Posts by Elayne

Happy day after the 20th, lol. I spent yesterday getting ready for and singing in a Solstice concert. We had a lot of fun!

I think 2020 will be a year of clarification. There are some differing and sometimes incompatible perspectives out there regarding Epicurean philosophy. Some are not challenges to the load-bearing framework of the philosophy but more style preferences (eg, isms or not)-- and others directly weaken or remove key pillars, by inserting incompatible philosophies like Buddhism or social utilitarianisms and idealisms like humanism, or by making abstractions about pleasure. I think it's time to make that clear between groups.

When I read Hiram's recent writing about Buddhist forms of introspection being a way to learn about the self, for instance, I know clearly that our versions of Epicurean philosophy are different. Buddhists do have some variations, but a core feature is the assertion that by closely introspecting on oneself, a person will experience directly that there is no self and that our ordinary experience of self and reality is a delusion. There are neurologic events that cause this and are related to what the brain does when typical environmental stimuli are removed. A concerning number of people without prior psychiatric disturbances have suffered long lasting dysfunction from this, anything from dissociative symptoms to psychosis.

This kind of activity is in striking contrast to Epicurus' repeated advice to meditate on nature-- to study what our sense organs and feelings, as triggered by ordinary interaction with reality, tell us. Not to undo the ordinary workings of the brain, which when functioning in the way it has evolved, is able to choose and plan for pleasure.

I will be interested in seeing the Society of Epicurus' statement. I am expecting it to incorporate elements that I will find to be structurally unsound. If it does not, I will be thrilled!

And those of us who adhere to the classical teachings of Epicurus will continue to clarify our position, sometimes by contrasting it with alternate views, just as Epicurus did.

That is a good thing IMO. People will be more easily able to choose the perspective they prefer.

I had the same concerns. Specifically, Epicurus didn't just have the goal of pleasure-- he laid out a detailed and thorough philosophy supporting pleasure as the goal. The way he linked his physics and the Canon to his ethics was profoundly novel. If he was just one of many who did that, the others didn't publish, so that's a surprising thing to say.

It's true that he came to his conclusions by observations-- he didn't invent reality but discovered how things work. However, that's not a reason to downplay his contribution. We don't say "well Einstein was just one of many, nothing special, because it's not like he invented relativity."

Anyone who closely and intelligently observed nature could have come to Epicurus' conclusions. Or Einstein's. But they didn't.

I came to much of his philosophy independently, but I lacked the sturdy framework to defend my position. Including to myself, to stay determined about living pleasurably, when I am surrounded by those who disagree.

Epicurus not only described reality-- he had the courage to teach about it in the presence of strong opposition. So I am grateful to him and enjoy feeling intense admiration.

Epicurus was highly successful in his time, and part of the reason is that he did not waste time debating opponents in the public square. By forming his own Garden, he was able to teach uninterrupted and to build a base from which outreach could occur. This strategy resulted in widespread adoption of his philosophy for centuries after his death. And that is what we are doing, following Epicurus' example of developing a strong, clearly defined hub from which to send our "leaflets" into the public space.

The success of competing philosophies does not rest only upon accuracy but upon many other factors, including power and timing. In that circumstance, it is critical to develop a strong nucleus, with a clear identity, and proceed carefully. Being more concerned with numbers than clarity at this stage only results in dilution of the philosophy and eventually an unrecognizable amorphous mess.

When powerful opponents are actively promoting interpretations of Epicurus which require the ignoring of some of his own writing and life, we are not forfeiting any right to lament their deplorable actions just because we've chosen to build our opposition carefully and in circles where they have less influence. That is an astonishing assertion.

When developing a non-violent resistance to tyranny, do you send 3 or 4 revolutionaries to yell at the established army? Instead of taking time to build a strong movement in places where the army hasn't bothered to frequent?

Lol, Joshua... my aesthetic distaste for the sound of ism, which sounds like a person is strangling when trying to swallow something, leads me to suggest DeWitt could have spoken of the spread of Epicureans or Epicurean groups, because that focuses on the people involved.

I don't find this discussion tedious, but I definitely think it is best suited for a group which understands the philosophy already.

I don't use the ism version because it sounds very clunky to me-- the sound is unattractive, and the ism doesn't even sound like it belongs with the rest of the word but is instead weirdly tacked on.

