Dissociation has been described by Shinzen Young as enlightenment's evil twin because it shares a lot of commonalities with equanimity but is very different along crucial dimensions.
My guess is that if I start making a qualitative description of how different states feel this will not feel like a satisfactory answer to your question?
When you dissociate from the pain, you turn your consciousness away from the pain and ignore it. When you learn to experience the pain with equanimity, you turn towards it, accept it completely, and learn to see it more as "process" than "thing", which makes it easier to tolerate for reasons that are above my pay-grade to explain.
This also relates to the idea of no-self. It's easier to understand as stating that "self" is a process, not a thing, and that process can be turned off and back on at will once you learn how it operates in your mind. The goal is not to turn the process off permanently, the goal is to have the freedom to turn it on or off at will, thus being liberated from it.
This is just one way of dealing with pain (as high fidelity physical pain separate from a sense of self) and there are many others (like surrounding the pain with metta, or expanding your awareness to infinity so the pain looks small, distracting yourself!)
I am no expert on disassociation, but one important difference may be doing it intentionally and could view your pain differently if you wanted (though maybe if you solely practice this then maybe not!) Another is you don’t lose access to physical sensations.
Psychologist and Buddhist here. Dissociation refers to something quite different from the practice in meditation of using one's awareness to focus on different aspects of one's experience. Dissociation and meditation are in many ways the inverse of each other -- involuntary loss of awareness versus voluntary application of awareness.
The "de-centering" of an aspect of one's experience in meditation is an intentional and somewhat effortful exercise of control over one's awareness. It's done in a state of conscious relaxation rather than distress. It's a kind of applied effort like weight lifting or ice skating. Dissociation is something that just happens to you.
The same practice of training awareness of bodily sensations that happens in meditation is also used in simple "grounding" exercises to help people who dissociate come back into awareness. So the one is also the antidote for the other.
Before checking, how would you guess, therefore, that Buddhist monks and nuns score on tests of brain health, emotional health, and general life satisfaction? Badly, right, because you contend that they're doing something "unhealthy" all day?
What is the danger, and how does meditation/dissociation cause that danger? Psychologists describe a lot of things as "dangerous" for vague reasons and often reasons that rely on their particular values.
(For the record - I suffer from catatonia secondary to depression, and meditation tends to trigger it; I therefore consider meditation dangerous *for me* and don't do it. But I haven't heard of ordinary people developing this issue via meditation.)
As long as most voters don't go out of their way to check that stuff out, I think its ok and Scott doesn't care and is better to not draw more attention to it.
Didn't see the original comment, but if it's what I think it was - linking to (what is presumably) your own blog in what's supposed to be an anonymous book review is extremely bad form, to the point that it might deserve having attention called to it.
I believe Scott didn't announce that the contest would be anonymous until well after the original call for entries. If I recall correctly, this is already the 3rd finalist that has linked to their own work.
I am kinda fascinated how Americans seem to be obsessed with pretty much the worst dessert ever, offensive pretty much to every sense, be it smell, touch, sight or taste. If you want to worship unhealthy foods, there are so many to choose from, both of sweet and otherwise varieties. But sugar donuts just attack your senses with a signal that is supposed to feel good, only it's so grotesquely overdone it can't unless one's senses are mangled by years of abuse by similar assault foods. It just makes me sad.
For anybody interested in 'enlightenment' at all, **highly** recommend checking out Aella. Fascinating life story, which included 10-months of regular and high dosage LSD, which gave them an experience of enlightenment. They have since interviewed dozens of people who claim to have experienced entlightment and clustered their experiences.
I have read so much about the Buddhist conception that the self is an illusion, and the idea is very appealing to me, but I have never been able to understand it even on a superficial level. I don't know why.
me either, but my guess is there is a somewhat less absolute statement than "the self doesn't exist" that is somewhat along the same lines, contains similar implications, and perhaps informs similar (beneficial?) actions, but doesn't require getting rid of the "self" as a convenient shorthand for the "stuff going on in my brain involving memories and desires and decisions"
Understand as in logically or like from experience?
I at least think I understand what Sam Harris thinks about the self being an illusion, and it's not that complicated I think.
The self: you being behind your face, and deciding stuff. Illusion: something that appears to be but is not real and that usually, upon closer inspection, stops appearing to be real.
So, it's not true that we make choices because determinism, and there's no physical reason to locate us behind our faces. And, apparently, paying close attention, the meditation people suddenly lose the sense that this is true and just perceive the stuff they can perceive without the sense of being located anywhere or authoring anything.
Yeah but why should we feel we are in the spot where the processing happens?
Since I didn't like your attitude in that last sentence, I'll throw out reality with a thought experiment. If we had brains as a service running on the cloud, and your body just had the senses, the peripherals, would you say you now have a physical reason to feel you are located in the data centre some kilometres away?
If anything, it's the senses; mostly sight and hearing, which lead the brain to make a model and its that model which gives one the sense that one is behind the face. And that's a reason, yes, I was loose with words. The point was that there's a physical reason to feel behind our faces in the same sense that there's a reason why you are seeing a face here =) . If someone came out and said that the smiley face is an illusion and there's really only just matrices of pixels, and there's no "physical reason" to claim there is a real face where you see the smiley, I'd have no problem understanding what they meant.
I agree that my original lazy definition of illusion doesn't account for the case where a subjective experience sort of matches reality sort of by coincidence, so do what you want with the word illusion, as long as we understand our points. Your brain is wet, but if you felt wet all the time it would be for other reasons and I'd have no trouble calling it an illusion, but you may not like using the word there.
(You might read that and think "if I'm feeling wet, the belief behind the experience is that my body is wet, not my brain", and that's fair. It was a bad example for the point that I would still call a coincidentally correct perception as an illusion. )
We don't feel like we are located behind our faces as a consequence of our brains being there (and arguably the feeling is not really where are processing centres are, or people wouldn't have taken as long to realise what the brain is for), so I have no trouble calling it an illusion in the sense I mentioned. But discussions about words are boring.
The biochemical process of thinking happens in the brain, but consciousness—or the self—is not in the brain. The brain is a physical thing whereas the self is a non-physical phenomenon; the two are qualitatively different. Just like you can't say music is in the violin. Sure, music comes from the violin. Music depends on the violin. The violin generates music. But music is neither inside nor part of the physical body of the violin.
The point is not to deny that consciousness is generated by brain processes. It's to draw attention to the experiential nature of consciousness.
See that I get, and I am on board with the considerable research that says that the conscious mind makes few (no?) decisions itself. I guess I am perhaps looking for something deeper than what is there. Which is kind of ironic.
The idea of no-self in Buddhism is a bit elusive partly because it's pointing to something experiential. Like how would you describe the taste of a pear to someone who has only ever tasted citrus fruit. You can approximate with words, but a huge amount of Buddhism is experiential.
I'm not sure how this research about the conscious mind not making decisions intersects with this idea of no-self. The Pali word "anatta" is sometimes translated instead as "non-self" which may be more helpful in capturing a sense of "not attaching to the idea of a core, solid, unchanging self" rather than the sense of "there's no one home in here."
Anatta is closely related to "anicca" which is the Buddhist idea of impermanence. So it's not so much that there's just nothing there at all to the self, but that it's a shifting weather pattern. Which part of the storm is "The Storm" -- the wind, the clouds, the rain, the lightning? The problem is our tendency to put capital letters into things, emotionally or psychologically-speaking.
It's our tendency to try to grab onto things that are shifting all the time, to try and nail them down, to clutch the things we like and push away the things we don't like, when experience and reality are constantly moving. That clinging and pushing away leads to a persistent feeling of unsatisfactoriness in our lives (that's the "dukkha" or suffering that Buddhists talk so much about).
These three ideas -- anatta, anicca, and dukkha -- are central to Buddhism and are all connected so it's hard to understand one in isolation without the others.
I think there is a lot that is quite deep here, at least in my humble experience. I'm on year 36 of reading and practicing Buddhism. The depths aren't always well captured in words. They are often not well captured by one-off books like this one or in reviews by people who are not familiar with the wider teachings. The reviewer's description of their 10-day meditation retreat is probably more useful because that's the part the reviewer is familiar with.
The brand of meditator I think I sort of understand would answer that question the same way you would, wording issues aside. That's just not the "self" that is supposed to be an illusion. Consciousness is still a thing, and its still a discrete thing.
Maybe other brand of meditators go further and claim stuff like that we all part of the same cloud of consciousness and there is no me or you, dunno, but there I'd make little sense to me too.
I think the “cloud of consciousness” comes from non-dual meditation, specifically vast spacious awareness/ natural state, or what’s pointed to in the headless way. If that’s the case, then I think that is just one way of interpreting the experience of vast spacious awareness.
A lot of these crazy statements make much more sense as specific interpretations of interesting meditative experiences.
Yeah. Its funny how an experience can "feel like" something that doesn't make logical sense. After waking up from dreams it happens often. There's the extreme case of this mental issue where people claim they are not alive yet they obviously know they are and can feel and experience stuff. I imagine people with strong synesthesia also make these incoherent claims. Maybe trans has something of this too?
What would be a coherent way of phrasing those experiences? Maybe: "I have a strong urge to describe my experience as X, even though X doesn't really mean anything, for whatever reason."
From my personal understanding, the universe. Or rather, there's no division between the perceived and the perceiving, it's just one big pulsing existence that, well, exists. Any sufficiently persistent attempt to perceive the perceiving will find that it is empty, and that's the trigger to switching to that "undivided" mindset.
Or at least that's kind of what it felt like to me. It's a state of mind, one that changes how you assign valence to perceptions. There are no extra abilities or anything, it's just a complete change of reference, with refusing to consider what you perceive as separable into categories and instead always looking at it as a whole.
At least what I was taught and experienced is extremely difficult to maintain in ordinary life, though, because alone theory of mind is kind of necessary when dealing with other people, and in general it's not the most productive of frames. So I'm not sure what I was taught and experienced is really the same as what these people are talking about.
I agree with your suggestion that the mind changes quite fundamentally with a "change of reference" -- when its habitual focus of awareness manages to reposition itself.
Most people in the modern world don't seem clued into the radical nature of this phenomenon. But, for example, imagine one ordinary person whose awareness is locked mostly in the past, who experiences life primarily as a dreamy series of regrets, etc, compared with another whose awareness is locked on the future, so is driven by fears and ambitions, or whatever. It's almost like they aren't even the same species.
And then consider another whose consciousness primarily dwells in the present, where the emotions that fuel action are profoundly de-privileged. It's not surprising that in the modern world this could appear to be unhelpful to the advancement of the human project, the job at hand, or whatever; whereas to the person who invites and cultivates such a state of awareness it is recognized as a legitimate (reality-based) answer to the problem of psychological suffering.
> The self: you being behind your face, and deciding stuff. Illusion: something that appears to be but is not real and that usually, upon closer inspection, stops appearing to be real.
A weaker version of the statement, something like "Your conscious self is not exactly the sort of thing you naively perceive it as" would be both true and still very insightful.
"The self does not exist" is much pithier and fits on a t-shirt better, but I think it's either untrue or based on an overly hand-wavey definition of "self".
Yeah, I agree. I think there's this phenomenon where one just wants to express an experience in a certain way, even if it doesn't make sense. There may be something to the experience that makes them *really* want to communicate it with phrases like "I've been enlightered, saw the truth, and there is no self", and then they stretch the logic of it a bit and become more confusing than necessary.
You seem to be caught in a conflation where you think of Buddhist practice as analogous to, say, faith in Christianity -- so that a rationalist would categorize the results of both journeys as subjective, and not based in reason or carbon-based reality.
I would argue that Buddhist practice, at its core, is a non-sentimental, non-narrativizing interrogation of the location where subjective consciousness meets the universe and the real world.
Your particular mind may be perfectly attuned to your dharma -- or fate -- so I'm not trying to say you're on the wrong path necessarily, but I recognize in your comments a common desire to categorize things that you haven't actually experienced. E.g., since the notion that self is an illusion doesn't make concrete sense to you (along with most everyone else) you work diligently to settle on a narrative that eases the discomfort of not really knowing precisely what the phrase refers to.
What's endlessly fascinating to me is how much effort we humans put into defending a universe constructed of narratives, while we have the tools to actually perform serious reality-based investigations at our fingertips. Rather than "doing the work" we are much, much more comfortable relying on our tried-and-true (stable-feeling) intellectual systems already in place rather than physicalized explorations that monitor our actual existence and consciousness, which is, of course, ever-changing (and, so, feels unstable).
It's a stark, straightforward choice that we make each moment; and we almost always default to analyzing ideas (or abstracting others' experiences) rather than monitoring direct experience -- which is relatively simple to do, once we give ourselves permission to spend the time and awareness doing so.
I don't recognise myself at all in what you are attributing to me here. Also, most of this comment doesn't make much sense to me, but it feels like given the way you are approaching this, there would be no point in trying to find common ground here.
But it IS true that we make decisions. Even if we grant that we don't have the possibility to make other decisions than the ones we eventually make, that is irrelevant for all practical purposes, because neither we ourselves nor anyone else can, in general, foresee what decision we make before we make it.
And that it is some mind module that wins the competition, and not the central "self" alone, that is responsible for the decision also doesn't mean it wasn't "us" - unless you expect the CEO of a company to do all the work, and come up with all the ideas by himself.
Yeah, I agree that "because determinism" is maybe not a good enough reason to claim that it's not real that we make decisions. And I also agree that for practical purposes, it is perfectly fine to talk about you making decisions, or a company making decisions, or your family, or a country.
The point the Sam Harris's try to make (often wrongly because these discussions are hard to keep clear and clean) is not opposed to that. You'd be fine with saying that a company made a decision even though it wasn't all done by the CEO; and that's the most practical way to see it from the outside.
But you probably agree too that the CEO should not be under the impression that all the decisions of the company came from himself, and if he was, he would be, in some sense, confused (under an "illusion"). And its in this same sense that they claim that when we identify the decisions that "come from our brains" as "our decisions", we are confused, we are being like tribal with our thought processes. And just like as a CEO you can take a breath, go on holidays, and lose the sense that the company IS you, by paying attention you lose the sense that you are the author of the decision you make.
> So, it's not true that we make choices because determinism,
This is a common misunderstanding of "choice" among hard determinists. Choice is simply a process of deliberating among all possible options and reducing them to 1, that being the choice. The fact that this process might be deterministic is irrelevant.
In same cases, I think the misunderstanding is more boring than that. I imagine a Sam Harris would say something like the following. If you ask the average person, who believes and feels he has free will, to imagine the thought experiment where some know-it-all can predict every decision they make, their sense of choice would be shaken; so most people when they say they have choice they are actually having the (incoherent) picture that they are some sort of agent, outside the physical world, who could always do/have done otherwise, or something like that; and determinism is a sufficient reason for that to be wrong, though not necessary because they whole concept is incoherent in itself.
TLDR, I think at least in some cases the misunderstanding is not about what choice really is but about what the non-philosopher people mean by it, and what their "sense of free will" is really telling them, intuitively.
I think this conflates how people who have never thought about a question try to first answer vs. how they think about it when they're forced to more carefully consider their moral reasoning when presented with various challenging cases. Fortunately, experimental philosophy has done this study:
Per the paper, most people actually subscribe to a form of source Compatibilism, which is compatible with determinism.
Regarding "could have done otherwise", this is another common confusion. Frankfurt showed that the principle of alternate possibilities is not sufficient for moral responsibility, so this can't be what people mean by that phrase. If you drill down further, you find that people actually mean that they could have done otherwise *had they known better*, and would do otherwise *if presented with a sufficiently similar scenario in the future*.
People learn to do better when they see their mistakes and are held accountable for them, and this is why moral responsibility is justified even in the presence of determinism. Even a deterministic agent that can learn from moral feedback is morally responsible for their actions when they should have known better.
Regarding your TLDR, I agree that the question of free will is (partly) about what it means colloquially. The debate over free will is about *defining* what free will means in a way that makes sense of our moral reasoning and our moral language. That's why I think Sam Harris is wrong on the matter of free will. He takes people's unexamined claims of its properties at face value, declares them incoherent, and concludes that there is therefore no such thing as free will. Rather than approaching it denotatively, he should approach it connotatively, which is how most people talk about things they don't fully wish to describe or don't fully understand.
Yeah, I agree that Sam Harris goes too eagerly from "what people intuitively mean by free will is incoherent" to a whole bunch of conclusions that need much more support than that.
Thanks for the paper; I'll check it out (though I wouldn't be surprised if it is too heavy for me, having never read a philosophy paper, and I choose to use my time in other stuff). Having said that, before reading it, my intuition regarding the original point of the thread (i.e. stepping away from the maelstrom of the general discussions on free will and such), is similar to Sam's. I'd guess most people's sense of being on the driver seat would be deeply shaken by learning that someone has been predicting their every turn, and they'd try desperately to screw those predictions to recover such sense; which is another way of saying that their default sense of choice relies on something that is incompatible with determinism. But yeah, it sounds from your description that the paper has news for me.
Fortunately, they don't need to try at all to refute the prediction machine, because a true 100% accurate prediction machine is simply impossible even in a deterministic universe. This conclusion follows naturally from the Halting Problem: deterministic computers can't infer all properties about other deterministic computers.
I think the free will paper is pretty accessible. As an empirical study of people's intuitive moral reasoning, it's a little more relevant than typical abstract philosophical musings. It also gives a good overview of various views of free will. If the question of free will interests you, then I recommend it!
"If you ask the average person, who believes and feels he has free will, to imagine the thought experiment where some know-it-all can predict every decision they make, their sense of choice would be shaken;"
Coming from a religious background, I was raised to believe that we have free will and that there definitely, 100% for sure is a omniscient "know it all" who not only can but has predicted every decision we make and will make. So I was surprised that people are shaken by the thought experiment, though on reflection I realized it was due to being inculcated with the idea from an early age.
The obvious point to make here is that secularism permits a less humble conception of human capability and agency than monotheistic religion does (and it's that conception/misconception that would be shaken by a godlike figure).
I'm not sure whether that's *true*, although certainly this is part of the Randian hatred for religion.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me has been via Douglas Hofstadter's Strange Loop theory, which I hope I'm not going to mangle here. During our childhood development, the first concept that we develop that binds together our sensory perceptions is "I", in the sense of the body as the locus of the sensory perceptions. We can then start conceptualizing these sensory perceptions in terms of "not-I", which leads to differentiation of all these things outside the body and the development of an ontology to start organizing the external world. However, the concept of "I" is the gatekeeper for all of these sensory perceptions - "I'm not Mom", "I'm not this chair" - which gives the self centrality in the emerging semantic network of the mind.
This sense of centrality in the semantic network then gets strengthened when the child develops the ability to bring the concept "I" into consciousness as an object of thought and thereby perceive the self as the entity perceiving. This establishes the strange loop, the self-referentiality that's characteristic of our mature sense of the self.
I don't think Hofstadter ever says too much about Buddhism, though it's been quite a while since I've read him, but my notion of what meditation can achieve is the decentering of "I" in the semantic network, to generalize identity to the semantic network itself. It's analogous to the progressive decentering of the Earth in the scientific account of the cosmos, or moving from traversing a computer's filesystem up and down the tree to seeing the filesystem as a whole.
If I imagine that my command prompt is a little daemon, stuck inside the filesystem, just moving up and down the tree and executing commands, it would be very easy for the daemon to identify its experience with the entirety of what the computer is, even though that daemon has neither a comprehensive view of the filesystem as a whole nor any conception of the material basis of its existence. I've never achieved anything like this in my feeble meditation practice - I can barely sit still for 20 minutes - but this is my notion of the perspective that Buddhist meditation is trying to achieve.
Consciousness is to some extent our brain running an emulation of itself. Awareness is a mental process; what we think of as our feelings is actually an emulation of our feelings, created so we have a mental picture of our feelings, so we can understand ourselves. Metacognition isn't just "looking at this thing that is here", because there's nothing to look with, nor anything to look at - instead what you're doing is conducting an elaborate mental theater of yourself.
This emulation can take place in different places in the brain; somebody with a "verbal style of thinking" may be running the emulation-of-self in the verbal part of their brain.
People then frequently label this mental-model-of-themselves as "self", so that when they realize it's an elaborate illusion, they conclude they have no "self" (which is correct, insofar as "self" points at this construct).
Enlightenment may or may not be the dissolution of this mental-model-of-self. It may also include being completely aware of all aspects of mind simultaneously at all times. It may also be dropping "awareness" entirely, and just "being", such that you're no longer concerned with that kind of "knowing-of-self".
