Posts by Joshua

Here is a sample of the relevant texts:

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PD26. Of desires, all that do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not satisfied, are not necessary, but involve a craving which is easily dispelled when the object is hard to procure, or they seem likely to produce harm.

PD29. Among desires, some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination.

PD30. Wherever, in the case of desires which are physical, but do not lead to a sense of pain if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense, such pleasures are due to idle imagination; and it is not owing to their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the empty imaginings of the man.

Men. 127. We must consider that of desires some are natural, others vain, and of the natural some are necessary and others merely natural; and of the necessary some are necessary for happiness, others for the repose of the body, and others for very life.

Diog. Oen Fr. 32. Each (virtue?) therefore ............... means of (?) ... just as if a mother for whatever reasons sees that the possessing nature has been summoned there, it then being necessary to allow the court to asked what each (virtue?) is doing and for whom .................................... [We must show] both which of the desires are natural and which are not; and in general all things that [are included] in the [former category are easily attained] .....

Diog. Oen Fr. 34. Let us first discuss states, keeping an eye on the point that, when the emotions which disturb the soul are removed, those which produce pleasure enter into it to take their place.

Well, what are the disturbing emotions? [They are] fears —of the gods, of death, and of [pains]— and, besides [these], desires that [outrun] the limits fixed by nature. These are the roots of all evils, and, [unless] we cut them off, [a multitude] of evils will grow [upon] us.

Diog. Oen NF 131 = YF 189. Vain desires, like those for fame and such things, are not only vain, but, as well as being vain, also difficult to fulfil. It is not unlike drinking much, yet always being thirsty. To be master of Pella, but [to have troubles for company, is vain].

Diog. Oen Fr. 153. Of the desires some are vain, others natural. Now those that are natural seek after such things as [are necessary] for our nature’s enjoyment, [while those that are vain] ................................................................................... What [need to mention the] fabulous treasures of Croesus and his gold ingots or the rivers running with gold for him? What [benefit], father Zeus, [did he derive] from these [richness]?

DRN Book IV, ~1084. For therein there is hope that from the same body, whence comes the source of their flame, the fire may in turn be quenched. Yet nature protests that all this happens just the other way; and this is the one thing, whereof the more and more we have, the more does our heart burn with the cursed desire. For meat and drink are taken within the limbs; and since they are able to take up their abode in certain parts, thereby the desire for water and bread is easily sated. But from the face and beauteous bloom of man nothing passes into the body to be enjoyed save delicate images; and often this love-sick hope is scattered to the winds.

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And here is how I would synthesize all of this information;

The test of whether a desire is necessary is in determining whether a feeling of pain results if that desire is not satisfied. If pain results, the desire is necessary. If pain does not result, the desire is unnecessary.

The test of whether a desire is natural is in determining whether there is a fixed limit in nature to which the object of desire is subjected. If there is a fixed limit in nature, the desire is natural. If there is not a fixed limit in nature, the desire is unnatural. Cassius is fond of quoting the dictum that hard cases make bad law, and we should probably be cautious when we approach the boundary between natural and unnatural desires. Remember, the purpose of this exercise is not to achieve a perfect score, or to make the grade, or to get on Santa's (or St. Peter's) nice list; the purpose is to secure a life of pleasure and to minimize, so far as it's reasonable to do so, the presence of pain.

Epicurus typically defines these terms in the negative, as in Principal Doctrine 26, and his advice to students on ethical questions is also offered in negative terms, as it is in Vatican Saying 51;

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VS51. You tell me that the stimulus of the flesh makes you too prone to the pleasures of love. Provided that you do not break the laws, or good customs, and do not distress any of your neighbors, or do harm to your body, or squander your pittance, you may indulge your inclination as you please. Yet it is impossible not to come up against one or other of these barriers, for the pleasures of love never profited a man and he is lucky if they do him no harm.

You have to do the math yourself, for yourself!

I quoted from Montaigne's essays, here is the relevant passage;

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Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they did not in time reconcile themselves to his favor: “Why, you pitiful fellow,” replied he, “what can they suffer who do not fear to die?” It being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free? “Why,” said he, “by despising death.” These, and a thousand other sayings to the same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself. Witness the Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by his master commanded to some base employment: “Thou shalt see,” says the boy, “whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty,” and having so said, threw himself from the top of the house. Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians, that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of his: “If thou threatenest us with more than death,” replied they, “we shall the more willingly die”; and to Philip, having written them word that he would frustrate all their enterprises: “What, wilt thou also hinder us from dying?” This is the meaning of the sentence, “That the wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all color of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out. We may be straitened for earth to live upon, but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus answered the Romans.” Why dost thou complain of this world? it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

Yes, that fragment is remarkably well-attested:

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[06] They say that he wrote to many other women of pleasure and particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also in love; and that in the treatise On the End of Life he wrote, ‘I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight.’

-Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers Bailey Translation

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Thus you speak: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain.” And these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted.

-Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Yonge Translation

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I do not suppose, Velleius, that you are like some of the Epicureans, who are ashamed of those expressions of Epicurus, in which he openly avows that he has no idea of any good separate from wanton and obscene pleasures, which, without a blush, he names distinctly.

-Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Yonge Translation

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For Epicurus says, without any concealment, but speaking with a loud voice, as it were, "For I am not able to distinguish what is good if you once take away the pleasure arising from sweet flavours, and if you also take away amatory pleasures." For this wise man thinks that even the life of the intemperate man is an unimpeachable one, if he enjoys an immunity from fear, and also mirth. On which account also the comic poets, running down the Epicureans, attack them as mere servants and ministers of pleasure and intemperance.

-Athenaeus, The Banquet of the Learned, Yonge Translation

Thank you all!

I dislike it when other people speculate about my motives in an attempt to prove a point, and I try--not always successfully--to refrain from doing this myself.

"You only left Christianity because you were hurt by people at church...You only deny God because you want to justify a life of sin...You only act morally because God's laws are written on your heart..."

Well, no. If they really wanted to know the answers to these questions, they could always ask. Be curious, as the man says:

Edit; yeesh, I forgot there's some strong language in that clip!

Don is right to mention the classical festivals of the dead, but it is worth noting that when Lucretius makes references to these practices (the feasts of Feralia, Parentalia, and Lemuria in Rome) it is generally to reveal the fear, foolishness, or hypocrisy of the people taking part. This is from Bailey's translation of the proem to Book three:

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For, although men often declare that disease and a life of disgrace are more to be feared than the lower realm of death, and that they know that the soul’s nature is of blood, or else of wind, if by chance their whim so wills it, and that so they have no need at all of our philosophy, you may be sure by this that all is idly vaunted to win praise, and not because the truth is itself accepted. These same men, exiled from their country and banished far from the sight of men, stained with some foul crime, beset with every kind of care, live on all the same, and, spite of all, to whatever place they come in their misery, they make sacrifice to the dead [parentant], and slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the gods of the dead [manibus divis], and in their bitter plight far more keenly turn their hearts to religion. Wherefore it is more fitting to watch a man in doubt and danger, and to learn of what manner he is in adversity; for then at last a real cry is wrung from the bottom of his heart: the mask is torn off, and the truth remains behind.

Bailey's translation of section 123 of the Letter to Menoeceus is not to be relied upon, and I will always recommend reviewing Don's translation and commentary starting on page 29:

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θεὸν is transliterated theon and is where English gets theology and atheist. τὸν θεὸν is singular, but, singular or plural, this can refer to a god, the gods, or the divine in general.

However, David Sedley in his paper "Epicurus' Theological Innatism" places significance on the singular construction. Sedley proposed each person creates their own "god" which is why he stressed the importance of the singular form. Sedley's paper is recommended reading. So, where the word is singular, I will try to translate it as such as to not obscure the semantics.

So I would amend Bailey's translation for clarity in the following way;

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First of all believe that [a] god is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a god is engraved on men’s minds, and do not assign to him [such a being] anything alien to his [its] immortality or ill-suited to his [its] blessedness: but believe about him [such a being] everything that can uphold his [its] blessedness and immortality.

Now, why does Epicurus use the singular here, and the plural subsequently? As Don points out, Dr. Sedley has a paper speaking to this question that I need to review. For now, I think we can look to the Letter to Herodotus for an answer:

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First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words, in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning.

[38] For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation, if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. And besides we must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accord with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.

The"first mental image" of a god is of 'a being blessed and incorruptible', and that image is a type, according to one definition of that word:

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2. a person or thing symbolizing or exemplifying the ideal or defining characteristics of something.

Now that we have this image in our minds, we can hold other claims, descriptors, delimiters, and representations up to it, to test whether they hold good or not. A jealous, petty, angry, vindictive god does not accord with the mental image of blessedness, and so we can disregard such a view of the gods.

