Posts by Don

I hesitated to weigh in on this thread, but let's dive in...

Quote from Cassius

the argument equating happiness with materialism and that consumerism leads to unhappiness, etc.

Quote from Kalosyni

The word "happiness" needs to be defined...because it is both the transitory feeling that arises when human needs are met/fulfilled, and also the feeling of being okay with (or satisfied with) how one's life is unfolding.

Quote from Cassius

I would say that the decision to seek "meaning" rather than happiness is directly related to buying in, or being browbeaten, into thinking that pleasure and happiness are disreputable goals.

These are exactly the reasons I personally dislike using the word "happiness" itself. In modern Western culture, this is what happiness means for most people: a fizzy, effervescent quality that many people see as inherently short-lived. "Are you happy?" means, it seems to me, to most people to convey a bubbly, giddy feeling. Of course, you're not feeling like that all the time. To recalibrate people's idea of "being happy," I would prefer using a different word for the overall direction of one's life. This sentence from a paper available through the National Library of Medicine illustrates my point:

the term “happiness” has been used to refer to momentary assessments of affect as well as to overall life evaluations. This absence of precision precludes understanding of the complexities known to coexist. For example, a person who is engaged in stressful or difficult activities, such as working toward an education or a job promotion, may find substantial meaning or satisfaction with life overall; a person who is generally suffering or lacking hope may experience temporary reprieve in an enjoyable moment.

Although it sounds clinical, "subjective well-being" (which I would maintain is a decent translation of ancient Greek eudaimonia) is a better word/phrase to use. I realize it's not going to catch on, but SWB is a common acronym for it in the academic literature now it seems. Again, I'm not advocating replacing "happiness" with SWB, but that's one of the reasons I tend to use well-being and not happiness when this comes up.

Quote from SillyApe

"meaning" is just a tool for the increase of our pleasure and the decrease of our pain... Though I understand where it comes from, I still think this is not a helpful tool.

That's pretty well put.

"Meaning" means many things to many different people. To me, it has the same problems as "happiness." "Meaning" can mean almost anything you want it to mean. It expands to fill any semantic field you want. "Happiness" is transitory and tied to materialistic culture; I'll just say "I live for meaning." No, you're just transposing one for the other.

I think we are all striving for "subjective well-being," a sense of satisfaction with our lives, a feeling that we're headed in the right direction, even though we will, of course, be faced with pain, hardship, loss, and so on, but inwardly we can face those things within an overall disposition of mental fortitude and satisfaction with the way we live and the way we decide to approach life. If I'm going to dedicate myself to the idea that "the wise man has more reasons for joy than vexation" that's a choice I make to maintain my "subjective well-being." I will face the day looking for moments of joy, pleasure, kindness, and reasons to have a positive affect and approach to life *without* any Pollyanna-rose-colored-glasses. I won't be a pushover or a milquetoast doormat. But I will also not be a sad sack with a dark cloud hanging over my head my whole life.

"The Universe" does not imbue our lives with "purpose" or "meaning." There is no "ultimate meaning." Your "life's purpose" is not "revealed" to you. If one wants their life to have "meaning," that's self-imposed. And, to me, "meaning" is simply that which gives you pleasure and a sense of well-being in your own life. Your purpose and meaning may hold no meaning for me. We can't tell anyone "your purpose is wrong" or "you're pursuing the wrong meaning to life."

Monty Python's film The Meaning of Life ends with this: "It's nothing very special, really. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

I think I've mentioned this before in this thread, but to update:

The apparent innate ability in psychological experiments of babies and animals to identify fairness seems to me to be connected with the idea that there is a prolepsis of justice or just behavior.