Some of the valence of suffering may arise from more fundamental constructs applying sympathy to this construct-of-self; we magnify our pain by emulating it. For some people, suffering may exist entirely in sympathy for this model, such that once they abolish it, they cease to experience suffering entirely. Alternatively, the experience of suffering may be the wish-that-things-be-different (where a wish that things be a particle way may or may not be attachment), which may not be possible when you aren't running a mental model of yourself and implicitly comparing it to an idealized mental model of yourself. I can turn suffering on and off pretty much at will, but I don't know what is "really" is under the covers; I have a suspicion that the lever I use to turn suffering on and off may be related to depression and anhedonia, however, so whatever mechanism I use, I don't recommend others pursue.
Once you stop associating self with the mental model of yourself, you may notice that the awareness-sense you have doesn't seem to have any kind of "root" anywhere (until you notice one, after which you start all over again), which you may conceptualize as your awareness-sense being outside yourself entirely - the awareness-sense which pokes and prods at things in your mind isn't itself any of the things it pokes and prods, which can create a kind of mental distance between that awareness and the experience it is aware of.
That is, the awareness isn't in pain. The awareness isn't walking down the street. The awareness is just aware of those things. If you start associating "you" with that awareness, you'll stop associating "you" with the things you're aware of, and you can lose your sense of attachment to the "you" that is still doing those things.
I think a religious context makes it very easy to start thinking of this awareness as, say, a soul, or a specific implementation of a more universal awareness. (Because the awareness has no internal characteristics of its own, all awareness is in a sense identical.)
One useful framing is aliefs. Or an intellectual understanding vs a visceral (physical feelings and making actions) understanding.
I put on a VR headset, climbed a tower, but could not make myself step off. Intellectually, I knew I was safe, by viscerally I felt scared and could not make myself fall off.
For a sense of self, you can understand it’s a fabrication intellectually in all the ways described in the other comments, but viscerally understanding it would mean you don’t take yourself so seriously as much. Less personally attacked and less compelled to act in an in-character manner.
If you're STEM-oriented, it's a treat, since the author is an AI researcher and it shows. If you liked it, the rest of the series might pique your interest; it's called "A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence".
The "self" is an empty intuition. It's not a label that refers to any distinct entity or concept in physical reality. Much like "good" or "evil".
Whether your "self" currently points to your body, your brain, you and your loved ones ("I feel you've become a part of myself"), or the entire universe - it makes no difference, it doesn't constrain any anticipations.
Noself means appreciating this not just intellectually but viscerally, I think.
I've had moments where I ceased to feel that there was a meaningful difference between my own body and those of strangers I passed on the street. All just organisms deterministically doing their thing. Biggest difference was that I had more access to info about myself than about them.
Control also became a non-thing. Just a mechanical detail of how systems interact.
Though interestingly, the self-pointer did not just dissolve. Instead, it felt like "I" was my own body and those other people at the same time. I could look at them with a kind of "Yeah, this [behavior/actions/decisions of theirs] is me expressing itself, doing its thing" stance. Like they were familiar.
A similar thing seems to be going on when meditators report feeling like they are the entire universe. The self-pointer persists, just gets moved.
I'd say that's because it's like trying to explain colour to a blind man; you can hear endless descriptions of its beauty and still not really 'get' it. Have you tried meditating, to the point where you can feel your 'self' fall apart into various cognitions?
Not an experienced Buddhist here, but the way I parse it is as follows:
When going about your daily life, you very likely have a clear sense of "things" around you. As you interact with different things, you clearly have a notion of the boundaries between things. As in: This is a cup, this is a plate, this is a dog, this is a cat. One thing starts where another thing ends.
And just as you can identify things and give them boundaries, within the realm of your perception there is one special thing which you identify as being "you". You perceive this thing in a distinguished manner - you know that if the special you-thing comes into contact with a hot object then you will feel pain, for instance.
In the same manner, when doing purely mental operations, you have an idea of a "you-concept" which is actually doing the mental work.
The way I understand the idea of "no-self" is that the boundaries between things and concepts are arbitrary fictions created by the brain in order to make us able to effectively interact with the world. And while these fictions are very convenient, when you look at the real world you start running into Ship of Theseus-like problems all the way down - because the fictions are fictions, not the way the real world works.
The problem here is that - where does that leave the you-thing? Buddhism's solution to this conundrum is that the you-thing is just as fictional as all other things - you are convinced there is a thing/concept that is "you" because that is convenient for interacting with the universe in a way that leads to increased reproductive fitness. However, you are not a singular thing - you are multiple entities (whose boundaries are also nebulous) interacting in a concerted enough manner that it fools yourself into thinking the you-thing is real.
It's not exactly an "illusion," I think that word (too often used in this context for a long time) has the wrong connotation. Dharmically the 'self' like everything else is a conditioned process, subject to prior causes and conditions, constantly changing due to new causes & conditions. Really it's just a placeholder concept so that the body-mind knows which body-mind it is for survival purposes. The problems arise when the concept is allowed to run away with itself and claim too much for itself.
Overall, i loved the synthesis and an attempt to bring clarity to topics that often feel confusing and contradictory.
I think i've reached a similar synthesis as you:
- on the idea of meditation going well with metta / loving compassion training, since having values is important for being functional in the world
- the notion of feelings as giving 'weight' to thoughts and causing them to surface
- instead 'of 'destroying' the self, dissolving boundaries between self and other.
- desire being different from pain; i.e. when something hurts, it's easy to add to it the unpleasant desire for the pain to go away; that desire is an additionally unpleasant feeling that's somehow worse than the raw pain
Here are a few points where we differ:
> I hope that by now you agree that we shouldn’t give up our feelings. But perhaps we should rebel against evolution and rebuild ourselves to approximate a perfect moral agent more closely
What you are calling 'rebellion against evolution', i would call something more like 'calibration.' We evolved in one environment that is so different from where we are now, it would be a real wonder if the drives and desires we have at present tended to make us calm and happy. Sugary donut, loot crates, internet porn, and algorithmic social networks didn't exist for our ancestors.
This notion of calibration then seems to link together the idea of global workspace of consciousness, and mental chatter. If our brains consist of many different conflicting control systems, then these control systems fighting against each other gives rise to unmet desires, aka feelings, and this give rise to thoughts and mental chatter. There's an old buddhist story comparing the untrained mind to a bunch of animals all chained together - each animal wants to go to its preferred environment. Here's a writeup:
If you adopt the hypothesis that these control systems all evolved with certain defaults, and that the defaults worked in the ancestral environment, but are mismatched with the present environment, you get a conclusion that says something like: "we generally feel shitty and have lots of internal chatter because the various control systems in our brains are all pulling us in different directions. The control systems that don't feel good then generate negative feelings, which give rise to thoughts, in an attempt to moderate between the various control systems. We can re-write the intensity with which we try to manage the control systems, by consciously relaxing the weight we put on any one control system; we can learn to feel pain without adding on to the pain the desire for the pain to go away. Doing this mindful acceptance allows the control systems to 'settle down' which reduces both the arising of unpleasant feelings, and the mental chatter that rides along with them."
> he world is a causally interconnected system, with no sharp divide between the inside and outside of an organism, or between actions which are done by the organism and to it. (This is one of the things people sometimes mean by “emptiness.”) If that's true, then the Perfectly Wise Perfect Utilitarian wouldn't have a sense of self-as-site-of-action either. (She could still act in whatever way we normally act, but she wouldn't see an in-principle difference between "directly" wiggling her toe and causing you to wiggle yours e.g. by asking you to do it
I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that distance does matter in terms of predictive accuracy. There may not be sharp divides between the insides and outside of organisms, but divides to exist. An example here might be simpler if you replace a perfectly enlightened human being with a perfectly enlightened AGI that runs on a computer in a garage in new jersey. The computer in the garage in new jersey knows that it's running on hardware located in a garage, and although it might _care_ globally, it knows that its capacity to _act_ is constrained locally, and the quality fo the information it recives about distant locations is likely to degrade with distance.
This is a place where i disagree with a lot of people in the EA community. I agree with the basic premise (we should try to do as much good as possible with the limited donation budget) but i think the idea that we can just ignore spacetime when making decisions is absurd. Our ability to accurately predict the consequences of our actions is heavily constrained by proximity; it's much harder to tell what my choices will do when i am trying to affect a situation far away in space or time.
Overall, though, i loved this writeup. Thank you for taking the time to share it.
>What you are calling 'rebellion against evolution', i would call something more like 'calibration.' We evolved in one environment that is so different from where we are now, it would be a real wonder if the drives and desires we have at present tended to make us calm and happy. Sugary donut, loot crates, internet porn, and algorithmic social networks didn't exist for our ancestors.
Context change or no, evolution has no interest in making us calm or happy. It has an interest in our genes being passed on. Negative emotions are key parts of that; it is not an accident that adultery can drive a cuckold to murder, or that one without a family feels the lack.
A "recalibration" of evolutionary drives is mass sperm/egg donation, possibly supplemented by personal Quiverfull living. Ceasing to care about how many children you produce isn't a "calibration"; it *is* a rebellion.
This is a great argument. Recalibration of drives, in order to account for the modern environment (without opposing evolution), would be something like that, yeah.
OK, further response here: you seem to be arguing, implicitly, that calibration is only calibration if you're pursuing an r-selected strategy. But we're humans - so we should likely pursue k-selected strategies. Not caring _at all_ how many children you produce, at all, is rebellion. But that's very different from having a few children and trying to do the best you can to raise them.
An, arguably, doing any kind of altruism is still contributing to the propagation of your DNA - rebellion against evolution would have to include rejecting doing anything in service of humanity, and actively trying to harm people.
The Buddha didn't preach not-self as a metaphysical doctrine but as a tool of inquiry, just like he broke with yogic traditions teaching jhana as a means of ultimate liberation but still used jhana as a tool. Non-self/non-dual schools already existed at the time of the Buddha. There is a sutta I am having trouble locating at the moment where someone comes to ask him this explicit question as a point of difference between schools: does the Buddha teach a doctrine of self or a doctrine of no-self and the Buddha says that the question has a confused foundation rendering an answer 'not even wrong' or in Buddhist terminology 'neither true-nor-untrue, nor both-true-and-untrue.' I try to explain some of this in the section on anatta here:
Additionally, I think people trying to get a better grasp on Buddhist practice intellectually would be well served by viewing it as continuous with models of adult psychological development, like Kegan. In Kegan's model each level is about being able to view the previous level as object, instead of being subject to it. One can broadly think about meditative insight the same way, just with deeper-in-the-stack objects like 'sense of identification and control' and 'craving and aversion.'
Treating these meditation frameworks (no-self/nondual) as just another tool is great meta-framework.
This ties in with the emotion problem mentioned in the review. Most people interface with their emotions using narratives, self, and physical sensations (“I’m right because X. Alice did me wrong because of Y...”). Some meditators learn to interface with their emotions as solely physical sensations (“tightened contraction in my chest that feels like [hard to describe]”), and this is useful! A tendency is then to believe that this is the only correct way to deal with your emotions, which may lead to being a doormat or letting problems fester because you don’t understand their narrative meaning.
Someone who is deeply familiar with interfacing with their emotions in many ways will not run into the same issues as one who only uses one.
Meditators can ironically become narrow minded and dogmatic. I believe that discussions revolving meditation would benefit from saying what specific meditation technique OUT OF 1000’S OF POSSIBLE TECHNIQUES is being used and what effect it is supposed to have. All techniques are not the same but are frequently lumped together under “meditation”
I don't want to sound snarky here, but I think it's worth pointing that Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus have been doing a long-running Blogging Heads series which, the couple times I had the misfortune of stumbling on, I found to be virtually unwatchable due to the two of them sniping at and try to talk over each other constantly. He seems to still have a decent sized reservoir of ill will, at least for his co-host, despite the meditation.
I can imagine reasons why someone might not like the weekly Bob and Mickey conversations, although they’re a highlight of my week. But ill will for his co-host?? I don’t think you could have possibly stumbled onto one for long?
This is interesting but doesn't feel that much like a book review. Is there a position on whether votes should be based on "how much do I like this as an article in a vacuum" vs "how much does it succeed at the task of being a book review"?
This review is what people have in mind when they dismiss the ACX community a place for precocious 13 year old know-it-alls. I read the review because Robert Wright's work is outstanding and deserves discussion in this forum. But it doesn't deserve this onanistic, willful misunderstanding and self-indulgent speculation about topics the review author seems to only be familiar with from reading the first half of some of the sentences in the book.
The actual book is well cited and builds its arguments carefully and reasonably. Obviously the reviewer wasn't able to connect with them and has their own ideas the nature of reality. I don't see what that has to do with the book itself, at all.
Fully agreed. This was disappointing to see Scott choose. I don't have the time, but I'd love to see someone provide the context and surrounding material for the quotes that the author of this review seems to cherry-pick, as many of the seemingly-novel points made here are indeed made, with more nuance and authority, by Wright himself.
Near the end: "After the retreat, I also had one of my largest bursts of creativity, writing the third chapter of my dissertation at record speed. It’s about beauty and meditation," so, the author has spent time around the ideas. So whatever the flaws are in the review we can't blame it on lack of invested time.
You may seem to still have some "negative emotion issues", at least on behalf of Robert Wright, Tom! Not enough meditation practice perhaps... (Sorry, it was just too tempting.)
On a serious note: From my hobby interest in the sociology of meditation schools (there is decades since I did any meditation myself), the lack of what good old Popperians would call a demarction criterion should worry novices in particular. Also known as the "would the real Enlightened teacher please stand up" problem.
In the absence of an observable demarcation criterion that can falisify the claim of someone claiming to be enlightened, there is no way for novices to screen teachers and separate the truly Enlightened from mimics, charlatans and self-deceptors. It's a signalling problem. This goes for Buddhists as well as the various Hindu schools.
It gets worse: if one assumes that achieving true Enlightenment is difficult while mimicing the real thing is cheap, mimics will tend to drive the true Enlightened out of the meditation-market.
In lieu of honest signals, Enlightened meditation scholars (be they real or fakes) may use the strategy "be angry and/or arrogant" as a way to tackle those who doubt their claim.
Unfortunately, sending the message "I am angry and you are an idiot" is easy to mimic.
The inability of the Enlightened to send honest signals (i.e. costly behavior that cannot be mimiced) is possibly a tragedy, if one assumes that there may indeed be something called "true Enlightenment" out there.
As with Gods, so also with True Enlightenment - popperians would ague that both may exist, we just have no way to falsify the claim that they do.
There’s a parallel issue in presenting a book review to an audience that has not read the book, especially when intentionally setting out to strawman the book in order to posit your own claims as superior. Fortunately with book reviews there is at least the “demarcation event” of reading the actual book, and I’m glad more people will do that than read this review.
Of course if people do both and disagree with my assessment of the review, that’s up to them. I just would prefer than published book reviews give a fair representation of the book, rather than an intentionally unfair “strawmanning” the consistently misses or ignores major themes and assertions of the book itself.
I didn't hate this by any means, but I would counsel anyone that snark, though relentlessly attempted on the internet, is far harder to pull off than you might think. It's really easy to instill an unintended childish quality in a piece even while that piece says intelligent and true things. Go carefully in that direction. Just one reader's opinion.
I thought this was really good. I confess that I don’t understand the idea that an idea of self ceasing to matter should or would lead toward utilitarianism. All those other selves are no more important than mine on this perspective and there’s no better reason to care about the others than to care about my own. Seems the lesson would be to stop caring about any sort of consequentialist system rather than supporting a move toward utility maximizing.
There’s a lot tangled in meditation results and insights. On one hand, one type of meditation literally improves my mood and another improves my ability to let go of things so I’m not as stubborn. These two help me be nicer to people if that’s my goal!
On the other hand, other types of meditation will lead to seeing your self narrative and sense of self as constructed in your brain. It’s harder to value myself above others when it’s sort of play-pretend. Another expands your awareness to its max, which may even cause you to let go of your spatial sense of body separation. This feels like there is no difference between you and the environment (“all is one”, “one with god”) or flow states like those in the book “the rise of Superman” by kotler. I’m specifically remembering a guy who was one with a dying bird after he base jumped and his parachute failed.
Can you expand on which type is which? Broadly, using terms vaguely and without nitpicking, I'd guess, in order: metta / insight / .... mindfulness of breathing?
1. Samadhi/vipassana(?) - when I focus on a meditation object (like my breath) and try to gain finer grained fedility, I’m in a better mood afterwards. Though I think this only true with physical sensory information.
2. Letting go/surrender: any practice where you have to let go of something (like a thought that comes up) builds this skill, but I think non-dual meditation on vast spacious awareness
3. Insight? - seeing your sense of self as different than you thought may require a pre-req of a certain level of concentration. I found good use of 3-characteristic exercises found in “Seeing that Frees” as useful. Another was a pointing out instruction in vast spacious awareness showing that I can know things without them “passing through my head” or whatever.
4. Vast spacious awareness/ headless way - poking holes in my mental map of my body is what opened me up to vast spacious awareness. [Michael Taft’s non-dual YouTube series is where I got half of this from!]
These are all your interconnected and I’m not as clear in my head of what each does. What’s important to me is building better models on how these techniques affect me.
What somehow annoyed me is that is isn't completely clear whether the Utilitarian framing is only from the reviewer, or does the author of the book uses it too ?
I hear Michael Taft (mediation teacher, deconstructing yourself podcast) mention that a sense of self is very useful for many goals, like walking from one place to another without hitting the walls! So there are meditation people who made a similar argument as your comment.
There is a difference between (1) my sense of self is obviously, importantly real and in charge of many things (like my thoughts) and (2) my sense of self is a useful mental construction for many goals but not in charge of many functions that it thought it was (like my thoughts!)
Me too, thanks for the reference. Here's the full quote for others:
> In fact, your conscious mind is more plausibly a press secretary. You’re not the president or the king or the CEO. You aren’t in charge. You aren’t actually making the decision, the conscious part of your mind at least. You are there to make up a good explanation for what’s going on so that you can avoid the accusation that you’re violating norms.
Why should we believe for a second that meditation can make us a "Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe"? The review calls this "not implausible" and founds much of the reasoning in the review on that possibility (since it's apparently the end goal for meditation). This seems obviously provably false. Is there a single scrap of not-easily-faked evidence that meditators can feel other people's pain through some extrasensory mechanism? I don't think so. Given that this a central point of the review, I found this whole thing impossible to take seriously.
(Am I being too harsh here? Too literal? I've reread that section three times and each time it seems like the reviewer very much believes in the super-utilitarian as literally possible.)
Extra-sensory experience doesn’t make sense for sure.
But it’s clear that many people pursue the good of a small group of others (their family, friends, etc), and some even pursue the good of a few others equally as much (or more!) than theirselves. I interpreted this section to mean expanding this group to all of humanity, with the connected meditation practice being metta.
I don’t completely agree with the reviewer though, that’s just my interpretation of that section.
I did not get the impression that the reviewer or Wright believe that one can literally sense others' pain and pleasure. I read it to mean that one should care about everyone *as if* one could feel everyone.
Below is the paragraph that firmly convinced me otherwise. It's very plainly talking about actually experiencing other people's pain, and not merely caring about other people's pain.
Suppose you’re that Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe. In that case, I think it's fair to say that you don't have a self. (Or, if you prefer, your self is the whole universe.) After all, what makes my toe mine, rather than yours? Arguably, the fact that when I stub it, I'm the one who feels pain, and not you. If I literally felt you stub your toe, I might start calling it "my toe."
No, this is in part II - the "steelman". In fact, it's precisely his way to cohere his two steelmen - the paragraph where he introduces the "perfect utilitarian" begins with the words "So what Wright should have said..."
Re-reading it, you’re right. The reviewer mentions both “literally feeling everyone’s pain” and “enlightenment that leads to becoming the perfect utilitarian”.
I initially pattern-matched it to something else, because it’s nonsense to believe that you’ll be able to literally feel someone else’s pain in e.g. someone else’s toe by meditating enough.
I read this as an extended riff on the nature of empathy. A scale, with literally feeling others' pain at one end, and then feeling pain in response to witnessing others in pain, and then the more abstract "caring" in response to their pain, etc. But yes the reviewer did state the literal interpretation.
Years ago I read Walpola Rahula "What the Buddha Taught" and I see that review is in the list. Since then I've concluded that the idea of "self" involves a lot of concept creep and using one word for a zillion different things. Especially with the advances of neuroscience. I think it's entirely possible that the layman's experience of self lies in the sensation of conscious control over thoughts, the ability to steer some aspect of consciousness. I don't usually see people write that though and so I approach as a skeptic, via translations, and when the result is kindof boggly I cannot get too exercised about it. Losing that can happen in stroke, psychosis and brain injury, so why not from meditation too, in a sense. However, knowing nothing about the perfect utilitarian, I am in no position to follow that line, but it does sound inaccurate to me.
> Is there a single scrap of not-easily-faked evidence that meditators can feel other people's pain through some extrasensory mechanism?
It's not intended literally. Meditation makes you cognitively associate your pain less with yourself, and makes you more empathetic to others' pain (makes it easier to place yourself in their shoes and *imagine* their pain), and therefore you weight them both equally.