Note, though, that the 'first mental image' of a thing is NOT an ideal platonic form of the class of things it represents, and it has no being outside of our minds. There is no perfect and unchanging realm of pure being. And our souls do not innately possess knowledge of these mental images to be 'recollected' through the study of logic and geometry; these mental images are formed as impressions by repeated exposure. They are a distillation of experience, and not something external and eternal that precedes experience.

If I've made a mistake here, I trust that Don and Bryan will correct me!

The christian apologist Lactantius attributed the formulation of the paradox to Epicurus in the late third or early fourth century AD. Nothing like it survives in any of the extant writings of Epicurus, and the earliest source is in the works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus of the second century, who does not attribute it to him. It probably has its origin in ancient Skepticism.

Welcome!

Regarding the gods, the size of the sun, and the findings of modern physics, these are questions of perennial interest around here.

My own view is this: if I am going to hold forth as an Epicurean, I have an obligation to try to understand his system of thought to the best of my ability. When I am trying to explain Epicureanism to others, I try to explain it the way I think Epicurus himself understood it. I don't always succeed in presenting it well, or accurately, but I try never to intentionally misrepresent.

That being said, I do not feel obligated to agree with the ancients on every point; and when I am stating my own views, I try to make it clear that that's what I'm doing.

To quote Thoreau, the cart before the horse is neither useful nor beautiful. The philosophy of Epicurus is not best understood as a set of pass/fail litmus tests.

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XIII. Those who place the Chief Good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name, and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues; but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but for its conduciveness to health; the art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also Wisdom, which must be considered as the art of living, if it effected no result would not be desired; but as it is, it is desired, because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.

-Torquatus, Cicero's On Ends

I wrote this reply yesterday in response to the article but decided not to post it. But it saved as a draft, and someone might find it interesting, so here it is:

________________________

From the article:

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But this says nothing about the origins of such life, either here or elsewhere. The salient question: is it physically or chemically possible for living, self-replicating organisms with internal metabolic processes to come about through entirely naturalistic processes unaided by intelligence?

The evidence seems to say, resoundingly, No.

The evidence is inconclusive. To say that the evidence is inconclusive is not at all the same as saying that the evidence suggests (resoundingly or otherwise) that abiogenesis is impossible.

A relevant example of this principle can be found in astronomy. When in the 16th century Tycho Brahe critiqued the Copernican model of the solar system, his objection was grounded in (among other things) the fact that stellar parallax had never been observed. Attempts to observe this hypothetical parallax had been made, and in the event would go on being made for nearly three hundred years before the phenomena was finally and conclusively measured scientifically by Henderson, Struve, and Bessel in independent experiments in the 1830s.

If Yates were writing in the 1820s, would he have confidently pronounced (resoundingly!) that the measurement of stellar parallax in our cosmos was impossible? Perhaps not. Well, then he shouldn't say it or imply it here. Inconclusive does not mean impossible; it just means inconclusive.

He then delivers himself of the opinion that abiogenesis cannot be tested, on the grounds that the men and women performing the test would themselves be intelligent. Therefore, any proto-organism or self-replicating molecule produced in a laboratory experiment by those men and women would, by definition, have been created by one or more intelligent beings. By this logic we should disregard all laboratory experiments. That legumes fix nitrogen into the soil they grow in in a laboratory experiment would tell us nothing about the nitrogen cycle in nature, but ONLY if we are foolish enough to insist that the cause of their fixing nitrogen is to be found in the intelligence of the researcher and not in the biochemistry of the legume. The researcher arranges the conditions in which nitrogen is fixed, but he does not fix the nitrogen. Likewise with abiogenesis. Arranging the conditions in which life emerges from non-life would not be an act of intelligent creation.

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The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock, are usually devoid of
visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable
microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the
spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of
estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When
the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in
his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a
swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral
existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the
pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before,
making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that
moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after
week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening—we can imagine
—for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust
above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if
not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a
burden on the wind.
Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It’s a
strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night,
after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see
the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies
immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky
counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under
the frog’s chin swells like a bubble, then collapses.
Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat
apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing
outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night
with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak,
dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may
nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only
to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also
out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of
the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their
own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common
life.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect
that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick
extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and
without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the
toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don’t, that the
sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail
cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene
of their happiness.
What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their
metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher
animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of
the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here
and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest
survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The
rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And
again.

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

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Welcome O2x Ohio !

