Article: "Extraterrestrial Life May Look Nothing Like Life On Earth..." (and for our purposes, applying the article to "gods")

The framing of this article reminds me of the relevant section of the letter to Menoeceus.

The question: "How do you look for alien life when you don't know what alien life might look like?"

Could be transposed as: "How do you look for gods when you don't know what gods might look like?"

And it seems to me that the only answer to that question is to start with a "definition" stating the essential attributes of the thing you think you are looking for. The article doesn't focus on addressing those in the case of "alien life," but it seems to me that what Epicurus is doing in regard to gods: his starting point is to define them as living beings, blessed, and imperishable, and saying that we reach that conclusion based on prolepses (which I think most of us presume relates to "images"). There's a lot more to say than that, but the point of this post is only to point out that you can't even discuss something without stating a clear picture of what you're talking about, and that problem is as apparent today (in this article) as it would have been to Epicurus.

Quote

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like?

These questions are preoccupying astrobiologists, who are scientists who look for life beyond Earth. Astrobiologists have attempted to come up with universal rules that govern the emergence of complex physical and biological systems both on Earth and beyond.

I’m an astronomer who has written extensively about astrobiology. Through my research, I’ve learned that the most abundant form of extraterrestrial life is likely to be microbial, since single cells can form more readily than large organisms. But just in case there’s advanced alien life out there, I’m on the international advisory council for the group designing messages to send to those civilizations.

Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like?

www.space.com

You're certainly entitled to your personal opinion on this topic, Tau Phi, but it's my responsibility to the website readers to point out that Epicurus felt dramatically differently, and I think - and apparently every dedicated Epicurean in recorded history thought - for very good reason.

If your life is not disturbed by the issue of gods then you are fortunate, but that is not the case for most of the world throughout history. Epicurean philosophy is based largely on developing a proper view of divinity as a response to those problems and is a very legitimate response.

Quote from Kalosyni

There is nothing in Epicurean texts that says the gods are invisible.

Actually I think there is. It's pretty clear as I understand that texts that gods cannot be sensed through the five senses. Now if you want to call the "direct receipt of images by the brain" a sense then you can say that they can be sensed, but I think it's pretty clear that they are not visible to us. Perhaps that's one of the finer points of their being in the intermundia (very far away - too far to see them).

Quote from TauPhi

My point is, Epicureans should not engage in an attempt to actively seek a physical contact with their gods

Now if " PHYSICAL CONTACT" is the point you're making then we are in complete agreement, cause as I said to Kalosyni the texts are clear that they can't be seen or touched. But I read your comment as saying we should not "seek information" or "knowledge" about the gods. That would be directly contrary to core Epicurean views. I don't want to get too picky about language but let me go back and review the thread.

Here's the part i was responding to:

Quote from TauPhi

But the answer to your question about the hunt for gods, if those are Epicurean gods, is: "You don't." Epicurean gods do not interfere with human affairs. Whenever you find creatures that are living beings, blessed, and imperishable, you know for sure that those are not Epicurean gods. The act of finding them establishes interference, therefore whatever you have just found is definitely not Epicurean gods. Looking for such gods makes as much sense as trying to see an invisible elephant. If you see it, it's definitely not an invisible elephant.

So if you're clarifying that you mean don't "physically" hunt for them, then I'd agree, at least until we make further progress in space travel etc. But I read that as a dismissal of any concern about divinity whatsoever, and that position (don't concern yourself about gods at all) is simply not what Epicurus taught.

"The act of finding them establishes interference"

I can see where you might be coming from and I can see this being arguable in a limited context -- here on Earth --- but I don't think Epicurus would agree that there are truly hard and fast and definite limitations that prevent this from being so if we traveled through space.

If Epicurus had been asked to consider whether they could be sensed in some way after space travel (maybe he did like Lucian did, but we don't know) then I think he would have said that of course that would be conceivable. He said that there are infinite numbers worlds with life on them, some like and some unlike ours, and all his basic definition requires is that they be living, happy, and imperishable. All the rest about quasi-bodies and the like is pretty clearly labeled a derivative speculation based on reasoning which might or might not prove to be correct (as to size, shape, language, etc)

Quote from TauPhi

I am responding to your parallel of looking for extraterrestrial life to looking for Epicurean gods. I am talking about active, physical pursuit of finding life (and gods) in the universe, not about an abstract deliberation on their existence or non-existence.