No, your interpretation of the structure of the argument and the meaning in context is not correct. Scott, the reviewer, does not at all intend to convey that sensation of another's pain is literally the same as the sensation of your own pain.
To be perfectly clear since you were apparently confused, the paragraph you quoted was a thought experiment to explore the idea of what it would *mean* if you could feel another's pain and how that would impact your moral reasoning.
As a thought experiment, it's not a literal statement of the actual state of things, but is meant to test the limits of a specific proposition(s). That's the whole purpose of starting that paragraph with "suppose...".
These sorts of thought experiments appear all the time in science and philosophy, where they're called "intuition pumps" [1].
Your first reading comprehension mistake was apparently thinking Scott's the reviewer. See the very first paragraph, in italics. I would go through your second, but I've already done so elsewhere and your lack of charity gives me no reason to do so again. Take the time to read it if you'd like.
>> Suppose you’re that Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe. In that case, I think it's fair to say that you don't have a self.
No man is an island entire of itself.
>> (Or, if you prefer, your self is the whole universe.)
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
>> After all, what makes my toe mine, rather than yours?
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
>> Arguably, the fact that when I stub it, I'm the one who feels pain, and not you.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
>> If I literally felt you stub your toe, I might start calling it "my toe."
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I propose an additional contest: best (worst) pun in the text of a review. This one should be in the running: "When reading Why Buddhism is True, I had Greg's tumor, er, in the back of my mind"
There are more pun entries in the book review contest so far than there are books; multiple jokes per review if the pattern holds. Some would say that those jokes are what should be edited out first, but it seems to be part of a subcultural communication style here, maybe, "write like Scott when possible."
I think it’s fine to use “er”. I don’t expect the average writer to include puns like that, so I’m not looking for them and will likely miss them. To look for puns in everything I ever read regardless of the author isn’t worth the effort tradeoff for me.
I usually have to exaggerate my puns and jokes for people who don’t know me very well, but for my closest friends, I’m very subtle.
Automatic disqualification would be too much of a punishment in my opinion, in fact, clever reviewers should enjoy impunity from disqualification as well!
Dude, you're clearly temperamentally not a Buddhist, but a Shaiva!
Your path is clearly flavoured by the destruction of the artificial boundaries of the of the self as opposed to the destruction of the self itself, you do not Fucking Hate™ the world or have revulsion for it and want to escape it to go into a monastery which is far away from all its horrible filth, you don't Fucking Hate™ all feelings and actions and engagement with the world like a Good Sutrayana Boy™, and your thesis has as one of its foci a topic which was also something the Shaivas made major contributions to and were quite into (aesthetics).
Join us!
We have (and strongly value) aesthetics, both academic and appreciatory, in a seamless whole! (This is not hyperbole - the current paradigm in classical/traditional Indian aesthetics was *founded* by a Shaiva yogi (meditator, you'd call him today), and has remained pre-eminent since. In fact, I think that even today, only a fraction of its potential has been unlocked - sad twist of history, and something I'm interested in moving forward.) (If you want more information about it, LMK and I'll answer with what resources I know of. It's probably interesting to you academically as well, given it's an aesthetic theory.)
And our meditation methods actually allow you to *appreciate* not just nice things, but all things and experiences *as themselves*. So if you find yourself accidentally smelling something disgusting, your reaction may be of disgust, but it's also of an appreciation of the disgusting smell as well as the disgust, as in "Man, this smell is so disgusting right now! So cool!" (Let me hasten to add we begin with nicer things than this, this is just an effect of cultivating the ability to nonjudgementally experience and savour all experience.) Normally, people can only have this experience vicariously, through media - few truly appreciate the 3D-6sense-full-immersion-VR experience that is their own life. One fruit of practice in this tradition is the aesthetisation of all of life.
And they also enhance greatly aesthetic enjoyment itself - many of the arts of India have historically found a great outburst of creative expression following the influence of our tradition! And no wonder - we don't Fucking Hate™ the world, in fact we (in a sense) Fucking Love™ all of it...
And huge amounts of creative juice, too! The ideal archetype in our system is not the monk with deadened eyes/feelings, it's the ecstatic yet unattached connoisseur of life itself, with all its ups and downs and joys and sorrows.
And strong, effective, healthy egos that are capable of acting in the world without self-centredness as step one (and 1.5) of our path! Because it's a path that is grown and built and developed from the ground up for householders (people in the world doing stuff), not monastics (though there are monastic variants, for those who are temperamentally like that - there are a few). Many of the major figures of the tradition were men (and women) of eminence.
And we don't Fucking Hate™ the mind and intellect either, nor reason; though we're suspicious of attractors of delusion and suffering it has a bad habit of falling into...
And feasts! And the very, very occasional powdered sugar donut, too (though we don't make a habit of it, for obvious reasons).
And cookies!
But more seriously - it seems clear that you're temperamentally more aligned with the Shaivas (your words and work and analysis betray your true affinity - you even articulated the Shaiva analogue of the no-self doctrine as something that appeals to you more, apparently as an independent preference, in the book review!), or the Vajrayana Buddhists (if you want to stay within the broader Buddhist fold).
I will add here that historically, we were bigger/richer/more popular/more influential/more creative than the Buddhists; it is thanks to an accident of history that Buddhism is more prominent and has greater name recognition and brand power today. Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism), for example, is what you get when you apply to Mahayana Buddhism the Tantrik mode of practice which was developed among the Shaivas. (Both traditions got fucked in India by the Muslims and their destruction of institutions, monasteries, and mathas, but Buddhism had established institutional bases outside, so it lived (though it died in India); we survived in India in a tremendously reduced form, sometimes worse than not surviving, and are beginning to recover only now, with the recovery of the various streams of the classical material.)
LMK if you (or anyone else) would like to know more, and I can post sources and links.
(Luckily, there is now available a (free) introductory practice course which provides instruction in a broad array of meditation practices from the tradition (suitable and safe for beginners), along with a solid introduction to the most useful/fundamental conceptual tools and categories, and general guidelines and so on; I'll post it only if someone wants it/asks for it, since it'd be spam otherwise.)
Overall I'm unsure of how I feel about this review. I'm an occasional meditator and this is useful for motivating me to get back into what is, for me, an objectively good habit. OTOH I feel like it didn't really delve that deeply into what's interesting or unique about this book. Overall I think it's a fine review but maybe not at the level of many of the other entries.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Only being able to vote for one is a bad voting system. Why not take the one with the most hearts? Or have a form where we can vote for as many as we choose.
Given that it is not immediately obvious why anyone should be interested in pursuing the happiness of all humanity, a connection with everything in existence, or philosophies that largely mirror Utilitarianism (especially considering the basic evolutionary predisposition toward self-interest and survival instincts that can and have superseded a number of similar 'ties to humanity,' such as blood relations), it behooves anyone making this claim to offer a moral argument as to why I or anyone else should have any interest in others at all.
That is, I'll not tolerate sneaky Utilitarians making out that their philosophical outlook is somehow the default one. The question is far from settled.
I initially thought the author was Ben who was thanked at the end of the article and went to ask him this question
Then I corrected myself and thought to post this question here instead
## Question
“Distinguishes craving and aversion from pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are intrinsic to feelings. Craving and aversion are how we react “
So this part seems to suggest (and I agree) our day to day we conflate pleasure with craving, and pain with aversion
What about desire and craving?
Most spritual writing talks about removing desire but maybe I’m too much of an engineer brain by thinking isn’t that self defeating because you would have to desire to stop all desires no?
I found this review's comments about morality fairly annoying.
It's not exactly a great revelation "why moral people are sometimes described as 'selfless'" if the standard of morality that you are putting forward is altruism, i.e. never privileging your own interests over those of others. Actually I find it odd that someone could not get this.
And it talks about things like "It's all in the service of realizing that other people's perspectives are as real as your own, and their happiness as important as yours." But it doesn't at all defend the idea of altruism that this is supposed to be evidence for. Yes, other people's perspectives are real. But why is their happiness supposed to be as important *to you* as your own is *to you*, as opposed to its being as important *to them* as your own is *to you*? That is just as symmetrical and indeed I would say the more obvious interpretation. This is not defended.
The Buddhist/Humean "bundle theory" of the self, which the review doesn't clearly reject or endorse, purports to give a *reason* why the egoistic perspective is nonsensical: that there is no self whose interests it is possible to prioritize. Since there is no actual distinction between "you yourself" being tortured and anyone else being tortured, you should seek to minimize all torture equally. The problem is that this is a completely absurd view.
Moreover, defenders' interpretations in my experience bounce back and forth between two versions of it. The more mystical version says somehow your locus of experience could jump unpredictably into someone else's body, and therefore "you" (a term they reject but which is actually indispensable) could experience someone else's future pain in exactly the same way you experience your own current pain. The more nihilistic and skeptical version says there simply is no continuity whatsoever; it's all a matter of convention. In which case it is very difficult to see why any fleeting present-instant person should care about *anyone's* future pain.
Agreed on most points, I also found myself irritated, glad it wasn't just my pedantry. A nitpick: I've more often heard Humeanism used as an argument for the truth (or at least inevitability) of egoism, rather than undermining it. But I'm no deep reader of Hume. Do you/the literature take him to have been skeptical about the self's existence, rather than just presenting a deflationary picture of its nature?
- Mindfulness meditation is being pushed in the West as a way to learn to stop thinking and love Moloch.
- Spiritual practice can be dangerous, especially the kind of spiritual practice where the goal is for you to end up as a monk separate from society hoping to achieve enlightenment.
- It's being taught by amateurs who have barely any experience in Buddhism, much less an actual monk training, who routinely conduct their practice in single week sessions where disciples overdose on meditation, and so their disciples end up with a much larger share of mental health issues.
- There are plenty of Western options for spiritual practice where there's an abundant literature, experienced teachers, and the kind of meditation that trains your cognitive tools instead of sabotaging them. [Disclaimer : the author, now retired, was one of them.]
I don't find that post convincing, or really even informative. He makes lot of claims but provides no evidence for them. Not even anecdotes, really, just his intuitions.
That's a fair criticism. One of the reasons might be that he's been talking a *lot* about spirituality since he founded the new blog, so he doesn't feel like he has to repeat the logic/evidence for the claims every week, and that would get tiresome for the regulars (which I did notice when I was following his previous blog, though I understood that this was necessary for newcomers).
I don't know this author. That said, I thought this post was an ineffective introduction; every other paragraph reads like a strawman, and I wound up having a hard time trusting whatever they would write. Pretty quickly, I felt like I was staring at thousands of words sneering at "those other people" whose approach to spirituality is obviously mindless and at any rate *clearly inferior* to the author's own flavor of Western Occultism.
There is a lot of research over the past 30-40 years on the downside of various meditation practices. In particular the risk of psychosis (sometimes charitably labelled MEPS - Mystical Experience with Psychotic Features.) There even is/was a DMS code for that, at least back in the late 1990s (I have not checked the latest editions). Hallucinations is a marker of psychosis.
I have not read meta-studies of this literature, but my hunch is that breathing exercises (manipulating the oxygen supply to your brain) is the most effective way to induce a psychosis. However, all practices bring with them their share of practitioners who experience psychosis (even Tai chi).
If you are a novice, experiencing a psychosis, and then being told by your teacher you have a mystical experience, is a very powerful way for that teacher to achieve domination over you. This is the stuff that sects are made of.
....And then there are amateur teachers who are ignorant of the risk of psychosis, and give you extremely dangerous advice simply out of ignorance.
So beware of unscrupolous or amateur teachers.
Advice in such situations is to stop whatever practice you are doing (do not pour gasoline on a fire), and seek grounding. Slow walking is often useful, the more/longer the better. Grounding is likely to take months, so this must be kept up.
The review'er to his/her credit mentions the hallucination risk (although apparently not related to White's book); but in a too-light fashion, this is no cute/laughing matter: "After all, during that retreat, I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril, the most beautifully bewhiskered otter I had ever seen, and a pile of loose teeth."
The Church of the Subgenius is one of the very best things an American can use to inoculate her or his mind against the baleful influences of marketing, advertising and the worship of money. I am still quite pissed off at Rev. Stang regarding the funding for the recent documentary, which feels cosmically right somehow, but it's a good introduction.
"We actually are a religion that seems like an art piece that seems like a religion that seems like performance art that seems like a joke that seems like a religion." - Paul Mavrides
The "nihilistic vegetable" thing is interesting. I've read Scott's earlier posts on meditation and noticed that some features of enlightenment struck me as oddly relatable... as someone with a history of depression. I'm still not sure what to make of that.
Oh, and I think "~~give you puppies and unicorns and the ability to cure cancer~~" is meant to be struckthrough text. That's how Discord parses it, anyway, and reading it that way makes sense.
If we want the reviews to be anonymous, there shouldn't be links to the authors personal philpapers profile in the review. This is not the first author to link their own work, so maybe we should just give up the anonymity aspect of the contest since it's clearly not feasible.
But some authors don't link to their own work. If we want to make it work like a spoiler tag and we want it to be fair, there should be a spoiler tag at the top of the review with the authors name behind it.
To me the idea of no-self is strongly connected to physical determinism. There was a point in meditation where I, with absolute clarity, saw that all humans are just physical objects with weird behavior. They can't be anything else, because all behavior follows from fundamental subatomic laws.
In physical determinism there is no place for self or consciousness.
At the same time, in jarring juxtaposition, Humans aren't *really* physical creatures. If every human body was replaced by a magical robot body, we would not really be different people. I would still like my friends, be concerned about my social circle and all that stuff.
If you think about this, then most of the stuff you care about is not definable in a physical reality.
So, to me
No-Self = viewing the world purely through a physical lense
Opposite = viewing the world purely as abstract communication between humans, which sadly has to go through base reality
I believe that, in some part, meditation teaches to switch between the views. If you are in pain, well it's only synapses firing, what do you care? If you want to be kind? Well, every body contains an almost infinite amount of possibility, how could you not care about them?
I liked this review! Of course, it's impossible to judge a review in terms of how well it represents the book if one hasn't read the book, and I haven't.
I haven't been able to meditate myself (too boring and/or sleepy, though admittedly I haven't tried too hard), but from what I've seen, the Rationalist approach to meditation is a giant motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Meditation proponents talk a good game about using meditation to see awesome visions, "become better people", "abandon the self", become one with the Universe, gain increased intelligence and perception, acquire extrasensory and/or psionic powers, and generally become an enlightened energy being. But as soon as you ask them, "that sounds cool, can you prove it ?", they fade back into the shadows, and the only claims that withstand scrutiny are the ones about the awesome hallucinations -- and I'm not even convinced all of those are real.
My personal hypothesis (and I admit that I don't have any evidence, it's just a guess) is the cause and effect are reversed in this case. Perhaps some people are just really good at auto-hypnosis, due to some mutation or epigenetic trait or whatever. With a little training, they can learn to hallucinate at will, be it through Buddhist meditation, Pentecostal chanting, Shamanic rituals (the drug-free ones, if any such exist), etc. Such people go on to become spiritual leaders in whatever religions they'd chosen, preaching the merits of their personal meditation method -- which is still mostly pointless for the other 99% of the population.
As far as I'm aware, practitioners don't actually claim that meditation will grant supernatural powers, boost intelligence, or trigger hallucinations. I'm really curious about why you think they do.
Generally, the aim of meditation is stated along the lines of 'mindfulness', or 'self-compassion'. You can decide these things are bullshit if you want, but stating there lacks any evidence in support of the practice isn't a very fair reading of the literature.
> After all, during that retreat, I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril, the most beautifully bewhiskered otter I had ever seen, and a pile of loose teeth.
I realize he's speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek (or finger-in-nostril if you will), but most meditators claim to experience some sort of visions. Others, such as @Elriggs below, claim to have enhanced powers of perception, intelligence, or creativity as per the OP (admittedly, creativity is hard to measure). Yet others claim outright supernatural powers of telepathy, clairsentience, or even telekinesis; there were a few inadvertently humorous threads on that topic on ye olde SSC. That said, I admit that the OP does not stray quite that far off-field. In any case, you say:
> Generally, the aim of meditation is stated along the lines of 'mindfulness', or 'self-compassion'.
Sounds great, but what does that mean ? If you want to just feel better about yourself, there are lots of techniques that can get you there, from meditation to church to a licensed therapist to a tub of ice cream and a Netflix subscription. Is that all that meditation is good for ? Don't get me wrong, a technique that makes you feel better for cheap is still quite worthwhile, but is that all that meditation is ? And can you answer this question in a quantitative way ?
I think you're not really engaging with a useful, or very common definition of 'meditation' or what it achieves. If you are interested, I would encourage you to look beyond selected quotes from users on an internet board, and seek something closer to consensus.
'Mindfulness' and 'feeling better' are not interchangeable, although if you think they are, well it does explain much of your skepticism.
> Sounds great, but what does that mean ?
Google isn't a bad place to start: 'mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique'. In other words, meditation is a way to focus attention, and regulate emotions.
I suspect you will claim that this is meaningless mumbo-jumbo, so let me preempt by saying I disagree. Experiences like painful or intrusive thoughts, and a racing mind are likely very common, and most people have associated them with an anxious, or otherwise undesirable state. I'm not claiming that meditation will necessarily fix those things, only that the concept of 'mindfulness' has clear and obvious meaning, which is plainly different from 'Watching Netflix'.
I get the sense you are just having fun bashing what you perceive to be deluded or dumb people (I would ask what makes you so certain of your priors), so I might look silly making an earnest argument. In the event I'm wrong, you may find this a helpful overview: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3916
Yes, I know what the term "mindfulness" is supposed to mean, but my point is that it pays to be careful to separate one's internal feelings from one's objective capabilities. For example, drinking alcohol can make you feel like you're strong enough to take on the entire world and charming enough to seduce anyone you meet; however, objectively, alcohol most often has the opposite effect.
As I said above, there's nothing wrong with "focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations"; it sounds like a good thing to do. It can be achieved through meditation, prayer, psychiatry, and a variety of other techniques; and if it can lead to reduced anxiety, then I'm all for it. If that's all that meditation is, I've got no quarrel with it.
But that's the motte. The bailey, as expressed by people on this very thread as well as the OP, is that meditation isn't just a technique for increasing mindfulness and reducing anxiety. At minimum, it is claimed to be the *best* technique in the world for this purpose; but more often than not, meditation is claimed to actually increase one's powers of perception, intelligence, empathy, and creativity; as well as possibly inducing hallucinations and dissolving the ego-self.
Obviously, reduced anxiety can achieve some of these effects to some extent -- after all, it's hard to take an IQ test when your heart is racing and your mind keeps running in circles. But, again, that is the motte; the bailey is that meditation is not just a replacement for Ativan, but a power that enhances your mind beyound what is humanly possible without meditation. These extravagant claims (and all the rest, vis a vis hallucination, no-self, laser-eye-beams, whatever) are what I have the problem with; as I said, I've got no quarrel mindfulness as such.
I'm not convinced by the Motte and Bailey argument. People don't seem to be coy about their spiritual beliefs, is there really a contingent of people that believes wild claims about meditation, yet cautiously retreats to meeker arguments during internet conversations? Does the book reviewed by the OP? I did not get that impression. In my experience, believers in the supernatural will be more than happy to advocate for their view; the rationalist argument (Sam Harris et al, I presume) is a coherent position of its own, rather than a Motte for the supernatural or outlandish claims.
Even the OP (which I find less than charitable at times) squarely frames the book's argument within the language of 'mindfulness' rather than 'superpower'. Rather than discerning a Motte-and-Bailey, I find that you're putting up a bit of a strawman.
It is somewhat ironic that you would liberally appeal to the Motte and Bailey fallacy, yet make the following succession of arguments:
A: Mindfulness may be a meaningless concept, and at any rate seems indistinguishable from 'feeling good'; meditation does nothing more than a tub of ice cream.
B: Of course mindfulness is a thing, and it has some obvious value; however it is not the exclusive outcome of meditation -- talk therapy may work just as well.
A: There exist no empirical reason to think meditation has positive effects. "The only claims that withstand scrutiny are the ones about the awesome hallucinations -- and I'm not even convinced all of those are real"
B: 'There's nothing wrong with "focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations"; it sounds like a good thing to do. It can be achieved through meditation, prayer, psychiatry, and a variety of other techniques'
And, paraphrasing:
A: Meditation has no clear utility and makes no sense. Its proponents are trying to gain psionic powers, lol
B: Meditation can obviously be beneficial, but some of its more dedicated proponents overstate its effectiveness, or downplay similar effects of alternative approaches, like therapy.
