Posts by Godfrey

Cassius I've made an attempt to corelate the current science as presented in the Barrett book with my understanding with the Canon. You're quite right to point out some of the differences! Regarding affect, to me it's useful to think about if and/or how arousal relates to intensity (as I understand it, it's different); I'm also curious to what degree the Greek pathe might correspond to affect.

Regarding behaviors, Joshua had a good point last night about animals that are raised in captivity being unable to survive in the wild. Intuitively (meaning I'm totally guessing!) it seems to me that animal behaviors are driven by pleasure and pain (or affect) and by the faculty of pattern recognition, both interacting with the senses. I think that this is taking materialism to its logical conclusion, although observation would trump any purely logical conclusion and looking at animals seems like a good direction to pursue.

As to Vellius, that brings up the controversy of Cicero being such a tainted source and how much we can trust him. This is why I was interested in reading modern theories in the first place: to try to make up for the uncertainties in the ancient texts and see if that can shed any light on Epicurus' thinking. But as you say, they are two different things.

Just to get the ball rolling:

The only things hard-wired in this regard are the faculties of pattern recognition, sensation and affect: all "instinct" can be reduced to this.

Pattern recognition is one of the ways that we have been thinking about Anticipations and I think pretty much aligns with DeWitt. It both precedes and reacts to sensations, forming concepts and affecting behaviors from such an early age that it is commonly and mistakenly thought that there are ideas and behaviors that are innate.

Affect is defined as a faculty of registering pleasure/displeasure and the degree of arousal. This corresponds to the Feelings and is a guide to behaviors and to forming concepts. These behaviors and concepts are formed from a very early stage of development in each individual, often through social connections, and are not innate.

Quote from Don

Chomsky and others believe the structures of language and deep grammar are hardwired.

This goes to the question "what are the prolepseis?" This is actually where I've been going with this and maybe it belongs in another thread.

I interpret this quote as referring to a faculty of "pattern recognition" with which we learn language. In my quote in post #21 I was referring to Lucretius' description of the development of language (hopefully I'm remembering it correctly). Could it be that that process of developing language is another function of pattern recognition?

Here's the article to download.

Perhaps I'm digressing....

But we do draw conclusions about the unobservable by thinking about the observable

I think we agree that language developed over time and is not inborn but learned, possibly beginning in utero. So there wasn't a model for it. I'm suggesting that it's the same for the birds and the beavers.

This might, however, be a different issue from a specific instance of using a word or designing a building. In both of those cases the model is previous experience as well. So is it really a different issue?

So are nest-building birds or dam-building beavers beings or nature? What are their models?

Cassius just to be clear, are you saying that there is a difference between "arguing" the philosophy and living the philosophy?

Stallings: "For anyone who has been born desires to hold on tight To life – at least as long as he’s detained by sweet delight"

Melville: "A man once born must wish to stay in life So long as soothing pleasure keeps him there."

Leonard, 1916 (from Perseus): "Whosoever Hath been begotten wills perforce to stay In life, so long as fond delight detains"

Personally I prefer the implications of Stallings and Leonard in this case. I notice from the Smith excerpt, however, that the context of this line has quite a bit going on. I'll await the podcast discussion before going any further. All in due time!

Was this line in the podcast today?

Brown does seem to be the most accurate to the philosophy; as to the Latin, I have no idea. He also uses "should" in the first part of the sentence rather than "must" or "must needs." Should, to me, is the better choice (again, not knowing Latin).

What line is this? I'm curious how the more contemporary translators treat it.

Cassius affect and the affective circumplex (I keep thinking of cineplex ) are described in post #2. The affective circumplex is illustrated in the image in that post and is just a graph of valence (pleasure/displeasure) in one direction and arousal in the other direction. Maybe there's a simpler name for it like "affect graph," I've just been using the name from the book.

It seems like another useful way to represent and discuss pleasure, as we do from time to time

Digressing to post #31:

Quote from Cassius

Skepticism, nihilism, rationalism, idealism, and on and on are the primary philosophical opponents that we are playing against just as much as we're playing against schizophrenia or other "clinical" conditions. We aren't in the game solely to respond to clinical conditions that developed naturally, though we do want to respond to those too.

"Predictions," perhaps as a fine-tuning or an evolution of anticipations, provide both a response to other philosophies and a tool for working with clinical conditions. This is because of the information that we are able to modify our predictions (although it is a process and takes work) as a means toward increasing our pleasure. Also, as LFB takes pains to point out, there is no pure "rationality" as it is always affected by our affect.

Understanding the processes she describes in her book not only provides arguments against other philosophies, but because the processes do seem to have a relationship to the Canon then they also provide support for the Epicurean view of life.

The affective circumplex is something that can be evaluated as to whether it gives us a better understanding of pleasure and pain. That information is valuable to an Epicurean to the degree that it can be put into practice.

As to clinical conditions, I came across this short podcast:

https://shows.acast.com/one-thing-pain…lorimer-moseley

At about 7 plus minutes there is a description that sounded to me like a practical application of the Canon. Although that's my interpretation; the interviewee was discussing information from his scientific work and not anything about Epicurus. But that is exactly what, to me, is so interesting: we keep running across science that seems to correspond to EP. This doesn't make me want to become a scientist, but it does motivate me to try to understand ways to incorporate new information into my pursuit of Epicurean pleasure as the two seem to be mutually reinforcing.

