Epicureans implicitly understood the core contention of positive psychology, as articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life... People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy."
But, because consciousness does not float free of body, optimal experience is not entirely subject to thought-control. We must attend not merely to ideas, to be happy, but to the health and maintenance of our organism. Sustainable happiness is the goal, and the time we seek to optimize is all too fleeting. It's not that we're ensconced in our bodies, awaiting release and a more ethereal shot at eternal happiness. For the epicurean, we are our bodies. We've got to get it while we can.
We won't all get it, though, in the same way. "There must be forms and degrees of consciousness that are only somewhat or hardly at all like mine," which means that other species and other individuals of our species will attain optimal experience differently. My sources of flow may not all be yours. We must each delight in our own unique springs, as well as in those we share. That's what makes social interchange so endlessly engaging and instructive.
Epicureans value social equality and freedom, but still have much to learn from one another. We still run the rat race, most of us, "consuming our lives in groundless cares."
"If God didn't want some particular person to be president..." There's reason enough, says the epicurean, to doubt the gods' interest in our politics. We're on our own.
Some things to talk about: what is the human spirit? Can we reclaim that word from the supernaturalists? Or should we just drop it?
Is there more to "soul" (or epicurean "soul atoms") than patterns of information? (See Michael Shermer's "The Soul of Science"... and see the film "Her")
According to Greek legend, Poseidon’s son Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the monster Minotaur. After his triumphant return to Athens, his ship was preserved as a memorial. As the vessel aged, decaying planks were replaced with new ones; eventually, all the original timber was replaced. Philosophers know the story of Theseus’s ship as a classic example of the problem of identity. What was the true identity of the ship, the shape or the wood?
A more contemporary example may be found in the form of my first car, a 1966 Ford Mustang with a 289-cubic-inch engine and a speedometer that pegged at 140 m.p.h. As a young man high in testosterone but low in self-control, by the time I sold the car 15 years later there was hardly an original part on it. Nevertheless, my “1966” Mustang was now considered a classic, and I netted a tidy profit. Like Theseus’s ship, its essence — its “Mustangness” — was intact.
The analogy holds for human identity. The atoms in my brain and body today are not the same ones I had when I was born. Nevertheless, the patterns of information coded in my DNA and in my neural memories are still those of Michael Shermer. The human essence, the soul, is more than a pile of parts — it is a pattern of information.
As far as we know, there is no way for that pattern to last longer than several decades, a century or so at most. So until a technology can copy a human pattern into a more durable medium (silicon chips perhaps?), it appears that when we die our pattern is lost. Scientific skepticism suggests that there is no afterlife, and religion requires a leap of faith greater than many of us wish to make.
"Pursuing Happiness," in William James's "Springs of Delight"...
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