. The idea is that we can more easily be self-sufficient in our pleasure if we retain our ability to control our mental disposition."

By arguing against military service, Diogenes is saying we control our disposition by taking action to control our circumstances. Similar to Epicurus advising not to commit crimes, because we will be anxious about getting caught. He doesn't say we can do what we want, because we can have control over our mental dispositions anyway.

With all the "new thought" stuff going around and the revival of the Stoic belief that external circumstances are of no consequence-- that something in us is controlling our attitude and feelings, unaffected by the world around us-- I think this is not a Tenet I would endorse. I would say rather that we can act on the external world and thus create pleasure for ourselves.

13-- I am not a religious person, so I would not be interested in endorsing this tenet. All I can say is that all activities should be chosen for how they produce more pleasure than pain. But I do not equate effort with pain. Effort can often be quite pleasurable. There is nothing about effortless pleasure that I prefer over effortful pleasure (such as, say, dancing), if the pleasure itself is equal. This Tenet seems like another endorsement of static over kinetic pleasure, and we've discussed that a lot here, so I won't rehash. I would just say that I don't think there is strong evidence that Epicurus made a big deal about this distinction, and I would not make it something members of a group had to agree to one way or another.

12-- I know of no evidence that Epicurus promoted idealism in anything. How would an idealistic or imaginary version of his gods be coherent with his philosophy as a whole?

Also, you tend to give your own writing as a source material, but sometimes you link to a book. The end notes would be stronger if you followed the traditional format and gave a full citation, including page numbers. It wouldn't be such a problem to use your own writing or YouTube videos as sources if those writings themselves contained the original source references, but generally they do not. However, this shouldn't be a big deal for you to tweak if you choose to.

4 - 11 seem fine.

For 3, I think he is talking about something a little different but related to what you are saying. We don't have enough info to be sure, so it is hard for me to see making that a Tenet. When you say "what it is", this seems to be verging on calling the prolepses conceptual, and Epicurus was opposed to including reason/ concepts in how we know what is true. But since you didn't say that outright, it may not be what you meant.

This is an example of a time when I am not afraid to put forth a proposal for what, in my personal philosophy, the prolepses are. Whether Epicurus thought the same, we will never know, but when I read what he said, it sounds like my understanding of prolepses are coherent with his.

For me, prolepses are innate pattern recognitions, which perform functions as simple as organizing visual input so that different objects have boundaries and are seen as separate from each other and as complex as the innate tit for tat sense of justice. There are no concepts in my Canon-- a pattern recognition is different from a concept or even a "what it is". Pattern recognition could certainly help predict "what it does or will do", but that isn't a concept either. I wish I could ask Epicurus, but I think if we spoke the same language and he had access to current developmental research, he would agree with me. I just can't prove it or insist on it.

Because this one is trickier, I would personally not pin it down in a list of things my fellow Epicureans needed to agree on.

For 1 and 2, the footnotes are to articles by Hiram and not to primary source material. The second article, by Hiram, says at the end,

"Our hedonism is not about us being subjective, or whimsical, it’s what we mean what we say that nature is our guide: if we ignore our faculties, it’s only to our detriment and to our harm. If we heed them, it’s to our advantage.

Our natural goods are all pleasant, and pleasure is always good." But no quotes are given from Epicurean sources.

The statement that hedonism is not about us being subjective is in contradiction to Tenet #2, which says pleasure and aversion are about subjective nature. There seems to be, as I suspected from the inaccurate division of our perceptions into subjective and objective, a disdain for subjective experience creeping in, perhaps unconsciously. Why would it be a problem if pleasure seeking was subjective? It IS subjective. It can't be experienced other than subjectively.

I also thought I read in Tenet 2 a hint of a standard other than pleasure-- a suggestion that pleasure and pain are useful for a more important purpose, survival or health perhaps. This initial impression is strengthened by the quote above.

While this is of course the way evolution works-- faculties that lead to survival and reproduction persist-- that is not the same thing as making survival and reproduction our primary goal. Any time you start bringing up evolutionary causes as conscious goals, then you ought to include reproduction, not just survival, to be internally consistent. This leads to saying pleasure is good because it leads to survival and offspring, and if there is a circumstance where pain leads to survival and more offspring, we ought to choose that instead.

Pain and pleasure are not just value-setting faculties, which sounds abstract-- they are primarily _feelings_-- sensations. Pleasure is always good simply because pleasure is the only good-- it is the definition of good. Good is a meaningless word unless you are talking about the feeling of pleasure. And I don't think your article makes that clear-- it makes pleasure and pain sound primarily instrumental. This is an entirely different slant on things than what you get from reading Epicurus.

Joshua, when I hear people say things like that, I am so grateful my family is atheist. At least Epicurus was dealing with people who believed in multiple gods, and he wasn't atheist in the way that would have been meant back then. He just had a different definition of gods, since his were material.

He still participated in the compulsory rites. But you are in a different situation, since mass is not compulsory by law.

What did you come up with? And how did it go?

Well, no, it would not be a difference between us to say that I am "scared" to engage other philosophic voices. I am surprised to hear you say that, when you know I have been outspoken when I disagree! Lol!

And I agree entirely with his advice on consistency and coherence. New information such as more accurate physics and astronomy do not change the underlying structure of his philosophy-- the consistency and coherence remains intact. Applying the ethics to new situations that didn't exist in his time, due to new technology, and using research about what activities tend to cause pleasure for most typical humans-- those are other examples of innovation.

But there are also a lot of things that are inconsistent and incoherent, and I am strongly opposed to those things being tacked onto the philosophy.

Hi Hiram-- thank you, I got the link to the Tenets this morning. I am going to think through my responses, but for now I can say that I am not aware of Epicurus categorizing the senses as objective. We experience subjectively through our senses as well as our feelings. In fact, we have no option other than subjective experience. Scientists tend to call data objective when it has been repeatedly measured by different people using different equipment in different labs, etc, but our sensory experiences are still always subjective. Your references for 1 and 2 do not include any division into subjective and objective. Prolepses are also subjective. I think much of my response will be about what is _not_ included, but that will take me a while. For now, I am curious about why you say Epicurus said the senses were objective.

Your book review I agree with, but I would just add that the Buddhist conclusion is not based on reason. They use reason to try and explain it-- to say the self is not legit because it is temporary, which I have always thought was silly. But that is just their explanatory overlay, which is based on what life feels like if you have altered your brain function through meditation. There is a fairly high rate of dissociative states in long term and/ or heavy meditators. Sometimes this sensation of depersonalization and/or derealization is permanent. They literally experience a sensation of having no self. I think there is some evidence meditation reduces activity of the default network, which is necessary for self-monitoring/ awareness, and there is a lot we don't know about how various practices alter brain function

This is a desirable outcome for some. For me, it sounds like brain damage. I guess the most that can be said is that for these people, they feel like they have no self. For the rest of us, we mostly feel that we are selves. No way to really argue over that one, right? But what they propose is that all of us will find out we are no-self, if we introspect through meditation. All that means to me is that my brain would become damaged, but they see it as current delusion on my part--that I'm already no-self and just don't know it. When they go that far, I think I _can_ say they are incorrect about my current experience of self.

Hiram, I did not say no one had contributed to philosophy about pleasure-- neither is it true that no physicist contributed to the ability of Einstein to have his insight. But it is still true that no one but Epicurus put the pieces of Physics, Canon and Ethics together so clearly, and no one worked as hard and tirelessly as he did to teach it. He was not a "prophet"-- he was a scientist and a philosopher. And IMO he clearly deserves a first rank place among the philosophers, or I would not call myself an Epicurean but something else.