Talk:Principal Doctrine 19
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The true time is composed of many minimum sensory moments, while the conventional time is mentally joined to motions and events ("accident of accidents": no historicism), which reverse the doing as if never done (possible cyclicity in Lucretius), bar our short term memory with four or five simultaneously possible mental object; but soon it makes room for something else.. Perceivable time is at all times the minimum and present one. The gods are living in an infinite series of moments, but the depletable time of men may be perceived in some same way if one concentrates (katepyknouto) on present moment.
A pleasures chain with few pain breakdown (a 'longer pleasure') is certainly a better choice, but each chain ring - but combined tactile ones - is lived in a exclusive minimum sensory moment, and when one dies serenely replete, through that reasoning, he is at all times losing the same qualitative moment at the age of twenty like at ninety: "Every man passes out of life as if he had just been born " [V.S. 60 ]. "any length of time naturally produces pleasure for all - provided one recognizes pleasure's limits - and because of the fact that at the same time the flesh right now receives the amount of pleasure equal to what is provided by an unlimited length of time". [Phild, On Death] "Every man passes out of life as if he had just been born " [V.S. 60 ]. Likewise Marcus Aurelius: "(in untimely death) one cannot lose past time nor future time he don't possesses [...] (the one who believes though to lose it) if he dies whether burdened with age or at once he' feeling loss always of the same thing [II, 14]." Past pleasures do not continue nor cumulate in present time, because, in case, they blur the present and turn into present, but we relive it really in abridged way.
The true logismos must refer whether to internal present sensation, or to prolepsis of atomistic minimum time's: not to conventional time. The logismos (more and less, quantitative calculation) is able to calculate/to weight pleasures against ensuing troubles, not to fix conventional (empty) and theoretic value hierarchies. "By reasoning, memory of similarities and differences, and knowledge of consequences and by sharp insight the wise man avoids all things that contribute nothing to happiness." [Rhet. II, pp. 30-31]. Therefore in single moment or in infinite moments each pure (without concurrent pains from other 'pores') pleasure is "equal", i.e. equally valid. If a shorter or less intense pleasure were less valid, it wouldn't be a pleasure any more. For Aristotle too: "In no time one would have a pleasure which, with a larger length, would be more complete. [...] In pleasure the form is perfect in every time' s moment" [To Nicomachus Ethics B, X, 3]. We think pleasures as differentiated because they are always linked with different things, causes, projects. Katapyknosis (meditation, concentration, 'condensation') try to 'put brackets' round conventional links and to expand the true links of mental/emotional time.
