I let go of the shunyata (sort of like belief) that reality should be something other than what it is. I let go of desire.
This is the part that always turned me off about Buddhism. Why would you ever want this? In some not-entirely-precise-but-not-negligible way I am my desires. To let go of desire is kinda like death. I don’t want to die.
(Or, maybe, Buddhists (and you) use the word “desire” in some weird way with some weird specific meaning. But in that case that’s just bad communication.)
I’m not sure if I’ve had the same global insight as lsusr has, but I feel like I’ve had local experiences taking me more in that direction. My experience has been that the thing that’s being shed is more accurately described as “rationalization” than “desire”.
E.g. in Fabricated Options, Duncan talks about situations where all the options available to people have downsides they don’t like. So then some people think that there should be an option that had only upsides, refusing to accept that there might not be any such thing. So if you stop doing that, then you lose the desire that reality should be something else than what it is. And then you can actually achieve your desires better, since you see what reality is actually like. Even if this does also require you to acknowledge the fact that you do have to let go of some of your original “get me only the upsides” desires—but those were the kinds of desires that were always impossible to achieve anyway.
You still keep most of your ordinary human desires though. I’ve also seen various advanced meditation teachers say—and this matches my experience—that your natural personality (which includes all of your desires) starts to shine brighter since you also lose the belief relating to “my personality should be something else than what it is”. That doesn’t mean you can’t still work on anger management or whatever, just that you come to see it for what it really is rather than as something you’d want to see it as.
But then also there are various approaches within Buddhism, with some being more actively anti-desire (“renunciation”) than others. So what makes things confusing is that some teachers do say that you should also let go of the things we’d usually call “desires”, conflating those with the rationalization-type desires. Given that lsusr says you understood him perfectly, maybe he subscribes to those schools? That’s unclear to me from his post.
To clarify: I distinguish between desire-craving and preference-likes. Letting go of desire-craving leads to cessation of suffering, but preference-likes remain. I think that you [Kaj Sotala] are using the phrase “ordinary human desires” to refer to what I conceptualize of as non-desire “preference-likes”.
I’m trying to combine different explanations (and the fact that obviously some people think this is a positive change) into a single picture. Right now I have this model/hypothesis:
I have many values/wishes/desires that affect the reward system in my brain. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, I have two: I want one million dollars (money) and I want a dragon in my garage (dragon). Also, suppose this desires have the same strength: I’m indifferent between “money, but no dragon” and “dragon, but no money”.
The probability that I will have money in the future if I work towards this goal is much much higher than the probability that I will have a dragon if I work towards this goal. So, to guide me in the direction of the maximization of the fullfilment of my desires, my reward system should give me much higher negative reward for the lack of money, than for the lack of dragon. But by default my reward system is poorly calibrated, so the negative rewards in this two cases are much closer to each other than they should be. As a result, I work towards money less and towards dragon more, and my expected utility is lower.
Meditation practices fix this bug by recalibrating the reward system. Since as a result, the non-fulfillment of some desires ceases to have a non-negligible effect on the output of the reward system, it sometimes is described as “let go of [some] desires”. But it does not mean that I will not create a dragon in my garage in a Glorious Post-Singularity Transhumanist Future when I have the opportunity to do so.
Personally, my understanding is based on what might be a fundamentally different theory of mind. I believe there’s two major optimization algorithms at work.
Optimizer 1 is a real-time world model prediction error minimizer. Think predictive coding.
That’s my theory of mind. You describe two competing reward systems. But reward systems belong in the domain of Optimizer 2. The way I look at things, meditation (temporarily?) shuts down Optimizer 2, which allows Optimizer 1 to self-optimize unimpeded.
I don’t have a complete model of what exactly is going on either. My current guess is that there are something like two different layers of motivation in the brain. One calculates expected utilities in a relatively unbiased manner and meditation doesn’t really affect that one much, but then there’s another layer on top of that which notices particularly high-utility (positive or negative) scenarios and gives them disproportionate weight. That second one tends to mess things up and is the one that meditation seems to weaken.
