Re: your point that any reductionist explanation is going to be miss a lot: yes, I certainly agree. This is what I was trying to gesture at in the introduction, when I said that this is a non-mystical explanation, not the non-mystical-explanation: because no single explanation can cover everything, and any single framework is going to be insufficient and only cover a particular aspect of the thing.
In fact, a previous version of this article included a section where I mentioned that I expect that reading my articles might be slightly harmful for one’s actual practice of doing meditation… but that I still think it’s worth writing them:
Another strength of the “no explanations, just practice” method is that describing what you should expect to find may by itself lead you astray. On some occasions, I read a description about some meditative insight. I then imagined that “oh, directly experiencing this must feel like X”, and went looking for something that would feel like X. When I did eventually experience the insight, I recognized it from the description but also realized that I had been imagining it entirely wrong. It might have been better if I had never read of it, and just went in blind instead.
… a lot of people seem to take a paint by numbers approach to these practices that then don’t really work for them. The investigation you do into your own experience has to be a real investigation, and not one in which you are highly confident about what there is to find. i.e. people feel like they’re meditating wrong if their experience doesn’t seem to match whichever map they are using. [...]
I do think that this has resulted in ambient memetic immunity of the same type hypothesized by Scott Alexander and others about why new psychotherapy methods work for a while and then seem to stop working. People get some sort of idea of what all these experiences are supposed to be and as a result ignore actual moment to moment sensation. This happened to me with piti (a jhana factor). I realized I had been keeping my eyes to the horizon looking for some sort of special spiritual sensation instead of noticing what was actually happening in my body.
It is very easy to keep thinking about how everything is mental sensations, instead of actually looking at your experience. As I will cover more extensively later, much of insight meditation involves noticing the conflict between what you expect to see, and what you actually see. If you have a strong preconception of what you should see, then this will get in the way of actually seeing what’s there. (There are also other reasons for why having strong expectations can be harmful, which I will cover later on in the article.)
But for all of its benefits, the no-explanation style of explanation has enormous downsides. Most notably, it will completely fail if you have no particular reason to trust the person’s authority: they are telling you to do this thing which they claim to lead to deep insights, while also claiming that it can’t be explained or that it is pointless to explain? Why should you give their words any weight, and how do you know that they are not just peddling a set of practices that will make you go insane rather than giving you any real insight?
“I have this great insight, but I not only can’t explain it to you, but I’m going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn’t understand it if I tried to explain it” sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, “If only you weren’t blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord”.
The no-explanation explanation depends completely on the reader already having trust in meditation being something that is worth doing. In the absence of that trust, it fails completely.
Furthermore, I do think that it is useful to have some idea of what you are looking for. Now, most “just practice, don’t worry about what’s going on” explanations do talk about what you should be paying attention to… but since they do not provide the generator of that advice, you don’t know how and when it should be modified to suit individual circumstances. If you are under the close supervision of a teacher or in standardized circumstances—such as in a monastery—this is not a problem. Outside that traditional setting, it is a problem.
I think that while there is a lot that cannot be explained in straightforward reductionist terms, I find that there is also a lot that can be. And three points with regard to that:
First, as I suggest in the above excerpt, there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space. Life is full of things that one can do, so one quite reasonably asks “if nobody bothers to give a sensible explanation of what’s going on with meditation, isn’t the most likely explanation that it’s just breaking people’s brains and deluding them into thinking that they are having deep insights?” (compare the well-known phenomenon of psychedelics sometimes producing a feeling of deep insight which is totally disconnected from whether one has actually thought of anything insightful).
To take your analogy:
Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It’s one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries—giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.
Now, say someone comes along and says they aren’t happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into “straightforward terms” and come up with a “precise” language to “correctly capture the essentials” and make an “unambiguous model” that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I’m afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You’ll end up with something, but I think you’ll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn’t know what they are missing—like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who’s never heard a performance.
Suppose that somebody has never tried sex, has no idea of what it is about, and is skeptical of whether it is worth trying. They tell me that before they try it, they want me to distill the sexual experience into straightforward terms and come up with a precise language to correctly capture the essentials and make an unambiguous model that they can inspect.