PD31 through PD33 have always seemed to me to emphasize the fact that the book Principal Doctrines was not divided into tidy "sayings" but rather topical sections. 31-33 to me have always read as one unit (Saint-Andre translation with my own edits):

31. Natural justice is a covenant for mutual benefit, to neither willfully harm one another nor to be willfully harmed. With regard to those animals that do not have the power of making a covenant to neither harm one another nor to be harmed, there is neither justice nor injustice; similarly for those peoples who have neither the power nor the desire of making a covenant to not harm one another or be harmed. Justice does not exist in itself; instead, it is always a compact to not harm one another nor to be harmed, which is agreed upon by those who gather together at some time and place.

τὸ τῆς φύσεως δίκαιόν ἐστι σύμβολον τοῦ συμφέροντος εἰς τὸ μὴ βλάπτειν ἀλλήλους μηδὲ βλάπτεσθαι. ὅσα τῶν ζῴων μὴ ἐδύνατο συνθήκας ποιεῖσθαι τὰς ὑπὲρ τοῦ μὴ βλάπτειν ἄλληλα μηδὲ βλάπτεσθαι, πρὸς ταῦτα οὐθὲν ἦν δίκαιον οὐδὲ ἄδικον· ὡσαύτως δὲ καὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν ὅσα μὴ ἐδύνατο ἢ μὴ ἐβούλετο τὰς συνθήκας ποιεῖσθαι τὰς ὑπὲρ τοῦ μὴ βλάπτειν μηδὲ βλάπτεσθαι. οὐκ ἦν τι καθʼ ἑαυτὸ δικαιοσύνη, ἀλλʼ ἐν ταῖς μετʼ ἀλλήλων συστροφαῖς καθʼ ὁπηλίκους δήποτε ἀεὶ τόπους συνθήκη τις ὑπὲρ τοῦ μὴ βλάπτειν ἢ βλάπτεσθαι.

To me, there is an inherent connotation of willful harm being done to or by people. I realize that's maybe common sense but Epicurus is not saying we should never come to harm, either by chance or accident or neglect or something else. Δίκαιος to me conveys the need for intentionality by either party involved within a social context. If a wild animal attacks you, there is no justice or injustice. If you are hurt in a hurricane, there is no justice or injustice. However, if a person lies in wait or plots hurting you and carries that out, that's when Justice can be brought into the discussion.

As I understand, both Lucretius and Epicurus believed that true, correct understanding of the gods *was* pietas / εὐσέβεια. Does it seem Lucretius was more concerned with pietas than religio, the inward correct understanding than the outward visible practices? If the inside was correct, the practices could reflect that inward understanding.

Here's pietas:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=la&inContent=true&q=pietas&doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0130&expand=yes

I did a quick search in Perseus' Latin Lucretius and found 11 instances of religio:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=la&inContent=true&q=religio&doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0130&expand=yes

However, I found no results, zero, when searching superstitio! I tried a couple permutations and nothing.

Luke Ranieri's latest video on Classical Attic pronunciation. A great intro to pronouncing ancient Greek words.

Quote from Root304

Dopamine and Endorphin systems

I continue to recommend the book Dopamine Nation for some interesting insights:

Post

Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke

I just finished listening to Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke and would recommend it for anyone trying to understand the mechanism of pleasure in the brain and its role in addictive behavior.

https://www.annalembke.com/

I had heard a podcast with the author and, at first, thought the focus on addiction was too narrow. But I was wrong. While some of the patients discussed in the book (with their informed consent!) are difficult to hear/read, Lembke does an excellent job in showing the wide range…

Don

January 4, 2022 at 10:13 AM

Quote from Cassius

because of the desirability of life

As always, I think the original text brings even greater nuance to this. Living is not just desirable, it is to be welcomed! The word used there is:

ἀσπαστός (aspastós) = welcome (whose arrival is a cause of joy), a thing for which to be grateful

PS. It is directly related to the verb ἀσπάζομαι (aspázomai)

• to welcome kindly, bid welcome, greet
• to kiss, embrace, caress
• (of things) to follow eagerly, cleave to
• to be glad that

Possibly related to a verb meaning to draw toward oneself.

