Posts by Don

Good quotes, Kalosyni .

It literally just hit me as I read the Menoikeus quote that:

Quote from Letter to Menoeceus

[132] "For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit."

A pleasant life is produced by sober reasoning etc. Epicurus doesn't tell Menoikeus that the sum total of a pleasant life is sober reasoning etc but that such a life is produced by those things.

From my own commentary on that section:

Rearranging the Greek into a more "English order":

οὐδ᾽ ὅσα πολυτελὴς τράπεζα ἰχθύων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀλλὰ νήφων λογισμὸς φέρει τὸν ἡδὶν γεννᾷ βίον

"and nor does an extravagant table of fish and other things bring forth a sweet life but self-controlled reasoning [does bring forth a sweet life]."

Good quotes, Kalosyni .

It literally just hit me as I read the Menoikeus quote that:

Quote from Letter to Menoeceus

[132] "For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit."

A pleasant life is produced by sober reasoning etc. Epicurus doesn't tell Menoikeus that the sum total of a pleasant life is sober reasoning etc but that such a life is produced by those things.

From my own commentary on that section:

Rearranging the Greek into a more "English order":

οὐδ᾽ ὅσα πολυτελὴς τράπεζα ἰχθύων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀλλὰ νήφων λογισμὸς φέρει τὸν ἡδὶν γεννᾷ βίον

"and nor does an extravagant table of fish and other things bring forth a sweet life but self-controlled reasoning [does bring forth a sweet life]."

Quote from Lucian

Hermes. Unanimous verdict for Pleasure.

And the crowd goes wild!

At the risk of stating the obvious to everyone: Porch = Stoics (The "Stoics" held their teaching in the Stoa Poikile, the "Painted Porch" in Athens. Lucian's Greek text itself has Στοά Stoá )

Quote from Lucian

The question now before you is this: are men to live the lives of swine, wallowing in voluptuousness, with never a high or noble thought?

I had forgotten about this connection of Epicureans with pigs. So both Horace and Lucian make use of this. And Horace lived 65-8 BCE; Lucian 125 – after 180 CE... So that metaphor had/has some legs!

🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷

My vision of the jar is oil and water. They don't mix.

But we could add different colors of water, signifying different pleasures.

I'm just blue skying it.

This is great work, Bryan .

Quote from Bryan

We could draw a line from "subtlety" to "simple living" if it was otherwise established, but I do not see that it is.

The closest I have is in The Double Indictment (section 2) Lucian has Zeus complain "I myself have to do any number of tasks that are almost impossible to carry out on account of their subtlety (ὑπὸ λεπτότητος)" -- which may be enough to draw it all together and preserve the manuscripts reading.

I see LSJ cites Plato, Laws, in their definition, so maybe applicable:

Plato, Laws, section 646b

Ἀθηναῖος: τί δέ; σώματος, ὦ ἑταῖρε, εἰς πονηρίαν, λεπτότητά τε καὶ αἶσχος καὶ ἀδυναμίαν, θαυμάζοιμεν ἂν εἴ ποτέ τις

Athenian: And how about plunging into a bad state of body, such as leanness or ugliness or impotence? Should we be surprised if a man of his own free will ever

LSJ defines that use as "thinness, meagreness, of body"

Quote from Kalosyni

Quote from Don

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 )

I also found it unsettling.

It's sort of the uncanny valley transposed to the audio instead of video environment.

Uncanny valley - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Quote from kochiekoch

Epicurus beer!!!

Epi-Coors-us?

Quote from Eikadistes

I'd also add, the Canon.

Agreed.

I'd just add that we trust the Canon because, as a foundation, we have confidence that we live in a material world governed by knowledge laws and not capricious supernatural entities.

Chicken and egg? Does trust in Nature come first or does trust in the Canon come first so we can have trust in Nature?

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.