"Epicurean" has a pleasing and more elegant sound. "Epicurean Philosophy" has a smooth, rhythmic rise and fall. "I am Epicurean" instead of "I practice Epicureanism." That's just my subjective opinion. But Elli's explanation strengthens my dislike of the ism form.

EP is just bc of typing with a finger on the phone-- I read it as Epicurean Philosophy the same as I read "because" for bc, "in my opinion" for IMO, and so on.

Wow! I'm sorry that happened, Nate! I love your memes.

Another thing I would say-- it's true for me that relationships, friendships, are what keep the universe from feeling "cold" and mechanical. Rationality as a primary approach does have a cold feel, and feeling has warmth. So subtract out the melodrama and negativity, and there's a chunk of gold in there. Life is nothing worth having without feeling-- without pleasure-- and indeed, let us be friends to one another!

What I meant to say above is that rather than a balm, a little humor as in the Dover Bitch response might be in order, and it can be used educationally too.

I guess you may both know the snarky response poem, The Dover Bitch-- it's one of my favorites!

https://poets.org/poem/dover-bitch I think it at least grazes the edge of an Epicurean response.

In high school, I remember thinking "Geez, man, why so gloomy?! Things can't possibly be that awful!" There was a short period in my adult life when it resonated with me, but fortunately I got over that.

Godfrey, in my garage I currently have my coffee roaster corner, the very tall stand for my yoga trapeze (with a gym mat under it), and weights... I may have room, actually, for ping pong, come to think of it! Lol! My family had a ping pong table when I was growing up, and my dad's parents also... lots of fun memories.

My possibly strange interior design tastes are going to show up big time in the garage, eventually... I'm going to paint it midnight blue, hang bistro lights, stick glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, and hang things like planet mobiles and bird pinatas. This winter when it gets cold, I plan to try making a giant papier mache tree for my living room. I have a spare room downstairs that my son and I use to do paintings and various craft projects.

Garden Dweller, for me mental pleasure would include things like remembering past pleasures, planning future pleasures, learning something new, spending time with friends, reading... I do not go looking for mental pain, but if it shows up, I would check to see if I had slipped into any sort of idealistic thinking or false beliefs that cause fears. And counter that with reality!

Here was the original post that started this discussion: I replaced it with the current topic header. I wrote it a few months ago, and since then I have found that being an omnivore but exercising more is working better for my pleasure and future health markers.

"Here is something I have had to make decisions about recently: what I eat. I have had a long-standing preference for foods like beans, pasta, olive oil, nuts, fruits, vegetables, cheese, and good bread. I don't eat much sugar, but when I do, it is usually in the form of chocolate!

These foods have agreed with me, physically. I had given up meat for several years, because it aggravated my autoimmune arthritis and made my feet hurt, but about 6 months ago, I started eating some meat here and there. After passing menopause, it didn't seem to bother me as it had previously.

Then, I went for my routine physical, and my fasting blood sugar was in the pre-diabetic, insulin resistant range. I had never had trouble before. This was scary, because everyone I know of on my mother's side of the family has diabetes. I have 3 high risk genes for macular degeneration, and my grandmother had it-- my mother died too young to know if she would have gotten it. This condition causes people to lose their central vision-- my grandmother was unable to read or write after she got it. The risk of macular degeneration is sharply increased in the setting of insulin resistance.

Because adding meat was the only change I had made, I decided to try stopping it, leaving me with basically a vegetarian Mediterranean diet. Unfortunately, my blood sugars remained high. I have read a good bit about this issue due to my profession, and I re-reviewed the latest studies. This is not medical advice, but the main strategies I have seen with research support are Mediterranean, whole foods plant based (very low fat), and ketogenic, which can be either meat or plant based. It seems harder to get things to work with both carbs and fat-- for many people, one or the other has to go. With the meat based keto, there is some concern about increased insulin resistance over time. These studies have multiple problems-- all manner of confounding factors. And we have so many possible genetic enzyme variants. I doubt that the same diet will work for every person.

I thought about my goal of pleasure in life, as I am in the habit of doing. Eating 2-3 times a day is one of the easiest times to have pleasure. I cannot imagine living without the sensory pleasure of food I enjoy. And cooking for myself and friends is a great pleasure. It doesn't have to be complicated or expensive food, but I want it to taste good, by gosh! However, my vision also provides me with extraordinary pleasure-- reading, writing, art-work, crafts... it is a key pleasure sense for me.

