You can make the same argument about radios or other devices that are relays for information. Without understanding how a radio works it’s really hard to know that the content that the radio plays isn’t an emergent phenomena.
When a radio is damaged, all that is affected is the clarity or the presence of the material that is being transmitted. There is no damage to a radio that would make spoken word material sound just the same, except that all nouns naming animals were garbled. The material coming over the radio has aspects to it that malfunctions of the radio may obscure but never manipulate.
In contrast, the correspondences found between brain damage and phenomena of consciousness suggest a very broad connection of the brain to the hypothetical soul, a connection so broad that there seems little work left for the soul to do. “Brain as the antenna of the soul” is at present looking very like “God in the gaps”.
I wouldn’t see the names of animals as phenomena of consciousness. I would rather label them mental phenomena.
I don’t know what distinction you’re drawing there. I cannot find different meanings to attach to the phrases “mental phenomena” and “phenomena of consciousness”.
Plenty of people meditate in an effort to raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind that goes around and labels and judges.
I don’t know what “raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind” means either. Labelling and judging are ordinary functions of the mind. I can grok that the name is not the thing without having to regard “naming” as some sort of newage sin.
I don’t know what “raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind” means either.
That’s the point. If you are not familiar with the meaning of the terms that the other side of the debate uses, it’s hard to understand arguments.
Labelling and judging are ordinary functions of the mind.
The mind is generally considered as something distinct from consciousness by those people who meditate a lot and have developed a certain kind of self awareness in the process.
I don’t think that’s a gap of understanding that can be fixed easily, because it’s about gathering reference experiences.
The mind is generally considered as something distinct from consciousness by those people who meditate a lot and have developed a certain kind of self awareness in the process.
I don’t think that’s a gap of understanding that can be fixed easily, because it’s about gathering reference experiences.
Well, I have tried. None of the descriptions that I have read of the results of meditation match up to anything I have experienced. The various things I’ve read do not seem to agree with each other either. Do these people who meditate a lot even know what the others are talking about? Or am I looking at the equivalent of cryptozoologists describing the characteristics of the Loch Ness Monster?
Another point:
If you ask a bunch of people on this forum to describe what they mean with rationality, utility and uncertainty the descriptions that you will get are not identical. That doesn’t mean that those words have no meaning.
Talk about meditative experiences faces a difficulty not faced by those topics. We can all agree on what Bayes theorem and the VNM theorem are and that they are theorems, that the conjunction fallacy is a fallacy, that entanglement with reality is a necessary condition of acquiring knowledge about reality, and so on. There are open issues, such as whether utilitarianism, and if so what sort, is either descriptively or normatively sensible for humans or AIs, but it is easy to discuss such things and agree on what we are talking about, even if we do not agree about what is true about them. Even if we are drawing lines on our maps differently, we can discover that fact, and align them for the purposes of any particular discussion. LessWrong could not exist in the form it does if this were not so. Instead, it would be nothing more than Eliezer’s personal gurublog, and the bragging threads could not exist.
None of this is true of meditation.
Meditation explores the inside of one’s own mind. This is also something that objectively exists, but each person’s is private to them, and they cannot exhibit to anyone else what they find there, only talk about it in terms that may not map well to anyone else’s experience. There are no theorems, and few empirical observations to agree on, which makes it rich terrain for cultivating woo. As an anti-woo touchstone, “How does this putative guru lead his everyday life?” is a start, but doesn’t go beyond eliminating some of the junk. Is there any meditation forum that has a regular bragging thread, for people to announce the awesome things they did recently as a result of their practice? The mind boggles (but does so in a place where no-one else can see it).
One example of apparently differing experiences. A frequent observation made in what I have read is that the self is an illusion and with practice one can penetrate this illusion. That is the direct opposite of what I experience when I meditate. So, which of us is doing it wrong and becoming more mired in illusion, and which is doing it right and perceiving more accurately? This is not something I am willing to take an “outside view” on, i.e. to reject both my own experience, and the very idea of discovering the truth of the matter, in favour of going along with what other people say about theirs.
While I find the subject interesting, I have never yet found anything in other people’s material to repay that interest, even from the intersection of the meditative and rationalist communities.
Yes, you are right that talking about meditation is hard and might be harder than what we are doing here.
On the other hand imagine someone without any math background at all reading our discussions about Bayes theorem and the VNM theorem. Do you think that person would get the impression that we all basically agree?
On the other hand imagine someone without any math background at all reading our discussions about Bayes theorem and the VNM theorem. Do you think that person would get the impression that we all basically agree?
There’s plenty we do all agree on, such as what the VNM theorem says. And there are things we don’t, such as whether VNM implies we all really have utility functions. If someone is reading LessWrong without the background to meaningfully participate, that’s their problem, not ours. But they can solve that problem simply by reading up on the background, just as you or I can if some empirical subject comes up here that we aren’t familiar with.
