Note that I already discussed this paper a bit at the end of my earlier post on meditation; (this kind of) enlightenment removing your subjective suffering over your incompetence and otherwise leaving most of your behavior intact is as predicted and would still be considered valuable by many people. Also, enlightenment is only one of the things you can develop via meditation, and if you want practical benefits there are other axes that you can focus on.
From an epistemic rationality perspective, isn’t becoming less aware of your emotions and body a really bad thing? Not only does it give you false beliefs, but “not being in touch with your emotions/body” is already a stereotyped pitfall for a rationalist to fall into…
Definitely. But note that according to the paper, the stress thing “was observed in a total of three participants”; he says that he then went on to “went on to conduct other experiments” and found results among similar lines, and then gives the yoga and racism examples. So it’s not clear to me exactly how many individuals had that kind of a disconnect between their experience of stress and their objective level of stress; 3⁄50 at least sounds like a pretty small minority.
I’m intending to flesh out my model further in a future post, but the short version is that I don’t believe the loss of awareness to be an inevitable consequence of all meditation systems—though it is probably a real risk with some. Metaphorically, there are several paths that lead to enlightenment and some of them run the risk of reducing your awareness, but it seems to me entirely possible to take safer paths.
Note that I already discussed this paper a bit at the end of my earlier post on meditation; (this kind of) enlightenment removing your subjective suffering over your incompetence and otherwise leaving most of your behavior intact is as predicted and would still be considered valuable by many people. Also, enlightenment is only one of the things you can develop via meditation, and if you want practical benefits there are other axes that you can focus on.
From an epistemic rationality perspective, isn’t becoming less aware of your emotions and body a really bad thing? Not only does it give you false beliefs, but “not being in touch with your emotions/body” is already a stereotyped pitfall for a rationalist to fall into…
Definitely. But note that according to the paper, the stress thing “was observed in a total of three participants”; he says that he then went on to “went on to conduct other experiments” and found results among similar lines, and then gives the yoga and racism examples. So it’s not clear to me exactly how many individuals had that kind of a disconnect between their experience of stress and their objective level of stress; 3⁄50 at least sounds like a pretty small minority.
I’m intending to flesh out my model further in a future post, but the short version is that I don’t believe the loss of awareness to be an inevitable consequence of all meditation systems—though it is probably a real risk with some. Metaphorically, there are several paths that lead to enlightenment and some of them run the risk of reducing your awareness, but it seems to me entirely possible to take safer paths.