Regarding your interest in the Epicurean understanding of light, I can be of some help when it comes to the secondary literature. Well, primarily the secondary literature on Lucretius. The tradition of commentary on the school of Epicurus has been fraught since very near the beginning, which is why I would ordinarily echo Dewitt's exhortation to return to the texts! However, I think you may find this essay by Edward Neville Andrade (1887-1971) of University College, London to be of some interest. It was published as an introductory essay to the second volume of H. A. J. Munro's three volume text (I), commentary (II), and translation (III) of De Rerum Natura. The essay is titled The Scientific Significance of Lucretius, and, though the scientific perspective of the author is now a century and a half out of date, he is much more thorough than other sources we have. Einstein for example wrote a forward to a German translation of Lucretius, but it is no more than superficial regarding the actual ideas presented by the poet. That's why Andrade's essay is useful--he goes much deeper.

Here is the text at the Internet Archive. I hope you find it helpful.

And here is another interesting scientific appraisal of Epicureanism, this one in the form of a popular lecture by the Irish physicist John Tyndall--a lecture that caused great controversy when it was delivered in 1874.

There is another consideration to note here, and that is that not all imagineable boundless and eternal universes are the same.

Imagine a universe that is boundless and eternal, but where a particular force in that universe like gravity peaks at an epicenter in space and asymptotically approaches zero on every infinite line radiating away from that epicenter. I can imagine a rim around the core of that peak beyond which star formation becomes impossible. If the same universe had a similar peak in time rather than space, toward which the speed of light would eternally accelerate and away from which it would infinitely decelerate. Such a universe would be infinite and eternal, but might only be fit for life in a finite and temporary zone around the correlation of both peaks in spacetime. If somewhere in the infinite number of digits behind the decimal in Pi we eventually encounter an endless string of nines, we've reached the Borg and the end of all variety.

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I also recall that one of the analogies or issues you have quoted before is something to do with the ability to infer or predict all the possibilities of various oceans from knowing the characteristics of s a single drop of water. Do you recall the source for that one?

"From a drop of water,' said the writer, 'a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it."

-A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (from the Sherlock Holmes stories)

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Should we conclude that after a thing has happened once, that in an infinite and eternal universe it will happen an infinite number of times, but that it is impossible and in fact improper to predict with any confidence after huge numbers of monkeys are born that there will ever be any more intelligent beings born anywhere in the universe?

Oh, I was only speaking about this Earth. In an infinite and eternal cosmos anything that is possible within that cosmos should be expected to exist an infinite number of times. If you assign each letter in the Latin alphabet to a number (a->1, b->2, etc) somewhere in the infinity of digits behind the decimal point in the number Pi one would expect to find a sequence of numbers that happens to spell out the collected works of William Shakespeare. This particular supposition is currently theoretical, and awaiting formal proof.

Q: Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?

Mathematician: As it turns out, mathematicians do not yet know whether the digits of pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers. That being said, many…

www.askamathematician.com

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There is no necessity either way in a particular circumstance, but is not a process with has been observed to be in operation is limited by nature rather than by necessity (?)

You may have to rewrite that last clause for me....

Another passage from that Hitchens book;

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Our own solipsism, often expressed in diagram or cartoon form, usually
represents evolution as a kind of ladder or progression, with a fish gasping
on the shore in the first frame, hunched and prognathous figures in the
succeeding ones, and then, by slow degrees, an erect man in a suit waving
his umbrella and shouting “Taxi!” Even those who have observed the
“sawtooth” pattern of fluctuation between emergence and destruction,
further emergence and still further destruction, and who have already
charted the eventual end of the universe, are half agreed that there is a
stubborn tendency toward an upward progression. This is no great surprise:
inefficient creatures will either die out or be destroyed by more successful
ones. But progress does not negate the idea of randomness, and when he
came to examine the Burgess shale, the great paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould arrived at the most disquieting and unsettling conclusion of all. He
examined the fossils and their development with minute care and realized
that if this tree could be replanted or this soup set boiling again, it would
very probably not reproduce the same results that we now “know.”

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It depends on precisely what we mean by 'gradations'. Here is a passage from God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens, discussing the gradations evident in modern biology which demonstrate the pathway by which light-sensitive cells developed over millions of generations into the complex eyes found in modern humans;

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Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light; it developed into a recessed eyespot, where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provided additional data on the direction of light; then into a deep recession eyespot, where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; then into a pinhole camera eye that is able to focus an image on the back of a deeply-recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; then into a pinhole lens eye that is able to focus the image; then into a complex eye found in such modern mammals as humans.