But how would one get “up to speed” on the subject of meditation? I have read, I have practiced, I have meditated with others. But still, my experience does not join up with anyone else’s that I know of. I might as well be exploring a different continent. How many different continents are there in this space? Does anyone even know?
Imagine that human colour vision was highly polymorphic, with different people having different sets of colour receptors, sensitive to different wavelengths anywhere in the range from infrared to ultraviolet, and no one version being preponderant. Communicating what it is like to experience different colours would be difficult, but even there it would be easy to objectively demonstrate differences. Some people would, and some would not, be able to distinguish various pairs of objects. In the real world, how would one go about testing a hypothesis of mental polymorphism?
I personally started with meditation 10 years ago by reading a book from the Aikido master Tohei. It was good enough that I continued the practice from time to time.
Two and a half years ago I started attending group for somatic-psychoeducation regularly. It’s a framework developed by a Frenchman called Danis Bois. The interesting thing about Danis is that even being accomplished in teaching meditation and bodywork he thought that a lot of the esoteric crowd was too dogmatic and close minded so he went to university studying academic pedagogy. He’s now a professor at a Portuguese university.
I learned a lot in those 2 1⁄2 years. When I read the book that supposed to be an introduction into the method half a year into it, I couldn’t do much with it. Now the book makes more sense. I do know from experience that the process isn’t easy. This year I think I got a grasp about what Buddhist might mean when they say Karma and how Karma fits into a framework where everything is to be supposed to be accessible through direct experience.
If you can find someone doing somatic-psychoeducation I recommend it, but quick Googling shows nobody in Norwich.
As far as the Indian tradition goes, they do something called Satsang. Good satsang teachers usually have a kind of charisma that the average person can perceive and that’s impressive to some people who do feel emotions naturally. If you aren’t neurotypical get a neurotypical person along to see whether they feel the charisma. A teacher without his own spiritual experience who just reiterated what he read somewhere won’t have that charisma.
If you can find a good Satsang session sitting in and asking questions with a goal of trying to predict answers, might be a good way to learn the framework even if you don’t completely take it for yourself.
I don’t subscribe to perennialism according to which all spiritual tradition say the same thing. At the same time there are things that are common over multiple traditions.
As far as written descriptions go, a written description of the nature of the color red doesn’t give a blind person a real idea of what red looks like even when it’s written in braille.
I don’t think that any decent spiritual tradition works simply through reading descriptions. Most have a least some instance of teaching via questions & answers.
When a radio is damaged, all that is affected is the clarity or the presence of the material that is being transmitted. There is no damage to a radio that would make spoken word material sound just the same, except that all nouns naming animals were garbled. The material coming over the radio has aspects to it that malfunctions of the radio may obscure but never manipulate.
In contrast, the correspondences found between brain damage and phenomena of consciousness suggest a very broad connection of the brain to the hypothetical soul, a connection so broad that there seems little work left for the soul to do. “Brain as the antenna of the soul” is at present looking very like “God in the gaps”.
I wouldn’t see the names of animals as phenomena of consciousness. I would rather label them mental phenomena.
Plenty of people meditate in an effort to raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind that goes around and labels and judges.
I don’t know what distinction you’re drawing there. I cannot find different meanings to attach to the phrases “mental phenomena” and “phenomena of consciousness”.
I don’t know what “raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind” means either. Labelling and judging are ordinary functions of the mind. I can grok that the name is not the thing without having to regard “naming” as some sort of newage sin.
That’s the point. If you are not familiar with the meaning of the terms that the other side of the debate uses, it’s hard to understand arguments.
The mind is generally considered as something distinct from consciousness by those people who meditate a lot and have developed a certain kind of self awareness in the process.
I don’t think that’s a gap of understanding that can be fixed easily, because it’s about gathering reference experiences.
Well, I have tried. None of the descriptions that I have read of the results of meditation match up to anything I have experienced. The various things I’ve read do not seem to agree with each other either. Do these people who meditate a lot even know what the others are talking about? Or am I looking at the equivalent of cryptozoologists describing the characteristics of the Loch Ness Monster?
Another point: If you ask a bunch of people on this forum to describe what they mean with rationality, utility and uncertainty the descriptions that you will get are not identical. That doesn’t mean that those words have no meaning.
Talk about meditative experiences faces a difficulty not faced by those topics. We can all agree on what Bayes theorem and the VNM theorem are and that they are theorems, that the conjunction fallacy is a fallacy, that entanglement with reality is a necessary condition of acquiring knowledge about reality, and so on. There are open issues, such as whether utilitarianism, and if so what sort, is either descriptively or normatively sensible for humans or AIs, but it is easy to discuss such things and agree on what we are talking about, even if we do not agree about what is true about them. Even if we are drawing lines on our maps differently, we can discover that fact, and align them for the purposes of any particular discussion. LessWrong could not exist in the form it does if this were not so. Instead, it would be nothing more than Eliezer’s personal gurublog, and the bragging threads could not exist.