Physics seems to me to be more of an intellectual exercise and perhaps not as useful for daily living. (Unless, of course one is a physicist Martin !) But neuroscience seems to have direct applications to daily living. One doesn't need to be a neuroscientist, but one can get value from reading up on it (to the point where it brings one more pleasure than pain )

Quote from Cassius

All we really need to do is to articulate in broad terms that there are mechanisms by which we can have confidence in living happily if we eject both skepticism and rationalism in favor of reliance on the faculties that Nature gave us.

The only thing that I would add to this is that if understanding the mechanism in more detail helps us to increase pleasure, then it is worthwhile to do so to the degree that it does so. I think that having a basic understanding of predictions and affect could be useful in that regard.

A quick post; today is pretty busy so it may be a while before I get back on....

In reacting to Don 's post, I think one of LFB's points is that sensations in a particular instance don't come first. A prediction comes first and the sensations serve as a reality check as you can see from the description of a prediction loop. So the sensations are "true" but they don’t seem to be primary.

Another thing that seems like it might be fruitful to discuss is affect and the affective circumplex.

Oops, another cross post!

LFB is closer to Elayne's term "pattern recognition" as the only thing innate; she calls it "statistical learning."

Quote

The brain begins constructing concepts very early in life, perhaps even in utero. “The newborn brain has the ability to learn patterns, a process called statistical learning. The moment that you burst into this strange new world as a baby, you were bombarded with noisy, ambiguous signals from the world and from your body. This barrage of sensory input was not random: it had some structure. Regularities. Your little brain began computing probabilities of which sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, and interoceptive sensations go together and which don’t.”

I'm only looking at the neuroscientific view now as it's fresh in my mind. I'll need to step away for a bit before I conceptualize more about concepts.

The most confusing issue seems to be the word "concepts." When LFB writes "concepts" in the brain she is referring to what we would call "preconceptions."

Quote

The brain uses concepts to group and separate things and to guess the meaning of sensory inputs, both external and internal. Without these you are experientially blind; with concepts your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that your senses seem to be reflexes, not constructions.

However I think when she refers to culture, concepts can also come from "conceptual thinking" that is shared among people and passed down to subsequent generations. So she's using the same word in different ways and it becomes our task to translate it into proper Epicurean verbiage.

We do have rational "conceptualizing," but she points out that our rational thought is never purely rational but is always influenced by body budget and affect.

Something like "the gods" or "justice," as I understand this, is a preconception not because it is innate but because we are exposed to it so early in life that we don't remember ever not knowing it. But that brings up the point that a sense of fairness is often observed in very young children: is this a preconception of justice? I would posit that it is an example of a prediction loop involved in the process of keeping the child's body budget balanced.

1. Yes

2. My pleasure!

3. So am I

An extra tidbit pertinent to discussions on the forums"

Essentialism vs Construction

“The belief in essences is called essentialism.” Similar to Platonic Forms, idealism, etc, and integral to the classical view. LFB explores this in terms of emotions, Darwin, and natural selection, but I am taking the liberty of applying it to philosophy.

Why is essentialism so persistent?

- It’s intuitive and easy to believe.

- It’s difficult to disprove: since essences are unobservable, one can always believe in them even if they can’t be found. If an experiment fails to detect an essence, it can be blamed on a failed experiment. “Essentialism inoculates itself against counterevidence.”

- If a scientist believes in essences he will design experiments to finding them.

- William James: “Whenever we have made a word. . . to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name.”

- “So, essentialism is intuitive, logically impossible to disprove, part of our psychological and neural makeup, and a self-perpetuating scourge in science. It is also the basis for the classical view’s most fundamental idea, that emotions have universal fingerprints. No wonder the classical view has such stamina—it’s powered by a virtually unkillable belief.”

- “It’s hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don’t force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology.”

What does this mean for the pursuit of pleasure? LFB explains that this information can be used to design a “recipe for living,” by working with your body budget and your concepts. People with a balanced body budget are apt to have better health, sharper mental abilities for longer, and a more meaningful and fulfilling life. (To me this sounds very Epicurean: pleasure equates to health, displeasure [or pain] to disease.)

Some ingredients of the recipe:

- Keep your body budget in good shape. “...your interoceptive network labors day and night, issuing predictions to maintain a healthy budget, and this process is the origin of your affective feelings (pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness). If you want to feel good, then your brain’s predictions about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so on, must be calibrated to your body’s actual needs. If they aren’t, and your body budget gets out of whack, then you’re going to feel crappy no matter what self-help tips you follow.”

- The foundation for regulating your predictions and body budget begins with the basics: healthy eating, exercising, getting enough sleep.

- To build on that, improve your physical comfort and your physical surroundings. Get a massage, spend time in nature and natural light. Regular lunch dates with a friend, taking turns treating each other has benefits in terms of giving, gratitude and friendship. Get a pet. Research your hobbies to see if they’re beneficial for stress.

- Improve your emotional intelligence: increase your “emotional granularity.” Becoming more specific in identifying emotions improves your brain’s ability to construct more specific and useful emotion concepts in any given situation. Take trips, read books, watch movies, try new foods, experience different perspectives. Learn new words as these contribute to your store of concepts. Invent new emotion concepts for specific situations and learn emotion concepts from other languages.

- Track your positive experiences; keep a gratitude journal. Reinforcing positive concepts makes them easier for your brain to re-create.

- Learn to deconstruct your affective feelings into their basic physical sensations. Avoid letting those sensations color how you see the world. (Separate “pain” and “suffering”) “When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal.”

- Recategorize your physical feelings from negative to positive. For instance from harmful anxiety to helpful anticipation; or categorize discomfort as helpful as when exercising: “pain is weakness leaving the body.”

- Try mindfulness meditation.

- Cultivate and experience awe.