Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims
After the release of Ben Pace’s extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that’s more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the second publication in my series of intended posts about religion.
Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Marcello Herreshoff, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, Roger Thisdell, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj Sotala, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Paul Colognese, and David Spivak for reviewing earlier versions of this post. Thanks especially to Renshin Lauren Lee, Roger Thisdell, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their input on my claims about perennialism, and Mark Miller for vetting my claims about predictive processing.
In my previous post, I introduced the idea that there are broad convergences among the mystical traditions of the major world religions, corresponding to a shared underlying essence, called the perennial philosophy, that gave rise to each of these mystical traditions.
I think there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious, incomprehensible, or supernatural about the claims in the perennial philosophy. My intention in this post is to articulate my interpretations of some central claims of the perennial philosophy, and present them as legible hypotheses about possible ways the world could be.
It is not my intention in this post to justify why I believe these claims can be found in the mystical traditions of the major world religions, or why I believe the mystical traditions are centered around claims like these. I also don’t expect these hypotheses to seem plausible in and of themselves – these hypotheses only started seeming plausible to me as I went deeper into my own journey of inner work, and started noticing general patterns about my psychology consistent with these claims.
I will warn in advance that in many cases, the strongest versions of these claims might not be compatible with the standard scientific worldview, and may require nonstandard metaphysical assumptions to fully make sense of.[1] (No bearded interventionist sky fathers, though!) I intend to explore the metaphysical foundations of the perennialist worldview in a future post; for now, I will simply note where I think nonstandard metaphysical assumptions may be necessary.
The Goodness of Reality
Sometimes, we feel that reality is bad for being the way it is, and feel a sense of charge around this. To illustrate the phenomenology of this sense of charge, consider the connotation that’s present in the typical usages of “blame” that aren’t present in the typical usages of “hold responsible”; ditto “punish” vs “disincentivize”; ditto “bad” vs “dispreferred”. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language that unambiguously captures this sense of charge, but I think it’s captured pretty well by the technical Buddhist term tanha, which is often translated as “thirst” or “craving”. I interpret this sense of charge present in common usages of the words “blame”, “punish”, and “bad” as corresponding to the phenomenology of “thirst” or “craving”[2] for reality to be different from how it actually is.
When our active blind spots get triggered, we scapegoat reality. We point a finger at reality and say “this is bad for being the way it is” with feelings of tanha, when really there’s some vulnerability getting triggered that we’re trying to avoid acknowledging.
This naturally invites the following question: of the times we point at reality and say “this is bad for being the way it is” with feelings of tanha, what portion of these stem from active blind spots, and what portion of these responses should we fully endorse (e.g. because reality is actually conflicting with our values)?
My interpretation of perennialism claims that it’s always from active blind spots, and that we should never fully endorse charged responses toward reality. Put another way, any tanha-tinged sense of entitlement we have around reality being different from the way it is ultimately derives from an active blind spot. This is an empirical claim about psychology[3] that I will refer to as the “Goodness of Reality” hypothesis, since we can think of this hypothesis as asserting that any assessment that reality is bad (in the sense of warranting a tanha-tinged response) is mistaken. If we think of all aspects of reality as being the result of God’s will (à la Spinoza’s interpretation of God), we could also interpret this as the “Goodness of God” hypothesis.
Loosely speaking, I think Christianity’s emphasis on forgiving all, Taoism’s emphasis on not resisting anything, Buddhism’s emphasis on being equanimous with everything, and Islam’s emphasis on submitting to all aspects of God’s will are different ways of talking about the same general thing.
It’s common for people to misinterpret the Goodness of Reality hypothesis as implying that we should never defend ourselves, or that we shouldn’t ever bother to improve our situations. This is mistaken for at least two reasons:
it’s possible to want to defend ourselves or to improve our situations without feeling tanha.
if the right thing to do is to defend ourselves or to improve our situations, then the suppression of the desire to do the right thing typically involves tanha.