None of this is true of meditation.
Meditation explores the inside of one’s own mind. This is also something that objectively exists, but each person’s is private to them, and they cannot exhibit to anyone else what they find there, only talk about it in terms that may not map well to anyone else’s experience. There are no theorems, and few empirical observations to agree on, which makes it rich terrain for cultivating woo. As an anti-woo touchstone, “How does this putative guru lead his everyday life?” is a start, but doesn’t go beyond eliminating some of the junk. Is there any meditation forum that has a regular bragging thread, for people to announce the awesome things they did recently as a result of their practice? The mind boggles (but does so in a place where no-one else can see it).
One example of apparently differing experiences. A frequent observation made in what I have read is that the self is an illusion and with practice one can penetrate this illusion. That is the direct opposite of what I experience when I meditate. So, which of us is doing it wrong and becoming more mired in illusion, and which is doing it right and perceiving more accurately? This is not something I am willing to take an “outside view” on, i.e. to reject both my own experience, and the very idea of discovering the truth of the matter, in favour of going along with what other people say about theirs.
While I find the subject interesting, I have never yet found anything in other people’s material to repay that interest, even from the intersection of the meditative and rationalist communities.
Yes, you are right that talking about meditation is hard and might be harder than what we are doing here.
On the other hand imagine someone without any math background at all reading our discussions about Bayes theorem and the VNM theorem. Do you think that person would get the impression that we all basically agree?
There’s plenty we do all agree on, such as what the VNM theorem says. And there are things we don’t, such as whether VNM implies we all really have utility functions. If someone is reading LessWrong without the background to meaningfully participate, that’s their problem, not ours. But they can solve that problem simply by reading up on the background, just as you or I can if some empirical subject comes up here that we aren’t familiar with.
But how would one get “up to speed” on the subject of meditation? I have read, I have practiced, I have meditated with others. But still, my experience does not join up with anyone else’s that I know of. I might as well be exploring a different continent. How many different continents are there in this space? Does anyone even know?
Imagine that human colour vision was highly polymorphic, with different people having different sets of colour receptors, sensitive to different wavelengths anywhere in the range from infrared to ultraviolet, and no one version being preponderant. Communicating what it is like to experience different colours would be difficult, but even there it would be easy to objectively demonstrate differences. Some people would, and some would not, be able to distinguish various pairs of objects. In the real world, how would one go about testing a hypothesis of mental polymorphism?
I personally started with meditation 10 years ago by reading a book from the Aikido master Tohei. It was good enough that I continued the practice from time to time.
Two and a half years ago I started attending group for somatic-psychoeducation regularly. It’s a framework developed by a Frenchman called Danis Bois. The interesting thing about Danis is that even being accomplished in teaching meditation and bodywork he thought that a lot of the esoteric crowd was too dogmatic and close minded so he went to university studying academic pedagogy. He’s now a professor at a Portuguese university.
I learned a lot in those 2 1⁄2 years. When I read the book that supposed to be an introduction into the method half a year into it, I couldn’t do much with it. Now the book makes more sense. I do know from experience that the process isn’t easy. This year I think I got a grasp about what Buddhist might mean when they say Karma and how Karma fits into a framework where everything is to be supposed to be accessible through direct experience.
If you can find someone doing somatic-psychoeducation I recommend it, but quick Googling shows nobody in Norwich.
As far as the Indian tradition goes, they do something called Satsang. Good satsang teachers usually have a kind of charisma that the average person can perceive and that’s impressive to some people who do feel emotions naturally. If you aren’t neurotypical get a neurotypical person along to see whether they feel the charisma. A teacher without his own spiritual experience who just reiterated what he read somewhere won’t have that charisma.
If you can find a good Satsang session sitting in and asking questions with a goal of trying to predict answers, might be a good way to learn the framework even if you don’t completely take it for yourself.
I don’t subscribe to perennialism according to which all spiritual tradition say the same thing. At the same time there are things that are common over multiple traditions.
As far as written descriptions go, a written description of the nature of the color red doesn’t give a blind person a real idea of what red looks like even when it’s written in braille. I don’t think that any decent spiritual tradition works simply through reading descriptions. Most have a least some instance of teaching via questions & answers.
The comment has about emergentism, but your reply was about soul theory, which is quite different.
Strong emergentism is notoriously badly defined, but a typical version might include:
1 mental phenomena are irreducible, or have an irreducible component
2 mental phenomena are not predictable from neural activity by standard physical laws
3 mental phenomena phenomena are related to neural activity by special psychophysical laws
Note that 3 guarantees a close relationship between neural activity and consciousness.
...
Is anyone claiming to have found any yet?
No, but that’s another issue, again.