Posts by Joshua

Elayne I want to thank you in particular for correcting me on one point–'non-rational' is far preferable to 'irrational'!

Quote

"When making decisions, don't use logic and reason, use the Epicurean canon.

Hmmm...🤔

I'm experiencing some heavy resistance to this phrasing. Let me see if I can articulate a response.

I first take issue with what might be differing interpretations with the word decision. If the word decision means "a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration", and these decisions can either be—according to the prevailing view of psychology—rational or irrational (in the neutral connotation of that last word), then we're faced with a startling apposition! Am I suggesting to my friends that they only make irrational decisions? I hope not. I think we too easily forget how quickly reason encroaches even on the simplest and most absent-minded of choices.

Here's a decision I often make based on personal pleasure; "I think I'll get a coke."

And here's only some of the underlying architecture of that decision;

-Observation 1: "This place sells soft drinks in a range of choices."

-Observation 2: "My previous experience with soft drinks—and it is extensive—suggests to me that a soft drink will give me pleasure."

‐Observation 3 (self evident): "pleasure is the end or goal of my life."

-Premise 1 (inductive reasoning): "If I get a coke it will probably give me pleasure this time, too."

-Decision/Conclusion: "I think I'll get a coke."

So that even if I were to restrict the question only to 'decisions about pleasure', or 'decisions about the proper end of life', I would still have problems with it. But how much more troubling when we move beyond these humble beginnings!

I have family members who hold to a position they call "Zetetic Astronomy". One of the conclusions of their astronomy is that the Earth is flat. We have very little to learn from what these people think, but there is a lot to be learned from how they think. The basis of Zeteticism is that the traditional Scientific Method is fundamentally flawed. Scientists begin by making hypotheses about their observations, which they then attempt to falsify. From the point of view of the Zeteticist, these scientists are merely introducing a prejudice or bias into their work when they hypothesize. "What they ought to be doing instead (this is me paraphrasing) is performing the observation with an unbiased mind, and trusting the results."

For example; "I don't observe a gravitational pull when I put two apples side by side. No evidence for gravity."

"When I pour water on a baseball, it runs off onto the ground. No evidence for spinning ball with water on it."

"When I ride a merry-go-round, I can feel movement and rotation. I don't normally feel that. No evidence for motion or rotation of Earth."

You get the gist. I've had wearying hours of such "arguments", and have no stomach for them any longer. This particular individual used to drive me to distraction by failing to meet one simple demand; articulate your argument in the form of a syllogism. He never agreed to do it. C'est la vie!

TL;DR—The point I'm laboring to make is that reason and logic impend rather quickly in any decision-making process. Epicurus was right to exclude them from the canon, but they become inescapable fast. No, that's not advice I would give to my friends.

I like this idea. It took me a few moments to figure out who "D.L." is, it might not hurt to give the full name on the first citation.

I reported to the ER one time with visual lights/patterns, transient aphasia, confusion, headache, vomiting—and was diagnosed with complex migraine with aura. Lucky me, I thought I was having a stroke!

It was miserable. I wouldn't say chronic, but I have had them intermittently over the years. My experience tracks with what Charles said. As soon as I understood what was going on (a phenomenon called spreading cortical depression), I began to handle them much better. The physical pain was the same but the suffering was considerably lessened. Now I know what's going to happen before it happens, and I can take measures to mitigate it. It becomes much easier to protect my abiding pleasure in this way.

I agree with Don.

And I think my answer to the bliss pill would be tentative and empirical: I'll observe its effects in others who take it, and begin to form my conclusions then. Ask me another silly hypothetical question—I have no shortage of silly hypothetical answers!

Quote

Now I have to go back to the intermundia for a while.....

There, by contrast, is a sentence you don't often see in Georgia!

I moved to NW Florida a year ago and I'm still resisting the allure of "y'all". In lieu of bringing back "ye", which contrary to popular notions was historically plural, I'm still clinging to "you guys". But more generally I try to reframe my sentences so as to escape the problem altogether!

Quote

I suspect good analogies could be drawn between how disinformation spreads today with they way a particular kind -Christianity- spread in the Roman Empire.

"Our problem is this: our prefrontal lobes are too small, and our adrenal glands are too big, and we're afraid of the dark and afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid that a child can—and all children do, as you can tell by their questions—actually see right through them." -Christopher Hitchens

Bevil Higgons; "In Imitation of Lucretius"; 1736; English poem by a Jacobite historian, which attempts a Christian refutation of Lucretius' Epicureanism.

Second side note: on the line "W–– govern'd in a B–– Reign";

I'm not entirely clear who is referenced here, but Higgons and his family were well-known Jacobites who held fast to the House of Stuart after the Glorious Revolution and the installation of the Hanoverian dynasty with George I.

My best guess is that "W" is Robert Walpole, who governed under "B", being King George (either the First or Second), Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Walpole was a Whig and the Jacobites were associated with the Tory's.

Side note: he precedes his poem with a Latin inscription from Ovid:

"Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe—quem dixere Chaos;"

"There was one countenance upon all of the world—which they call Chaos;"

http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId…=&brand=default

Yet another random find.

When I saw that this was published posthumously I started to get my hopes up. Too salacious to let out in his lifetime? Sadly not. This poem should be called Against Lucretius. It's basically a systematic refutation of Lucretius' Epicureanism as expressed in the first part of DNR Book I. First there's the invocation of the biblical creator. Then a paean to the triumph of Britain; next, a nod toward atomism but bracketed by the claims that God is the designer of the atoms, and that materialism itself could never proceed past the point of random chaos.

