Epicurus, from an old LJ entry

The paragraph below was an entry into a LJ entry on October 13, 2003. I wrote it while reading books and other internet materials on Epicurus, a Greek philosopher I particularly like who had a philosophy based on a hedonism so moderate that the lifestyle it recommended ends up looking a lot like that of a buddhist monastic. This is in no small part because he favored long-term hedonistic good over short-term pleasures, and pleasures of the mind over that of the body. He had other ideas as well, about the Gods and of Physics, which the following paragraph describes.

"It never ceases to amaze me how early modern concepts started. It turns out Epicurus was one of the first to originate neo-Darwinian thought, because he sought to explain the efficient design of human beings by a process of natural selection, rather than by the design of Gods, which he felt existed but were not involved with the daily workings of men's lives. This apathetic-pantheon was also his solution to the Problem of Evil, saying that evil existed in this world despite the existence of gods because those gods were too busy hanging out with each other to be concerned with mortals. The Gods, exercising the high hedonistic ideal, are role models for than influences in everyday life. Epicurus also was a big proponent of mind-body identity, saying that mind and body are closely interdependent, though he felt that the mind rested in our chest rather than the head, because whenever we feel anxiety or happiness we feel it in our chest. (He was ahead of his time in most things, running parallel with much modern thought, so I'll give him some slack on this one.) Same goes for his postulation that we see images of things because those objects give off waves of atom-thin sheets that hit our eye and show us their pattern. Even in his time he should have struck that one down just by the fact that torch and candle-light illuminates objects -- if objects gave off atomic sheets of their own image on their own, than darkness or light would not matter to vision. But at least he got the waves thing right, and correctly guessed that we were not directly perceiving objects, but taking in with our senses images made up of actual physical material that is being given off by those objects."