Posts by Don

See also

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, πίστις

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, π , πισσόχριστος , πίστ-ωμα

Quote from Cassius

"Trust" or "Faith" implies an object which we are trusting or having faith in. As general term in an Epicurean context, what would be that object?

Nature as in "the way things are."

In some contexts like Epicurus, I'd prefer "trust" instead of "faith" to get away from other religious contexts.

πῐ́στῐς • (pĭ́stĭs) f (genitive πῐ́στεως or πῐ́στῐος); third declension

trust in others, faith

belief in a higher power, faith

the state of being persuaded of something: belief, confidence, assurance

trust in a commercial sense: credit

faithfulness, honesty, trustworthiness, fidelity

that which gives assurance: treaty, oath, guarantee

means of persuasion: argument, proof

that which is entrusted

AI reveals new details about a famous Latin inscription

An analysis of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti using AI reveals its legal tone and imperial messaging, offering new insights missed by historians.

www.sciencenews.org

Okay, now this seems to be a positive use of AI in research. From the opening paragraphs:

Quote

Researchers used an AI system called Aeneas to analyze the supposedly autobiographical inscription, which translates to “Deeds of the Divine Augustus.” When compared with other Latin texts, the RGDA inscription (as it is known) shares subtle language parallels with Roman legal documents and reflects “imperial political discourse,” or messaging focused on maintaining imperial power — an insight not previously noted by human historians, researchers report July 23 in Nature.

Quote from Rolf

All in all, rather unsettling.

Took the words right out of my mouth ... so to speak (pun unintentionally intended now that I wrote that )

Okay, one last post for now on this, directly relating AI to dangerous skepticism (which we rightly rail against here on the forum):

Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months

What happens when you can't trust photos, videos, text, or the entire web?

open.substack.com

This Substack article gets at why I feel the way I do about AI's use in art and creative endeavors:

Death of Illustration by a Thousand Prompts

How Skechers and other brands are napalming the creative playing field—one terrible AI ad at a time.

open.substack.com

Quote

...like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a Stradivarius because they heard you can make music with a kazoo.

...

We're not just automating away individual careers. We're dismantling the entire pipeline that creates the next generation of visual storytellers.

Quote from kochiekoch

Obviously, none of the stuff is going to go away,

I'm not so sure. The trajectory of investment vs real results doesn't seem sustainable over the long haul. Return on investment for these companies seems illusory at best, bordering on fraudulent.

To bring this back to the topic of the forum, I don't contend that people, including those of us on this forum, get pleasure from playing with these software tools or seeing/hearing the results of prompts.

I do contend that Epicurean philosophy is not pleasure at all costs. These tools, for me, are starting to fall under the "pleasures of the profligate" in some ways. They're like a quick hit that feeds on itself and leaves us wanting more. If I type this prompt I get this. What if I change this? What happens if I add another detail? For business needed "creative work ," why pay humans to create things that speak to other humans? That's expensive! Save £€¥$ and use the free software or subscribe for cheap. And meanwhile the AI dutifully responds again and again and again ad infinitum until all the electricity is being sucked dry.

Meanwhile human artists and poets and writers and cartoonists and musicians are either picking crops to live or are marginalized and paid as niche artisanal oddities to perform for the ultra-rich in some dystopian gated community.

There's also the implication of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Humans remain intrigued and seduced by "magic," and AI can appear magical. However, it's Alexander the Oracle Monger's Snake God all over again.

Quote from Pacatus

Quote from Don

Just tried it! It works.

I tried, and it didn't work with the " " around the -ai, but did without them.

Oh! Sorry for the confusion! I just used the quotes to set that off as a set phase. I didn't use the " " in my search either.

This discussion (and it's a good one!! Thanks to whomever it was that got this rolling!!) reminds me of the discussions we've had over the experience machine (which I believe was mentioned earlier?).

My primary reason for saying that one should not hook themselves up to the experience machine is the source of pleasures change from experienced to induced.

My understanding is that Epicurus said "All sensations are true" in that their source is natural and coming from some existing thing in the universe. There is a reality beyond our minds and bodies. We experience sensations because we are alive in a material world which has an effect on us.

