Posts by Joshua

The christian apologist Lactantius attributed the formulation of the paradox to Epicurus in the late third or early fourth century AD. Nothing like it survives in any of the extant writings of Epicurus, and the earliest source is in the works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus of the second century, who does not attribute it to him. It probably has its origin in ancient Skepticism.

Welcome!

Regarding the gods, the size of the sun, and the findings of modern physics, these are questions of perennial interest around here.

My own view is this: if I am going to hold forth as an Epicurean, I have an obligation to try to understand his system of thought to the best of my ability. When I am trying to explain Epicureanism to others, I try to explain it the way I think Epicurus himself understood it. I don't always succeed in presenting it well, or accurately, but I try never to intentionally misrepresent.

That being said, I do not feel obligated to agree with the ancients on every point; and when I am stating my own views, I try to make it clear that that's what I'm doing.

To quote Thoreau, the cart before the horse is neither useful nor beautiful. The philosophy of Epicurus is not best understood as a set of pass/fail litmus tests.

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XIII. Those who place the Chief Good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name, and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues; but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but for its conduciveness to health; the art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also Wisdom, which must be considered as the art of living, if it effected no result would not be desired; but as it is, it is desired, because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.

-Torquatus, Cicero's On Ends

I wrote this reply yesterday in response to the article but decided not to post it. But it saved as a draft, and someone might find it interesting, so here it is:

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From the article:

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But this says nothing about the origins of such life, either here or elsewhere. The salient question: is it physically or chemically possible for living, self-replicating organisms with internal metabolic processes to come about through entirely naturalistic processes unaided by intelligence?

The evidence seems to say, resoundingly, No.

The evidence is inconclusive. To say that the evidence is inconclusive is not at all the same as saying that the evidence suggests (resoundingly or otherwise) that abiogenesis is impossible.

A relevant example of this principle can be found in astronomy. When in the 16th century Tycho Brahe critiqued the Copernican model of the solar system, his objection was grounded in (among other things) the fact that stellar parallax had never been observed. Attempts to observe this hypothetical parallax had been made, and in the event would go on being made for nearly three hundred years before the phenomena was finally and conclusively measured scientifically by Henderson, Struve, and Bessel in independent experiments in the 1830s.

If Yates were writing in the 1820s, would he have confidently pronounced (resoundingly!) that the measurement of stellar parallax in our cosmos was impossible? Perhaps not. Well, then he shouldn't say it or imply it here. Inconclusive does not mean impossible; it just means inconclusive.

He then delivers himself of the opinion that abiogenesis cannot be tested, on the grounds that the men and women performing the test would themselves be intelligent. Therefore, any proto-organism or self-replicating molecule produced in a laboratory experiment by those men and women would, by definition, have been created by one or more intelligent beings. By this logic we should disregard all laboratory experiments. That legumes fix nitrogen into the soil they grow in in a laboratory experiment would tell us nothing about the nitrogen cycle in nature, but ONLY if we are foolish enough to insist that the cause of their fixing nitrogen is to be found in the intelligence of the researcher and not in the biochemistry of the legume. The researcher arranges the conditions in which nitrogen is fixed, but he does not fix the nitrogen. Likewise with abiogenesis. Arranging the conditions in which life emerges from non-life would not be an act of intelligent creation.

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The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock, are usually devoid of
visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable
microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the
spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of
estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When
the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in
his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a
swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral
existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the
pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before,
making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that
moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after
week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening—we can imagine
—for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust
above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if
not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a
burden on the wind.
Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It’s a
strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night,
after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see
the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies
immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky
counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under
the frog’s chin swells like a bubble, then collapses.
Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat
apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing
outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night
with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak,
dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may
nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only
to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also
out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of
the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their
own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common
life.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect
that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick
extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and
without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the
toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don’t, that the
sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail
cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene
of their happiness.
What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their
metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher
animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of
the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here
and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest
survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The
rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And
again.

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

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Welcome O2x Ohio !