An addendum I'd add to my post #5 above is:

Positive feelings (ie, pleasure) can be categorized as "positive" because they are conducive, favorable, helpful, or beneficial to life or living.

Negative feelings (ie, pain) can be categorized as "negative" because they are unfavorable, unhelpful, detrimental, contrary to, or damaging to life or living.

Negative feelings are inevitable for living, mortal beings and those feelings are valuable by signaling what to avoid or flee from. But we need not embrace or glorify them. And yes, some negative feeling/pain is sometimes necessary for achieving positive feelings/pleasure by one's future self. My go to example is exercise. Those who claim to glorify pain as in "no pain, no gain" are actually saying that they will willingly experience pain but you know what... They leave out the gain, which is taking pleasure in the results of their action!

Here's my take:

• You are alive.
• As an alive being, you *will* have a reaction to every stimulus that interacts with you. You can't not have a reaction. You can't not *feel* something.
• Those reactions or feelings will be either positive or negative. Positive feelings we call pleasure. Negative feelings we call pain.
• That is why, while we're alive, we feel pleasure or pain. There is no "neutral" feeling.
• Sometimes the pleasure will be slight, sometimes intense. Same with pain. But you're still feeling something.
• So, where there is no pain there is pleasure. And vice versa.
• So The Absence of Pain Is Pleasure; The Absence of Pleasure is Pain.

I am literally in the middle of going through the fragments and texts and putting together a list of all the foods that the Epicureans were said to "limit" themselves. Lentil stew, anyone?

The reason I post here is the word Οἰνίδιον "small wine, poor wine" from Diogenes Laertius X.11

"at all events they were content with half a pint of thin wine"

The -ιδιον is a diminutive. Personally, it would make sense to me if this referred to young wine, low in alcohol, like "small beer."

Quote from Cassius

even as you bore down to lower levels there's still "something" there(?)

That's been my perspective all along. There is never nothing. There's always something - in the widest sense - out of which things - in the widest sense - arise.

The gate to the garden is always open, Eric. Stop back anytime!

Good point

For me, whether I'm technically correct or not, I've been using sophistry to mean someone, or an argument that, uses clever unnecessarily complex language to sound smarter and more erudite than they actually are. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bs."

One issue I see in this discussion is "What do you* mean by 'know'?"

* btw "You" in the general sense, not you specifically.

Quote from Cassius

The problem is that of coming to grips with whether it is ever possible to "know" anything

There are various senses of that word "know" so I would be curious to know (LOL) what word Plato used specifically. For example:

I know I'm alive

I know where I am

I know 2+2=4

I know the capital of the US is Washington DC

I know the universe was in a hot dense state at one point

And so on

I freely confess I haven't read Plato's Meno, but glancing at the ol' Wikipedia article, this made me LOL:

Quote from Meno article on WP

Meno's theme is also dealt with in the dialogue Protagoras, where Plato ultimately has Socrates arrive at the opposite conclusion: virtue can be taught. Likewise, while in Protagoras knowledge is uncompromisingly this-worldly, in Meno the theory of recollection points to a link between knowledge and eternal truths.

So can Plato be taken seriously if he comes to opposite opinions? I'm all for reconsidering opinions and beliefs in light of new evidence, but how can there be a "Meno problem" if even its author provides multiple answers?

Quote

Socrates rephrases the question, which has come to be the canonical statement of the paradox:

[A] man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.

— translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1871

There's the old, I believe, Weinberger quote about:

• Known knowns
• Known unknowns
• Unknown unknowns

We can investigate "known unknowns" through prior experience. Unknown unknowns can eventually come to light as we experience more. We can investigate unfamiliar phenomena, test, observe, etc. via knowledge we have. "Meno" isn't really a problem unless one defines terms in such a way as to create a problem. Or so it seems to me.