We definitely disagree on that. People in the past who were not able to go to the stars were limited in their knowledge, but had no need for regret about it, because they could not. People in the future can go to the stars and the Epicurean theories of life on other worlds and even divinity will have even more practical meaning than it does today. And the very thought that we should restrict ourselves from exploring space and learning more about the universe is antithetical to Epicurus' emphasis on studying nature as the best way to live happily. The best way to learn more about nature and our place in it will be to go to the stars. Not everyone will want to or be able to do that, but the idea of arguing against the desirability of doing so - for those who wish to - would be against the positive and even combative spirit of the ancient Epicureans.

Quote from TauPhi

And again I have to disagree with this, taking the Epicurean perspective into consideration. It doesn't matter how much progress we make. Even if we have technology to be everywhere at the same time in the universe, Epicurean gods are off limit to humans. This is non-negotiable. Otherwise, the idea of such gods collapses entirely and Epicurus is proven dead wrong in this area of his philosophy.

Again, we disagree. The texts are not clear that they are by nature non-sensible to us for all time, only that they are in the intermundia and/or for whatever reason they are not something we sense EXCEPT through prolepsis, and Epicurus is labeling that as "clear." So we disagree on this aspect -- totally - in taking it to the conclusion that any other intpretation would "collapse" the philosophy.

You're going further even than the "idealists" would go in stating that it would be "impossible" to gain additional knowledge about divinity.

Quote from TauPhi

The first part is about non-gods. The second part is about gods. They don't mix.

Again, I think we're just in fundamental disagreement here because you are maintaining that it is inherently impossible to gain additional knowledge in the future (after space travel) than we have today, and I think that's a fundamentally flawed perspective. We'll learn much more in the future about everything as we travel out into space, including what forms life may take in which it lives happily and imperishably.

This discussion is exactly what I thought might occur and I am glad to have the opportunity to explore it.

The biggest hurdle in Epicurean philosophy is to take seriously that Epicurus was using important words in different ways than the majority use them.

Pleasure IS the absence of pain literally and fully in Epicurean philosophy, because the feelings are defined to be one of two - either pleasure or pain, with no middle or third option. But most people are like Cicero, and that choice of wording just goes past them like water off a duck's back. Like Cicero, they insist on equating pleasure with sensual stimulation alone, and they refuse to include within pleasure other positive experiences of life that don't include sensory stimulation, so they have to get that definition out of their minds if they are going to understand Epicurus' position better than Cicero did.

The same thing is going on with gods. I am not going to assert why any one individual thinks the way they do, but I *will* assert that most every living being on the earth today has been conditioned to thing that "gods" are supernatural, omniscient, omnipotent, and all the other baggage that goes along with monotheism.

Epicurus was clearly breaking from that and saying that should define godhood as ONLY being happy and imperishable . That's why he could talk about being gods among men and not seem ridiculous, because he didn't for a minute entertain that there is anything supernatural about being a god. Being "imperishable" is somewhat allegorical, but even there there is allegory in surrounding yourself with "immortal" things like friendship.

It's possible Tau Phi that you have a unique perspective that makes you impervious to concerns about divinity, and again if that is so I applaud you for it. But you are in a small minority of people on earth if you are , and it was Epicurus' view that it was not sufficient to say "supernatural gods do not exist."

His direction clearly seems to be, "Supernatural gods do not exist, but the idea of "divinity" is not crazy at all, and there is good reason that people think about it." There's lots and lots of speculation that can be had about images and prolepsis and "why" Epicurus thought that people have legitimate concerns about divinity, and that's the kind of thing that this forum is setup to do -- to explore what Epicurus taught and then apply it as productively as possible. This is not one of those fringe areas of physics that is easy to admit that modern science has changed. This is a core area of human philosophy and psychology which is going to be with us as long as we are human.

And to repeat, even the "idealists" who reject the view that Epicurus thought his gods really existed appear to me to be essentially in agreement with how important a question this is. Having a proper perspective on divinity is a lot more than saying negatively "supernatural gods don't exist." It's an essential part of the picture to understand where the issue comes from and to have a positive position that relates to where we want to go in living as close to happily and imperishably as we can.

Ok - let me go back to the opening post. The point of it (and the thrust of the article, I think) is that to even look for something you have to define what you are looking for. In this sense "look" refers to investigation to establish that something is real.

I can see that we have an ambiguity in what it means to find that something is real. Most of the time we are referring to the five senses to establish reality, but in this case Epicurus / Lucretius seem to be talking about direct receipt of images by the mind as the criteria by which we are motivated to think of them as real.