The experience machine renders us a passive inert participant in someone else's idea of what pleasure is. We are at the mercy of the manufacturer and repairman of Experience Machine LLC.

Yes, our "experiences" would be "real" to us but only in the sense that a dream or hallucination is real. There would be no external stimuli coming from a real external universe. We would be cut off from the universe, encased in the shell (or wires or hoses, pick your mechanism) of the experience machine. I don't believe, from my understanding of Epicurean philosophy, that Epicurus would endorse a life of living in a dream or an hallucination. All our friends would be figments of our imagination. All our pleasures would be fake. Our life would be a pale reflection of what it could be.

Epicurean philosophy is not pleasure at any cost; it is taking responsible for moving one's life - navigating one's little boat - using pleasure as your North Star, weathering the storms through which the Star can be seen through the clouds and lightning, and steering one's own course. It does not mean abdicating one's pleasure to someone or something (eg, AI) else.

Quote from Cassius

1. Don't we have to be certain that *all* AI generated pleasure is going to harm us more than help us in order to reach that conclusion?
2. Because certainly there are *some* major benefits to AI or else it would not be "taking the world by storm."

Those are two very different statements.

1. "*all* AI generated pleasure" - I'm not sure what you mean by this. The "pleasures" "generated" via AI go beyond what we're primarily discussing in this thread. I'm particularly concerned about the generation of artwork - prose and image - by AI algorithms. Machines are not "creative." They're "generative," in that they will indeed generate images and text but there is no creativity involves. It is a concrete process governed by an algorithm put in place by programmers (even if one says an AI engine "learns" from its large language model or "training" data. The learning is programmed into the machine.

There are benefits to AI in the sense of analyzing medical data, for example:

How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping Medical Imaging Technology: A Survey of Innovations and Applications - PMC

AI might also help with other problems for which time constraints preclude humans from tackling (we're mortal beings... we can't crunch numbers 24/7 for days at a time).

Granted, this Big Data issue has some dark underbelly, too, but it's being used as a tool; not as an end in itself. People are using AI to generate music, prose, artwork, as ends in themselves, many times as short cuts to $$$. The AI slop that has infected Amazon is staggering:

Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon

Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There's little they can do to rein in the rip-offs.

www.wired.com

So, my answer to your "Don't we have to be certain that *all* AI generated pleasure is going to harm us more than help us in order to reach that conclusion?" would be that we have to be wary of AI's different aspects and usages and how it is being used to assess the harm/help.

2. "taking the world by storm." - One of the reasons that AI is "taking the world by storm" is due to hype, overselling, overpromising, underperforming, and "lather, rinse, repeat." AI companies - and AI executives - are precarious in many ways and appear, to what I've read, to engage in obfuscation and misdirection to appear smarter than they are. If you really listen to what some of these AI "geniuses" are saying... they're not saying anything. It's all buzzwords and empty rhetoric. And people don't want to say "the emperor has no clothes" so they nod their heads and the ruse goes on.

Why 75% Of Businesses Aren’t Seeing ROI From AI Yet

Also in the Forbes CIO newsletter: DeepSeek throws a grenade into the AI space, AI looms large in Microsoft And Meta earnings, AI moves Doomsday Clock closer…

www.forbes.com

And the Better Offline podcast gives an unfiltered no-holds-barred look at what's going on in the tech sector: https://www.youtube.com/@BetterOfflinePod

So, in conclusion, I'm mostly okay with using AI as a tool to do what humans find impossible or highly onerous to do (e.g., crunching massive data). As for art, I want my art to be created by feeling, mortal humans with real emotions and real skills and real creativity.

Quote from Pacatus

One of the contributors wrote that beginning Google searches by typing “-ai” eliminates the AI overview feature.

Just tried it! It works. KUDOS to you, Pacatus !! I'll be sharing this little tip.

Maybe some temporal context might help?
This line from the letter in question (1.2.55) was written (per Wikipedia for now) :

Quote

Epistularum liber primus (First Book of Letters) is the seventh work by Horace, published in the year 20 BC. This book consists of 20 Epistles.