As an Epicurean, I decided to experiment and find the diet that provided the best intersection of short term (taste) and long term (vision) pleasures. I got a glucose meter and started tracking what happened. The ultra low fat high carb whole foods plant based diet fixed my blood sugars quickly-- my fasting sugar went into the 70's, and I never got over 120 after meals. But without nuts or olive oil, I was not getting a lot of taste pleasure. If that had turned out to be the only option that worked, I would have tried to adjust to it, because of the importance of vision to my happiness.

Next I tried ketogenic, mainly plant based except the cream in my one cup of morning coffee. This tastes really good to me, and it has also worked very well for my numbers. I still get to eat most of the vegetables I like, and some berries. Every time I try adding fish, meat, or cheese, my fasting and post-meal glucose go up. Apparently my body is not thrilled about those proteins. The absence of meat turns out to not really affect my pleasure-- I don't feel deprived. I am going to have to learn some new recipes, lol. After a few months, I will probably experiment with adding meat and cheese back in, just in case.

Anyway, that is a long explanation of my decision, but the key is that I did not approach it just with taste pleasure alone or future health alone-- I found a way to have my (nut) cake and see it too. I thought about my own pleasure, not what my doctor might find most pleasurable for herself. I studied nature, in the form of published research and my own responses to my actions.

- And I didn't just give up, as I see many people do, and say something like "well, that's just my bad genetic luck"-- I took action."

From a medical perspective... most of the modern diet schemes rely on a false underlying belief that there is some kind of ideal diet for the human species, a diet which results in "perfect health" (literally the name of a diet book by Paul Jaminet, lol). This has never happened for any species studied. All species are subject to disease, and no known diet is "ideal"-- because what is needed depends on fluctuating environmental conditions. Whenever you see the words ideal, perfect, etc, Plato has shown up, lol!

I have read most of the popular nutrition books out there, from various perspectives, and the hilarious thing is that they almost all start with the same trope: "your doctor only got x hours of nutrition education in medical school, therefore your doctor doesn't know anything, and therefore I'm right." Then they all proceed to cherry pick the data to support their positions, which clash with each other wildly.

The truth is that none of them know as much as they think they do, because the research is extraordinarily complicated and incomplete. So right away, when a writer pops off acting like they have solved the riddle of nutrition, I know they believe in a myth of perfect health and have also ignored the complexity and incompleteness of current research.

Many of them will say things like "you shouldn't wait for a large study to confirm what we are going to tell you"-- which is ok if it means "try things out yourself and see how you feel" but is ridiculous if it means "we are just going to reason things out and then you should believe us." Don't we know by now that reason is inferior to evidence?

Or they pull out the quote about unpopular positions being laughed at, fought against, etc, then accepted. As if that means they are right.

There is a hilarious book called "The Gluten Lie" by a researcher in ancient Chinese religion. He lays out the case that all these diets are religious in nature and then he makes up his own at the end-- then goes and finds studies to support his random, made up diet.

It is incredibly difficult to know what additional factors are causing measured effects-- social factors? Taste-- if you like your food, how does that affect your health? Chewing vs pureed food with same components? Mineral content? Artificial flavors? What are the effects of different amino acids in proteins we consume, such as branched chain AA? Were the olive oils used in various studies actually olive oil or canola oil with food coloring (a common problem in grocery stores)? What's your genetic background (which turned out to be an issue with omega 3 supplements-- why they didn't get the expected results)? Honest researchers will admit there is a lot we don't know.

One problem is that if a person quits eating a food, sometimes they can then have more trouble digesting and metabolizing it later. So a person who has been on a keto diet becomes more carb intolerant than someone who has been eating carbs. If you haven't been eating foods with fiber, even a small amount of salad may give you awful gas. If you have been eating extremely low fat, a moderate fat meal can cause your blood sugar to go up much higher than when you were including some fat all along-- you become fat intolerant.

I have tried a whole bunch of different schemes, especially this year when my fasting glucose went up to 105, prediabetes. Some of that is in a prior post, and I wound up on a vegetarian keto diet because meat didn't get my fasting glucose down... but eventually even that drove my fasting glucose up, a known effect of keto, due to insulin resistance in the liver. Not the direction I wanted, especially since my post-meal glucoses were fine. The ultra low fat vegan diet worked amazingly but I hated it and felt deprived. So now I am back to being an omnivore, and my fasting and post meal glucose is normal again. I have no extreme reactions to any food, because I eat a wide variety, so I am flexible in what I can eat. However, during all that experimenting, I started hiking more, and I think this is probably the key thing for me-- lots more moving around.