Regarding your interest in the Epicurean understanding of light, I can be of some help when it comes to the secondary literature. Well, primarily the secondary literature on Lucretius. The tradition of commentary on the school of Epicurus has been fraught since very near the beginning, which is why I would ordinarily echo Dewitt's exhortation to return to the texts! However, I think you may find this essay by Edward Neville Andrade (1887-1971) of University College, London to be of some interest. It was published as an introductory essay to the second volume of H. A. J. Munro's three volume text (I), commentary (II), and translation (III) of De Rerum Natura. The essay is titled The Scientific Significance of Lucretius, and, though the scientific perspective of the author is now a century and a half out of date, he is much more thorough than other sources we have. Einstein for example wrote a forward to a German translation of Lucretius, but it is no more than superficial regarding the actual ideas presented by the poet. That's why Andrade's essay is useful--he goes much deeper.

Here is the text at the Internet Archive. I hope you find it helpful.

And here is another interesting scientific appraisal of Epicureanism, this one in the form of a popular lecture by the Irish physicist John Tyndall--a lecture that caused great controversy when it was delivered in 1874.

There is another consideration to note here, and that is that not all imagineable boundless and eternal universes are the same.

Imagine a universe that is boundless and eternal, but where a particular force in that universe like gravity peaks at an epicenter in space and asymptotically approaches zero on every infinite line radiating away from that epicenter. I can imagine a rim around the core of that peak beyond which star formation becomes impossible. If the same universe had a similar peak in time rather than space, toward which the speed of light would eternally accelerate and away from which it would infinitely decelerate. Such a universe would be infinite and eternal, but might only be fit for life in a finite and temporary zone around the correlation of both peaks in spacetime. If somewhere in the infinite number of digits behind the decimal in Pi we eventually encounter an endless string of nines, we've reached the Borg and the end of all variety.

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I also recall that one of the analogies or issues you have quoted before is something to do with the ability to infer or predict all the possibilities of various oceans from knowing the characteristics of s a single drop of water. Do you recall the source for that one?

"From a drop of water,' said the writer, 'a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it."

-A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (from the Sherlock Holmes stories)

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Should we conclude that after a thing has happened once, that in an infinite and eternal universe it will happen an infinite number of times, but that it is impossible and in fact improper to predict with any confidence after huge numbers of monkeys are born that there will ever be any more intelligent beings born anywhere in the universe?

Oh, I was only speaking about this Earth. In an infinite and eternal cosmos anything that is possible within that cosmos should be expected to exist an infinite number of times. If you assign each letter in the Latin alphabet to a number (a->1, b->2, etc) somewhere in the infinity of digits behind the decimal point in the number Pi one would expect to find a sequence of numbers that happens to spell out the collected works of William Shakespeare. This particular supposition is currently theoretical, and awaiting formal proof.

Q: Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?

Mathematician: As it turns out, mathematicians do not yet know whether the digits of pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers. That being said, many…

www.askamathematician.com

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There is no necessity either way in a particular circumstance, but is not a process with has been observed to be in operation is limited by nature rather than by necessity (?)

You may have to rewrite that last clause for me....

Another passage from that Hitchens book;

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Our own solipsism, often expressed in diagram or cartoon form, usually
represents evolution as a kind of ladder or progression, with a fish gasping
on the shore in the first frame, hunched and prognathous figures in the
succeeding ones, and then, by slow degrees, an erect man in a suit waving
his umbrella and shouting “Taxi!” Even those who have observed the
“sawtooth” pattern of fluctuation between emergence and destruction,
further emergence and still further destruction, and who have already
charted the eventual end of the universe, are half agreed that there is a
stubborn tendency toward an upward progression. This is no great surprise:
inefficient creatures will either die out or be destroyed by more successful
ones. But progress does not negate the idea of randomness, and when he
came to examine the Burgess shale, the great paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould arrived at the most disquieting and unsettling conclusion of all. He
examined the fossils and their development with minute care and realized
that if this tree could be replanted or this soup set boiling again, it would
very probably not reproduce the same results that we now “know.”

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It depends on precisely what we mean by 'gradations'. Here is a passage from God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens, discussing the gradations evident in modern biology which demonstrate the pathway by which light-sensitive cells developed over millions of generations into the complex eyes found in modern humans;

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Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light; it developed into a recessed eyespot, where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provided additional data on the direction of light; then into a deep recession eyespot, where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; then into a pinhole camera eye that is able to focus an image on the back of a deeply-recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; then into a pinhole lens eye that is able to focus the image; then into a complex eye found in such modern mammals as humans.