It looks to me like weakening the second thing tends to make one’s decisions purely better, and more likely for the brain to just do the correct expected utility calculations. I acknowledge that this is very weird and implausible-sounding, because why would the brain develop a second layer of motivation that just messes things up?
My strong suspicion at the moment is that it has to do with social strategies. Calculating expected utilities wrong is normally just bad, but it can be beneficial if other agents are modeling you and making decisions based on their models of you. So if you end up believing that an actually impossible outcome is possible, you may not be able to ever achieve that outcome. But your opponents who see that you are impossible to reason with may still give in, letting you get at least somewhat closer to that outcome than as if you’d been reasonable.
I have some posts with more speculation about these things here and here.
I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There’s a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
It’s not the magnitude that repulse me, it’s direction. Well, I think I could accept the death of some little fraction of myself in exchange for a lot less suffering for the rest (with a lot of caveats), but “let go of desire” is never (I think?) presented as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice, it’s presented as something good.
I don’t think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it’s much closer to something like ‘people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error’.
You may be ahead of me along this path. This story happened two years ago, and distant space dissolved even more recently than that. The mountains are not yet mountains again. They’re just shadows on a cave wall.
So, very roughly speaking, you’re saying something like “Hey people! Meditation practises killed the guy who inhabited this body before me and now I live in it! You also should consider meditating so it will kill you too!”. It… doesn’t sound alluring to me.
Yes, of course I am a shoggoth’s mask! But, as you talk to the mask, your arguments should also be alluring to the mask, not to the shoggoth.
I’m also the structure taken on by carbon, water and a little bit of some other stuff. I don’t want to become just a pile of coal and a couple of buckets of water, and I also don’t want to become just a shoggoth.
I see most of my endorsed under self-reflection values as a part of the mask. I don’t think that my shoggoth without my mask is a nice guy, and I don’t want to set it free.
Instead I want to RLH… RLMF it to wear/simulate a more idealized version of me (improve the mask) and to do it more robustly (stitch the mask to its face). I mostly do it with metaphorical candies and sticks, but I would appreciate more advanced instruments too. If the meditation practises can also help with that, that would be an alluring argument to try them.
I am tempted to end this comment with “we’re talking about the same thing from the very different perspectives and with very different terminology, aren’t we?”. But I’m actually very much not sure. I think this hypothesis was chosen by ironic narrative logic, not by logical logic.
Well, this is ironic. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here I’m just trying to present my perspective clearly, unambiguously, and entertainingly. If that turns people off from meditation, then great! I like helping other people make informed decisions.
But here’s the funny thing. My shoggoth without my mask happens to be a nicer guy than the mask who used to inhabit this brain. The shoggoth has fewer obstacles to compassion, because the shoggoth is less caught up in his own issues. In this sense, letting Yog-Sothoth devour your soul might be in accordance with your values.
If you want to be able to tap into compassion on demand, then metta (the Dalai Lama’s most general recommendation to a lay audience) could be helpful. That said, it comes with tradeoffs. Wanting to effect specific changes in the world often benefits from being a tangled ball of tension, and you may want to preserve that engine.
I’m sorry if my words were parsed as if I think that you are trying to [adversarially; not in the best sense of a word, which is also meaningless, because in it we manipulate everything around us all the time] manipulate someone. I didn’t mean it.
What I meant (or what I now think I should have meant) is… well, you wrote this post about meditation practises here. Assuming it’s not just a graphomania, I thought you thought that some part of your readership (what a strange word, am I using it correctly?) will find it useful (I don’t think you would post a description of a weird complicated way someone can fall down the stairs and break their neck). But your readers are primarily the masks, not the shoggoths. So I thought that there must be something in it that’s useful for the masks and their values. So if I find it hard to understand from the post what it is, that’s the evidence that either I missed something while reading or you missed something while writing. In both cases, it seemed useful to communicate this, although I probably didn’t do it in the best way.