Anyway, I am in favor of people trying different things and seeing how they feel. And maintaining a strong level of suspicion when reading popular nutrition authors.

Garden Dweller, I like the final piece of practical planning! I advise strongly against the section on constantly monitoring your body for discomfort, though. This is guaranteed to result in discomfort, because of the way our brains work. When we tell our brains to check for pain, this requires our brains to keep the sensation of pain in mind, looking for a match. Most of us are suggestible enough that we will get a "nocebo" effect from this (opposite of placebo), but at a minimum it requires keeping the feeling of pain in mind, which is painful itself.

People who have various types of health anxiety turn out to be very high on body awareness. The typical amount of body awareness, not training yourself to be unusually aware, is what we've evolved to have. If there truly is a noxious stimulus needing your attention, most of the time you'll know it without special effort. Sometimes there can be minor issues like sitting in an awkward position while reading and being so absorbed that your foot goes to sleep, lol. But these are generally minimal issues. You can improve this by checking for bodily pleasure at the onset of reading. I also set my phone alarm to periodically remind me of the pleasure of getting up and stretching/dancing around.

I look for pleasure in my body, when I'm checking in, even more key for me due to chronic inflammatory arthritis. If there is a major flare, I'll know, but otherwise I have no need to focus on the parts that are sore. It isn't information that leads to increased pleasure because it isn't fixable.

Even in Epicurus' example of the great pleasure one feels upon escaping a situation threatening one's life IMO includes the assumption that this life one wants is pleasurable. Otherwise we wouldn't want it. People are not relieved, for instance, if their planned medical euthanasia for fatal/intractably painful condition is postponed!

I would not say self preservation is superior at all. Pleasure is a term that includes life already-- a dead thing can't have pleasure. So to maximize pleasure already means to maximize pleasurable aliveness. Life without pleasure or hope of future pleasure has no good in it-- it can't stand alone as a valuable thing.

I think the thing that confuses people is that life can be present without pleasure -- separable--but pleasure is literally a meaningless word without life-- inseparable. To try and separate things out by putting life first gets you into the weeds. If you put pleasure first, no more weeds.

Even for maintenance, it depends on whether one enjoys the process of maintaining whatever possession it is in question (in addition to the pleasure of having and/or using the object. I happen to enjoy certain types of routine maintenance. As for the work needed, if the work itself is enjoyable this is not a problem either. As long as you keep pleasure as the criterion, making these types of decisions tends to be relatively easy in my experience.

I don't get any particular pleasure from simplicity or minimalism-- in fact, there's something about all that which irritates me. Probably just a style preference. I like the Bohemian look.

In general I prefer to go right up to the knife's edge of pleasure, the limit, not holding back until right before the point where more of something would cause pain. I'm a maximalist, lol.

Todd, although we have more of certain diseases, we've gotten the ability to treat or cure others, and on balance I think it would need proof to say we are overall sicklier. Cancer rates actually appear to be about the same now as in early humans-- wild animals get cancer-- but we can treat it now in many cases. There's evidence that infections are milder in developed countries partly because less virulent strains out compete the ones that kill you quickly. In less developed places, people are stuck going around with guinea worms, etc-- all sorts of parasites that make life wretched. There's a theory we've traded that for autoimmune dz and allergies, but I'll take a walnut allergy over a guinea worm any day. We can cure sexually transmitted diseases that used to result in chronic misery, like syphilis. Childbirth fistulas are rare now. It would be hard to set up a comparison, but her statement strikes me as extreme. Pet peeve of mine, professionally. Non medical people making extreme claims without citations. Lol

Kyle, as a "cradle atheist" raised in Alabama, I think you are on the right track. For a long time, I have been annoyed by the secular groups having a "Day of Reason" to counter the national day of prayer-- why not a Day of Evidence?

Epicurus was the first person I "met", through his work, who seemed on the same page with me about that. The evidence of our senses (and instrumental extensions) and our feelings are primary. Reason is a secondary tool.

I hope you will choose this philosophy! At least, try it out and see how it feels 😀.