All the intermediate stages of this process have been located in other creatures, and sophisticated computer models have been developed which have tested the theory and shown that it actually “works.”

However, the popular conception of evolutionary biology--that organisms get successively bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter in the course of generations--is descriptively accurate in some cases but wholly wrong when considered as prescription of nature. Mutation and selection may give rise to faster organisms when those faster organisms are better fit for their environment than their slower counterparts, but when the metabolic expense of speed does not make a species more fit to survive in its environment then members of that species who do not 'pay' that metabolic cost will be better fit than those that do. This is why populations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria lose their resistance when that antibiotic is no longer used; individuals with the genetic resistance lose the benefit but still suffer the cost, and those individuals are out-competed by individuals without resistant genes.

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Was it predictable from the existence of monkeys that humans would arise?

There was always some chance that humans could arise--we know this because we exist--but no, I do not think we can safely say that this outcome was ever likely. It seems likely to us because it happened, and we're living the outcome. This is the very definition of Hindsight bias. If an asteroid hadn't cratered into the Yucatán Peninsula at the K-Pg boundary, and a new language-using species had arisen from the non-avian dinosaurs that are now extinct, it might seem to that species that their existence was predictable. We have excellent reasons to suspect otherwise.

This post is copied from another thread on teleology;

[other thread]

OK, I am off work. You have raised a number of excellent points and I agree that we need to refine this mass of material down to something digestible.

Relevant Texts

[All citations in this section are to translations by Cyril Bailey]

Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles, sections 115-116;

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The signs of the weather which are given by certain animals result from mere coincidence of occasion. For the animals do not exert any compulsion for winter to come to an end, nor is there some divine nature which sits and watches the outgoings of these animals and then fulfills the signs they give.

[116] For not even the lowest animal, although ‘a small thing gives the greater pleasure,’ would be seized by such foolishness, much less one who was possessed of perfect happiness.

All these things, Pythocles, you must bear in mind; for thus you will escape in most things from superstition and will be enabled to understand what is akin to them. And most of all give yourself up to the study of the beginnings and of infinity and of the things akin to them, and also of the criteria of truth and of the feelings, and of the purpose for which we reason out these things. For these points when they are thoroughly studied will most easily enable you to understand the causes of the details. But those who have not thoroughly taken these things to heart could not rightly study them in themselves, nor have they made their own the reason for observing them.

• The animals do not migrate for the purpose of changing the seasons,
• The seasons do not change for the purpose of moving the animals,
• And no divine mind has set these things into motion.

Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 64;

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[64] Further, you must grasp that the soul possesses the chief cause of sensation: yet it could not have acquired sensation, unless it were in some way enclosed by the rest of the structure. And this in its turn having afforded the soul this cause of sensation acquires itself too a share in this contingent capacity from the soul. Yet it does not acquire all the capacities which the soul possesses: and therefore when the soul is released from the body, the body no longer has sensation. For it never possessed this power in itself, but used to afford opportunity for it to another existence, brought into being at the same time with itself: and this existence, owing to the power now consummated within itself as a result of motion, used spontaneously to produce for itself the capacity of sensation and then to communicate it to the body as well, in virtue of its contact and correspondence of movement, as I have already said.

This passage (and the subsequent passages as well, to some extant) is relevant because of the pains Epicurus goes to to avoid teleological language;

• The body, having come into existence with the soul, affords opportunity to the soul to experience sensation.
• The body, having afforded this opportunity to the soul, acquires its own share in this "contingent capacity" from the soul - that is, the body acquires its share in sensation.
• We can summarize this ateleological view in the following way: the use of any natural thing is afforded by its existence, not the other way around.
• By contrast, the existence of any artificial thing could be said to be afforded by its planned use. A table is brought into being for the purpose of dining. The human hand is pressed into service (say, of transferring food from the table to the mouth) only after it is found to exist.