I never said that mindfulness is a useless concept; I originally said that *your* description of the benefits of meditation sounds rather mundane. You then focused on mindfulness as the primary benefit, and as I said repeatedly, I've got no problem with that. I acknowledge that meditation is one of many techniques that can enhance mindfulness. I am, of course, doubtful that either meditation or mindfulness can grant one enhanced physical or mental abilities -- beyound the normal enhancement that comes from not being anxious and distracted all the time.
And yet, you have people on this very comment thread claiming exactly this. The OP claims that meditation can be used to induce hallucinations (which is a claim I'm reasonably willing to accept, mind you), and claims it to be psychically dangerous in some hard-to-understand way. Others are claiming enhanced perception and intelligence; over the years, I've definitely heard many claims of psychic powers. I understand that *you* are not making such claims; but then, you're the motte, and I have no problem with your opinion in that capacity. You say:
> Meditation can obviously be beneficial, but some of its more dedicated proponents overstate its effectiveness, or downplay similar effects of alternative approaches, like therapy.
Replace "some" with "most", and I'd happily endorse that statement.
Also, it might sound like I'm bullying meditation proponents specifically, and... well that's true I guess. I just find it ironing that a movement that calls itself capital-R "Rationalist" would buy into unfalsifiable woo claims so readily.
Ah! Telepathy! I am much better at reading other people’s body language now, which is the closest, nonsensical pattern match. (Literal telepathy needs a lot more evidence, in my mind, and people don’t think in internal dialogue often unless they’re reading or writing(typical mind fallacy?))
Though low-level-sensory-accessing-meditation only helps me look at actual sensory information of a person (posture, facial expression, change in voice), I still have to build a model, be capable of honest feedback to myself, and make predictions.
Hmmm...It is rather important to make a distinction between having hallucinations and having enhanced powers of perception/intelligence/creativity/insights and similar positive stuff.
Most (all?) "spiritual" practices can induce hallucinations, including very strong hallucinations: i.e. having the perception of hearing and seeing stuff. (And not only Eastern practices; I would not let the various "Western" spiritual practices of Judaism/Christianity/Islam off the hook.) This is empirically well documented, there is a quite large research literature; no reason to have strong doubts here. Keep a strong prior (as they say).
In contrast, there are (empirical) reasons to have strong doubts about claims of enhanced powers of perception/intelligence/creativity/insights; this is not similarly empirically documented in any serious research literature I am aware of.
Here is the problem: If the practitioner starts to treat his/her hallucinations as "real" in some sense, you are a very short step away from a full-blown psychosis. Which carries a non-neglible suicide probability, along with a lot of other usually-not-regarded-as-positive things.
Mind you, such hallucinations can be extremely unsettling, in particular if you are not warned by a spiritual teacher (or someone) that strong hallucinations may turn up during your practice; and you are in an even more dangerous situation if the teacher thinks having such mental experiences is a good thing; that you are "on the path".
The probability that you will fully recover from strong hallucinatory experiences is unfortunately rather low, if you come to your psychiatrist/priest/spiritual guide/whoever and say things like: "I do [fill in spiritual practice]. Lately I have noticed there are angels behind my wall, but also devils. I see them occasionally and they whisper to me at night. Walking the streets, I get messages from posters on the wall."
Compare that to a similar person coming in and saying stuff like: "I do [fill in spiritual practice]. Lately I have all kinds of strange experiences, like posters on the walls - of all things - seem to have messages to me, and I have weird feelings of angels and devils in my house. What is happening to me? Am I going crazy?"
The latter person is uncertain if what he/she experiences is "real". This is encouraging, as suggests a good long-term outcome. The former person shows signs of a full-blown psychosis. And this is a very serious mental state, unfortunately with a much worse prognosis.
Experienced meditation teachers know that some of their novices will experience this stuff, and they are then hopefully willing and able to lead the novices out of it, by grounding excercises and the like.
Plus, experienced meditation practitioners are able to keep a mental distance (so to speak) to their own hallucinations, not treating them as "real". Judging from the review, this includes the review'er of White's book.
But there is a dangerous tendency in many meditation/spiritual communities to none the less regard hallucinations as "real" in some sense, or at least as beneficial, i.e. not to be avoided.
Unfortunately, that way madness lies, for some of the novices.
The increased perception one happened to me. For whatever reason, building a higher fidelity perception of your breath extends to other senses (like taste and vision). It’s like I’m gaining access to lower-level sensory information that I usually ignored (like static in vision). This isn’t too special, it’s similar to more autistic people perceive the world (or at least my one friend I talked to about this) and LSD descriptions.
I’m not too hip on the hallucination thing, but my steelman is accessing lucid dreaming. I’ve heard of this with the fire kassina and dream yoga. Doing an intense retreat of fire kasina, people can “write their names in the air with their fingers”, which I’ve succeeded in a small degree. The ability goes away after not doing the meditation for a bit, but I’m not very skilled at it!
Do you actually get enhanced perception, or do you just *feel* like your perception is enhanced ? Merely seeing static would count as a "hallucination" in my book (a low-grade one, but still). Being able to read small print at a distance of 500m would count as enhanced perception (though obviously the enhancement does not have to be that dramatic).
More importantly, have you ever tried to actually test your meditatively-enhanced sensory powers, or are you content with feeling like they exist ?
I consider static (and after images that look like auras around objects and breathing walls) as low-level sensory noise.
The “improved eyesight” one is a good example to clarify! I don’t mean enhanced perception in that way, but enhanced as in gaining access to lower-level sensory information. It’s much easier for me to notice the “lizard skin” details on my hands, or my fingerprints on cups in the light. On a goal-oriented basis, this can help me relate to others, draw better, and be more awe-struck by visual information.
Improved sense of taste and smell are better examples; I do have a much better sense of taste than I had before. Besides food tasting better, some food actually tastes worst!
Sound is a counter example. I can play piano by ear somewhat, but I haven’t noticed any improvement there!
I'm not sure what "lower-level sensory information" means, but you say:
> It’s much easier for me to notice the “lizard skin” details on my hands, or my fingerprints on cups in the light.
I don't know what "lizard skin" is, exactly (I'm no artist nor biologist), but this sounds like you can resolve higher-resolution details while meditating, which is a testable claim. So, have you tested it ?
By analogy, when people get drunk, they often report feeling physically powerful, charming, and physically warm. However, if you put these feelings to the test, you find that drunk people are uncoordinated, boorish, and unfortunately prone to freezing in subzero temperatures. I'm not saying that meditation gets you drunk, merely that it can be important to separate one's internal feelings from objective facts.
> this sounds like you can resolve higher-resolution details while meditating
Maybe? If you look at your hand close enough and reflected in light, it will look like lizard scales. This isn't really special, anyone could notice this if they look. I am saying that "low-level sensory meditation" will make these details more naturally obvious.
In realism art classes, they will tell you to draw what you see, not what you think you see. I remember drawing faces and greatly improving my skill by simply drawing a new face upside down (drawing upside down is common advice!). Anyone can do this of course! But doing this style meditation will make seeing shades and colors much more naturally obvious.
There is a chance that this skill helps with other things I really care about, but I don't have any strong opinions on that.
For a testable claim, I did taste rotten meat at a meal one time and 2/4 people could not taste it. The other 1 person usually has a good sense of smell and taste and agreed with me.
It doesn't make sense to me to be self-deceived on whether or not I'm seeing lower-level sensory information. I don't always see those details or taste things in fine detail (like when I'm distracted), but I can purposely focus on them and perceive it.
I was happy to see the topic and themes of the review since they get at one of my main reservations about the "rationalist" project: it's trying (correctly, in my view) to map out the limitations of evolved cognitive heuristics for decision-making while also embracing a worldview that can't really provide any other consistent basis for decision-making. So reading the review was helpful in that it provided some intuition as to why rationalists tend to be interested in Buddhist-style meditation, which also seems to be the reviewer's main point. I personally was disappointed when part II adopted, with not much argument, the standard utilitarian position, but it wouldn't be fair of me to hold that against the reviewer. More objectively disappointing were that a) I don't feel like I actually learned what the book's argument was, and b) part III felt like a non sequitur. The post as a whole feels more like a personal engagement with the book's themes than like a review as such. For what it is, though, it's a very good one!
I've never had any propper meditation training but it seems that for the most of my life I've been... let say more enlightened than the rest of the people around. I've been friendly to everyone, I knew, and totally disregarded any attempts from other people to be hostile towards me. At first I didn't notice, but later on reflection I figured out that people are playing some weird status games which seems ridiculous and cruel. So I decided I won't participate. Again on reflection it seems that I was somewhat of an outcast for a long time but I didn't mind it at all. When people talked about the "enlightenned behaviour" of some saints or Jesus I was nodding along and actually taking it as an advice in ethics applicable to me and was confused why others seem to not do it. It was nearly impossible to offend or enrage me and I've always been fast to forgive. I've always had a very good control over my desires and fears. In general I've felt that I'm not supposed to have desires, but not due to some abusive parenting, on the contrary my parents have always been super supportive, but due to the fact that in the grand scheme of things, for the universe itself there is no "objective reason" to want anything. And yeah, I had a lot of religious experiences and insights directly from the God Himself, as I felt at the moment.
I wouldn't say that it was generally unhelpfull. I value a lot of my cognitive adaptations. But my dating life was terrible, at first. I felt the universal love and beauty centered in one person but had no idea what to do with it. And also I knew that in theory I can feel it towards anyone. Well maybe in full power only towards women - I'm still having problems with accepting my limiting heterosexuality. Than why this person? Why can't all the world be in love with everyone else? That still feels somewhat tormenting. Also at some point of my life I've found myself just going with the flow. I was doing bullshit job, and didn't have much motivation to change anything.
Anyway, at some point in my life I've learned that one can deeply care about "eartly matters", despite the universe being irrelivant because `There is light in the world, and it is us!` And so I've started practising "disenlightenment". I've started figuring out my desires and radically changed my life. Currently I'm learning to be angry with people to better stand up for my interests. That's hard because my initial reaction is to become uninvolved. But now I at least have the ability to consciously decide to be angry, though it still makes me feel somewhat dirty.
From my experience I can tell that our society isn't really optimized for enlightment-ish people. Not that it's a surprising conclusion, all things considered.
There isn’t one right way to interact with the world or your emotions. The way you naturally deal with others is definitely useful in some situations and is rare!
I’m glad to hear you’re experimenting with expressing your desires. There will definitely be a learning period where you express them in an unskilled way, but as long as you pay attention and learn from mistakes, you’ll be much better off than people who can only express their emotions in one way.
> The same sensation Wright normally "defines as unpleasant" is there, without actually feeling unpleasant. (This is super weird, but...
This is very much in line with my personal experience on MDMA in regards to talking about difficult emotional topics. The feeling in there but most negative emotion is removed. Weird but definitely real.
I want to watch a movie about the police hunting a serial-killer nicknamed the "Zen Predator of the Upper East Side”. He uses his Siddhis to "make oneself invisible" to attack his victims. "Sitting crosslegged he flies through the air like a winged bird", he leaves crime scenes. "He appears. He vanishes."
"He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, & mountains as if through space." He masteted "Telekinesis (Supernormal Locomotion)", "the power of Transformation", "The ability to replicate one's body" and
"Penetration of others' minds (Thought Reading)". The only hope is bringing back from retirement an old, enbittered meditator.
Not directly related to the review, but maybe I'll share my experience with meditation: started doing it more or less daily around late 2017, following the instructions of the 'Mind Illuminated'. I remember enjoying and being excited with the practice during the first months, where I was seeing myself progressing along the lines of the book. I wasn't practising *everyday, but most of the days, at least 30min. I have had nice experiences of more or less deep concentration, and interesting insights (at least at the time). Around 1.5 years more or less after I started I started slacking a bit on the practice due to a feeling of being stuck and not progressing (for those familiar with the book, around stage 6/7). Since then I have relaxed on the practice, and have had long periods without meditating at all. Not sure if directly related to meditation, but I have noticed some seemingly permanent changes on myself (all not that great): the mental chatter seems to be gone, and I seem to live is a state of awareness of myself and surroundings (sensations, feelings). Not sure this is usual, when meditating I notice visual memories, feelings, sensations, but thoughts, not really. I'm much less reactive emotionally - my usual experience has a neutral emotional quality to it (emotions do arise, but in a more detached way). Creativity and drive to do/learn things is also much lower compared to before (this sucks). Note that this hasn't affected work, personal relationships or social life, I'm a bit of an extrovert and I enjoy socialising, but I seem to be on auto-pilot most of the time. Concluding, if I'm correct on the assessment of these changes and they are due to meditation, not sure they have made me a better person (whatever that means) or improved my life. Maybe paradoxically, I continue meditating often and I enjoy the much-pleasant states I usually obtain. Not sure if this resonates with the experiences of some of you, feedback is welcome.
Do you feel more content/happy/mentally healthy as a result of meditation? I can see less drive to do things as possibly being good, if the drive was a result of social pressures and things like that (e.g. wanting to learn and write things to appear more educated to others rather than true desire to know things). Do you think this might have been the case?
First question, not sure. There is less emotional variance, but in terms of average contentment/happiness/mental health not sure I'm better than before. I have the impression is similar. Second question I don't think so, I was always a naturally curious guy, and somehow creative (it's not that I lost that curiosity, but the drive to do stuff is lower - I seem to require a higher mental effort to start a task). Was reading some stuff lately, I suspect I may have fallen into this 'trap' :) https://deconstructingyourself.com/escaping-observer-trap.html
Psych explanation: mindfulness meditation gives people a dose-dependent degree of depersonalization, derealization, dissociation. This tends to be helpful in small doses and harmful in large doses (rather like most psychoactive drugs; the common outcomes are either vegetable or psychosis). Recent post by David Chapman: https://vividness.live/meditation-risks
Self-other boundary: I think people tend to classify everything the world either as "self" (100% controlled) or "other" (0% controlled), and they temporarily project the boundary around things (the clothes they wear, the bike they ride) without being aware of doing it. I think this explains a lot of phenomena: because they lack intermediates to these buckets, saying that they are not as good drivers as they think they are would push driving all the way from 100% to 0% controlled, so they become angry and fight back at the claim. If they encounter clear evidence that they don't have 100% control of something they thought of as self, they either flip it over to 0% (we call this result learned helplessness) or they vigorously explain why the evidence doesn't matter. When other people bring up the incident (implying that it does matter according to others), they furiously double down on "no it doesn't matter and stop talking about it", which is I believe the other common trauma-response.
My favored explanation on how to break this is to imagine going to martial arts training, specifically to imagine grappling. Contested, partial control of both bodies is the whole point. Hopefully this is anvilicious enough to create a continuous spectrum of control between 100% and 0%. (The parallels to Cromwell's law in epistemology should be obvious.)
For whatever it's worth I wrote a review of this book also a couple years ago. I have a somewhat different take, so you might find it interesting for comparison.
I think there's some things the review and Wright are getting wrong, but it's sort of hard to explain. There's this thing about the way we typically point at what meditation and enlightenment are supposed to look like are easily misunderstood because we lack the verbal categories and experiences to directly point to the thing until after we've done it, so all the words used sort of point in the wrong direction if you take them too literally, and I feel like that's what happening here and being amplified by the fact that most Western Buddhists are practicing some kind of confused practices that result from taking the practices too literally and out of context (they can't help it, their teachers seem similarly confused as best I can tell).
I don't intend for this to be a general my-practice-is-better-than-yours kind of claim, but a more direct claim that lots of Westerners seem to be doing things that are just not effective practices for Westerners to be doing and getting weird outcomes because they're doing things that are maladaptive for their context. A great example is that strong renunciation practices seem poorly adapted to Westerners who don't lead lives full of obvious moment to moment suffering because we have central heating and air conditioners and modern medicine and plentiful food. Instead we Westerners are already pretty comfortable, and applying monastery grade meditation can carry us to places that don't really fit with wanting to live in a world full of cool things that are fun to interact with.
There's alternatives of course, but Wright doesn't really touch on them because he doesn't seem to be familiar with them.
Interesting essay, need some time to digest it, although in general I agree with the general scepticism around attempts to align Buddhism with "modern" psychology.
I practise Vajrayana, idgaf about that tbh, seems like a modernist Theravadin/Zen thing mainly? I feel like the model of liberation and "enlightened activity" also differs a lot between Mahayana (incl. Vajrayana) and Theravada -- traditional texts like the Bodhisattva-bhumi have lots of advice on how the bodhisattva acts in the world (start a big business, don't aim for a little shop)
My usual discomfort with Buddhism is the sentiment that Your mind is chaotic and cluttered and you must clean it! Order it! Make it meager and quiet like a temple. I feel like, why? I like the chaos, the many desires and interests and ideas bouncing around. It’s really fun! And helps accomplish a lot of my goals.
But this review is a new perspective to me. It starts with a single large scale instrumental goal that I identify with, How can I be a better utilitarian? And makes a compelling case that meditation can help. I can’t tell how Buddhist this is versus stealing their neat tools to go build your own thing, but I appreciate it and for the first time kind of want to meditate.
It still has tough competition though: what makes this better than Shut up and calculate? Do I really need to feel my friend stubbing his toe to buy bed nets in Africa? Couldn’t it be distracting, even making me over focus on pain I can observe rather than pain I can infer? Even if I identify with all of humanity and cease to feel self, how does that help with the problem of triage? Maybe a moderate amount of feeling the world spirit is enough and after that it’s just hard nose-to-the-grindstone work?
I didn't like this review. It's hard to tell how much is even a review of the book vs. the reviewer's own interpretations of the subject matter; devoting a significant percentage of the review to strawmanning the book's contents did not seem like a defensible choice; in some ways, I feel less informed about the book than before I read the review, when I knew nothing about it; etc.
The review's big section on pain also seemed needlessly confused on what I thought weren't particularly complicated ideas. In particular, despite only some cursory meditation practice (i.e. <15 min per day for a few months, many years ago), the insight that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional seemed a) central to meditation, b) obvious once I'd been meditating for a while and c) while I couldn't make great use of this insight in my day-to-day life, it did serve me moderately well in improving my subjective experience of specific short events I knew I'd dislike, like visiting the dentist.
The title of the book puts me off. "Why Buddhism Works For Me" I could accept. But Buddhism is just as dogmatic and anti-science as any other religion, and yes, it is a religion. Its basis is karma, which is metaphysical and unprovable.
Dissociation has been described by Shinzen Young as enlightenment's evil twin because it shares a lot of commonalities with equanimity but is very different along crucial dimensions.
My guess is that if I start making a qualitative description of how different states feel this will not feel like a satisfactory answer to your question?
I also think they're quite different.
Isn't dissociation about tuning stimuli out of conscious awareness?
Wiki mentions mindfulness as a potential dissociation treatment, for whatever that's worth
When you dissociate from the pain, you turn your consciousness away from the pain and ignore it. When you learn to experience the pain with equanimity, you turn towards it, accept it completely, and learn to see it more as "process" than "thing", which makes it easier to tolerate for reasons that are above my pay-grade to explain.
This also relates to the idea of no-self. It's easier to understand as stating that "self" is a process, not a thing, and that process can be turned off and back on at will once you learn how it operates in your mind. The goal is not to turn the process off permanently, the goal is to have the freedom to turn it on or off at will, thus being liberated from it.
This is just one way of dealing with pain (as high fidelity physical pain separate from a sense of self) and there are many others (like surrounding the pain with metta, or expanding your awareness to infinity so the pain looks small, distracting yourself!)
I am no expert on disassociation, but one important difference may be doing it intentionally and could view your pain differently if you wanted (though maybe if you solely practice this then maybe not!) Another is you don’t lose access to physical sensations.
Psychologist and Buddhist here. Dissociation refers to something quite different from the practice in meditation of using one's awareness to focus on different aspects of one's experience. Dissociation and meditation are in many ways the inverse of each other -- involuntary loss of awareness versus voluntary application of awareness.
The "de-centering" of an aspect of one's experience in meditation is an intentional and somewhat effortful exercise of control over one's awareness. It's done in a state of conscious relaxation rather than distress. It's a kind of applied effort like weight lifting or ice skating. Dissociation is something that just happens to you.
The same practice of training awareness of bodily sensations that happens in meditation is also used in simple "grounding" exercises to help people who dissociate come back into awareness. So the one is also the antidote for the other.
I agree with this. Well expressed, too.
Before checking, how would you guess, therefore, that Buddhist monks and nuns score on tests of brain health, emotional health, and general life satisfaction? Badly, right, because you contend that they're doing something "unhealthy" all day?
What is the danger, and how does meditation/dissociation cause that danger? Psychologists describe a lot of things as "dangerous" for vague reasons and often reasons that rely on their particular values.
(For the record - I suffer from catatonia secondary to depression, and meditation tends to trigger it; I therefore consider meditation dangerous *for me* and don't do it. But I haven't heard of ordinary people developing this issue via meditation.)
As long as most voters don't go out of their way to check that stuff out, I think its ok and Scott doesn't care and is better to not draw more attention to it.