I then try to fulfill their request, doing my best to describe the essence of sex as I understand it, as accurately and straightforwardly as possible. Inevitably, this description ends up leaving out a lot, and only captures those aspects of it that are the easiest to translate into a third-person framework.
But it’s still a correct (albeit incomplete) description, and one that I feel I can stand behind. If they have any questions, I can do my best to answer them in terms of the framework that I have developed for explaining sex. Eventually, they might be satisfied with my explanation and decide that this sex thing does sound interesting and worthwhile enough that they want to give it a try.
So they do, and then they get to discover for themselves all the stuff that I was unable to describe, and the fact that I was unable to give a complete description of those parts doesn’t matter anymore.
Of course, they might also conclude from my description that they now understand sex well enough that it’s not worth their time to even try. And maybe they are wrong about that. Though they might also be right, given their own priorities and values!
Either way, I find it unlikely that withholding the explanation would have made them more likely to try. Probably they would have dismissed it as not worth their time anyway. But if the explanation was good, at least they were in a significantly more informed position to make their decision.
Again, my series is not intended as a way to get people to meditate. But it is intended, in part, to help people make a more informed decision about whether or not meditation seems interesting enough to try.
Second, as I suggested in the post itself, meditation can also loosen your grip on your reality. There is value in just going into the practices without worrying about third-person models, but that also involves a risk of not noticing when you start breaking your brain.
I once heard a meditation teacher say that “you should have external feedback, as well as friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They’re willing to listen to you talk about it because they like you and it’s one of your interests, but if you suddenly start telling them how you’re enlightened, they’ll tell you how you’re full of shit.”
I think that this is a good attitude to have. People who meditate should try to make models of their experience and have non-meditators scrutinize and criticize those models, so as to get external feedback about when they might be veering into dangerous territory, mental health-wise. You can’t really do that if you are only sticking to a first-person perspective, because insanity can seem like complete sanity to the person who is going insane.
If it seems completely impossible to you to describe any of your experience in terms that would make sense to a skeptical scientific reader… well, it might be that it’s just really hard to explain and you don’t know how. It might also be that you are getting increasingly delusional, and you can’t explain it because it’s not coherent enough for there to be anything to explain. Or both—it might be a real thing that you just can’t explain, but because you can’t explain it, you also won’t be able to recognize when the process starts going bad.
Third, regardless of whether these explanations have any effect on whether anyone starts meditating, and regardless of whether it helps any of the people who already meditate… I think that the insights that people have while meditating, suggest fascinating things about how the mind works, which deserve scientific investigation. For example, a better understanding of the mechanisms that create suffering—even from a purely intellectual, third-person perspective—would help figure out how to avoid creating forms of digital sentience that might suffer. A better intellectual understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind no-self may help people make better decisions and understand themselves better. Understanding how craving distorts perception and reasoning may lead to a better scientific understanding of the relevant psychological processes, and so on.
There are lots of discoveries found by people doing insight practices, that current Western psychology hasn’t really incorporated yet, and which I believe Western psychology would significantly benefit from. And it would be a terrible waste if nobody tried to formulate those discoveries in a form that would be conducive to psychology learning from, especially since previous steps taken in this direction have already yielded significant gains [1, 2].
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
The global workspace can only hold a single piece of information at a time. At any given time, multiple different subsystems are trying to send information into the workspace, or otherwise modify its contents.
The exact process by which this happens is not completely understood,
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
According to the Multiple Drafts model, perception is accomplished in the brain by parallel, multi-track processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. These content discriminations produce something like a narrative stream. Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects and precipitates different narratives. There are many small agents screaming for attention. What we experience is a product of many processes of interpretation.
Frustratingly, Dennett has very little to say about how these content discriminations work and it is unclear what governs the modules.
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.” [...]
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)
Re: your point that any reductionist explanation is going to be miss a lot: yes, I certainly agree. This is what I was trying to gesture at in the introduction, when I said that this is a non-mystical explanation, not the non-mystical-explanation: because no single explanation can cover everything, and any single framework is going to be insufficient and only cover a particular aspect of the thing.