PS. And when we "learn" something, we're not recollecting from a past life. We build on experience and knowledge that we've acquired or that we have a genetic predisposition for. Take language. Babies have an innate ability to make sounds, them to imitate sounds or communicative gestures (I always remember video of the baby with deaf parents inserting their hand, open close open close, "babbling" in sign language), then we learn how to formally put sounds and words and sentences together. That's just one example, but I believe at least an illustrative one.

Quote from Pacatus

Don

I admit I was not responding to Chalmers per se. Just to the notion that there are no such “hard questions” (or that they are readily answerable by our current understandings of neurobiology). For the rest, my post – and the example of intentionality – stands. (Do I need to reaffirm that I don't ascribe to any "supernaturalism"?)

Fully, completely, and totally agree there are some really difficult, hard questions to answer about how the world works! Zero argument there. Including, of course, in neuroscience. But like Alexander the Oraclemonger's snake god, I'm sure, in the end, there's a rational physical explanation for them... It just might take awhile longer to find the explanation to topics like intentionality, for example.

And you're officially on record for anti-supernaturalism Of that, I never doubted. and, mea culpa, if my post came off as combative. Certainly not my intention

Quote from Cassius

Along the lines of the Asimov quote that Pacatus listed, I would not admit that Epicurus was "wrong" at all. Incomplete as to details, yes, but that does not make the overall theory "wrong." We don't need the details nearly as often as we need the overall outline.

Hmmm... I don't know about this: "not 'wrong' at all"? Maybe in broad outline, as in physical processes were at work in the eidola theory, it was not wrong. I don't think calling eidola theory "incomplete" is even the way to express it. It's not like we've added to more details about the eidola and how they're produced. I would contend that we ignore details at our peril. The sound waves and chemical compounds and photons and particles and so on that lead to sensation are not eidola. Our minds are not impacted by subtle eidola, engraving channels in the subtle atoms of our psykhē.

I give credit to Epicurus for positing a step on the way to our incomplete but fuller understanding.

I give credit to Epicurus for staying firm on physical material processes of sensation.

I agree on all that and its importance in the evolution of understanding how things work.

So, if you're saying that the "high-level summary of the details" is that "sensation and consciousness is the result of knowable physical processes" then, okay, that's not wrong. But as to whether I'm going think of my thoughts as the result of eidola impacting my psykhē or whether they're electrical neural activity with input from other internal and external stimuli, I'm taking the latter.

Quote from Cassius

The conceptual framework of particles striking our senses, and then the body processing them in natural logical ways toward conclusions we can be confident about, is the key.

I see that as so broad though that I ask "Could that just as easily correspond to Plato's flashlight/emission model of vision?"

Quote from Cassius

my reasoning her is based on the premise that we are looking to build Epicureans who can live happily

Agreed, but Epicurus also said "Hence, since such a course is of service to all who take up natural science, I, who devote to the subject my continuous energy and reap the calm enjoyment of a life like this, have prepared for you just such an epitome and manual of the doctrines as a whole." So, it seems to me he felt the broad outline was important to keep in mind at all times, but investigating how the world worked with "continuous energy" gives one the confidence to have "calm enjoyment of life."

Quote from Pacatus

I don’t think that one has to go to some supernatural/mystical “woo” to recognize that there are hard questions of consciousness – which is probably worth a thread of its own. For example: intentionality.

Just to be clear: I don't think answering the "how" consciousness is easy. It's a "hard problem." But I understand Chalmers as saying there's something"more" in addition to neurons and the brain and body to account for it. That's what I meant by woo. I come down on the late Daniel Dennett side (mostly) when it comes to looking for nonphysical mechanisms (ie, there's not any/it's all physical/material stuff). I fully admit I could be wrong about Chalmers, but that's the direction I saw him heading in in what I've seen or read.

Quote from Cassius

As I see it, the important issue is whether the mind and the sense work through material / bodily means or through some other means. We aren't a biochemistry group, and it would be as unproductive for us to get into the details of biochemistry as it would be to get into the latest discussions of particle physics.