All boiler-plate up to here, but then an interesting turn: an inversion of the crime of Agamemnon. After laying out his belief that all races are brothers (as all men are sons of Adam), it is fratricide that marks out the real crime. Slavery, suggests Higgons, is proof that man is hopelessly sinful without the guidance of God. He might as well have translated it literally—"to such heights of evil are men driven without religion."

And just a few other features of interest. His science is mostly adequate for its time, but with an oddity or two. If I'm reading it correctly, he says in one line that gravity causes heavier objects to fall faster than lighter objects–something even Lucretius knew was wrong. He also acknowledges the probable existence of life on other worlds, which is somewhat odd for someone who believes in the myths of Genesis.

Its a fairly quick read, but doesn't amount to much for us. A few pages of serviceable but uninspired heroic couplets.

Quote

Most ordinary people have training in astrophysics

🤣 Either you've slipped up, Cassius, or you meet with a different vintage of 'ordinary' than I do!

This bit about the 'bliss pill' is a very modern-sounding thought-experiment, but its roots are ancient. Homer proposes a similar problem in his Odyssey with the land of the Lotus-Eaters, memorably captured by Tennyson in a poem of that name.

If you could spend your life on an exceedingly pleasant island in the Mediterranean eating narcotic flowers, drowsy and content and forgetful of family and duty and honor, would you choose that? The 'right' answer for Homer and all good pious Greeks was no. It might be worth exploring what the Epicurean answer would be.

Quote

33. The cry of the flesh is not to be hungry, thirsty, or cold; for he who is free of these and is confident of remain so might vie even with Zeus for happiness.

I cite this passage because the words "confident to remain so" seems to me to be the crucial distinguishing factor between pleasure and happiness. I liked the way Cassius formulated it; pleasure is a direct feeling, happiness is a higher level construction that involves pleasure, but the hope of continued pleasure and the absence of fear.

Epicurus' core teaching about death is that it is "nothing" to us. This is essential. If what awaited us beyond the grave was eternal torment, no amount or length of pleasure would be adequate to keep us happy. We have to know where we're 'going' with it, in our life and after it.

I don't think I can agree with Elli that Gaia is a better Greek analogue than Aphrodite. Partially because Aphrodite is the consort of Ares (Mars), partially because Aphrodite has the clearer association with pleasure, and partially because Lucretius was drawing on Empedocles and his duality between Love and Strife.

Certainly in Venus' capacity as 'nurturing' and 'mother', she has a resemblance to Gaia. It would be better to say, as the Loeb edition does say, that she "is a figure of extraordinary complexity".

I am inclined to agree with Elayne when it comes to 'stretching the text'---If indeed that is what we are doing, in a fair analysis. A few months ago I read The Rise and Fall of Alexandria. I've mentioned it before, but I keep coming back to it because for me the key point I take from it is this; we have an obligation to estimate the value of these early thinkers by considering the context in which they wrote. Take a practical example:

Hippocrates' understanding of internal medicine, and its supposed foundation in the fluctuations of the four 'humors', is so wrong that it can be difficult for us to appreciate how much progress he had made toward being right. The men of his age believed, by and large, that disease and health were the sport of the gods. A prayer here, a burnt offering there--throw in a consultation with a witch or an exorcist, when other means fail--that was the best they could hope for. Hippocrates took a more analytical view of things. He thought that disease of the body had its origin in nature, and not the divine. He thought that the course of disease could be traced, from cause to effect, and that with sufficient study these natural processes could be laid bare to the understanding of the human intellect. This early and infantile version of science has in the intervening centuries been clarified, expanded, systematized, subjected to rigor and experimentation--has indeed been reworked almost beyond recognition. Almost. But the kernel of the original idea (which was nothing short of a revolution in human understanding, for its time) remains unaltered. The origin of disease is not in caprice and malevolence, not vengeance and anger; it is instead rational and explicable.

There's no shame in Lucretius being 'wrong' from time to time. He got nearly everything of real importance right.

Quote

"But still, what a difference when one lays aside the strenuous believers and takes up the no less arduous work of a Darwin, say, or a Hawking or a Crick. These men are more enlightening when they are wrong, or when they display their inevitable biases, than any falsely modest person of faith who is vainly trying to square the circle and to explain how he, a mere creature of the Creator, can possibly know what that Creator intends." -Christopher Hitchens

And let us not for a moment suffer the confusion that this 'naturalness' is in any way related to Natural Law, a position that I regard as more unnatural than almost anything in philosophy. Nature furnishes the norm, but it does not furnish moral "Laws" for our mindless obedience!

I do love Robert Burns, but it's a sad day for an Epicurean when he can't bring himself to buy a pint for an old friend–as in lines 9 and 10!

Another excellent poem, and especially relevant for this "towmond" (12-month);

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair,

Whene'er I foregather wi' Sorrow and Care,

I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang,

Wi' a cog o' guid swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome Thought;

But man is a sodger, and life is a faught:

My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,

And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch daur touch.

A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa',

A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a':

When at the blythe end o' our journey at last,

Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past!

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way;

Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae:

Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain,

My warst word is:- "Welcome, and welcome again!"

Happy New Year!

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/04/skeleton-mosaic-turkey/

Scrolling down that same page, I saw a link to this other interesting article!