Posts by Joshua

That's the mosaic I found recently! This might be the kind of thing that would interest me.

Richard Dawkins proposed a line of thinking several years ago that might shed light on the whole "different levels of reality" issue. He suggested four different 'worlds' that living organisms might model for themselves in order to be better suited for their own size and speed;

• Atomic Scale (hypothetical)
• Microbe/Insect scale
• Animal Scale
• Cosmic Scale (Hypothetical)

Essentially what he's doing is extrapolating from the two middle scales outward in both directions to get to the hypothetical edges. The edges are hypothetical not because the don't exist in reality, but because there are no known organisms that operate in such a way as to require them to successfully model physics at those scales. In reality, there are more "worlds" modeled than the ones above--for example, blue herons model movement under water far better than humans do, because herons stand above the surface of water and hunt fast moving prey below it. Another example; creatures that live in ocean depths would model their world differently to those on dry land, or to those floating on air currents high above land. And further; the strange ability of hive insects to find their way back to the hive by 'recording' distance and estimating angles. There are apparently ants that can do this, or something very much like it.

Here's the general idea; at different scales, different physical forces interact in interesting ways. Here's one example; humans can't stand on water, but some insects can. At the insect scale, the forces of surface tension and air friction "outweigh" the force of gravity. They can walk on water, fall from high places without injury, etc. The result of this is that insects will be better fit for survival if they can successfully model surface tension, and humans will be better fit for survival if they can successfully model gravity. Nature is the same at each scale, but its implications for living things are different. If you were to imagine a whale-like animal the size of an asteroid that could live in space, the whale would need to successfully model things like the two body problem, inertial movement in a frictionless environment, how to use gravity wells as 'slingshots', and how to avoid falling into them--precisely the kinds of things that NASA needs to model when sending out probes and shuttles.

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For more information:

• A short Wikipedia page on this topic.
• This TEDtalk starting around the five minute mark.

We also have to consider the motives of the early translators. Most of them in their frontmatter went to great lengths to disavow the main tenets of the poem. One published anonymously, another vowed that she would feed it to the fire if she still had it in her hands. Delight is a gray area. Pleasure is subversive.

"DELIGHT of Humane kind, and Gods above,

Parent of Rome; Propitious Queen of Love,

Whose vital pow’r, Air, Earth, and Sea supplies,

And breeds what e’r is born beneath the rowling Skies:

For every kind, by thy prolifique might,

Springs, and beholds the Regions of the light."

John Dryden translation in heroic couplets; rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Dryden is already taking liberties with the meter in the second line, bit he nails the first line and that sets the tone.

Voluptas was also a goddess, signifying sensual pleasure, granddaughter of Venus--alternatively, an aspect of Venus herself--and her Greek equivalent was Hedone.

Delight makes for a good English translation in part because it is 'higher in tone'--more suited to an archaic form like Latin epic verse. It has the same Latin root as 'delectable', and there are also metrical considerations. "de-LIGHT of GODS and MEN" is iambic, the standard English poetic foot. Delight of gods and men...the darling buds of May.

Pleasure breaks up the flow. This is true even in prose, though it wouldn't be as strongly felt.

My memory is that Gellar-Goad also describes the relevant passages as being grammatically uncertain--full of nesting subordinate clauses, hedging language, and so on. Epicurus and Lucretius were hesitant to draw any firm conclusion on this point.

I've listened to that episode twice already, I agree that it's a good one.

My first nominee would be this:

Episode One Hundred Twenty-Nine - Letter to Pythocles 03 - The Implications Of the Epicurean Position On The Size of the Sun

And also the first episode of the Letter to Menoeceus. I think Kalosyni has pointed to this as one she enjoyed.

Episode One Hundred Thirty-Four - The Letter to Menoeceus 01- Context and Opening of the Letter

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I'm also curious of how you account for dreaming when the senses are not tuned to external stimuli. The sensations are not active. Only the faculty of the mind is active.

This is a legitimately difficult issue, but one trope often used in film about dreaming is how the content of dreams becomes affected by external stimuli.

Here's one example;

My own own view of dreams is that they are the product of a mind distanced from external stimuli but not severed from it, and turning its attention from a stream of sensation to a memory bank of the residue of sensation, while also functioning with decreased emotional inhibition. Lucretius and Shakespeare both vividly describe dreams as consisting primarily of daily experience, though jumbled together in strange ways. But who knows. I don't hang my much by dreams.