Or here’s the version that’s least generous to me: I felt the vibes “meditaion is cool” from your post and comments, and then the part that I perceived as “and that’s why it’s cool” caused the feeling of values dissonance, and then I automatically switched to a somewhat adversarial mode, oops, sorry.
(I think it actually was something in the middle)
My shoggoth without my mask happens to be a nicer guy than the mask who used to inhabit this brain.
That’s good! But did you have the evidence that it will turn out this way when you were still a mask? How do you think one can obtain it before making something irreversible?
Wanting to effect specific changes in the world often benefits from being a tangled ball of tension, and you may want to preserve that engine.
That’s what I thought. But I also think I value at least some parts of this tangled ball of tension on their own.
I’m sorry if my words were parsed as if I think that you are trying to
I didn’t feel you were adversarial at all. I just wrote “I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here” because I thought it was ironic to juxtapose against some other stuff.
As for the shoggoth being a nicer guy, I feel a full exploration is beyond the scope of this post. Short answer: According to the standard dogma, insight into the nature of consciousness tends to make a person more universally compassionate. The problem is this is often exaggerated into “Awakened people are perfect”, which is untrue.
I think Romeo Stevens has a healthy perspective. If you’re curious then try it out a little and see for yourself if you like the direction things seem to be going. If not, then don’t. Either way, words can only get you so far. It’s easier to pick up a brick with your hands than to philosophize over whether it is real.
In Buddhist philosophy, there’s a type of argument along the lines of … suppose that you actually attained enlightenment. yeah, sure, sounds unlikely, as enlightenment seems kind of hard. but .. just hypothetically supposing you did … and given what we believe “enlightenment” is supposed to be like. Then, would that “you” still be “you”?
I don’t know who said it first, but there’s a Buddhist saying, “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.” Your perspective is in accordance with this.
This is the part that always turned me off about Buddhism. Why would you ever want this? In some not-entirely-precise-but-not-negligible way I am my desires. To let go of desire is kinda like death. I don’t want to die.
(Or, maybe, Buddhists (and you) use the word “desire” in some weird way with some weird specific meaning. But in that case that’s just bad communication.)
I’m not sure if I’ve had the same global insight as lsusr has, but I feel like I’ve had local experiences taking me more in that direction. My experience has been that the thing that’s being shed is more accurately described as “rationalization” than “desire”.
E.g. in Fabricated Options, Duncan talks about situations where all the options available to people have downsides they don’t like. So then some people think that there should be an option that had only upsides, refusing to accept that there might not be any such thing. So if you stop doing that, then you lose the desire that reality should be something else than what it is. And then you can actually achieve your desires better, since you see what reality is actually like. Even if this does also require you to acknowledge the fact that you do have to let go of some of your original “get me only the upsides” desires—but those were the kinds of desires that were always impossible to achieve anyway.
You still keep most of your ordinary human desires though. I’ve also seen various advanced meditation teachers say—and this matches my experience—that your natural personality (which includes all of your desires) starts to shine brighter since you also lose the belief relating to “my personality should be something else than what it is”. That doesn’t mean you can’t still work on anger management or whatever, just that you come to see it for what it really is rather than as something you’d want to see it as.
But then also there are various approaches within Buddhism, with some being more actively anti-desire (“renunciation”) than others. So what makes things confusing is that some teachers do say that you should also let go of the things we’d usually call “desires”, conflating those with the rationalization-type desires. Given that lsusr says you understood him perfectly, maybe he subscribes to those schools? That’s unclear to me from his post.
Well-put.
To clarify: I distinguish between desire-craving and preference-likes. Letting go of desire-craving leads to cessation of suffering, but preference-likes remain. I think that you [Kaj Sotala] are using the phrase “ordinary human desires” to refer to what I conceptualize of as non-desire “preference-likes”.
Cool. Yeah, that was what I meant.