Horace's famous "Epicuri de grege porcum" appears in an epistle to Albius Tibullus (1.4.12-16) written around the same time (apparently) as the letter in question, in fact it's only two letters later in Book 1.

I don't have time right now, but it might be instructive to read the first few letters in Book 1:

The Project Gutenberg eBook of THE WORKS OF HORACE, by C. Smart, A.M..

to see what Epicurean themes - if any - jump out and whether Horace is providing his own take on the philosophy (whether or not he's a pig in the herd) or not.

Quote from Cassius

And if in fact someone posted a poem that so appealed to you that you in fact found it to be one of the most enjoyable poetic experiences of your life to read it, would you then wish that you had never read it if you found out later it had been generated by AI?

Quote from Pacatus

And I am not saying that I couldn’t be fooled by a sufficiently “aesthetic” AI – but that would just make me sad and angry. Art, like passion, is a human affair.

Quote from Cassius

the limitations of hypotheticals

This isn't a hypothetical. There are entirely AI-generated bands, artwork, animation, texts including poetry right now that are fooling people or "passing the Turing Test" if you will. We are well beyond hypotheticals at this point.

Quote from Cassius

resuming that the poem did in fact cause me great enjoyment and that I could continue to read the poem in the future with enjoyment and with no necessary harmful effects, I would not wish not to have had the experience.

I don't doubt you could get pleasure from the words, but the words are literally meaningless to the software that composed them. The poem would be nothing more than a glorified random word generator spewing out a line of words that the algorithm decided were likely to be adjacent to each other given a prompt. There is no - ZERO - human emotion, feeling, creativity (other than the clever programmers) that went into those words that you find pleasurable to read. There's nothing behind the poem's expression. It's a Potemkin village of a poem. There's no there there.

Now, if you want to compare it to taking pleasure in a sunset that was unplanned and due to random fluctuations in the atmosphere... okay? In relation to that AI poem, you - the reader - are imbuing that poem with meaning. The "author" of the poem is NOT trying to communicate their feeling to you. The AI poem is a Rorschach Test. A random inkblot that you can look at and say "that looks like a bee resting on a flower" or read a poem and say "Oh, this reminds me of a day I spent in the sunshine." YOU are imbuing algorithmically-selected words with meaning. Granted, we do SOME of this with all poetry, but the author has an intention of what they wrote if it's a human author.

Quote from kochiekoch

I think the ethical problem here is full disclosure. If you are given the information that the game is CGI, you know what you're getting and you can choose not to view it.

Are you trusting an AI summary in your search??

Quote from Cassius

Here's the first search results:

Ya gotta assess the individual search result links.

Quote from Cassius

this phrase is derived from his writings, specifically from his "Epistles" (Book I, Epistle II, line 55).

The line is from the Letters, but that Perseus link doesn't go to Horace's Letters.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere:

The Project Gutenberg eBook of THE WORKS OF HORACE, by C. Smart, A.M..

Here's the context:

Quote

Money is sought, and a wife fruitful in bearing children, and wild woodlands are reclaimed by the plow. [To what end all this?] He, that has got a competency, let him wish for no more. Not a house and farm, nor a heap of brass and gold, can remove fevers from the body of their sick master, or cares from his mind. The possessor must be well, if he thinks of enjoying the things which he has accumulated. To him that is a slave to desire or to fear, house and estate do just as much good as paintings to a sore-eyed person, fomentations to the gout, music to ears afflicted with collected matter. Unless the vessel be sweet, whatever you pour into it turns sour. Despise pleasures, pleasure bought with pain is hurtful. The covetous man is ever in want; set a certain limit to your wishes. The envious person wastes at the thriving condition of another: Sicilian tyrants never invented a greater torment than envy. He who will not curb his passion, will wish that undone which his grief and resentment suggested, while he violently plies his revenge with unsated rancor. Rage is a short madness. Rule your passion, which commands, if it do not obey; do you restrain it with a bridle, and with fetters. The groom forms the docile horse, while his neck is yet tender, to go the way which his rider directs him: the young hound, from the time that he barked at the deer's skin in the hall, campaigns it in the woods. Now, while you are young, with an untainted mind Imbibe instruction: now apply yourself to the best [masters of morality]. A cask will long preserve the flavor, with which when new it was once impregnated. But if you lag behind, or vigorously push on before, I neither wait for the loiterer, nor strive to overtake those that precede me.