The most important text, as cited by Cassius above, is Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5;

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[823] Herein you must eagerly desire to shun this fault, and with foresighted fear to avoid this error; do not think that the bright light of the eyes was created in order that we may be able to look before us, or that, in order that we may have power to plant long paces, therefore the tops of shanks and thighs, based upon the feet, are able to bend; or again, that the forearms are jointed to the strong upper arms and hands given us to serve us on either side, in order that we might be able to do what was needful for life. All other ideas of this sort, which men proclaim, by distorted reasoning set effect for cause, since nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use. Nor did sight exist before the light of the eyes was born, nor pleading in words before the tongue was created, but rather the birth of the tongue came long before discourse, and the ears were created much before sound was heard, and in short all the limbs, I trow, existed before their use came about: they cannot then have grown for the purpose of using them.

[843] But, on the other side, to join hands in the strife of battle, to mangle limbs and befoul the body with gore; these things were known long before gleaming darts flew abroad, and nature constrained men to avoid a wounding blow, before the left arm, trained by art, held up the defence of a shield. And of a surety to trust the tired body to rest was a habit far older than the soft-spread bed, and the slaking of the thirst was born before cups. These things, then, which are invented to suit the needs of life, might well be thought to have been discovered for the purpose of using them. But all those other things lie apart, which were first born themselves, and thereafter revealed the concept of their usefulness. In this class first of all we see the senses and the limbs; wherefore, again and again, it cannot be that you should believe that they could have been created for the purpose of useful service.

[858] This, likewise, is no cause for wonder, that the nature of the body of every living thing of itself seeks food. For verily I have shown that many bodies ebb and pass away from things in many ways, but most are bound to pass from living creatures. For because they are sorely tried by motion and many bodies by sweating are squeezed and pass out from deep beneath, many are breathed out through their mouths, when they pant in weariness; by these means then the body grows rare, and all the nature is undermined; and on this follows pain. Therefore food is taken to support the limbs and renew strength when it passes within, and to muzzle the gaping desire for eating through all the limbs and veins. Likewise, moisture spreads into all the spots which demand moisture; and the many gathered bodies of heat, which furnish the fires to our stomach, are scattered by the incoming moisture, and quenched like a flame, that the dry heat may no longer be able to burn our body. Thus then the panting thirst is washed away from our body, thus the hungry yearning is satisfied.

• "All other ideas of this sort, which men proclaim, by distorted reasoning set effect for cause, since nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use."

Further Reading

Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, page 67;

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The limited teleology at which Epicurus finally arrived had nothing to do either with creationism or adaptation of organ to function. It had nothing to do with the universe at large, which was ruled by natural laws. It had nothing to do even with animals, although animal behavior afforded evidence that pleasure was the end or telos of living. It was recognized, to be sure, that animals possess volition and that certain kinds of animals are actuated by innate ideas to organize themselves into herds for mutual protection, but only the rational human being was believed capable of intelligent planning for living and for keeping steadily in view the fact that pleasure is the end or telos ordained by Nature. This amounts to saying that a nonpurposive Nature had produced a purposive creature, for whom alone an end or goal of living could have a meaning. This is teleology at a minimum. For such a belief no teacher had set a precedent.

Ian Johnston, Lecture on Lucretius;

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The poem’s influence, according to Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie, can be linked to a range of twentieth-century poets and philosophers. So pervasive is its presence in the intellectual climate that for one critic at least (Stuart Gillespie) Charles Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius is rather like Milton’s claiming that he had not read Genesis.

John Tyndall, Address at Belfast;

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Trace the line of life backwards, and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical [54/55] condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have 'a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.' Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking, but, however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life? Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not 'that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who wrings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb?' Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

I think part of the reason Epicureanism remained unchanged is because it treated with clear finality certain of its basic premises, and it did so in a way that rendered any further dispute rather pointless among those that accepted the premise. Consider such premises as there is no life after death, and Nature was not created, but has always existed.

Any school of philosophy proposing that there is life after death has not ended a dispute but begun one; what is the afterlife like? Is it eternal or finite? Is it the same for everyone, or will people experience different afterlives depending on their respective portions of fame, virtue, nobility, or piety? How long does the soul linger in the body, and where does it go after? Is there any hope of return from the afterlife? Can people still living contact those who are dead, and vice versa?

Christianity has shattered into a million tiny fragments over questions like these, but for the Epicurean every one of these points of argument is utterly meaningless. There is no life after death, so there's no point in speculating about what that non-existent 'life' might be like. Such speculations, which are not even of academic interest, will certainly never have the power to bring about schism, or mutual recrimination, or factional infighting. And quite a lot of Epicurean philosophy is like that; once you accept the premise that nature was not created by a god, or that the substrate of everything that exists in nature is mere matter, or that the senses are fundamentally reliable, you slam the door shut forever on all of the speculation that does not take its point of departure from that premise.