Fair point, I removed the comment.
Didn't see the original comment, but if it's what I think it was - linking to (what is presumably) your own blog in what's supposed to be an anonymous book review is extremely bad form, to the point that it might deserve having attention called to it.
I believe Scott didn't announce that the contest would be anonymous until well after the original call for entries. If I recall correctly, this is already the 3rd finalist that has linked to their own work.
but powdered sugar donuts ARE good for me
They're very nutritious, providing all the fat and sugar that you need!
I am kinda fascinated how Americans seem to be obsessed with pretty much the worst dessert ever, offensive pretty much to every sense, be it smell, touch, sight or taste. If you want to worship unhealthy foods, there are so many to choose from, both of sweet and otherwise varieties. But sugar donuts just attack your senses with a signal that is supposed to feel good, only it's so grotesquely overdone it can't unless one's senses are mangled by years of abuse by similar assault foods. It just makes me sad.
For anybody interested in 'enlightenment' at all, **highly** recommend checking out Aella. Fascinating life story, which included 10-months of regular and high dosage LSD, which gave them an experience of enlightenment. They have since interviewed dozens of people who claim to have experienced entlightment and clustered their experiences.
-Interview of them on ClearerThinking podcast. https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=017
-Their website. https://knowingless.com. Here is post summarising their clutering of enlightenment experiences: https://knowingless.com/2020/07/15/the-enlightenment-interviews/
Oh, and I forgot to mention Aella identifies as a rationalist of the LessWrong kind, and it shows in how they express and explain themselves.
You mentioned the 10 month LSD thing without actually linking to that post, and I think it's great (it was my introduction to Aella's writing) so here it is: https://knowingless.com/2017/02/11/experiences-on-acid/
Her most powerful piece of writing, according to me, is https://knowingless.com/2019/08/17/you-will-forget/
Thanks for other links Mo. I have not actually read those posts (or most of per posts) yet and learnt about her from the podcast I linked to.
I have read so much about the Buddhist conception that the self is an illusion, and the idea is very appealing to me, but I have never been able to understand it even on a superficial level. I don't know why.
me either, but my guess is there is a somewhat less absolute statement than "the self doesn't exist" that is somewhat along the same lines, contains similar implications, and perhaps informs similar (beneficial?) actions, but doesn't require getting rid of the "self" as a convenient shorthand for the "stuff going on in my brain involving memories and desires and decisions"
Yes, well said.
Understand as in logically or like from experience?
I at least think I understand what Sam Harris thinks about the self being an illusion, and it's not that complicated I think.
The self: you being behind your face, and deciding stuff. Illusion: something that appears to be but is not real and that usually, upon closer inspection, stops appearing to be real.
So, it's not true that we make choices because determinism, and there's no physical reason to locate us behind our faces. And, apparently, paying close attention, the meditation people suddenly lose the sense that this is true and just perceive the stuff they can perceive without the sense of being located anywhere or authoring anything.
Yeah but why should we feel we are in the spot where the processing happens?
Since I didn't like your attitude in that last sentence, I'll throw out reality with a thought experiment. If we had brains as a service running on the cloud, and your body just had the senses, the peripherals, would you say you now have a physical reason to feel you are located in the data centre some kilometres away?
If anything, it's the senses; mostly sight and hearing, which lead the brain to make a model and its that model which gives one the sense that one is behind the face. And that's a reason, yes, I was loose with words. The point was that there's a physical reason to feel behind our faces in the same sense that there's a reason why you are seeing a face here =) . If someone came out and said that the smiley face is an illusion and there's really only just matrices of pixels, and there's no "physical reason" to claim there is a real face where you see the smiley, I'd have no problem understanding what they meant.
I agree that my original lazy definition of illusion doesn't account for the case where a subjective experience sort of matches reality sort of by coincidence, so do what you want with the word illusion, as long as we understand our points. Your brain is wet, but if you felt wet all the time it would be for other reasons and I'd have no trouble calling it an illusion, but you may not like using the word there.
(You might read that and think "if I'm feeling wet, the belief behind the experience is that my body is wet, not my brain", and that's fair. It was a bad example for the point that I would still call a coincidentally correct perception as an illusion. )
We don't feel like we are located behind our faces as a consequence of our brains being there (and arguably the feeling is not really where are processing centres are, or people wouldn't have taken as long to realise what the brain is for), so I have no trouble calling it an illusion in the sense I mentioned. But discussions about words are boring.
The biochemical process of thinking happens in the brain, but consciousness—or the self—is not in the brain. The brain is a physical thing whereas the self is a non-physical phenomenon; the two are qualitatively different. Just like you can't say music is in the violin. Sure, music comes from the violin. Music depends on the violin. The violin generates music. But music is neither inside nor part of the physical body of the violin.
The point is not to deny that consciousness is generated by brain processes. It's to draw attention to the experiential nature of consciousness.
See that I get, and I am on board with the considerable research that says that the conscious mind makes few (no?) decisions itself. I guess I am perhaps looking for something deeper than what is there. Which is kind of ironic.
The idea of no-self in Buddhism is a bit elusive partly because it's pointing to something experiential. Like how would you describe the taste of a pear to someone who has only ever tasted citrus fruit. You can approximate with words, but a huge amount of Buddhism is experiential.
I'm not sure how this research about the conscious mind not making decisions intersects with this idea of no-self. The Pali word "anatta" is sometimes translated instead as "non-self" which may be more helpful in capturing a sense of "not attaching to the idea of a core, solid, unchanging self" rather than the sense of "there's no one home in here."
Anatta is closely related to "anicca" which is the Buddhist idea of impermanence. So it's not so much that there's just nothing there at all to the self, but that it's a shifting weather pattern. Which part of the storm is "The Storm" -- the wind, the clouds, the rain, the lightning? The problem is our tendency to put capital letters into things, emotionally or psychologically-speaking.
It's our tendency to try to grab onto things that are shifting all the time, to try and nail them down, to clutch the things we like and push away the things we don't like, when experience and reality are constantly moving. That clinging and pushing away leads to a persistent feeling of unsatisfactoriness in our lives (that's the "dukkha" or suffering that Buddhists talk so much about).
These three ideas -- anatta, anicca, and dukkha -- are central to Buddhism and are all connected so it's hard to understand one in isolation without the others.
I think there is a lot that is quite deep here, at least in my humble experience. I'm on year 36 of reading and practicing Buddhism. The depths aren't always well captured in words. They are often not well captured by one-off books like this one or in reviews by people who are not familiar with the wider teachings. The reviewer's description of their 10-day meditation retreat is probably more useful because that's the part the reviewer is familiar with.
Thank you for your comment which has clarified some issues about Buddhism for me.
But who does the perceiving?
The brand of meditator I think I sort of understand would answer that question the same way you would, wording issues aside. That's just not the "self" that is supposed to be an illusion. Consciousness is still a thing, and its still a discrete thing.
Maybe other brand of meditators go further and claim stuff like that we all part of the same cloud of consciousness and there is no me or you, dunno, but there I'd make little sense to me too.
I think the “cloud of consciousness” comes from non-dual meditation, specifically vast spacious awareness/ natural state, or what’s pointed to in the headless way. If that’s the case, then I think that is just one way of interpreting the experience of vast spacious awareness.
A lot of these crazy statements make much more sense as specific interpretations of interesting meditative experiences.
Yeah. Its funny how an experience can "feel like" something that doesn't make logical sense. After waking up from dreams it happens often. There's the extreme case of this mental issue where people claim they are not alive yet they obviously know they are and can feel and experience stuff. I imagine people with strong synesthesia also make these incoherent claims. Maybe trans has something of this too?
What would be a coherent way of phrasing those experiences? Maybe: "I have a strong urge to describe my experience as X, even though X doesn't really mean anything, for whatever reason."
Looking at how people already describe these things may be insightful. Dreams are a great example for describing it to others.
Internally, it can coherent by being okay with using contradictory system
From my personal understanding, the universe. Or rather, there's no division between the perceived and the perceiving, it's just one big pulsing existence that, well, exists. Any sufficiently persistent attempt to perceive the perceiving will find that it is empty, and that's the trigger to switching to that "undivided" mindset.
Or at least that's kind of what it felt like to me. It's a state of mind, one that changes how you assign valence to perceptions. There are no extra abilities or anything, it's just a complete change of reference, with refusing to consider what you perceive as separable into categories and instead always looking at it as a whole.
At least what I was taught and experienced is extremely difficult to maintain in ordinary life, though, because alone theory of mind is kind of necessary when dealing with other people, and in general it's not the most productive of frames. So I'm not sure what I was taught and experienced is really the same as what these people are talking about.
I agree with your suggestion that the mind changes quite fundamentally with a "change of reference" -- when its habitual focus of awareness manages to reposition itself.
Most people in the modern world don't seem clued into the radical nature of this phenomenon. But, for example, imagine one ordinary person whose awareness is locked mostly in the past, who experiences life primarily as a dreamy series of regrets, etc, compared with another whose awareness is locked on the future, so is driven by fears and ambitions, or whatever. It's almost like they aren't even the same species.
And then consider another whose consciousness primarily dwells in the present, where the emotions that fuel action are profoundly de-privileged. It's not surprising that in the modern world this could appear to be unhelpful to the advancement of the human project, the job at hand, or whatever; whereas to the person who invites and cultivates such a state of awareness it is recognized as a legitimate (reality-based) answer to the problem of psychological suffering.
> The self: you being behind your face, and deciding stuff. Illusion: something that appears to be but is not real and that usually, upon closer inspection, stops appearing to be real.
A weaker version of the statement, something like "Your conscious self is not exactly the sort of thing you naively perceive it as" would be both true and still very insightful.
"The self does not exist" is much pithier and fits on a t-shirt better, but I think it's either untrue or based on an overly hand-wavey definition of "self".
Yeah, I agree. I think there's this phenomenon where one just wants to express an experience in a certain way, even if it doesn't make sense. There may be something to the experience that makes them *really* want to communicate it with phrases like "I've been enlightered, saw the truth, and there is no self", and then they stretch the logic of it a bit and become more confusing than necessary.
You seem to be caught in a conflation where you think of Buddhist practice as analogous to, say, faith in Christianity -- so that a rationalist would categorize the results of both journeys as subjective, and not based in reason or carbon-based reality.
I would argue that Buddhist practice, at its core, is a non-sentimental, non-narrativizing interrogation of the location where subjective consciousness meets the universe and the real world.
Your particular mind may be perfectly attuned to your dharma -- or fate -- so I'm not trying to say you're on the wrong path necessarily, but I recognize in your comments a common desire to categorize things that you haven't actually experienced. E.g., since the notion that self is an illusion doesn't make concrete sense to you (along with most everyone else) you work diligently to settle on a narrative that eases the discomfort of not really knowing precisely what the phrase refers to.
What's endlessly fascinating to me is how much effort we humans put into defending a universe constructed of narratives, while we have the tools to actually perform serious reality-based investigations at our fingertips. Rather than "doing the work" we are much, much more comfortable relying on our tried-and-true (stable-feeling) intellectual systems already in place rather than physicalized explorations that monitor our actual existence and consciousness, which is, of course, ever-changing (and, so, feels unstable).
It's a stark, straightforward choice that we make each moment; and we almost always default to analyzing ideas (or abstracting others' experiences) rather than monitoring direct experience -- which is relatively simple to do, once we give ourselves permission to spend the time and awareness doing so.
I don't recognise myself at all in what you are attributing to me here. Also, most of this comment doesn't make much sense to me, but it feels like given the way you are approaching this, there would be no point in trying to find common ground here.
Cool beans :-)
But it IS true that we make decisions. Even if we grant that we don't have the possibility to make other decisions than the ones we eventually make, that is irrelevant for all practical purposes, because neither we ourselves nor anyone else can, in general, foresee what decision we make before we make it.
And that it is some mind module that wins the competition, and not the central "self" alone, that is responsible for the decision also doesn't mean it wasn't "us" - unless you expect the CEO of a company to do all the work, and come up with all the ideas by himself.
Yeah, I agree that "because determinism" is maybe not a good enough reason to claim that it's not real that we make decisions. And I also agree that for practical purposes, it is perfectly fine to talk about you making decisions, or a company making decisions, or your family, or a country.
The point the Sam Harris's try to make (often wrongly because these discussions are hard to keep clear and clean) is not opposed to that. You'd be fine with saying that a company made a decision even though it wasn't all done by the CEO; and that's the most practical way to see it from the outside.
But you probably agree too that the CEO should not be under the impression that all the decisions of the company came from himself, and if he was, he would be, in some sense, confused (under an "illusion"). And its in this same sense that they claim that when we identify the decisions that "come from our brains" as "our decisions", we are confused, we are being like tribal with our thought processes. And just like as a CEO you can take a breath, go on holidays, and lose the sense that the company IS you, by paying attention you lose the sense that you are the author of the decision you make.
Of course we make decisions. The argument against free will isn't that we don't have a will - it's that it isn't free.
> So, it's not true that we make choices because determinism,
This is a common misunderstanding of "choice" among hard determinists. Choice is simply a process of deliberating among all possible options and reducing them to 1, that being the choice. The fact that this process might be deterministic is irrelevant.
In same cases, I think the misunderstanding is more boring than that. I imagine a Sam Harris would say something like the following. If you ask the average person, who believes and feels he has free will, to imagine the thought experiment where some know-it-all can predict every decision they make, their sense of choice would be shaken; so most people when they say they have choice they are actually having the (incoherent) picture that they are some sort of agent, outside the physical world, who could always do/have done otherwise, or something like that; and determinism is a sufficient reason for that to be wrong, though not necessary because they whole concept is incoherent in itself.
TLDR, I think at least in some cases the misunderstanding is not about what choice really is but about what the non-philosopher people mean by it, and what their "sense of free will" is really telling them, intuitively.
I think this conflates how people who have never thought about a question try to first answer vs. how they think about it when they're forced to more carefully consider their moral reasoning when presented with various challenging cases. Fortunately, experimental philosophy has done this study:
Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: a reply to Feltz and Millan, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42152751.pdf
Per the paper, most people actually subscribe to a form of source Compatibilism, which is compatible with determinism.
Regarding "could have done otherwise", this is another common confusion. Frankfurt showed that the principle of alternate possibilities is not sufficient for moral responsibility, so this can't be what people mean by that phrase. If you drill down further, you find that people actually mean that they could have done otherwise *had they known better*, and would do otherwise *if presented with a sufficiently similar scenario in the future*.
People learn to do better when they see their mistakes and are held accountable for them, and this is why moral responsibility is justified even in the presence of determinism. Even a deterministic agent that can learn from moral feedback is morally responsible for their actions when they should have known better.
Regarding your TLDR, I agree that the question of free will is (partly) about what it means colloquially. The debate over free will is about *defining* what free will means in a way that makes sense of our moral reasoning and our moral language. That's why I think Sam Harris is wrong on the matter of free will. He takes people's unexamined claims of its properties at face value, declares them incoherent, and concludes that there is therefore no such thing as free will. Rather than approaching it denotatively, he should approach it connotatively, which is how most people talk about things they don't fully wish to describe or don't fully understand.
Yeah, I agree that Sam Harris goes too eagerly from "what people intuitively mean by free will is incoherent" to a whole bunch of conclusions that need much more support than that.
Thanks for the paper; I'll check it out (though I wouldn't be surprised if it is too heavy for me, having never read a philosophy paper, and I choose to use my time in other stuff). Having said that, before reading it, my intuition regarding the original point of the thread (i.e. stepping away from the maelstrom of the general discussions on free will and such), is similar to Sam's. I'd guess most people's sense of being on the driver seat would be deeply shaken by learning that someone has been predicting their every turn, and they'd try desperately to screw those predictions to recover such sense; which is another way of saying that their default sense of choice relies on something that is incompatible with determinism. But yeah, it sounds from your description that the paper has news for me.
Fortunately, they don't need to try at all to refute the prediction machine, because a true 100% accurate prediction machine is simply impossible even in a deterministic universe. This conclusion follows naturally from the Halting Problem: deterministic computers can't infer all properties about other deterministic computers.
I think the free will paper is pretty accessible. As an empirical study of people's intuitive moral reasoning, it's a little more relevant than typical abstract philosophical musings. It also gives a good overview of various views of free will. If the question of free will interests you, then I recommend it!
"If you ask the average person, who believes and feels he has free will, to imagine the thought experiment where some know-it-all can predict every decision they make, their sense of choice would be shaken;"
Coming from a religious background, I was raised to believe that we have free will and that there definitely, 100% for sure is a omniscient "know it all" who not only can but has predicted every decision we make and will make. So I was surprised that people are shaken by the thought experiment, though on reflection I realized it was due to being inculcated with the idea from an early age.
The obvious point to make here is that secularism permits a less humble conception of human capability and agency than monotheistic religion does (and it's that conception/misconception that would be shaken by a godlike figure).
I'm not sure whether that's *true*, although certainly this is part of the Randian hatred for religion.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me has been via Douglas Hofstadter's Strange Loop theory, which I hope I'm not going to mangle here. During our childhood development, the first concept that we develop that binds together our sensory perceptions is "I", in the sense of the body as the locus of the sensory perceptions. We can then start conceptualizing these sensory perceptions in terms of "not-I", which leads to differentiation of all these things outside the body and the development of an ontology to start organizing the external world. However, the concept of "I" is the gatekeeper for all of these sensory perceptions - "I'm not Mom", "I'm not this chair" - which gives the self centrality in the emerging semantic network of the mind.
This sense of centrality in the semantic network then gets strengthened when the child develops the ability to bring the concept "I" into consciousness as an object of thought and thereby perceive the self as the entity perceiving. This establishes the strange loop, the self-referentiality that's characteristic of our mature sense of the self.
I don't think Hofstadter ever says too much about Buddhism, though it's been quite a while since I've read him, but my notion of what meditation can achieve is the decentering of "I" in the semantic network, to generalize identity to the semantic network itself. It's analogous to the progressive decentering of the Earth in the scientific account of the cosmos, or moving from traversing a computer's filesystem up and down the tree to seeing the filesystem as a whole.
If I imagine that my command prompt is a little daemon, stuck inside the filesystem, just moving up and down the tree and executing commands, it would be very easy for the daemon to identify its experience with the entirety of what the computer is, even though that daemon has neither a comprehensive view of the filesystem as a whole nor any conception of the material basis of its existence. I've never achieved anything like this in my feeble meditation practice - I can barely sit still for 20 minutes - but this is my notion of the perspective that Buddhist meditation is trying to achieve.
My (ha!) take:
Consciousness is to some extent our brain running an emulation of itself. Awareness is a mental process; what we think of as our feelings is actually an emulation of our feelings, created so we have a mental picture of our feelings, so we can understand ourselves. Metacognition isn't just "looking at this thing that is here", because there's nothing to look with, nor anything to look at - instead what you're doing is conducting an elaborate mental theater of yourself.
This emulation can take place in different places in the brain; somebody with a "verbal style of thinking" may be running the emulation-of-self in the verbal part of their brain.
People then frequently label this mental-model-of-themselves as "self", so that when they realize it's an elaborate illusion, they conclude they have no "self" (which is correct, insofar as "self" points at this construct).
Enlightenment may or may not be the dissolution of this mental-model-of-self. It may also include being completely aware of all aspects of mind simultaneously at all times. It may also be dropping "awareness" entirely, and just "being", such that you're no longer concerned with that kind of "knowing-of-self".
Some of the valence of suffering may arise from more fundamental constructs applying sympathy to this construct-of-self; we magnify our pain by emulating it. For some people, suffering may exist entirely in sympathy for this model, such that once they abolish it, they cease to experience suffering entirely. Alternatively, the experience of suffering may be the wish-that-things-be-different (where a wish that things be a particle way may or may not be attachment), which may not be possible when you aren't running a mental model of yourself and implicitly comparing it to an idealized mental model of yourself. I can turn suffering on and off pretty much at will, but I don't know what is "really" is under the covers; I have a suspicion that the lever I use to turn suffering on and off may be related to depression and anhedonia, however, so whatever mechanism I use, I don't recommend others pursue.
Elaborating a little bit more ...
Once you stop associating self with the mental model of yourself, you may notice that the awareness-sense you have doesn't seem to have any kind of "root" anywhere (until you notice one, after which you start all over again), which you may conceptualize as your awareness-sense being outside yourself entirely - the awareness-sense which pokes and prods at things in your mind isn't itself any of the things it pokes and prods, which can create a kind of mental distance between that awareness and the experience it is aware of.
That is, the awareness isn't in pain. The awareness isn't walking down the street. The awareness is just aware of those things. If you start associating "you" with that awareness, you'll stop associating "you" with the things you're aware of, and you can lose your sense of attachment to the "you" that is still doing those things.