In fact, a previous version of this article included a section where I mentioned that I expect that reading my articles might be slightly harmful for one’s actual practice of doing meditation… but that I still think it’s worth writing them:
I think that while there is a lot that cannot be explained in straightforward reductionist terms, I find that there is also a lot that can be. And three points with regard to that:
First, as I suggest in the above excerpt, there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space. Life is full of things that one can do, so one quite reasonably asks “if nobody bothers to give a sensible explanation of what’s going on with meditation, isn’t the most likely explanation that it’s just breaking people’s brains and deluding them into thinking that they are having deep insights?” (compare the well-known phenomenon of psychedelics sometimes producing a feeling of deep insight which is totally disconnected from whether one has actually thought of anything insightful).
To take your analogy:
Suppose that somebody has never tried sex, has no idea of what it is about, and is skeptical of whether it is worth trying. They tell me that before they try it, they want me to distill the sexual experience into straightforward terms and come up with a precise language to correctly capture the essentials and make an unambiguous model that they can inspect.
I then try to fulfill their request, doing my best to describe the essence of sex as I understand it, as accurately and straightforwardly as possible. Inevitably, this description ends up leaving out a lot, and only captures those aspects of it that are the easiest to translate into a third-person framework.
But it’s still a correct (albeit incomplete) description, and one that I feel I can stand behind. If they have any questions, I can do my best to answer them in terms of the framework that I have developed for explaining sex. Eventually, they might be satisfied with my explanation and decide that this sex thing does sound interesting and worthwhile enough that they want to give it a try.
So they do, and then they get to discover for themselves all the stuff that I was unable to describe, and the fact that I was unable to give a complete description of those parts doesn’t matter anymore.
Of course, they might also conclude from my description that they now understand sex well enough that it’s not worth their time to even try. And maybe they are wrong about that. Though they might also be right, given their own priorities and values!
Either way, I find it unlikely that withholding the explanation would have made them more likely to try. Probably they would have dismissed it as not worth their time anyway. But if the explanation was good, at least they were in a significantly more informed position to make their decision.
Again, my series is not intended as a way to get people to meditate. But it is intended, in part, to help people make a more informed decision about whether or not meditation seems interesting enough to try.
Second, as I suggested in the post itself, meditation can also loosen your grip on your reality. There is value in just going into the practices without worrying about third-person models, but that also involves a risk of not noticing when you start breaking your brain.
I once heard a meditation teacher say that “you should have external feedback, as well as friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They’re willing to listen to you talk about it because they like you and it’s one of your interests, but if you suddenly start telling them how you’re enlightened, they’ll tell you how you’re full of shit.”
I think that this is a good attitude to have. People who meditate should try to make models of their experience and have non-meditators scrutinize and criticize those models, so as to get external feedback about when they might be veering into dangerous territory, mental health-wise. You can’t really do that if you are only sticking to a first-person perspective, because insanity can seem like complete sanity to the person who is going insane.
If it seems completely impossible to you to describe any of your experience in terms that would make sense to a skeptical scientific reader… well, it might be that it’s just really hard to explain and you don’t know how. It might also be that you are getting increasingly delusional, and you can’t explain it because it’s not coherent enough for there to be anything to explain. Or both—it might be a real thing that you just can’t explain, but because you can’t explain it, you also won’t be able to recognize when the process starts going bad.
Third, regardless of whether these explanations have any effect on whether anyone starts meditating, and regardless of whether it helps any of the people who already meditate… I think that the insights that people have while meditating, suggest fascinating things about how the mind works, which deserve scientific investigation. For example, a better understanding of the mechanisms that create suffering—even from a purely intellectual, third-person perspective—would help figure out how to avoid creating forms of digital sentience that might suffer. A better intellectual understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind no-self may help people make better decisions and understand themselves better. Understanding how craving distorts perception and reasoning may lead to a better scientific understanding of the relevant psychological processes, and so on.
There are lots of discoveries found by people doing insight practices, that current Western psychology hasn’t really incorporated yet, and which I believe Western psychology would significantly benefit from. And it would be a terrible waste if nobody tried to formulate those discoveries in a form that would be conducive to psychology learning from, especially since previous steps taken in this direction have already yielded significant gains [1, 2].
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxyVCjp48S4
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.”
http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/som-1.html
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6pMbRiSBPs
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)