When we examine the things that did change and develop in ancient Epicureanism, they are quite minor. Epicurus preferred to transmit his ideas in uninterrupted discourse and in plain dress, but that did not prevent Lucretius from casting them in verse, or Lucian from engaging with them in dialectic.

Cicero develops an argument around this claim in Book 2 of On Ends, we'll need to find that section. The basic argument he makes is something like this;

• Epicurus holds that pain/fear/mental disturbance is an evil.
• It is not possible to be confident that one will avoid this evil in perpetuity.
• If the Epicurean cannot be confident of this, he cannot guarantee his continuing happiness, and as a result present happiness will be impossible.
• The Epicurean can never be happy.

Might not hurt to add an announcement at the top about how to 'mark all as read'.

Meno asks Socrates:[20][21]

• "And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?"

Socrates rephrases the question, which has come to be the canonical statement of Meno's paradox or the paradox of inquiry:[20][22]

• "[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

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From Wikipedia ^

Summary of the above:

• Lucretius poetically adopted for his own poem the Empedoclean struggle between the moral forces of Love and Strife [wikipedia]
  • However, in an atomistic understanding of Nature these forces are not moral. Through an endless process of combination and dissolution, the atoms form and reform all compound bodies.
  • Venus and Mars are complex figures in the poem.
    • Venus represents:
      • the formation of complex systems like our world.
      • the promise that pleasure is attainable even in a cosmos where 'destruction' nips at the heels of 'creation' - though of course matter is never actually created or destroyed
      • the mythical mother of the line of Aeneas, and therefore of the Roman people
      • the poet's Muse - a patron goddess appropriate for an Epicurean writing a philosophical poem
        • I'm thinking out loud here, so take this with a grain of salt: In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is a much more primordial being than the nine Muses - more ancient even than Zeus himself. She was born of the union between sea-foam and the discarded genitals of Ouranos - a daughter of the first order of divine beings. The Muses are the daughters of the second order (the Titans) on their mother's [Mnemosyne] side, and the third order (the Olympians) on their father's [Zeus himself]. She quite literally fell from heaven; 'Ouranos' is still the Greek word for 'sky' to this day.
    • Mars, less complex, represents:
      • Whole world systems hurtling into ruin
      • Death, pain, strife, war, disease (like the plague with which Lucretius ends his poem), and so on

I ought to have included John Tyndall's Belfast Address in the quoted passages above. Here it is;

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Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not 'that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who wrings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb?' Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

George Santayana discusses this question in his essay on Lucretius from Three Philosophical Poets;

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To a fortunate conjunction of atoms, a child owes his first being. To a propitious season and atmosphere, a poet owes his inspiration and his success. Conscious that his undertaking hangs upon these chance conjunctions, Lucretius begins by invoking the powers he is about to describe, that they may give him breath and genius enough to describe them. And at once these powers send him a happy inspiration, perhaps a happy reminiscence of Empedocles. There are two great perspectives which the moralist may distinguish in the universal drift of atoms,—a creative movement, producing what the moralist values, and a destructive movement, abolishing the same. Lucretius knows very well that this distinction is moral only, or as people now say, subjective. No one else has pointed out so often and so clearly as he that nothing arises in this world not helped to life by the death of some other thing; so that the destructive movement creates and the creative movement destroys. Yet from the point of view of any particular life or interest, the distinction between a creative force and a destructive force is real and all-important. To make it is not to deny the mechanical structure of nature, but only to show how this mechanical structure is fruitful morally, how the outlying parts of it are friendly or hostile to me or to you, its local and living products.

This double colouring of things is supremely interesting to the philosopher; so much so that before his physical science has reached the mechanical stage, he will doubtless regard the double aspect which things present to him as a dual principle in these things themselves. So Empedocles had spoken of Love and Strife as two forces which respectively gathered and disrupted the elements, so as to carry on between them the Penelope’s labour of the world, the one perpetually weaving fresh forms of life, and the other perpetually undoing them.

