Thanks for writing this post! Your writing helps me a lot in tying together other’s claims and my own experiences into a more coherent model.
As Richard_Kennaway points out in their comment, the goal of insight meditation and ‘enlightenment’ is not necessarily the same as the goal of rationality (e.g. instrumental rationality/shaping the world’s future towards a desired goal seems a part of rationality but not of ‘enlightenment’ as far as I can tell). I would be very interested in your opinion of how instrumental rationality relates to insight meditation and enlightenment.
My knowledge around this topic is admittedly weak, but the points where my introspection differs from your description might still be interesting:
When I introspect on my sense of self, my results are that it does stem from a quite localised part of my mind instead of being generated by different parts at different times*
Exploring the self-generating part of my mind led me to think that it can be somewhat described as a consciousness-level goal-setting system. The system’s decisions (of endorsement or rejection) can fuel mental processes which gives them the felt property of identity. I think that the goal-setting property fits nicely with the finding that it is not part of one’s problem-solving mind, but still a central aspect of the conscious experience. [EDIT: I just noticed that the ‘player’ description of Player vs. Character: A Two-Level Model of Ethics seems to point at the same experience]
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*In the sense of: The source is always in the same localised part of my mind – the feeling of self does extend to different parts of my mind in different situations.
I do think that this stuff is relevant for instrumental rationality as well; we’ll get to the details of how once I start talking about unsatisfactoriness / craving in the next post.
Thanks for writing this post! Your writing helps me a lot in tying together other’s claims and my own experiences into a more coherent model.
As Richard_Kennaway points out in their comment, the goal of insight meditation and ‘enlightenment’ is not necessarily the same as the goal of rationality (e.g. instrumental rationality/shaping the world’s future towards a desired goal seems a part of rationality but not of ‘enlightenment’ as far as I can tell). I would be very interested in your opinion of how instrumental rationality relates to insight meditation and enlightenment.
My knowledge around this topic is admittedly weak, but the points where my introspection differs from your description might still be interesting:
When I introspect on my sense of self, my results are that it does stem from a quite localised part of my mind instead of being generated by different parts at different times*
Exploring the self-generating part of my mind led me to think that it can be somewhat described as a consciousness-level goal-setting system. The system’s decisions (of endorsement or rejection) can fuel mental processes which gives them the felt property of identity. I think that the goal-setting property fits nicely with the finding that it is not part of one’s problem-solving mind, but still a central aspect of the conscious experience. [EDIT: I just noticed that the ‘player’ description of Player vs. Character: A Two-Level Model of Ethics seems to point at the same experience]
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*In the sense of: The source is always in the same localised part of my mind – the feeling of self does extend to different parts of my mind in different situations.
I do think that this stuff is relevant for instrumental rationality as well; we’ll get to the details of how once I start talking about unsatisfactoriness / craving in the next post.