I think a religious context makes it very easy to start thinking of this awareness as, say, a soul, or a specific implementation of a more universal awareness. (Because the awareness has no internal characteristics of its own, all awareness is in a sense identical.)
I like the framing here
One useful framing is aliefs. Or an intellectual understanding vs a visceral (physical feelings and making actions) understanding.
I put on a VR headset, climbed a tower, but could not make myself step off. Intellectually, I knew I was safe, by viscerally I felt scared and could not make myself fall off.
For a sense of self, you can understand it’s a fabrication intellectually in all the ways described in the other comments, but viscerally understanding it would mean you don’t take yourself so seriously as much. Less personally attacked and less compelled to act in an in-character manner.
Maybe try this piece by Kaj Sotala: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h2xgbYBNP4dLharg4/on-the-construction-of-the-self
If you're STEM-oriented, it's a treat, since the author is an AI researcher and it shows. If you liked it, the rest of the series might pique your interest; it's called "A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence".
The "self" is an empty intuition. It's not a label that refers to any distinct entity or concept in physical reality. Much like "good" or "evil".
Whether your "self" currently points to your body, your brain, you and your loved ones ("I feel you've become a part of myself"), or the entire universe - it makes no difference, it doesn't constrain any anticipations.
Noself means appreciating this not just intellectually but viscerally, I think.
I've had moments where I ceased to feel that there was a meaningful difference between my own body and those of strangers I passed on the street. All just organisms deterministically doing their thing. Biggest difference was that I had more access to info about myself than about them.
Control also became a non-thing. Just a mechanical detail of how systems interact.
(deleted to correct typos)
Though interestingly, the self-pointer did not just dissolve. Instead, it felt like "I" was my own body and those other people at the same time. I could look at them with a kind of "Yeah, this [behavior/actions/decisions of theirs] is me expressing itself, doing its thing" stance. Like they were familiar.
A similar thing seems to be going on when meditators report feeling like they are the entire universe. The self-pointer persists, just gets moved.
I'd say that's because it's like trying to explain colour to a blind man; you can hear endless descriptions of its beauty and still not really 'get' it. Have you tried meditating, to the point where you can feel your 'self' fall apart into various cognitions?
Not an experienced Buddhist here, but the way I parse it is as follows:
When going about your daily life, you very likely have a clear sense of "things" around you. As you interact with different things, you clearly have a notion of the boundaries between things. As in: This is a cup, this is a plate, this is a dog, this is a cat. One thing starts where another thing ends.
And just as you can identify things and give them boundaries, within the realm of your perception there is one special thing which you identify as being "you". You perceive this thing in a distinguished manner - you know that if the special you-thing comes into contact with a hot object then you will feel pain, for instance.
In the same manner, when doing purely mental operations, you have an idea of a "you-concept" which is actually doing the mental work.
The way I understand the idea of "no-self" is that the boundaries between things and concepts are arbitrary fictions created by the brain in order to make us able to effectively interact with the world. And while these fictions are very convenient, when you look at the real world you start running into Ship of Theseus-like problems all the way down - because the fictions are fictions, not the way the real world works.
The problem here is that - where does that leave the you-thing? Buddhism's solution to this conundrum is that the you-thing is just as fictional as all other things - you are convinced there is a thing/concept that is "you" because that is convenient for interacting with the universe in a way that leads to increased reproductive fitness. However, you are not a singular thing - you are multiple entities (whose boundaries are also nebulous) interacting in a concerted enough manner that it fools yourself into thinking the you-thing is real.
It's not exactly an "illusion," I think that word (too often used in this context for a long time) has the wrong connotation. Dharmically the 'self' like everything else is a conditioned process, subject to prior causes and conditions, constantly changing due to new causes & conditions. Really it's just a placeholder concept so that the body-mind knows which body-mind it is for survival purposes. The problems arise when the concept is allowed to run away with itself and claim too much for itself.
Overall, i loved the synthesis and an attempt to bring clarity to topics that often feel confusing and contradictory.
I think i've reached a similar synthesis as you:
- on the idea of meditation going well with metta / loving compassion training, since having values is important for being functional in the world
- the notion of feelings as giving 'weight' to thoughts and causing them to surface
- instead 'of 'destroying' the self, dissolving boundaries between self and other.
- desire being different from pain; i.e. when something hurts, it's easy to add to it the unpleasant desire for the pain to go away; that desire is an additionally unpleasant feeling that's somehow worse than the raw pain
Here are a few points where we differ:
> I hope that by now you agree that we shouldn’t give up our feelings. But perhaps we should rebel against evolution and rebuild ourselves to approximate a perfect moral agent more closely
What you are calling 'rebellion against evolution', i would call something more like 'calibration.' We evolved in one environment that is so different from where we are now, it would be a real wonder if the drives and desires we have at present tended to make us calm and happy. Sugary donut, loot crates, internet porn, and algorithmic social networks didn't exist for our ancestors.
This notion of calibration then seems to link together the idea of global workspace of consciousness, and mental chatter. If our brains consist of many different conflicting control systems, then these control systems fighting against each other gives rise to unmet desires, aka feelings, and this give rise to thoughts and mental chatter. There's an old buddhist story comparing the untrained mind to a bunch of animals all chained together - each animal wants to go to its preferred environment. Here's a writeup:
https://www.sgi.org/ru/sgi-president/writings-by-sgi-president-ikeda/six-animals-and-one-pillar.html
If you adopt the hypothesis that these control systems all evolved with certain defaults, and that the defaults worked in the ancestral environment, but are mismatched with the present environment, you get a conclusion that says something like: "we generally feel shitty and have lots of internal chatter because the various control systems in our brains are all pulling us in different directions. The control systems that don't feel good then generate negative feelings, which give rise to thoughts, in an attempt to moderate between the various control systems. We can re-write the intensity with which we try to manage the control systems, by consciously relaxing the weight we put on any one control system; we can learn to feel pain without adding on to the pain the desire for the pain to go away. Doing this mindful acceptance allows the control systems to 'settle down' which reduces both the arising of unpleasant feelings, and the mental chatter that rides along with them."
> he world is a causally interconnected system, with no sharp divide between the inside and outside of an organism, or between actions which are done by the organism and to it. (This is one of the things people sometimes mean by “emptiness.”) If that's true, then the Perfectly Wise Perfect Utilitarian wouldn't have a sense of self-as-site-of-action either. (She could still act in whatever way we normally act, but she wouldn't see an in-principle difference between "directly" wiggling her toe and causing you to wiggle yours e.g. by asking you to do it
I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that distance does matter in terms of predictive accuracy. There may not be sharp divides between the insides and outside of organisms, but divides to exist. An example here might be simpler if you replace a perfectly enlightened human being with a perfectly enlightened AGI that runs on a computer in a garage in new jersey. The computer in the garage in new jersey knows that it's running on hardware located in a garage, and although it might _care_ globally, it knows that its capacity to _act_ is constrained locally, and the quality fo the information it recives about distant locations is likely to degrade with distance.
This is a place where i disagree with a lot of people in the EA community. I agree with the basic premise (we should try to do as much good as possible with the limited donation budget) but i think the idea that we can just ignore spacetime when making decisions is absurd. Our ability to accurately predict the consequences of our actions is heavily constrained by proximity; it's much harder to tell what my choices will do when i am trying to affect a situation far away in space or time.
Overall, though, i loved this writeup. Thank you for taking the time to share it.
>What you are calling 'rebellion against evolution', i would call something more like 'calibration.' We evolved in one environment that is so different from where we are now, it would be a real wonder if the drives and desires we have at present tended to make us calm and happy. Sugary donut, loot crates, internet porn, and algorithmic social networks didn't exist for our ancestors.
Context change or no, evolution has no interest in making us calm or happy. It has an interest in our genes being passed on. Negative emotions are key parts of that; it is not an accident that adultery can drive a cuckold to murder, or that one without a family feels the lack.
A "recalibration" of evolutionary drives is mass sperm/egg donation, possibly supplemented by personal Quiverfull living. Ceasing to care about how many children you produce isn't a "calibration"; it *is* a rebellion.
This is a great argument. Recalibration of drives, in order to account for the modern environment (without opposing evolution), would be something like that, yeah.
OK, further response here: you seem to be arguing, implicitly, that calibration is only calibration if you're pursuing an r-selected strategy. But we're humans - so we should likely pursue k-selected strategies. Not caring _at all_ how many children you produce, at all, is rebellion. But that's very different from having a few children and trying to do the best you can to raise them.
An, arguably, doing any kind of altruism is still contributing to the propagation of your DNA - rebellion against evolution would have to include rejecting doing anything in service of humanity, and actively trying to harm people.
The Buddha didn't preach not-self as a metaphysical doctrine but as a tool of inquiry, just like he broke with yogic traditions teaching jhana as a means of ultimate liberation but still used jhana as a tool. Non-self/non-dual schools already existed at the time of the Buddha. There is a sutta I am having trouble locating at the moment where someone comes to ask him this explicit question as a point of difference between schools: does the Buddha teach a doctrine of self or a doctrine of no-self and the Buddha says that the question has a confused foundation rendering an answer 'not even wrong' or in Buddhist terminology 'neither true-nor-untrue, nor both-true-and-untrue.' I try to explain some of this in the section on anatta here:
http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2020/01/mistranslating-buddha.html
there's also this resource
https://puredhamma.net/key-dhamma-concepts/anicca-dukkha-anatta-2/anatta-systematic-analysis/
Additionally, I think people trying to get a better grasp on Buddhist practice intellectually would be well served by viewing it as continuous with models of adult psychological development, like Kegan. In Kegan's model each level is about being able to view the previous level as object, instead of being subject to it. One can broadly think about meditative insight the same way, just with deeper-in-the-stack objects like 'sense of identification and control' and 'craving and aversion.'
Treating these meditation frameworks (no-self/nondual) as just another tool is great meta-framework.
This ties in with the emotion problem mentioned in the review. Most people interface with their emotions using narratives, self, and physical sensations (“I’m right because X. Alice did me wrong because of Y...”). Some meditators learn to interface with their emotions as solely physical sensations (“tightened contraction in my chest that feels like [hard to describe]”), and this is useful! A tendency is then to believe that this is the only correct way to deal with your emotions, which may lead to being a doormat or letting problems fester because you don’t understand their narrative meaning.
Someone who is deeply familiar with interfacing with their emotions in many ways will not run into the same issues as one who only uses one.
Meditators can ironically become narrow minded and dogmatic. I believe that discussions revolving meditation would benefit from saying what specific meditation technique OUT OF 1000’S OF POSSIBLE TECHNIQUES is being used and what effect it is supposed to have. All techniques are not the same but are frequently lumped together under “meditation”
I don't want to sound snarky here, but I think it's worth pointing that Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus have been doing a long-running Blogging Heads series which, the couple times I had the misfortune of stumbling on, I found to be virtually unwatchable due to the two of them sniping at and try to talk over each other constantly. He seems to still have a decent sized reservoir of ill will, at least for his co-host, despite the meditation.
I can imagine reasons why someone might not like the weekly Bob and Mickey conversations, although they’re a highlight of my week. But ill will for his co-host?? I don’t think you could have possibly stumbled onto one for long?
This is interesting but doesn't feel that much like a book review. Is there a position on whether votes should be based on "how much do I like this as an article in a vacuum" vs "how much does it succeed at the task of being a book review"?
This review is what people have in mind when they dismiss the ACX community a place for precocious 13 year old know-it-alls. I read the review because Robert Wright's work is outstanding and deserves discussion in this forum. But it doesn't deserve this onanistic, willful misunderstanding and self-indulgent speculation about topics the review author seems to only be familiar with from reading the first half of some of the sentences in the book.
The actual book is well cited and builds its arguments carefully and reasonably. Obviously the reviewer wasn't able to connect with them and has their own ideas the nature of reality. I don't see what that has to do with the book itself, at all.
Fully agreed. This was disappointing to see Scott choose. I don't have the time, but I'd love to see someone provide the context and surrounding material for the quotes that the author of this review seems to cherry-pick, as many of the seemingly-novel points made here are indeed made, with more nuance and authority, by Wright himself.
Near the end: "After the retreat, I also had one of my largest bursts of creativity, writing the third chapter of my dissertation at record speed. It’s about beauty and meditation," so, the author has spent time around the ideas. So whatever the flaws are in the review we can't blame it on lack of invested time.
You may seem to still have some "negative emotion issues", at least on behalf of Robert Wright, Tom! Not enough meditation practice perhaps... (Sorry, it was just too tempting.)
On a serious note: From my hobby interest in the sociology of meditation schools (there is decades since I did any meditation myself), the lack of what good old Popperians would call a demarction criterion should worry novices in particular. Also known as the "would the real Enlightened teacher please stand up" problem.
In the absence of an observable demarcation criterion that can falisify the claim of someone claiming to be enlightened, there is no way for novices to screen teachers and separate the truly Enlightened from mimics, charlatans and self-deceptors. It's a signalling problem. This goes for Buddhists as well as the various Hindu schools.
It gets worse: if one assumes that achieving true Enlightenment is difficult while mimicing the real thing is cheap, mimics will tend to drive the true Enlightened out of the meditation-market.
In lieu of honest signals, Enlightened meditation scholars (be they real or fakes) may use the strategy "be angry and/or arrogant" as a way to tackle those who doubt their claim.
Unfortunately, sending the message "I am angry and you are an idiot" is easy to mimic.
The inability of the Enlightened to send honest signals (i.e. costly behavior that cannot be mimiced) is possibly a tragedy, if one assumes that there may indeed be something called "true Enlightenment" out there.
As with Gods, so also with True Enlightenment - popperians would ague that both may exist, we just have no way to falsify the claim that they do.
There’s a parallel issue in presenting a book review to an audience that has not read the book, especially when intentionally setting out to strawman the book in order to posit your own claims as superior. Fortunately with book reviews there is at least the “demarcation event” of reading the actual book, and I’m glad more people will do that than read this review.
Of course if people do both and disagree with my assessment of the review, that’s up to them. I just would prefer than published book reviews give a fair representation of the book, rather than an intentionally unfair “strawmanning” the consistently misses or ignores major themes and assertions of the book itself.
I didn't hate this by any means, but I would counsel anyone that snark, though relentlessly attempted on the internet, is far harder to pull off than you might think. It's really easy to instill an unintended childish quality in a piece even while that piece says intelligent and true things. Go carefully in that direction. Just one reader's opinion.
I thought this was really good. I confess that I don’t understand the idea that an idea of self ceasing to matter should or would lead toward utilitarianism. All those other selves are no more important than mine on this perspective and there’s no better reason to care about the others than to care about my own. Seems the lesson would be to stop caring about any sort of consequentialist system rather than supporting a move toward utility maximizing.
There’s a lot tangled in meditation results and insights. On one hand, one type of meditation literally improves my mood and another improves my ability to let go of things so I’m not as stubborn. These two help me be nicer to people if that’s my goal!
On the other hand, other types of meditation will lead to seeing your self narrative and sense of self as constructed in your brain. It’s harder to value myself above others when it’s sort of play-pretend. Another expands your awareness to its max, which may even cause you to let go of your spatial sense of body separation. This feels like there is no difference between you and the environment (“all is one”, “one with god”) or flow states like those in the book “the rise of Superman” by kotler. I’m specifically remembering a guy who was one with a dying bird after he base jumped and his parachute failed.
Can you expand on which type is which? Broadly, using terms vaguely and without nitpicking, I'd guess, in order: metta / insight / .... mindfulness of breathing?
I know some terms, but for me it’s
1. Samadhi/vipassana(?) - when I focus on a meditation object (like my breath) and try to gain finer grained fedility, I’m in a better mood afterwards. Though I think this only true with physical sensory information.
2. Letting go/surrender: any practice where you have to let go of something (like a thought that comes up) builds this skill, but I think non-dual meditation on vast spacious awareness
3. Insight? - seeing your sense of self as different than you thought may require a pre-req of a certain level of concentration. I found good use of 3-characteristic exercises found in “Seeing that Frees” as useful. Another was a pointing out instruction in vast spacious awareness showing that I can know things without them “passing through my head” or whatever.
4. Vast spacious awareness/ headless way - poking holes in my mental map of my body is what opened me up to vast spacious awareness. [Michael Taft’s non-dual YouTube series is where I got half of this from!]
These are all your interconnected and I’m not as clear in my head of what each does. What’s important to me is building better models on how these techniques affect me.
What somehow annoyed me is that is isn't completely clear whether the Utilitarian framing is only from the reviewer, or does the author of the book uses it too ?
http://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/
n.b. you have to read it to the end; it's a wild ride, but well worth the time (IMO).
Good reference! I won’t spoil why you specifically linked it here.
That was neat.
Hmm, the first strip reminds me of Ted Chiang's "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" ?
https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freedom-b5ab45cae2a5
Thanks for the link, I had fun reading it.
Sort of enjoyed this, but it took me more than an hour to read..
We have an immune system because our bodies actually do distinguish between ourselves and the rest of the world.
I hear Michael Taft (mediation teacher, deconstructing yourself podcast) mention that a sense of self is very useful for many goals, like walking from one place to another without hitting the walls! So there are meditation people who made a similar argument as your comment.
There is a difference between (1) my sense of self is obviously, importantly real and in charge of many things (like my thoughts) and (2) my sense of self is a useful mental construction for many goals but not in charge of many functions that it thought it was (like my thoughts!)
I like Robin Hanson's metaphor: your brain is complicated and the conscious portion is the press secretary rather than CEO.
Me too, thanks for the reference. Here's the full quote for others:
> In fact, your conscious mind is more plausibly a press secretary. You’re not the president or the king or the CEO. You aren’t in charge. You aren’t actually making the decision, the conscious part of your mind at least. You are there to make up a good explanation for what’s going on so that you can avoid the accusation that you’re violating norms.
"How much can you trust someone high on the fumes of their own breathing?" 😂
Why should we believe for a second that meditation can make us a "Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe"? The review calls this "not implausible" and founds much of the reasoning in the review on that possibility (since it's apparently the end goal for meditation). This seems obviously provably false. Is there a single scrap of not-easily-faked evidence that meditators can feel other people's pain through some extrasensory mechanism? I don't think so. Given that this a central point of the review, I found this whole thing impossible to take seriously.
(Am I being too harsh here? Too literal? I've reread that section three times and each time it seems like the reviewer very much believes in the super-utilitarian as literally possible.)
Extra-sensory experience doesn’t make sense for sure.
But it’s clear that many people pursue the good of a small group of others (their family, friends, etc), and some even pursue the good of a few others equally as much (or more!) than theirselves. I interpreted this section to mean expanding this group to all of humanity, with the connected meditation practice being metta.
I don’t completely agree with the reviewer though, that’s just my interpretation of that section.
I did not get the impression that the reviewer or Wright believe that one can literally sense others' pain and pleasure. I read it to mean that one should care about everyone *as if* one could feel everyone.
Below is the paragraph that firmly convinced me otherwise. It's very plainly talking about actually experiencing other people's pain, and not merely caring about other people's pain.
Suppose you’re that Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe. In that case, I think it's fair to say that you don't have a self. (Or, if you prefer, your self is the whole universe.) After all, what makes my toe mine, rather than yours? Arguably, the fact that when I stub it, I'm the one who feels pain, and not you. If I literally felt you stub your toe, I might start calling it "my toe."
Good quote!
Wasn’t that just a setup to show how that’s a nonsense understanding, and then builds a bit more sensible one in the next few paragraphs?
No, this is in part II - the "steelman". In fact, it's precisely his way to cohere his two steelmen - the paragraph where he introduces the "perfect utilitarian" begins with the words "So what Wright should have said..."
Re-reading it, you’re right. The reviewer mentions both “literally feeling everyone’s pain” and “enlightenment that leads to becoming the perfect utilitarian”.
I initially pattern-matched it to something else, because it’s nonsense to believe that you’ll be able to literally feel someone else’s pain in e.g. someone else’s toe by meditating enough.
I read this as an extended riff on the nature of empathy. A scale, with literally feeling others' pain at one end, and then feeling pain in response to witnessing others in pain, and then the more abstract "caring" in response to their pain, etc. But yes the reviewer did state the literal interpretation.
Years ago I read Walpola Rahula "What the Buddha Taught" and I see that review is in the list. Since then I've concluded that the idea of "self" involves a lot of concept creep and using one word for a zillion different things. Especially with the advances of neuroscience. I think it's entirely possible that the layman's experience of self lies in the sensation of conscious control over thoughts, the ability to steer some aspect of consciousness. I don't usually see people write that though and so I approach as a skeptic, via translations, and when the result is kindof boggly I cannot get too exercised about it. Losing that can happen in stroke, psychosis and brain injury, so why not from meditation too, in a sense. However, knowing nothing about the perfect utilitarian, I am in no position to follow that line, but it does sound inaccurate to me.
Speaking of strokes and enlightenment, Jill Bolte Taylor https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight
Brain scientist, stroke survivor, experiencer of enlightenment?