It needed but a slight concession to traditional rhetoric in order to exchange these names, Love and Strife, which designated divine powers in Empedocles, into the names of Venus and Mars, which designated the same influences in Roman mythology. The Mars and Venus of Lucretius are not moral forces, incompatible with the mechanism of atoms; they are this mechanism itself, in so far as it now produces and now destroys life, or any precious enterprise, like this of Lucretius in composing his saving poem. Mars and Venus, linked in each other’s arms, rule the universe together; nothing arises save by the death of some other thing. Yet when what arises is happier in itself, or more congenial to us, than what is destroyed, the poet says that Venus prevails, that she woos her captive lover to suspend his unprofitable raging. At such times it is spring on earth; the storms recede (I paraphrase the opening passage),[5] the fields are covered with flowers, the sunshine floods the serene sky, and all the tribes of animals feel the mighty impulse of Venus in their hearts.

The corn ripens in the plains, and even the sea bears in safety the fleets that traverse it.

Not least, however, of these works of Venus is the Roman people. Never was the formative power of nature better illustrated than in the vitality of this race, which conquered so many other races, or than in its assimilative power, which civilized and pacified them. Legend had made Venus the mother of Aeneas, and Aeneas the progenitor of the Romans. Lucretius seizes on this happy accident and identifies the Venus of fable with the true Venus, the propitious power in all nature, of which Rome was indeed a crowning work. But the poet’s work, also, if it is to be accomplished worthily, must look to the same propitious movement for its happy issue and for its power to persuade. Venus must be the patron of his art and philosophy. She must keep Memmius from the wars, that he may read, and be weaned from frivolous ambitions; and she must stop the tumult of constant sedition, that Lucretius may lend his undivided mind to the precepts of Epicurus, and his whole heart to a sublime friendship, which prompts him to devote to intense study all the watches of the starry night, plotting the course of each invisible atom, and mounting almost to the seat of the gods.[6]

This impersonation in the figure of Venus of whatever makes for life would not be legitimate—it would really contradict a mechanical view of nature—if it were not balanced by a figure representing the opposite tendency, the no less universal tendency towards death.

The Mars of the opening passage, subdued for a moment by the blandishments of love, is raging in all the rest of the poem in his irrepressible fury. These are the two sides of every transmutation, that in creating, one thing destroys another; and this transmutation being perpetual,—nothing being durable except the void, the atoms, and their motion,—it follows that the tendency towards death is, for any particular thing, the final and victorious tendency. The names of Venus and Mars, not being essential to the poet’s thought, are allowed to drop out, and the actual processes they stand for are described nakedly; yet, if the poem had ever been finished, and Lucretius had wished to make the end chime with the beginning, and represent, as it were, one great cycle of the world, it is conceivable that he might have placed at the close a mythical passage to match that at the beginning; and we might have seen Mars aroused from his luxurious lethargy, reasserting his immortal nature, and rushing, firebrand in hand, from the palace of love to spread destruction throughout the universe, till all things should burn fiercely, and be consumed together. Yet not quite all; for the goddess herself would remain, more divine and desirable than ever in her averted beauty. Instinctively into her bosom the God of War would sink again, when weary and drunk with slaughter; and a new world would arise from the scattered atoms of the old.

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And Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve argues a similar case;

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Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.

Hence it is that, as a poet, a maker of metaphors, Lucretius could do something very strange, something that appears to violate his conviction that the gods are deaf to human petitions.

* * *

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upper hand; the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored:

• And so the destructive motions cannot hold sway eternally and bury existence forever; nor again can the motions that cause life and growth preserve created things eternally. Thus, in this war that has been waged from time everlasting, the contest between the elements is an equal one: now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and, in turn, are conquered; with the funeral dirge mingles the wail that babies raise when they reach the shores of light; no night has followed day, and no dawn has followed night, which has not heard mingled with those woeful wails the lamentations that accompany death and the black funeral. (DRN 2.569–80 [Side-by-Side])

The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea —the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances —“the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”

Glad you asked! Charlton Griffin on Audible reads the Humphries version. It is excellent.

μουσοφιλὴς, "beloved of the Muses", or something similar.

ἕταρος means companion.

I would say the translation is good; Philodemus is emphasizing his work as a poet: that is, a 'darling of the Muses'.