Here's the Latin from Wikisource: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistulae…ius)/Liber_I/II

Oh, and it's Sperne voluptates; nocet empta dolore voluptas, and not speme?

Why You Should Never Use AI Under Any Circumstances for Any Reason No Matter What

We’re in the midst of what Chomba Bupe calls “Slopageddon,” a reference to the rapidly proliferating heap of “AI slop” that’s clogging up the Internet.

open.substack.com

I saw this article on my Substack feed and, initially starting to read thought, this might be good to share at the forum but it's not specifically applicable. Then I got to this section...

Quote

I’m reminded here of myriad reports of people believing that they’ve made their AI conscious or self-aware, and that they’re now able to communicate with angels or even God through it....

This is a phenomenon that, I think, not many of us in the field of AI ethics really anticipated....

here we have AI systems privately convincing people that their delusions and/or perceived communions with supernatural deities are real (or really happening).

So, yeah, AI slop is infecting every aspect of human experience. It's evangelists are trying to convince the rest of us to join their delusional fantasies and ignore the evidence of our senses. That seems directly on point for this forum after all.

PS. I am more than happy to have this deleted or delete it myself if this veers too political for the forum.

You're very kind, Bryan. Thanks for reminding me the fun one can have digging into these issues! I may her back into the mix. There's still a number of VSs that need looked at.

Quote from Cassius

That's because if we start and stop with that letter we are taking Epicurus' words out of context, and not accounting for the circumstance that Epicurus was writing for students who wanted summaries to make things easier to remember, but who were otherwise very familiar and had intimate access to his full views.

That's one reason I wrote My translation and commentary of that letter, to provide some context, both historically and philosophically. I need to give that a thorough reread and maybe do an updated edition. It's been a few years now.

Honestly, it would probably be more accurate for Alexa to be masquerading as an Epicurean student but actually to be listening to only report back EVERYTHING to its Stoic or Academic manufacturers so the info can be used against the Garden.

The more I learn about AI in all its nefarious energy-hogging consumer-facing forms, the more I loathe it. Use it for big data analysis or other academic applications, but stop shoehorning it into everything. Just one example: Google's AI summaries at the top of ALL my searches are intrusive and far and away useless the large majority of the time. I still use Google, but I'm rapidly being more likely to use other search engines for this exact reason.

Any novelty it did have has worn off for me.

Quote from Rolf

antinatalists want to minimise pain

I interpreted it that they want to minimize existence. A non-existent thing/entity/person cannot be said to "not experience pain." The "being" that is not born doesn't exist. Less beings in the world doesn't alleviate the pain experienced by the already existing beings.

Quote from Rolf

“throw the baby out with the bathwater”

I found your choice of metaphor directly on point. Well played!

Quote from Rolf

Besides, it’s not like Epicureanism is an inherently pro-natalist philosophy. Epicurus never told us to “be fruitful and multiply”. As far as I’m aware, it’s fairly neutral on the question of whether or not we should procreate.

Generally true. The philosophy doesn't take a pro or anti stance other than to value existence over non-existence and to evaluate whether to have children in light of acknowledgement of the pleasure and pain involved. It's a very subjective decision.

Not directly relevant to the natalist question, but at least Epicurus was genuinely concerned with the continued well-being of Metrodorus' children, enough to specifically address their care in his will.

I came across this article today:

The Case for Not Being Born

The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.

www.newyorker.com

I knew the term anti-natalism but never heard of Benatar or his work. But it struck me as diametrically opposed to Epicurean philosophy.

For example:

Quote

Like a boxer who has practiced his counters, Benatar has anticipated a range of objections. Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones. “For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good,” Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” he continued, because it suggests that “all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.”