All the intermediate stages of this process have been located in other creatures, and sophisticated computer models have been developed which have tested the theory and shown that it actually “works.”

However, the popular conception of evolutionary biology--that organisms get successively bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter in the course of generations--is descriptively accurate in some cases but wholly wrong when considered as prescription of nature. Mutation and selection may give rise to faster organisms when those faster organisms are better fit for their environment than their slower counterparts, but when the metabolic expense of speed does not make a species more fit to survive in its environment then members of that species who do not 'pay' that metabolic cost will be better fit than those that do. This is why populations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria lose their resistance when that antibiotic is no longer used; individuals with the genetic resistance lose the benefit but still suffer the cost, and those individuals are out-competed by individuals without resistant genes.

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Was it predictable from the existence of monkeys that humans would arise?

There was always some chance that humans could arise--we know this because we exist--but no, I do not think we can safely say that this outcome was ever likely. It seems likely to us because it happened, and we're living the outcome. This is the very definition of Hindsight bias. If an asteroid hadn't cratered into the Yucatán Peninsula at the K-Pg boundary, and a new language-using species had arisen from the non-avian dinosaurs that are now extinct, it might seem to that species that their existence was predictable. We have excellent reasons to suspect otherwise.

This post is copied from another thread on teleology;

[other thread]

OK, I am off work. You have raised a number of excellent points and I agree that we need to refine this mass of material down to something digestible.

Relevant Texts

[All citations in this section are to translations by Cyril Bailey]

Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles, sections 115-116;

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The signs of the weather which are given by certain animals result from mere coincidence of occasion. For the animals do not exert any compulsion for winter to come to an end, nor is there some divine nature which sits and watches the outgoings of these animals and then fulfills the signs they give.

[116] For not even the lowest animal, although ‘a small thing gives the greater pleasure,’ would be seized by such foolishness, much less one who was possessed of perfect happiness.

All these things, Pythocles, you must bear in mind; for thus you will escape in most things from superstition and will be enabled to understand what is akin to them. And most of all give yourself up to the study of the beginnings and of infinity and of the things akin to them, and also of the criteria of truth and of the feelings, and of the purpose for which we reason out these things. For these points when they are thoroughly studied will most easily enable you to understand the causes of the details. But those who have not thoroughly taken these things to heart could not rightly study them in themselves, nor have they made their own the reason for observing them.

• The animals do not migrate for the purpose of changing the seasons,
• The seasons do not change for the purpose of moving the animals,
• And no divine mind has set these things into motion.

Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 64;

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[64] Further, you must grasp that the soul possesses the chief cause of sensation: yet it could not have acquired sensation, unless it were in some way enclosed by the rest of the structure. And this in its turn having afforded the soul this cause of sensation acquires itself too a share in this contingent capacity from the soul. Yet it does not acquire all the capacities which the soul possesses: and therefore when the soul is released from the body, the body no longer has sensation. For it never possessed this power in itself, but used to afford opportunity for it to another existence, brought into being at the same time with itself: and this existence, owing to the power now consummated within itself as a result of motion, used spontaneously to produce for itself the capacity of sensation and then to communicate it to the body as well, in virtue of its contact and correspondence of movement, as I have already said.

This passage (and the subsequent passages as well, to some extant) is relevant because of the pains Epicurus goes to to avoid teleological language;

• The body, having come into existence with the soul, affords opportunity to the soul to experience sensation.
• The body, having afforded this opportunity to the soul, acquires its own share in this "contingent capacity" from the soul - that is, the body acquires its share in sensation.
• We can summarize this ateleological view in the following way: the use of any natural thing is afforded by its existence, not the other way around.
• By contrast, the existence of any artificial thing could be said to be afforded by its planned use. A table is brought into being for the purpose of dining. The human hand is pressed into service (say, of transferring food from the table to the mouth) only after it is found to exist.

The most important text, as cited by Cassius above, is Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5;

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[823] Herein you must eagerly desire to shun this fault, and with foresighted fear to avoid this error; do not think that the bright light of the eyes was created in order that we may be able to look before us, or that, in order that we may have power to plant long paces, therefore the tops of shanks and thighs, based upon the feet, are able to bend; or again, that the forearms are jointed to the strong upper arms and hands given us to serve us on either side, in order that we might be able to do what was needful for life. All other ideas of this sort, which men proclaim, by distorted reasoning set effect for cause, since nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use. Nor did sight exist before the light of the eyes was born, nor pleading in words before the tongue was created, but rather the birth of the tongue came long before discourse, and the ears were created much before sound was heard, and in short all the limbs, I trow, existed before their use came about: they cannot then have grown for the purpose of using them.