Regarding "the mind aware of itself" I think DeWitt makes this explicit by highlighting the paradox that it requires reason to pass judgment on reason.

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I mean, at the risk of sounding too extreme, I suspect that Epicurus is even open to the possibility that drinking to excess can be beneficial under some bizarre, even common, circumstances.

I don't think I've ever related a tale with so much vigor as when I was sitting with friends at my sister's wedding reception, describing a pleasant morning on I-24 south of Nashville when the resident of a hot air balloon floating over the interstate gestured for me to pull the air horn. The wine rather added something, I think.

Ha! There's nearly an hour gone looking for the Greek text. Found 45 minutes after Don...

Since I've found it, I can record for the record that this is fragment 93 from the 4th century b.c.e middle comedy poet Eubulus, thought to be from a comic play titled Semele or Dionysus, and preserved by the 2nd-3rd century c.e. Greek grammarian Athenaeus.

Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, Book II., chapter 3

Quote from Fragment from the Greek Playwright Euboulos

"For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness."

Perhaps primordial is not so much a time, as it is a state or condition. An uncoupled atom, a "first beginning" or "seed of things" in Lucretian terms, is the atom in its primordial state. It 'falls' along an inertial path in whatever direction, swerves unpredictably, 'falls' again, couples with another atom, joins other couplings to form a body, dissolves, and falls away in an endless cycle of accretion and dissolution.

Quote from Don

And my take is that this was the primordial situation with all atoms falling in parallel "straight down." However, once a couple collisions happened, the order was interrupted by collisions and conglomerations in parts of the cosmos. In other parts, the parallel falling continued. And so on.

I've never been able to reconcile a 'primordial' downward movement with the concurrent claim that there was no beginning.

I didn't find it too harsh. Probably most of the people I know and love hold to some variant of that idea, and I never want to come across as callous or cruel when talking to or about them, but if we cannot speak frankly about ideas then what's it all for?

canon

noun (1)

can·on ˈka-nən

1 A: a regulation or dogma decreed by a church council B: a provision of canon law 2 [Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin, from Latin, model] : the most solemn and unvarying part of the Mass including the consecration of the bread and wine 3 [Middle English, from Late Latin, from Latin, standard] A: an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture B: the authentic works of a writer; "the Chaucer canon" C: a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works; "the canon of great literature" 4 A: an accepted principle or rule B: a criterion or standard of judgment; "the canons of good taste" C: a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms

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I'm rethinking the various usages of the word "canon" as compared with Epicurus' Canon of Epistemology, and I'm beginning to think that we haven't been very clear on this point in previous episodes. I think the word test gets at the heart of all of these disparate applications. For example:

• Canonized saint (Catholic Church); a person by whom a Catholic is to test their life.
• Western Canon; A collection of writings against which to test the aesthetic and literary value of new writings.
• The Epicurean Canon; the three sources of knowledge by which we test what is true or knowable.

I could probably go on, but it seems to me that what separates the Epicurean canon is not that it is a test or measuring stick, and the others are not: what distinguishes the Epicurean canon is that it is a test of epistemology--other uses of the word canon are also tests, but they test different things by different criteria.

I also need to read that article!

I should add that the way the "square tower" issue is explained by some commentators, it does reduce to a tautology as you suggest--'sense organs sense'. But no inferences can be made from that, so I take it for granted that that wasn't it's proper application.

I've never experienced psychedelics, but going by report I would analyze them under the rubric I outlined above. Only in this case, instead of the brain 'involuntarily adding a layer of interpretation', it cakes it on so thickly that the reported sensation is altered completely before the conscious mind has time to act upon it. Here's a thought experiment: suppose you had one optic nerve simultaneously grafted to two different brains. One brain is high, the other is clear--what does the clear brain see?

...I've been up since 5 pm.

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It's better to admit that you don't know rather than to admit that there is anything beyond or above the senses that will let you determine the answer without them, or in contradiction of them. Because if you fall for that trap then you'll be totally lost in imaginary traps.

Something we discussed at length on the 3rd episode in the Pythocles series--the size of the Sun.

On an unrelated note, one thing I learned from looking up the definition of "norm" in this chapter is that its etymological root is Latin "norma", from Greek gnomon, meaning carpenter's square or the protruding piece on a sundial. DeWitt repeatedly says that for Epicurus "Nature furnishes the norm."

"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!"