> Is there a single scrap of not-easily-faked evidence that meditators can feel other people's pain through some extrasensory mechanism?
It's not intended literally. Meditation makes you cognitively associate your pain less with yourself, and makes you more empathetic to others' pain (makes it easier to place yourself in their shoes and *imagine* their pain), and therefore you weight them both equally.
See my other replies on this thread. In short, the reviewer goes to great pains to assure us that they do intend it literally.
No, your interpretation of the structure of the argument and the meaning in context is not correct. Scott, the reviewer, does not at all intend to convey that sensation of another's pain is literally the same as the sensation of your own pain.
Scott is not the reviewer
To be perfectly clear since you were apparently confused, the paragraph you quoted was a thought experiment to explore the idea of what it would *mean* if you could feel another's pain and how that would impact your moral reasoning.
As a thought experiment, it's not a literal statement of the actual state of things, but is meant to test the limits of a specific proposition(s). That's the whole purpose of starting that paragraph with "suppose...".
These sorts of thought experiments appear all the time in science and philosophy, where they're called "intuition pumps" [1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump
Your first reading comprehension mistake was apparently thinking Scott's the reviewer. See the very first paragraph, in italics. I would go through your second, but I've already done so elsewhere and your lack of charity gives me no reason to do so again. Take the time to read it if you'd like.
Please don't underestimate this sentence by the reviewer: "I’ll be intentionally strawmanning Wright."
YMMV, I thought it was a great book.
>> Suppose you’re that Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe. In that case, I think it's fair to say that you don't have a self.
No man is an island entire of itself.
>> (Or, if you prefer, your self is the whole universe.)
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
>> After all, what makes my toe mine, rather than yours?
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
>> Arguably, the fact that when I stub it, I'm the one who feels pain, and not you.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
>> If I literally felt you stub your toe, I might start calling it "my toe."
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I propose an additional contest: best (worst) pun in the text of a review. This one should be in the running: "When reading Why Buddhism is True, I had Greg's tumor, er, in the back of my mind"
There are more pun entries in the book review contest so far than there are books; multiple jokes per review if the pattern holds. Some would say that those jokes are what should be edited out first, but it seems to be part of a subcultural communication style here, maybe, "write like Scott when possible."
+1, possibly should be for best joke rather than specifically best pun.
Automatic disqualification for using "er" to flag the pun, though.
I think it’s fine to use “er”. I don’t expect the average writer to include puns like that, so I’m not looking for them and will likely miss them. To look for puns in everything I ever read regardless of the author isn’t worth the effort tradeoff for me.
I usually have to exaggerate my puns and jokes for people who don’t know me very well, but for my closest friends, I’m very subtle.
Automatic disqualification would be too much of a punishment in my opinion, in fact, clever reviewers should enjoy impunity from disqualification as well!
Whoever wrote this, to them I say:
Dude, you're clearly temperamentally not a Buddhist, but a Shaiva!
Your path is clearly flavoured by the destruction of the artificial boundaries of the of the self as opposed to the destruction of the self itself, you do not Fucking Hate™ the world or have revulsion for it and want to escape it to go into a monastery which is far away from all its horrible filth, you don't Fucking Hate™ all feelings and actions and engagement with the world like a Good Sutrayana Boy™, and your thesis has as one of its foci a topic which was also something the Shaivas made major contributions to and were quite into (aesthetics).
Join us!
We have (and strongly value) aesthetics, both academic and appreciatory, in a seamless whole! (This is not hyperbole - the current paradigm in classical/traditional Indian aesthetics was *founded* by a Shaiva yogi (meditator, you'd call him today), and has remained pre-eminent since. In fact, I think that even today, only a fraction of its potential has been unlocked - sad twist of history, and something I'm interested in moving forward.) (If you want more information about it, LMK and I'll answer with what resources I know of. It's probably interesting to you academically as well, given it's an aesthetic theory.)
And our meditation methods actually allow you to *appreciate* not just nice things, but all things and experiences *as themselves*. So if you find yourself accidentally smelling something disgusting, your reaction may be of disgust, but it's also of an appreciation of the disgusting smell as well as the disgust, as in "Man, this smell is so disgusting right now! So cool!" (Let me hasten to add we begin with nicer things than this, this is just an effect of cultivating the ability to nonjudgementally experience and savour all experience.) Normally, people can only have this experience vicariously, through media - few truly appreciate the 3D-6sense-full-immersion-VR experience that is their own life. One fruit of practice in this tradition is the aesthetisation of all of life.
And they also enhance greatly aesthetic enjoyment itself - many of the arts of India have historically found a great outburst of creative expression following the influence of our tradition! And no wonder - we don't Fucking Hate™ the world, in fact we (in a sense) Fucking Love™ all of it...
And huge amounts of creative juice, too! The ideal archetype in our system is not the monk with deadened eyes/feelings, it's the ecstatic yet unattached connoisseur of life itself, with all its ups and downs and joys and sorrows.
And strong, effective, healthy egos that are capable of acting in the world without self-centredness as step one (and 1.5) of our path! Because it's a path that is grown and built and developed from the ground up for householders (people in the world doing stuff), not monastics (though there are monastic variants, for those who are temperamentally like that - there are a few). Many of the major figures of the tradition were men (and women) of eminence.
And we don't Fucking Hate™ the mind and intellect either, nor reason; though we're suspicious of attractors of delusion and suffering it has a bad habit of falling into...
And feasts! And the very, very occasional powdered sugar donut, too (though we don't make a habit of it, for obvious reasons).
And cookies!
But more seriously - it seems clear that you're temperamentally more aligned with the Shaivas (your words and work and analysis betray your true affinity - you even articulated the Shaiva analogue of the no-self doctrine as something that appeals to you more, apparently as an independent preference, in the book review!), or the Vajrayana Buddhists (if you want to stay within the broader Buddhist fold).
I will add here that historically, we were bigger/richer/more popular/more influential/more creative than the Buddhists; it is thanks to an accident of history that Buddhism is more prominent and has greater name recognition and brand power today. Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism), for example, is what you get when you apply to Mahayana Buddhism the Tantrik mode of practice which was developed among the Shaivas. (Both traditions got fucked in India by the Muslims and their destruction of institutions, monasteries, and mathas, but Buddhism had established institutional bases outside, so it lived (though it died in India); we survived in India in a tremendously reduced form, sometimes worse than not surviving, and are beginning to recover only now, with the recovery of the various streams of the classical material.)
LMK if you (or anyone else) would like to know more, and I can post sources and links.
(Luckily, there is now available a (free) introductory practice course which provides instruction in a broad array of meditation practices from the tradition (suitable and safe for beginners), along with a solid introduction to the most useful/fundamental conceptual tools and categories, and general guidelines and so on; I'll post it only if someone wants it/asks for it, since it'd be spam otherwise.)
Post them! Been interested in Shaivism since reading about it in Guenon's Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines.
Overall I'm unsure of how I feel about this review. I'm an occasional meditator and this is useful for motivating me to get back into what is, for me, an objectively good habit. OTOH I feel like it didn't really delve that deeply into what's interesting or unique about this book. Overall I think it's a fine review but maybe not at the level of many of the other entries.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
4th Order Without Law
5th Why Buddhism is True
Only being able to vote for one is a bad voting system. Why not take the one with the most hearts? Or have a form where we can vote for as many as we choose.
Given that it is not immediately obvious why anyone should be interested in pursuing the happiness of all humanity, a connection with everything in existence, or philosophies that largely mirror Utilitarianism (especially considering the basic evolutionary predisposition toward self-interest and survival instincts that can and have superseded a number of similar 'ties to humanity,' such as blood relations), it behooves anyone making this claim to offer a moral argument as to why I or anyone else should have any interest in others at all.
That is, I'll not tolerate sneaky Utilitarians making out that their philosophical outlook is somehow the default one. The question is far from settled.
Agreed, see my post below.
> The nihilism problem legitimately [sic!] raised by Buddhist philosophy
Why the [sic!]? "Legitimately" is being used correctly here no? No typos either. Some kind of joke about legitimacy and nihilism?
Why is there a [sic] after a correctly-spelled word? Is this a clever joke I'm missing?
No, I think the reviewer just mentally misspelled it.
I initially thought the author was Ben who was thanked at the end of the article and went to ask him this question
Then I corrected myself and thought to post this question here instead
## Question
“Distinguishes craving and aversion from pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are intrinsic to feelings. Craving and aversion are how we react “
So this part seems to suggest (and I agree) our day to day we conflate pleasure with craving, and pain with aversion
What about desire and craving?
Most spritual writing talks about removing desire but maybe I’m too much of an engineer brain by thinking isn’t that self defeating because you would have to desire to stop all desires no?
I found this review's comments about morality fairly annoying.
It's not exactly a great revelation "why moral people are sometimes described as 'selfless'" if the standard of morality that you are putting forward is altruism, i.e. never privileging your own interests over those of others. Actually I find it odd that someone could not get this.
And it talks about things like "It's all in the service of realizing that other people's perspectives are as real as your own, and their happiness as important as yours." But it doesn't at all defend the idea of altruism that this is supposed to be evidence for. Yes, other people's perspectives are real. But why is their happiness supposed to be as important *to you* as your own is *to you*, as opposed to its being as important *to them* as your own is *to you*? That is just as symmetrical and indeed I would say the more obvious interpretation. This is not defended.
The Buddhist/Humean "bundle theory" of the self, which the review doesn't clearly reject or endorse, purports to give a *reason* why the egoistic perspective is nonsensical: that there is no self whose interests it is possible to prioritize. Since there is no actual distinction between "you yourself" being tortured and anyone else being tortured, you should seek to minimize all torture equally. The problem is that this is a completely absurd view.
Moreover, defenders' interpretations in my experience bounce back and forth between two versions of it. The more mystical version says somehow your locus of experience could jump unpredictably into someone else's body, and therefore "you" (a term they reject but which is actually indispensable) could experience someone else's future pain in exactly the same way you experience your own current pain. The more nihilistic and skeptical version says there simply is no continuity whatsoever; it's all a matter of convention. In which case it is very difficult to see why any fleeting present-instant person should care about *anyone's* future pain.
Agreed on most points, I also found myself irritated, glad it wasn't just my pedantry. A nitpick: I've more often heard Humeanism used as an argument for the truth (or at least inevitability) of egoism, rather than undermining it. But I'm no deep reader of Hume. Do you/the literature take him to have been skeptical about the self's existence, rather than just presenting a deflationary picture of its nature?
Wow, talk about a coincidence ! Just a few days ago :
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-flight-from-thinking/
and the accompanying Harper's article, for those who end up with a subscribe wall :
https://web.archive.org/web/20210317005421/https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/
Probably somewhat inaccurate and harsh TL;DR :
- Mindfulness meditation is being pushed in the West as a way to learn to stop thinking and love Moloch.
- Spiritual practice can be dangerous, especially the kind of spiritual practice where the goal is for you to end up as a monk separate from society hoping to achieve enlightenment.
- It's being taught by amateurs who have barely any experience in Buddhism, much less an actual monk training, who routinely conduct their practice in single week sessions where disciples overdose on meditation, and so their disciples end up with a much larger share of mental health issues.
- There are plenty of Western options for spiritual practice where there's an abundant literature, experienced teachers, and the kind of meditation that trains your cognitive tools instead of sabotaging them. [Disclaimer : the author, now retired, was one of them.]
I don't find that post convincing, or really even informative. He makes lot of claims but provides no evidence for them. Not even anecdotes, really, just his intuitions.
That's a fair criticism. One of the reasons might be that he's been talking a *lot* about spirituality since he founded the new blog, so he doesn't feel like he has to repeat the logic/evidence for the claims every week, and that would get tiresome for the regulars (which I did notice when I was following his previous blog, though I understood that this was necessary for newcomers).
I don't know this author. That said, I thought this post was an ineffective introduction; every other paragraph reads like a strawman, and I wound up having a hard time trusting whatever they would write. Pretty quickly, I felt like I was staring at thousands of words sneering at "those other people" whose approach to spirituality is obviously mindless and at any rate *clearly inferior* to the author's own flavor of Western Occultism.
Good post, and a good link.
There is a lot of research over the past 30-40 years on the downside of various meditation practices. In particular the risk of psychosis (sometimes charitably labelled MEPS - Mystical Experience with Psychotic Features.) There even is/was a DMS code for that, at least back in the late 1990s (I have not checked the latest editions). Hallucinations is a marker of psychosis.
I have not read meta-studies of this literature, but my hunch is that breathing exercises (manipulating the oxygen supply to your brain) is the most effective way to induce a psychosis. However, all practices bring with them their share of practitioners who experience psychosis (even Tai chi).
If you are a novice, experiencing a psychosis, and then being told by your teacher you have a mystical experience, is a very powerful way for that teacher to achieve domination over you. This is the stuff that sects are made of.
....And then there are amateur teachers who are ignorant of the risk of psychosis, and give you extremely dangerous advice simply out of ignorance.
So beware of unscrupolous or amateur teachers.
Advice in such situations is to stop whatever practice you are doing (do not pour gasoline on a fire), and seek grounding. Slow walking is often useful, the more/longer the better. Grounding is likely to take months, so this must be kept up.
The review'er to his/her credit mentions the hallucination risk (although apparently not related to White's book); but in a too-light fashion, this is no cute/laughing matter: "After all, during that retreat, I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril, the most beautifully bewhiskered otter I had ever seen, and a pile of loose teeth."
"Mindfulness meditation is being pushed in the West as a way to learn to stop thinking and love Moloch."
Praise "Bob" and Hail Connie!
I suppose that you're referring to this ?
http://conniepleaseslack.us/
I know what "slack" is but I still don't *exactly* get the reference ?
http://www.subgenius.com/
The Church of the Subgenius is one of the very best things an American can use to inoculate her or his mind against the baleful influences of marketing, advertising and the worship of money. I am still quite pissed off at Rev. Stang regarding the funding for the recent documentary, which feels cosmically right somehow, but it's a good introduction.
"We actually are a religion that seems like an art piece that seems like a religion that seems like performance art that seems like a joke that seems like a religion." - Paul Mavrides
https://vimeo.com/320887505
http://dobbstown.org/
God, I'm a bad salesman, which is why I worship one. Subgenius is also funny! It's really fucking funny if you're not Pink.
Fascinating !
The "nihilistic vegetable" thing is interesting. I've read Scott's earlier posts on meditation and noticed that some features of enlightenment struck me as oddly relatable... as someone with a history of depression. I'm still not sure what to make of that.
Oh, and I think "~~give you puppies and unicorns and the ability to cure cancer~~" is meant to be struckthrough text. That's how Discord parses it, anyway, and reading it that way makes sense.
If we want the reviews to be anonymous, there shouldn't be links to the authors personal philpapers profile in the review. This is not the first author to link their own work, so maybe we should just give up the anonymity aspect of the contest since it's clearly not feasible.
This still works in a way, just like spoiler tags : you can choose to remain ignorant of their identity if you wish so.
But some authors don't link to their own work. If we want to make it work like a spoiler tag and we want it to be fair, there should be a spoiler tag at the top of the review with the authors name behind it.
Very interesting review, thank you!
To me the idea of no-self is strongly connected to physical determinism. There was a point in meditation where I, with absolute clarity, saw that all humans are just physical objects with weird behavior. They can't be anything else, because all behavior follows from fundamental subatomic laws.
In physical determinism there is no place for self or consciousness.
At the same time, in jarring juxtaposition, Humans aren't *really* physical creatures. If every human body was replaced by a magical robot body, we would not really be different people. I would still like my friends, be concerned about my social circle and all that stuff.
If you think about this, then most of the stuff you care about is not definable in a physical reality.
So, to me
No-Self = viewing the world purely through a physical lense
Opposite = viewing the world purely as abstract communication between humans, which sadly has to go through base reality
I believe that, in some part, meditation teaches to switch between the views. If you are in pain, well it's only synapses firing, what do you care? If you want to be kind? Well, every body contains an almost infinite amount of possibility, how could you not care about them?
I liked this review! Of course, it's impossible to judge a review in terms of how well it represents the book if one hasn't read the book, and I haven't.
I haven't been able to meditate myself (too boring and/or sleepy, though admittedly I haven't tried too hard), but from what I've seen, the Rationalist approach to meditation is a giant motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Meditation proponents talk a good game about using meditation to see awesome visions, "become better people", "abandon the self", become one with the Universe, gain increased intelligence and perception, acquire extrasensory and/or psionic powers, and generally become an enlightened energy being. But as soon as you ask them, "that sounds cool, can you prove it ?", they fade back into the shadows, and the only claims that withstand scrutiny are the ones about the awesome hallucinations -- and I'm not even convinced all of those are real.
My personal hypothesis (and I admit that I don't have any evidence, it's just a guess) is the cause and effect are reversed in this case. Perhaps some people are just really good at auto-hypnosis, due to some mutation or epigenetic trait or whatever. With a little training, they can learn to hallucinate at will, be it through Buddhist meditation, Pentecostal chanting, Shamanic rituals (the drug-free ones, if any such exist), etc. Such people go on to become spiritual leaders in whatever religions they'd chosen, preaching the merits of their personal meditation method -- which is still mostly pointless for the other 99% of the population.
As far as I'm aware, practitioners don't actually claim that meditation will grant supernatural powers, boost intelligence, or trigger hallucinations. I'm really curious about why you think they do.
Generally, the aim of meditation is stated along the lines of 'mindfulness', or 'self-compassion'. You can decide these things are bullshit if you want, but stating there lacks any evidence in support of the practice isn't a very fair reading of the literature.
Well, even the OP explicitly says,
> After all, during that retreat, I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril, the most beautifully bewhiskered otter I had ever seen, and a pile of loose teeth.
I realize he's speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek (or finger-in-nostril if you will), but most meditators claim to experience some sort of visions. Others, such as @Elriggs below, claim to have enhanced powers of perception, intelligence, or creativity as per the OP (admittedly, creativity is hard to measure). Yet others claim outright supernatural powers of telepathy, clairsentience, or even telekinesis; there were a few inadvertently humorous threads on that topic on ye olde SSC. That said, I admit that the OP does not stray quite that far off-field. In any case, you say:
> Generally, the aim of meditation is stated along the lines of 'mindfulness', or 'self-compassion'.
Sounds great, but what does that mean ? If you want to just feel better about yourself, there are lots of techniques that can get you there, from meditation to church to a licensed therapist to a tub of ice cream and a Netflix subscription. Is that all that meditation is good for ? Don't get me wrong, a technique that makes you feel better for cheap is still quite worthwhile, but is that all that meditation is ? And can you answer this question in a quantitative way ?
I think you're not really engaging with a useful, or very common definition of 'meditation' or what it achieves. If you are interested, I would encourage you to look beyond selected quotes from users on an internet board, and seek something closer to consensus.
'Mindfulness' and 'feeling better' are not interchangeable, although if you think they are, well it does explain much of your skepticism.
> Sounds great, but what does that mean ?
Google isn't a bad place to start: 'mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique'. In other words, meditation is a way to focus attention, and regulate emotions.
I suspect you will claim that this is meaningless mumbo-jumbo, so let me preempt by saying I disagree. Experiences like painful or intrusive thoughts, and a racing mind are likely very common, and most people have associated them with an anxious, or otherwise undesirable state. I'm not claiming that meditation will necessarily fix those things, only that the concept of 'mindfulness' has clear and obvious meaning, which is plainly different from 'Watching Netflix'.
I get the sense you are just having fun bashing what you perceive to be deluded or dumb people (I would ask what makes you so certain of your priors), so I might look silly making an earnest argument. In the event I'm wrong, you may find this a helpful overview: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3916
Yes, I know what the term "mindfulness" is supposed to mean, but my point is that it pays to be careful to separate one's internal feelings from one's objective capabilities. For example, drinking alcohol can make you feel like you're strong enough to take on the entire world and charming enough to seduce anyone you meet; however, objectively, alcohol most often has the opposite effect.
As I said above, there's nothing wrong with "focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations"; it sounds like a good thing to do. It can be achieved through meditation, prayer, psychiatry, and a variety of other techniques; and if it can lead to reduced anxiety, then I'm all for it. If that's all that meditation is, I've got no quarrel with it.
But that's the motte. The bailey, as expressed by people on this very thread as well as the OP, is that meditation isn't just a technique for increasing mindfulness and reducing anxiety. At minimum, it is claimed to be the *best* technique in the world for this purpose; but more often than not, meditation is claimed to actually increase one's powers of perception, intelligence, empathy, and creativity; as well as possibly inducing hallucinations and dissolving the ego-self.