Most of the time images correspond to things that have physical reality. In the case of centaurs, he's apparently saying that images can arrange themselves and *not* correspond with reality. It's debatable whether gods fit into the category of centaurs or not. Idealists might say gods are in the centaur category and have absolutely no independent existence. Realists might say that gods do have an independent existence, but that existence is not in the form of what we think of as solid bodies, but in the form of "quasi-bodies" of apparently flowing atoms (referencing Velleius here).

As i read the thread now the essential point of controversy that Tau Phi is different from the point of the original post that you should define what you are investigating before you start your investigation.

Tau Phi is suggesting that the act of "finding" something by our having any perception of it whatsoever with any of our five senses by definition means that the perceived thing is not an Epicurean god.

In order to reach that conclusion, I would say that you would need to find a clear statement by an authoritative Epicurean that it is universally inherent in the nature of a god that a god cannot ever be perceptible to one of the human five senses.

(That gets back to the comment Kalosyni made earlier as to exactly what Epicurus said that gods re invisible. Did one of the key Epicureans make a clear statement that rules out an Epicurean god ever being visible under any conditions? If there is such a statement I can't call it to mind, and this issue could have caused the possibility of living in the intermundia to arise as a way to reconcile why they might be visible there but not visible to us here on earth.)

Here I would go back to the question of comparing our knowledge of gods to our knowledge of atoms. Throughout most of history we have had no capacity to sense an atom with any of our five senses, yet we would firmly believe that atoms exist. Do we also take the position that advances in technology will never make it possible through instrumentation to "see" an image of a "smallest" particle? I doubt there is a theoretical impossibility of -- through advanced science -- observing a visualization of an elemental particle.

In Epicurean philosophy as I understand it, "images" are like anything else - they are composed of elemental particles. If you take the David Konstan / traditional realist position that Epicurus meant what he said that gods are perceivable through images, then there is an atomic basis for gods just like anything else, and I would see no theoretical reason why that presence could not be detected at least through advanced instrumentation.

Further, I see no theoretical reason why, as the article indicates, that we should rule out finding living beings which are self-sustaining and successfully regenerate themselves indefinitely. The question of whether they would be detectable to our five senses if we were close enough to them physically is pretty much exactly what the article is all about.

It's not at all obvious to me that the simple act of our being able to "detect" them, like we do or will eventually detect atoms, would necessarily amount to their being "disturbed" by our act of being able to detect them. As it is already, I see no reason to infer that it is impossible for an Epicurean god to be aware of humans, even if we stipulate as we do that humans cause no "trouble" for gods. That would be parallel to our being able to visualize an atom through instrumentation -- visualizing an atom would not necessarily cause us any disturbance whatsoever.

To try to summarize at this point, the traditional realist view of Epicurean gods is that they have *some* kind of physical existence arising from atoms. "Atoms" are non-detectable to our unaided five senses, but I would expect that they either are already or will be detectable in the future via instrumentation. Certainly combinations of atoms frequently become visible and touchable to humans. The bottom line is that such observation is pleasurable and the additional pleasure that such knowledge brings makes it desirable.

To my knowledge there's nothing in the texts that rules out an analogy between combinations of atoms giving rise to other things that are theoretically detectable and combinations of atoms giving rise to gods.

To impose a flat rule that "if they are detectable to humans then they are not gods" seems to me to be going too far. To me, this imposes a limitation on the possibilities that I don't see good reason for in the texts. The texts, especially Lucretius, seem to refer to humans perceiving images of gods when asleep and even sometimes when awake, so to me the texts seem to me to go in the opposite direction.

Yes you have to be flexible in thinking about what "detection" really involves, but that's the very point of the article. it's helpful to think about how we look for things which we don't ordinarily perceive with our senses here on earth, because there are lots of such things that affect us.

Once we eventually find intelligent life in some other part of the universe, our failure to have detected their existence up to that point did not in any way mean that we should have ever presumed that they did not exist. We have had at least since the time of Epicurus very good reason to firmly expect that intelligent life outside earth exists. For the same reason, we have reason to expect that some of those life forms are imperishable and experience lives that fit Epicurus' definition of godlike. And our act of detecting them in some way doesn't necessarily violate our expectation that they are blessed and imperishable.

OK more than enough for the moment.....

i discover I do have one more thing to add to this.

The statement "if they are detectable to humans then they are not gods" is very close to:

"Believe that a god is something you can never know anything about."

Then where would you be?

You would be at the point: "If you claim to know anything about a god then by definition then what you are talking about is not a god."