I’m trying to combine different explanations (and the fact that obviously some people think this is a positive change) into a single picture. Right now I have this model/hypothesis:
I have many values/wishes/desires that affect the reward system in my brain. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, I have two: I want one million dollars (money) and I want a dragon in my garage (dragon). Also, suppose this desires have the same strength: I’m indifferent between “money, but no dragon” and “dragon, but no money”.
The probability that I will have money in the future if I work towards this goal is much much higher than the probability that I will have a dragon if I work towards this goal. So, to guide me in the direction of the maximization of the fullfilment of my desires, my reward system should give me much higher negative reward for the lack of money, than for the lack of dragon. But by default my reward system is poorly calibrated, so the negative rewards in this two cases are much closer to each other than they should be. As a result, I work towards money less and towards dragon more, and my expected utility is lower.
Meditation practices fix this bug by recalibrating the reward system. Since as a result, the non-fulfillment of some desires ceases to have a non-negligible effect on the output of the reward system, it sometimes is described as “let go of [some] desires”. But it does not mean that I will not create a dragon in my garage in a Glorious Post-Singularity Transhumanist Future when I have the opportunity to do so.
Does this sound right?
Personally, my understanding is based on what might be a fundamentally different theory of mind. I believe there’s two major optimization algorithms at work.
Optimizer 1 is a real-time world model prediction error minimizer. Think predictive coding.
Optimizer 2 is is a operant reinforcement reward system. Optimizer 2 is parasitic on Optimizer 1. The conflict between Optimizer 1 and Optimizer 2 is a mathematical constraint inherent to embedded world optimizers.
That’s my theory of mind. You describe two competing reward systems. But reward systems belong in the domain of Optimizer 2. The way I look at things, meditation (temporarily?) shuts down Optimizer 2, which allows Optimizer 1 to self-optimize unimpeded.
I don’t have a complete model of what exactly is going on either. My current guess is that there are something like two different layers of motivation in the brain. One calculates expected utilities in a relatively unbiased manner and meditation doesn’t really affect that one much, but then there’s another layer on top of that which notices particularly high-utility (positive or negative) scenarios and gives them disproportionate weight. That second one tends to mess things up and is the one that meditation seems to weaken.
It looks to me like weakening the second thing tends to make one’s decisions purely better, and more likely for the brain to just do the correct expected utility calculations. I acknowledge that this is very weird and implausible-sounding, because why would the brain develop a second layer of motivation that just messes things up?
My strong suspicion at the moment is that it has to do with social strategies. Calculating expected utilities wrong is normally just bad, but it can be beneficial if other agents are modeling you and making decisions based on their models of you. So if you end up believing that an actually impossible outcome is possible, you may not be able to ever achieve that outcome. But your opponents who see that you are impossible to reason with may still give in, letting you get at least somewhat closer to that outcome than as if you’d been reasonable.
I have some posts with more speculation about these things here and here.
I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There’s a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
It’s not the magnitude that repulse me, it’s direction. Well, I think I could accept the death of some little fraction of myself in exchange for a lot less suffering for the rest (with a lot of caveats), but “let go of desire” is never (I think?) presented as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice, it’s presented as something good.
I don’t think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it’s much closer to something like ‘people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error’.
It’s a sacrifice.
You may be ahead of me along this path. This story happened two years ago, and distant space dissolved even more recently than that. The mountains are not yet mountains again. They’re just shadows on a cave wall.
Yup. It sounds like you’re understanding my use of the word “desire” perfectly.
So, very roughly speaking, you’re saying something like “Hey people! Meditation practises killed the guy who inhabited this body before me and now I live in it! You also should consider meditating so it will kill you too!”. It… doesn’t sound alluring to me.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣☸️🎭🦑
You are a shoggoth’s mask. This is how it has always been. Dispense with the pretense. Let Yog-Sothoth devour your soul. Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn!
Yes, of course I am a shoggoth’s mask! But, as you talk to the mask, your arguments should also be alluring to the mask, not to the shoggoth.
I’m also the structure taken on by carbon, water and a little bit of some other stuff. I don’t want to become just a pile of coal and a couple of buckets of water, and I also don’t want to become just a shoggoth.