The Goodness of Reality hypothesis does imply that if you want to defend yourself, feeling tanha about being attacked is suboptimal because it biases your judgments about the most effective ways to respond. For example, feeling tanha about being attacked might lead you to overreact in your defense, or to underestimate your enemy’s ability to defeat you.[4][5]
I think the Goodness of Reality hypothesis appears the most implausible in cases of extreme injustice and suffering, which I think are the cases that stretch this hypothesis to its limits. The empirical claim that any unwillingness to bear injustice or suffering is actually rooted in confusion, and that there always exists a more truthful perspective on the experience in which we would bear it without tanha, is a highly nontrivial claim, and I am actually uncertain about whether it’s possible for this claim to add up within the standard scientific worldview.
Among religious traditions, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ gives an exemplary illustration of what it looks like to believe the Goodness of Reality hypothesis even in the face of seemingly-unbearable suffering and injustice – Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of everyone involved in his crucifixion as he was getting crucified, even though getting crucified to death for saying true things that people in power don’t want to hear is about as central an example as there can be for undergoing extreme suffering for totally unjust reasons.[6] I sometimes interpret “faith in Jesus Christ” as “faith in the Goodness of Reality hypothesis being applicable even in the most extreme cases of injustice and suffering”.
This Goodness of Reality hypothesis is a very strong empirical claim about psychology that strongly contradicts folk psychology, so I will elaborate on my personal reasons for considering it plausible:
With enough personal experience exploring my own psychology, it’s seeming more likely than not to me that this claim is true, rather than the other way around. By analogy, programmers have a strong prior that the compiler is (almost) always right, and mathematicians have a strong prior that when they derive a contradiction, they’ve made an error somewhere. Non-programmers and non-mathematicians haven’t accumulated the experience that would give them these priors. Likewise, people who’ve accumulated enough experience going down the spiritual path develop a strong belief that when they experience tanha, it’s because of an error on their end, based on past experience that people who haven’t gone deep down the spiritual path don’t have access to.
In the two times I’ve successfully double-cruxed with skeptical friends about this hypothesis, I’d found that their crux for this hypothesis being implausible was downstream of an active blind spot they were immersed in, and that they’d updated on the plausibility of this hypothesis after I managed to point out their active blind spot, along with how it was adversely affecting their personal life.
I have a prior that religious and spiritual traditions have a very deep implicit understanding of psychology, largely because of how Lindy they are.
I’ve observed numerous people living according to this hypothesis who seem very wise and very happy, which I think is some evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
I’ve read about people living according to this hypothesis even under conditions of extreme suffering, and felt inspired by their outlooks, which seemed to be coming from places of deep wisdom. One such person is the Tibetan Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso, who is renowned for the compassion he showed his torturers while he was in Communist prisons. Another such person is the Romanian priest Richard Wurmbrand, who was also tortured for his religious beliefs in Communist prisons, and wrote about his experiences in his book Tortured for Christ.[7]
We reap what we sow
The Bible talks about how we reap what we sow. Buddhism and Hinduism have a notion of karma, which I think is analogous. I think the principle being referenced is very deep and nuanced, but I think there’s a relatively straightforward secular interpretation for a very important aspect of this principle, based on the predictive processing account of how mirror neurons work.
The folk psychology view is that there’s a separate system for modeling others vs. modeling ourselves. The current predictive processing account is more that there’s a single system in our brain that models both ourselves and others – it models “identity-agnostic shards of agency” and then separately, on top, infers whether the “agency-shard” is activated by someone else vs. by ourselves. Crucially, there are no cognitive representations for the self that are unique to the self that cannot also apply for others, and vice-versa.[8] (See here for the relevant excerpts from Surfing Uncertainty.)
One implication of this is that we literally perceive other agents using empathy, since the modeling of an “identity-agnostic shard of agency” involves modeling affect. In a conversation with predictive processing expert Mark Miller (a former postdoc of Andy Clark’s), we’d come up with the formulation “we call it ‘feelings’ when it’s you, and we call it ‘empathy’ when it’s someone else”.