Obviously, reduced anxiety can achieve some of these effects to some extent -- after all, it's hard to take an IQ test when your heart is racing and your mind keeps running in circles. But, again, that is the motte; the bailey is that meditation is not just a replacement for Ativan, but a power that enhances your mind beyound what is humanly possible without meditation. These extravagant claims (and all the rest, vis a vis hallucination, no-self, laser-eye-beams, whatever) are what I have the problem with; as I said, I've got no quarrel mindfulness as such.
I'm not convinced by the Motte and Bailey argument. People don't seem to be coy about their spiritual beliefs, is there really a contingent of people that believes wild claims about meditation, yet cautiously retreats to meeker arguments during internet conversations? Does the book reviewed by the OP? I did not get that impression. In my experience, believers in the supernatural will be more than happy to advocate for their view; the rationalist argument (Sam Harris et al, I presume) is a coherent position of its own, rather than a Motte for the supernatural or outlandish claims.
Even the OP (which I find less than charitable at times) squarely frames the book's argument within the language of 'mindfulness' rather than 'superpower'. Rather than discerning a Motte-and-Bailey, I find that you're putting up a bit of a strawman.
It is somewhat ironic that you would liberally appeal to the Motte and Bailey fallacy, yet make the following succession of arguments:
A: Mindfulness may be a meaningless concept, and at any rate seems indistinguishable from 'feeling good'; meditation does nothing more than a tub of ice cream.
B: Of course mindfulness is a thing, and it has some obvious value; however it is not the exclusive outcome of meditation -- talk therapy may work just as well.
A: There exist no empirical reason to think meditation has positive effects. "The only claims that withstand scrutiny are the ones about the awesome hallucinations -- and I'm not even convinced all of those are real"
B: 'There's nothing wrong with "focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations"; it sounds like a good thing to do. It can be achieved through meditation, prayer, psychiatry, and a variety of other techniques'
And, paraphrasing:
A: Meditation has no clear utility and makes no sense. Its proponents are trying to gain psionic powers, lol
B: Meditation can obviously be beneficial, but some of its more dedicated proponents overstate its effectiveness, or downplay similar effects of alternative approaches, like therapy.
I never said that mindfulness is a useless concept; I originally said that *your* description of the benefits of meditation sounds rather mundane. You then focused on mindfulness as the primary benefit, and as I said repeatedly, I've got no problem with that. I acknowledge that meditation is one of many techniques that can enhance mindfulness. I am, of course, doubtful that either meditation or mindfulness can grant one enhanced physical or mental abilities -- beyound the normal enhancement that comes from not being anxious and distracted all the time.
And yet, you have people on this very comment thread claiming exactly this. The OP claims that meditation can be used to induce hallucinations (which is a claim I'm reasonably willing to accept, mind you), and claims it to be psychically dangerous in some hard-to-understand way. Others are claiming enhanced perception and intelligence; over the years, I've definitely heard many claims of psychic powers. I understand that *you* are not making such claims; but then, you're the motte, and I have no problem with your opinion in that capacity. You say:
> Meditation can obviously be beneficial, but some of its more dedicated proponents overstate its effectiveness, or downplay similar effects of alternative approaches, like therapy.
Replace "some" with "most", and I'd happily endorse that statement.
Also, it might sound like I'm bullying meditation proponents specifically, and... well that's true I guess. I just find it ironing that a movement that calls itself capital-R "Rationalist" would buy into unfalsifiable woo claims so readily.
Ah! Telepathy! I am much better at reading other people’s body language now, which is the closest, nonsensical pattern match. (Literal telepathy needs a lot more evidence, in my mind, and people don’t think in internal dialogue often unless they’re reading or writing(typical mind fallacy?))
Though low-level-sensory-accessing-meditation only helps me look at actual sensory information of a person (posture, facial expression, change in voice), I still have to build a model, be capable of honest feedback to myself, and make predictions.
Hmmm...It is rather important to make a distinction between having hallucinations and having enhanced powers of perception/intelligence/creativity/insights and similar positive stuff.
Most (all?) "spiritual" practices can induce hallucinations, including very strong hallucinations: i.e. having the perception of hearing and seeing stuff. (And not only Eastern practices; I would not let the various "Western" spiritual practices of Judaism/Christianity/Islam off the hook.) This is empirically well documented, there is a quite large research literature; no reason to have strong doubts here. Keep a strong prior (as they say).
In contrast, there are (empirical) reasons to have strong doubts about claims of enhanced powers of perception/intelligence/creativity/insights; this is not similarly empirically documented in any serious research literature I am aware of.
Here is the problem: If the practitioner starts to treat his/her hallucinations as "real" in some sense, you are a very short step away from a full-blown psychosis. Which carries a non-neglible suicide probability, along with a lot of other usually-not-regarded-as-positive things.
Mind you, such hallucinations can be extremely unsettling, in particular if you are not warned by a spiritual teacher (or someone) that strong hallucinations may turn up during your practice; and you are in an even more dangerous situation if the teacher thinks having such mental experiences is a good thing; that you are "on the path".
The probability that you will fully recover from strong hallucinatory experiences is unfortunately rather low, if you come to your psychiatrist/priest/spiritual guide/whoever and say things like: "I do [fill in spiritual practice]. Lately I have noticed there are angels behind my wall, but also devils. I see them occasionally and they whisper to me at night. Walking the streets, I get messages from posters on the wall."
Compare that to a similar person coming in and saying stuff like: "I do [fill in spiritual practice]. Lately I have all kinds of strange experiences, like posters on the walls - of all things - seem to have messages to me, and I have weird feelings of angels and devils in my house. What is happening to me? Am I going crazy?"
The latter person is uncertain if what he/she experiences is "real". This is encouraging, as suggests a good long-term outcome. The former person shows signs of a full-blown psychosis. And this is a very serious mental state, unfortunately with a much worse prognosis.
Experienced meditation teachers know that some of their novices will experience this stuff, and they are then hopefully willing and able to lead the novices out of it, by grounding excercises and the like.
Plus, experienced meditation practitioners are able to keep a mental distance (so to speak) to their own hallucinations, not treating them as "real". Judging from the review, this includes the review'er of White's book.
But there is a dangerous tendency in many meditation/spiritual communities to none the less regard hallucinations as "real" in some sense, or at least as beneficial, i.e. not to be avoided.
Unfortunately, that way madness lies, for some of the novices.
The increased perception one happened to me. For whatever reason, building a higher fidelity perception of your breath extends to other senses (like taste and vision). It’s like I’m gaining access to lower-level sensory information that I usually ignored (like static in vision). This isn’t too special, it’s similar to more autistic people perceive the world (or at least my one friend I talked to about this) and LSD descriptions.
I’m not too hip on the hallucination thing, but my steelman is accessing lucid dreaming. I’ve heard of this with the fire kassina and dream yoga. Doing an intense retreat of fire kasina, people can “write their names in the air with their fingers”, which I’ve succeeded in a small degree. The ability goes away after not doing the meditation for a bit, but I’m not very skilled at it!
Do you actually get enhanced perception, or do you just *feel* like your perception is enhanced ? Merely seeing static would count as a "hallucination" in my book (a low-grade one, but still). Being able to read small print at a distance of 500m would count as enhanced perception (though obviously the enhancement does not have to be that dramatic).
More importantly, have you ever tried to actually test your meditatively-enhanced sensory powers, or are you content with feeling like they exist ?
I consider static (and after images that look like auras around objects and breathing walls) as low-level sensory noise.
The “improved eyesight” one is a good example to clarify! I don’t mean enhanced perception in that way, but enhanced as in gaining access to lower-level sensory information. It’s much easier for me to notice the “lizard skin” details on my hands, or my fingerprints on cups in the light. On a goal-oriented basis, this can help me relate to others, draw better, and be more awe-struck by visual information.
Improved sense of taste and smell are better examples; I do have a much better sense of taste than I had before. Besides food tasting better, some food actually tastes worst!
Sound is a counter example. I can play piano by ear somewhat, but I haven’t noticed any improvement there!
So improved perception as in access to low level sensory information that’s already there, and not enhanced hardware components (like better eyesight)
I'm not sure what "lower-level sensory information" means, but you say:
> It’s much easier for me to notice the “lizard skin” details on my hands, or my fingerprints on cups in the light.
I don't know what "lizard skin" is, exactly (I'm no artist nor biologist), but this sounds like you can resolve higher-resolution details while meditating, which is a testable claim. So, have you tested it ?
By analogy, when people get drunk, they often report feeling physically powerful, charming, and physically warm. However, if you put these feelings to the test, you find that drunk people are uncoordinated, boorish, and unfortunately prone to freezing in subzero temperatures. I'm not saying that meditation gets you drunk, merely that it can be important to separate one's internal feelings from objective facts.
> this sounds like you can resolve higher-resolution details while meditating
Maybe? If you look at your hand close enough and reflected in light, it will look like lizard scales. This isn't really special, anyone could notice this if they look. I am saying that "low-level sensory meditation" will make these details more naturally obvious.
In realism art classes, they will tell you to draw what you see, not what you think you see. I remember drawing faces and greatly improving my skill by simply drawing a new face upside down (drawing upside down is common advice!). Anyone can do this of course! But doing this style meditation will make seeing shades and colors much more naturally obvious.
There is a chance that this skill helps with other things I really care about, but I don't have any strong opinions on that.
For a testable claim, I did taste rotten meat at a meal one time and 2/4 people could not taste it. The other 1 person usually has a good sense of smell and taste and agreed with me.
It doesn't make sense to me to be self-deceived on whether or not I'm seeing lower-level sensory information. I don't always see those details or taste things in fine detail (like when I'm distracted), but I can purposely focus on them and perceive it.
Brief review-of-the-review:
I was happy to see the topic and themes of the review since they get at one of my main reservations about the "rationalist" project: it's trying (correctly, in my view) to map out the limitations of evolved cognitive heuristics for decision-making while also embracing a worldview that can't really provide any other consistent basis for decision-making. So reading the review was helpful in that it provided some intuition as to why rationalists tend to be interested in Buddhist-style meditation, which also seems to be the reviewer's main point. I personally was disappointed when part II adopted, with not much argument, the standard utilitarian position, but it wouldn't be fair of me to hold that against the reviewer. More objectively disappointing were that a) I don't feel like I actually learned what the book's argument was, and b) part III felt like a non sequitur. The post as a whole feels more like a personal engagement with the book's themes than like a review as such. For what it is, though, it's a very good one!
I've never had any propper meditation training but it seems that for the most of my life I've been... let say more enlightened than the rest of the people around. I've been friendly to everyone, I knew, and totally disregarded any attempts from other people to be hostile towards me. At first I didn't notice, but later on reflection I figured out that people are playing some weird status games which seems ridiculous and cruel. So I decided I won't participate. Again on reflection it seems that I was somewhat of an outcast for a long time but I didn't mind it at all. When people talked about the "enlightenned behaviour" of some saints or Jesus I was nodding along and actually taking it as an advice in ethics applicable to me and was confused why others seem to not do it. It was nearly impossible to offend or enrage me and I've always been fast to forgive. I've always had a very good control over my desires and fears. In general I've felt that I'm not supposed to have desires, but not due to some abusive parenting, on the contrary my parents have always been super supportive, but due to the fact that in the grand scheme of things, for the universe itself there is no "objective reason" to want anything. And yeah, I had a lot of religious experiences and insights directly from the God Himself, as I felt at the moment.
I wouldn't say that it was generally unhelpfull. I value a lot of my cognitive adaptations. But my dating life was terrible, at first. I felt the universal love and beauty centered in one person but had no idea what to do with it. And also I knew that in theory I can feel it towards anyone. Well maybe in full power only towards women - I'm still having problems with accepting my limiting heterosexuality. Than why this person? Why can't all the world be in love with everyone else? That still feels somewhat tormenting. Also at some point of my life I've found myself just going with the flow. I was doing bullshit job, and didn't have much motivation to change anything.
Anyway, at some point in my life I've learned that one can deeply care about "eartly matters", despite the universe being irrelivant because `There is light in the world, and it is us!` And so I've started practising "disenlightenment". I've started figuring out my desires and radically changed my life. Currently I'm learning to be angry with people to better stand up for my interests. That's hard because my initial reaction is to become uninvolved. But now I at least have the ability to consciously decide to be angry, though it still makes me feel somewhat dirty.
From my experience I can tell that our society isn't really optimized for enlightment-ish people. Not that it's a surprising conclusion, all things considered.
There isn’t one right way to interact with the world or your emotions. The way you naturally deal with others is definitely useful in some situations and is rare!
I’m glad to hear you’re experimenting with expressing your desires. There will definitely be a learning period where you express them in an unskilled way, but as long as you pay attention and learn from mistakes, you’ll be much better off than people who can only express their emotions in one way.
> The same sensation Wright normally "defines as unpleasant" is there, without actually feeling unpleasant. (This is super weird, but...
This is very much in line with my personal experience on MDMA in regards to talking about difficult emotional topics. The feeling in there but most negative emotion is removed. Weird but definitely real.
I want to watch a movie about the police hunting a serial-killer nicknamed the "Zen Predator of the Upper East Side”. He uses his Siddhis to "make oneself invisible" to attack his victims. "Sitting crosslegged he flies through the air like a winged bird", he leaves crime scenes. "He appears. He vanishes."
"He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, & mountains as if through space." He masteted "Telekinesis (Supernormal Locomotion)", "the power of Transformation", "The ability to replicate one's body" and
"Penetration of others' minds (Thought Reading)". The only hope is bringing back from retirement an old, enbittered meditator.
Just an FYI for readers you can find Robert Wright on substack here: https://nonzero.substack.com/p/the-week-in-blob-cbb
Not directly related to the review, but maybe I'll share my experience with meditation: started doing it more or less daily around late 2017, following the instructions of the 'Mind Illuminated'. I remember enjoying and being excited with the practice during the first months, where I was seeing myself progressing along the lines of the book. I wasn't practising *everyday, but most of the days, at least 30min. I have had nice experiences of more or less deep concentration, and interesting insights (at least at the time). Around 1.5 years more or less after I started I started slacking a bit on the practice due to a feeling of being stuck and not progressing (for those familiar with the book, around stage 6/7). Since then I have relaxed on the practice, and have had long periods without meditating at all. Not sure if directly related to meditation, but I have noticed some seemingly permanent changes on myself (all not that great): the mental chatter seems to be gone, and I seem to live is a state of awareness of myself and surroundings (sensations, feelings). Not sure this is usual, when meditating I notice visual memories, feelings, sensations, but thoughts, not really. I'm much less reactive emotionally - my usual experience has a neutral emotional quality to it (emotions do arise, but in a more detached way). Creativity and drive to do/learn things is also much lower compared to before (this sucks). Note that this hasn't affected work, personal relationships or social life, I'm a bit of an extrovert and I enjoy socialising, but I seem to be on auto-pilot most of the time. Concluding, if I'm correct on the assessment of these changes and they are due to meditation, not sure they have made me a better person (whatever that means) or improved my life. Maybe paradoxically, I continue meditating often and I enjoy the much-pleasant states I usually obtain. Not sure if this resonates with the experiences of some of you, feedback is welcome.
Do you feel more content/happy/mentally healthy as a result of meditation? I can see less drive to do things as possibly being good, if the drive was a result of social pressures and things like that (e.g. wanting to learn and write things to appear more educated to others rather than true desire to know things). Do you think this might have been the case?
First question, not sure. There is less emotional variance, but in terms of average contentment/happiness/mental health not sure I'm better than before. I have the impression is similar. Second question I don't think so, I was always a naturally curious guy, and somehow creative (it's not that I lost that curiosity, but the drive to do stuff is lower - I seem to require a higher mental effort to start a task). Was reading some stuff lately, I suspect I may have fallen into this 'trap' :) https://deconstructingyourself.com/escaping-observer-trap.html
Psych explanation: mindfulness meditation gives people a dose-dependent degree of depersonalization, derealization, dissociation. This tends to be helpful in small doses and harmful in large doses (rather like most psychoactive drugs; the common outcomes are either vegetable or psychosis). Recent post by David Chapman: https://vividness.live/meditation-risks
Self-other boundary: I think people tend to classify everything the world either as "self" (100% controlled) or "other" (0% controlled), and they temporarily project the boundary around things (the clothes they wear, the bike they ride) without being aware of doing it. I think this explains a lot of phenomena: because they lack intermediates to these buckets, saying that they are not as good drivers as they think they are would push driving all the way from 100% to 0% controlled, so they become angry and fight back at the claim. If they encounter clear evidence that they don't have 100% control of something they thought of as self, they either flip it over to 0% (we call this result learned helplessness) or they vigorously explain why the evidence doesn't matter. When other people bring up the incident (implying that it does matter according to others), they furiously double down on "no it doesn't matter and stop talking about it", which is I believe the other common trauma-response.
My favored explanation on how to break this is to imagine going to martial arts training, specifically to imagine grappling. Contested, partial control of both bodies is the whole point. Hopefully this is anvilicious enough to create a continuous spectrum of control between 100% and 0%. (The parallels to Cromwell's law in epistemology should be obvious.)
For whatever it's worth I wrote a review of this book also a couple years ago. I have a somewhat different take, so you might find it interesting for comparison.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FGZk5PgoaNoLQrzAR/book-review-why-buddhism-is-true
I think there's some things the review and Wright are getting wrong, but it's sort of hard to explain. There's this thing about the way we typically point at what meditation and enlightenment are supposed to look like are easily misunderstood because we lack the verbal categories and experiences to directly point to the thing until after we've done it, so all the words used sort of point in the wrong direction if you take them too literally, and I feel like that's what happening here and being amplified by the fact that most Western Buddhists are practicing some kind of confused practices that result from taking the practices too literally and out of context (they can't help it, their teachers seem similarly confused as best I can tell).
I don't intend for this to be a general my-practice-is-better-than-yours kind of claim, but a more direct claim that lots of Westerners seem to be doing things that are just not effective practices for Westerners to be doing and getting weird outcomes because they're doing things that are maladaptive for their context. A great example is that strong renunciation practices seem poorly adapted to Westerners who don't lead lives full of obvious moment to moment suffering because we have central heating and air conditioners and modern medicine and plentiful food. Instead we Westerners are already pretty comfortable, and applying monastery grade meditation can carry us to places that don't really fit with wanting to live in a world full of cool things that are fun to interact with.
There's alternatives of course, but Wright doesn't really touch on them because he doesn't seem to be familiar with them.
Interesting essay, need some time to digest it, although in general I agree with the general scepticism around attempts to align Buddhism with "modern" psychology.
I practise Vajrayana, idgaf about that tbh, seems like a modernist Theravadin/Zen thing mainly? I feel like the model of liberation and "enlightened activity" also differs a lot between Mahayana (incl. Vajrayana) and Theravada -- traditional texts like the Bodhisattva-bhumi have lots of advice on how the bodhisattva acts in the world (start a big business, don't aim for a little shop)
I have a little quibble about the Bhikkhu Bodhi quote. It seems like he was actually joking: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/science-of-meditation/essentialism-and-emptiness-KBT5Z
My usual discomfort with Buddhism is the sentiment that Your mind is chaotic and cluttered and you must clean it! Order it! Make it meager and quiet like a temple. I feel like, why? I like the chaos, the many desires and interests and ideas bouncing around. It’s really fun! And helps accomplish a lot of my goals.
But this review is a new perspective to me. It starts with a single large scale instrumental goal that I identify with, How can I be a better utilitarian? And makes a compelling case that meditation can help. I can’t tell how Buddhist this is versus stealing their neat tools to go build your own thing, but I appreciate it and for the first time kind of want to meditate.
It still has tough competition though: what makes this better than Shut up and calculate? Do I really need to feel my friend stubbing his toe to buy bed nets in Africa? Couldn’t it be distracting, even making me over focus on pain I can observe rather than pain I can infer? Even if I identify with all of humanity and cease to feel self, how does that help with the problem of triage? Maybe a moderate amount of feeling the world spirit is enough and after that it’s just hard nose-to-the-grindstone work?
I didn't like this review. It's hard to tell how much is even a review of the book vs. the reviewer's own interpretations of the subject matter; devoting a significant percentage of the review to strawmanning the book's contents did not seem like a defensible choice; in some ways, I feel less informed about the book than before I read the review, when I knew nothing about it; etc.
The review's big section on pain also seemed needlessly confused on what I thought weren't particularly complicated ideas. In particular, despite only some cursory meditation practice (i.e. <15 min per day for a few months, many years ago), the insight that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional seemed a) central to meditation, b) obvious once I'd been meditating for a while and c) while I couldn't make great use of this insight in my day-to-day life, it did serve me moderately well in improving my subjective experience of specific short events I knew I'd dislike, like visiting the dentist.
The title of the book puts me off. "Why Buddhism Works For Me" I could accept. But Buddhism is just as dogmatic and anti-science as any other religion, and yes, it is a religion. Its basis is karma, which is metaphysical and unprovable.
Meditation + Steve Jobs + "creative" ... no?