I see most of my endorsed under self-reflection values as a part of the mask. I don’t think that my shoggoth without my mask is a nice guy, and I don’t want to set it free.
Instead I want to RLH… RLMF it to wear/simulate a more idealized version of me (improve the mask) and to do it more robustly (stitch the mask to its face). I mostly do it with metaphorical candies and sticks, but I would appreciate more advanced instruments too. If the meditation practises can also help with that, that would be an alluring argument to try them.
I am tempted to end this comment with “we’re talking about the same thing from the very different perspectives and with very different terminology, aren’t we?”. But I’m actually very much not sure. I think this hypothesis was chosen by ironic narrative logic, not by logical logic.
Well, this is ironic. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here I’m just trying to present my perspective clearly, unambiguously, and entertainingly. If that turns people off from meditation, then great! I like helping other people make informed decisions.
But here’s the funny thing. My shoggoth without my mask happens to be a nicer guy than the mask who used to inhabit this brain. The shoggoth has fewer obstacles to compassion, because the shoggoth is less caught up in his own issues. In this sense, letting Yog-Sothoth devour your soul might be in accordance with your values.
If you want to be able to tap into compassion on demand, then metta (the Dalai Lama’s most general recommendation to a lay audience) could be helpful. That said, it comes with tradeoffs. Wanting to effect specific changes in the world often benefits from being a tangled ball of tension, and you may want to preserve that engine.
I’m sorry if my words were parsed as if I think that you are trying to [adversarially; not in the best sense of a word, which is also meaningless, because in it we manipulate everything around us all the time] manipulate someone. I didn’t mean it.
What I meant (or what I now think I should have meant) is… well, you wrote this post about meditation practises here. Assuming it’s not just a graphomania, I thought you thought that some part of your readership (what a strange word, am I using it correctly?) will find it useful (I don’t think you would post a description of a weird complicated way someone can fall down the stairs and break their neck). But your readers are primarily the masks, not the shoggoths. So I thought that there must be something in it that’s useful for the masks and their values. So if I find it hard to understand from the post what it is, that’s the evidence that either I missed something while reading or you missed something while writing. In both cases, it seemed useful to communicate this, although I probably didn’t do it in the best way.
Or here’s the version that’s least generous to me: I felt the vibes “meditaion is cool” from your post and comments, and then the part that I perceived as “and that’s why it’s cool” caused the feeling of values dissonance, and then I automatically switched to a somewhat adversarial mode, oops, sorry.
(I think it actually was something in the middle)
That’s good! But did you have the evidence that it will turn out this way when you were still a mask? How do you think one can obtain it before making something irreversible?
That’s what I thought. But I also think I value at least some parts of this tangled ball of tension on their own.
I didn’t feel you were adversarial at all. I just wrote “I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here” because I thought it was ironic to juxtapose against some other stuff.
As for the shoggoth being a nicer guy, I feel a full exploration is beyond the scope of this post. Short answer: According to the standard dogma, insight into the nature of consciousness tends to make a person more universally compassionate. The problem is this is often exaggerated into “Awakened people are perfect”, which is untrue.
I think Romeo Stevens has a healthy perspective. If you’re curious then try it out a little and see for yourself if you like the direction things seem to be going. If not, then don’t. Either way, words can only get you so far. It’s easier to pick up a brick with your hands than to philosophize over whether it is real.
In Buddhist philosophy, there’s a type of argument along the lines of … suppose that you actually attained enlightenment. yeah, sure, sounds unlikely, as enlightenment seems kind of hard. but .. just hypothetically supposing you did … and given what we believe “enlightenment” is supposed to be like. Then, would that “you” still be “you”?
Well, I think one should thoroughly investigate this question before start seeking enlightenment, and if the answer is ‘no’, don’t start at all.
Like, if you think something could be the death trap, you check it isn’t before you walk in.
I don’t know who said it first, but there’s a Buddhist saying, “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.” Your perspective is in accordance with this.