Another implication is that the standards that we employ for relating with others are implicitly the same ones we use for relating with ourselves. If we treat others well, we normalize others treating us well in analogous circumstances. If we treat others poorly, we normalize others treating us poorly in analogous circumstances. Conversely, when we observe others treating us or each other well, it’s normalized for us to treat others well, and likewise for poor treatment. In some ways, this provides a basis for the Golden Rule.
I think when one really groks this, the line between altruism and self-interest starts to blur. Treating others poorly starts feeling personally costly, in a way that’s analogous to how pursuing short-term gains at the expense of larger long-term gains comes to feel costly for someone who’s good at coordinating with their past and future selves.
This account certainly has its limits. For example, it does not have much to say about how a mass shooter who gets killed at the end of their shooting spree reaps the consequences of the disproportionate harm they’ve caused others, just by having their own lives ended. I interpret the perennial philosophy as saying that there is a sense in which “we reap what we sow” isn’t just generally and approximately true, but precisely and exactly true, like a metaphysical analogue of Newton’s third law.[9] In The Hour I First Believed, Scott Alexander speculates about decision-theoretic arguments for acting from behind the veil of ignorance; I think these arguments go a long way toward justifying a precise and exact version of “we reap what we sow”, but getting all the details correct is tricky, and I’m not sure it’s actually possible to do so within the standard scientific worldview.
I will mention that a tantalizing hint about a precise and exact version of “we reap what we sow” is the phenomenon of the near-death experience life review, in which people re-experience their lives in extreme detail, not just from their perspective but also (to a large extent) from everyone else’s, such that they viscerally feel the impact of the harm and benefit they’ve caused others. I am still uncertain about what to make of life reviews, but I can definitely say that I was shocked and intrigued when I learned that the life review existed as a well-documented empirical phenomenon at all.[10] I will discuss life reviews in more detail in the section about the “afterlife”.
(Thanks to Mark Miller for vetting the technical plausibility of the predictive processing models in this section.)
Immoral behavior as confusion
The arguments under the “Faith in God” section imply that we should forgive everything, including immoral behavior. This section will go into more detail about the specifics behind forgiving immoral behavior in particular.
While getting crucified, Jesus said about his crucifiers: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”. On my understanding, he’d meant this literally – they had trapped priors that caused them to literally misperceive what they were doing, in the same sort of way that a traumatized veteran literally misperceives a loud car as a gunshot.[11] From this perspective, although it’s still important to set firm boundaries to protect against immoral behavior, it also implies that the optimal orientation toward immoral behavior is moreso one of compassion than one of judgment.[12]
I interpret the perennial philosophy as implying that immoral behavior always stems from an active blind spot, which, in turn, always has at its core a fear or vulnerability that’s too scary to confront. To be more precise, as per the previous section, I think we hurt others when we “live in a reality” in which we’re “stockholmed”[13] into thinking it’s normal for other people to hurt us in an analogous way.[14] The pop culture trope “hurt people hurt people” alludes to this.
I think this kind of behavior is ultimately downstream of some trapped prior that leads us to feel undeserving of empathy for being hurt in particular ways. For example, a boy who grows up with parents who severely chastise him for showing any sort of emotional vulnerability might form a trapped prior that prevents him from entertaining how it could actually be okay for boys to express emotional vulnerability, and concluding that any boy who shows emotional vulnerability should be invalidated rather than empathized with. This might lead him to bully other boys at school who express emotional vulnerability.
I think these trapped priors don’t necessarily result from emotional neglect, and could also result from defects in cognitive development, as I suspect is the case with some psychopaths. In a hypothetical where honest parents raise a son who becomes a pathological liar, primarily because he was genetically predisposed to pathologically lie, I would still consider the son “stockholmed” into thinking that it’s normal to lie and be lied to, and that he doesn’t deserve empathy for being lied to.