That might be a very neat word-play way of disposing with the entire idea of gods, but it would be more far-reachingly negative to the existence or usefulness of the concept of divinity than even the idealist view.

Note I am saying "very close to" and not "identical," but the difference in the positions would be in the finer points of the word "contact," and that's why I called attention to taking this too far.

Lucretius Book Six:

[68] And unless you spew out all this from your mind and banish far away thoughts unworthy of the gods and alien to their peace, the holy powers of the gods, degraded by thy thought, will often do thee harm; not that the high majesty of the gods can be polluted by thee, so that in wrath they should yearn to seek sharp retribution, but because you yourself will imagine that those tranquil beings in their placid peace set tossing the great billows of wrath, nor with quiet breast will you approach the shrines of the gods, nor have strength to drink in with tranquil peace of mind the images which are borne from their holy body to herald their divine form to the minds of men. And therefore what manner of life will follow, you may perceive.

Sometimes the most contentious issues generate the most progress.

I would say that the construction "Whenever you find creatures that are living beings, blessed, and imperishable, ... you know for sure that those are not Epicurean gods." can be very useful if made more complete and clear.

I have added the ellipsis because I don't think it is clear what 'find' means, nor is it complete.

As to "find," much revolves around whether "images received by the mind" should be included within "find."

But the bigger issue I have is the completeness. The following variations that make the statement more complete I would say are clearly in harmony with Epicurus, and more practical to apply, especially as will be needed for application as we begin space travel and start finding alien life:

• Whenever you find creatures who appear to be living beings, blessed, and imperishable, and yet causing trouble for others or experiencing trouble themselves, you know for sure that those are not Epicurean gods.

Or -

• Whenever you find creatures who appear to be living beings, blessed, and imperishable, and yet suffering from pain disease or dying, you know for sure that those are not Epicurean gods.

But in contrast, to construct something that leads to "Whenever you find creatures who appear to be living beings, blessed, and imperishable, you know for sure that these are not gods" shifts the emphasis to a physics test, rather than one that follows the logical definition that Epicurus sets out in both Menoeceus and PD01.

In addition to being a physics test that is not clearly present in the texts, the latter construction rings of a dualism between gods and the rest of the universe. I know of no reason to infer that gods cannot come into contact with any non-god entity whatsoever under any circumstances. It seems clear that that was in part the reason for the discussion of the intermundia. To say that by definition they cannot have any contact with any other forms of matter would place them entirely outside the sphere of natural entities composed of atoms, which Epicurus seems to be working hard to keep them squarely within.

As to not making the gods a physics test, I would apply what David Sedley says about pleasure in "Epicurus' Refutation of Determinism" (my emphasis added):

By establishing that cognitive scepticism, the direct outcome of reductionist atomism, is self-refuting and untenable in practice, Epicurus justifies his non-reductionist alternative, according to which sensations are true and there are therefore bona fide truths at the phenomenal level accessible through them. The same will apply to the pathe, which Epicurus also held to be veridical. Pleasure, for example, is a direct datum of experience. It is commonly assumed that Epicurus must have equated pleasure with such and such a kind of movement of soul atoms; but although he will have taken it to have some explanation at the atomic level, I know of no evidence that he, any more than most moral philosophers or psychologists, would have held that an adequate analysis of it could be found at that level. Physics are strikingly absent from Epicurus’ ethical writings, and it is curious that interpreters are so much readier to import them there than they are when it comes to the moral philosophy of Plato or Aristotle.

Quote from Don

If you want to go down the physics route translated into a modern paradigm, I'm going to posit that the intermundia refers to another dimension or another universe in the multiplicity of universes out in The All. Gods are material and natural, but reside outside our universe under a different physics than our own. We cannot see them with our eyes, because our universe doesn't overlap with theirs. They are not aliens living on planets in our universe. That's just an assertion on my part, granted. But that's the only way I could right now "accept" a corporeal divinity in an Epicurean theological context.

I'd say your suggestions there are possibilities, but not really compelled at all by the texts. I would expect Epicurus thought of the universe as "all that exists."

Quote from Don

I find it much easier to think of the gods as what an ideal life would be like without the limits on mortal, corruptible bodies.

I think this indicates our difference in perspectives. I have no problem stipulating that it is possible within natural physics for a living being to find ways to completely replace its own atomic structure over time so as to not be subject to the necessity of death. In fact I'd find it much more difficult for me to argue that it's "impossible." Absent the standard possibilities of humanity blowing itself up etc., I'd wager we are me no more than a couple of hundred years from that ability ourselves, at the outside.