[843] But, on the other side, to join hands in the strife of battle, to mangle limbs and befoul the body with gore; these things were known long before gleaming darts flew abroad, and nature constrained men to avoid a wounding blow, before the left arm, trained by art, held up the defence of a shield. And of a surety to trust the tired body to rest was a habit far older than the soft-spread bed, and the slaking of the thirst was born before cups. These things, then, which are invented to suit the needs of life, might well be thought to have been discovered for the purpose of using them. But all those other things lie apart, which were first born themselves, and thereafter revealed the concept of their usefulness. In this class first of all we see the senses and the limbs; wherefore, again and again, it cannot be that you should believe that they could have been created for the purpose of useful service.

[858] This, likewise, is no cause for wonder, that the nature of the body of every living thing of itself seeks food. For verily I have shown that many bodies ebb and pass away from things in many ways, but most are bound to pass from living creatures. For because they are sorely tried by motion and many bodies by sweating are squeezed and pass out from deep beneath, many are breathed out through their mouths, when they pant in weariness; by these means then the body grows rare, and all the nature is undermined; and on this follows pain. Therefore food is taken to support the limbs and renew strength when it passes within, and to muzzle the gaping desire for eating through all the limbs and veins. Likewise, moisture spreads into all the spots which demand moisture; and the many gathered bodies of heat, which furnish the fires to our stomach, are scattered by the incoming moisture, and quenched like a flame, that the dry heat may no longer be able to burn our body. Thus then the panting thirst is washed away from our body, thus the hungry yearning is satisfied.

• "All other ideas of this sort, which men proclaim, by distorted reasoning set effect for cause, since nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use."

Further Reading

Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, page 67;

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The limited teleology at which Epicurus finally arrived had nothing to do either with creationism or adaptation of organ to function. It had nothing to do with the universe at large, which was ruled by natural laws. It had nothing to do even with animals, although animal behavior afforded evidence that pleasure was the end or telos of living. It was recognized, to be sure, that animals possess volition and that certain kinds of animals are actuated by innate ideas to organize themselves into herds for mutual protection, but only the rational human being was believed capable of intelligent planning for living and for keeping steadily in view the fact that pleasure is the end or telos ordained by Nature. This amounts to saying that a nonpurposive Nature had produced a purposive creature, for whom alone an end or goal of living could have a meaning. This is teleology at a minimum. For such a belief no teacher had set a precedent.

Ian Johnston, Lecture on Lucretius;

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The poem’s influence, according to Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie, can be linked to a range of twentieth-century poets and philosophers. So pervasive is its presence in the intellectual climate that for one critic at least (Stuart Gillespie) Charles Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius is rather like Milton’s claiming that he had not read Genesis.

John Tyndall, Address at Belfast;

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Trace the line of life backwards, and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical [54/55] condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have 'a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.' Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking, but, however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life? Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not 'that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who wrings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb?' Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

I think part of the reason Epicureanism remained unchanged is because it treated with clear finality certain of its basic premises, and it did so in a way that rendered any further dispute rather pointless among those that accepted the premise. Consider such premises as there is no life after death, and Nature was not created, but has always existed.

Any school of philosophy proposing that there is life after death has not ended a dispute but begun one; what is the afterlife like? Is it eternal or finite? Is it the same for everyone, or will people experience different afterlives depending on their respective portions of fame, virtue, nobility, or piety? How long does the soul linger in the body, and where does it go after? Is there any hope of return from the afterlife? Can people still living contact those who are dead, and vice versa?

Christianity has shattered into a million tiny fragments over questions like these, but for the Epicurean every one of these points of argument is utterly meaningless. There is no life after death, so there's no point in speculating about what that non-existent 'life' might be like. Such speculations, which are not even of academic interest, will certainly never have the power to bring about schism, or mutual recrimination, or factional infighting. And quite a lot of Epicurean philosophy is like that; once you accept the premise that nature was not created by a god, or that the substrate of everything that exists in nature is mere matter, or that the senses are fundamentally reliable, you slam the door shut forever on all of the speculation that does not take its point of departure from that premise.

When we examine the things that did change and develop in ancient Epicureanism, they are quite minor. Epicurus preferred to transmit his ideas in uninterrupted discourse and in plain dress, but that did not prevent Lucretius from casting them in verse, or Lucian from engaging with them in dialectic.