Oh, I wouldn't suggest we become a biochemistry or particle physics forum; however, we've had any number of threads on neuroscience and physics. I don't advocate getting into the weeds of any specific science, but I think we have to keep distinct the ancient theories and the current theories (as in "a formal statement of the rules on which a subject of study is based or of ideas that are suggested to explain a fact or event or, more generally, an opinion or explanation; as in evolutionary theory" and NOT "it's just a theory").

Quote from Cassius

Epicurus' general approach remains perfectly valid...

Absolutely. I will be the first to contend that there is a through-line from Epicurus to modern scientific theories in that ALL are based on the truth of there being a material, physical universe *and* the laws governing said physical universe are knowable *and* there's no mystical, supernatural woo underlying the universe.

Quote from Cassius

But simply saying that it is sophistry doesn't persuade the legions of normal people outside this group who need to be provided both an explanation as to why it is sophistry and an alternative that makes sense from an Epicurean point of view.

So what's your solution to this problem other than to point out the natural, material basis for sensations? I fully realize there's Chalmer's supposed "hard problem" of consciousness where he seems to want to smuggle in supernatural or mystical bases for consciousness. I still think consciousness is just the sum total of our physical sensations, neurons, gut bacteria, and what not working in concert. Sure, it's complex!! But, in the end, we're still just physical beings sensing a physical world just trying to get through the day.

And I agree with Asimov's spectrum of "wrongness." BUT while eidola were less wrong than Plato's flashlight idea of sensation, it still was more wrong than our current understanding. There's nothing "wrong" with that, and I find it interesting to delve into how Epicurus came up with that approach. BUT we also need to understand why it was wrong, how it was wrong, and be humble enough to know how far we STILL have to go to understand how the universe works on all levels.

I'm going to start my response/rebuttal/reaction by saying that we do not sense things through the impact of eidola on our sense organs. Our bodies - all bodies - are not casting off "films of atoms" that travel through space. Yes, our eyes interact with photons. Our noses interact with molecules in the air. Our tongues interact with chemicals. And so on. Is it interesting to understand how Epicurus was reacting to his contemporaries' philosophical ideas? Sure. No argument there. However, Epicurus called his students to study nature and "how things work" in the material world. On that track, I think it behooves Epicureans living in the 21st century to understand how sensations and the brain work to their best of our ability in the here and now as well.

Quote from Cassius

Also, I think we can consider that concepts like "good," or "the good" or "the highest good" or "pleasure" (when viewed as a concept) or " the highest pleasure," or "gods" are, like virtue, good examples of the issue.

Determining what these things at the start of our quest is not an easy thing.

Those are different concepts from my understanding:

"good" is used by Epicurus to simply mean "that which brings pleasure." There is no other meter by which to determine "good" or "bad" other than the feelings of pleasure and pain.

"the good" or "the highest good" is simply "that to which all other actions/things point." Why do we do anything? We do it for our pleasure. Whether one agrees with this statement or not is irrelevant, because I have come to believe that it is simply a statement of fact. At the end of all questions of "Why?" the final answer is going to be "because it makes me feel pleasure." Substitute "satisfaction, well-being, etc." as the penultimate answer before saying "pleasure" but I believe that's the final answer you're going to have to give if one truthfully and honestly answers the question.

The "zarkoflex" example in the first video does nothing to alleviate my contention that this is all sophistry. If I tell you to go out into the world and find a lehmä, you won't know what that is. Where do I look? As the speaker said, maybe you google it. Maybe it doesn't come up. You keep looking. Eventually, you find out its the Finnish word for "cow." So you go to the farmer's field and point to the lehmä. You had heard about cows and seen cows and pictures of cows, you just didn't know the word lehmä. Same with a zarkoflex. If it exists in the world, it can still exist without your knowing the word for it.

This seems to be one reason Epicurus was teaching that we need to look at the most basic definition of things and why he didn't like Socrates'/Plato's obfuscation and redefining terms willy-nilly.

More later....