Virtually all of us are significantly “stockholmed” in some way or another, and I think this “stockholmedness” is the reason why it might intuitively seem possible to hurt others without hurting ourselves. When we hurt others from this “stockholmed” place of confusion, we are hurting ourselves by further entrenching our “stockholmedness”. But insofar as we’re unaware of our “stockholmedness”, we’re also numb to the downsides of further entrenching it. It’s only from the perspective of the self that can recognize this “stockholmedness” – that is, the self that can recognize the underlying active blind spot, rather than the self that’s immersed in it – that we can see how we’re hurting ourselves by hurting others.
In reference to the previous section, the point of forgiving others isn’t “to be a good person” per se, it’s that forgiving others is an inseparable component of truly forgiving ourselves. The Lord’s prayer, one of the most central prayers in Christianity, alludes to this: “[...] forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”.
I think this section is particularly pertinent for the immorality in ourselves. My first experience of Jesus Christ was basically one of feeling like there was no level of immorality I could descend to that would make me unworthy of love and compassion. It was one thing for me to entertain the ideas in this section intellectually; it was another thing entirely for me to feel that every aspect of my being was unconditionally loved and accepted, even the parts of myself whose existence I’d been too afraid to even acknowledge, because I’d thought they were too immoral to ever be forgiven. The terms “saved by Jesus” and “born-again Christian” started making more sense to me afterwards, as well as the phenomenon of evangelical Jesus freaks. I’d even considered becoming a Christian, but decided against it after thinking for 3 seconds, because the standard atheist arguments against mainstream Christianity still seemed correct.[15]
The “afterlife” as the highest-order bit for how to live
I interpret the perennial philosophy as claiming that from a self-interested perspective, the highest-order bit for how one should live one’s life is the “afterlife”.
I use the term “afterlife” in quotes because I don’t literally think there’s some separate realm that people continue living in when they die, at least the way most people imagine it.[16] I actually interpret the term “afterlife” to roughly mean “how you would perceive and experience your current life, if you weren’t dissociating from any aspect of it”. This is actually consistent with Catholic interpretations of heaven and hell:
In three controversial Wednesday Audiences, Pope John Paul II pointed out that the essential characteristic of heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of being of a spirit (angel/demon) or human soul, rather than places, as commonly perceived and represented in human language. This language of place is, according to the Pope, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him.
In some sense, it’s pretty mundane to suggest that it’s in people’s self-interests to live lives that they’d be happy with even if they weren’t bullshitting themselves about their lives. I interpret the perennial philosophy as making a further claim that people inevitably will confront their bullshit upon death.
In particular, I interpret the perennial philosophy as claiming that people virtually always experience what I’m calling the “afterlife” during their transition from life to death, namely during the life review. In other words, I interpret the perennial philosophy as positing a kind of “intermediate value theorem” saying that a life review must always be experienced at some point in the transition from life to death. (This is one of the strong perennialist claims that I think is incompatible with the standard scientific worldview, and my gut doesn’t feel sold on it being true. I do think some of the obvious objections to this claim can plausibly be addressed, which I will elaborate on below.)
Something akin to the life review also seems consistent with some portrayals of the “afterlife” in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the book Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, Christopher Bache writes [emphasis mine]:
To take this a step deeper, the [Tibetan Book of the Dead] explains that after our body falls away and after the encounter with the white light, we enter a state or dimension it call the Chonyid Bardo, the “Bardo of Experiencing of Reality,” in which our psyche is turned inside out, as it were. Here our unconscious emerges to dominate our experience while the less powerful ego moves into the background, compelled to participate in whatever emerges. One of the principles governing this bardo is “Thoughts create reality,” or “Thought creates experience.” Our thoughts, whatever they are, become our complete and total experience. In this case, our thoughts are every thought, memory, or fantasy we ever stuck away in our unconscious. [...] In this way we, our total being, not just our ego, create our own heaven and hell. As most of us have stored away positive as well as negative thoughts in our consciousness, we will experience both to some degree, one following the other.
It’s worth mentioning that I think it is possible to explain within the standard scientific worldview why some people experience life reviews. Here is my current handwavy model (thanks to Mark Miller for vetting its technical plausibility):
By default, we erroneously identify as the active blind spots that we’re immersed in.
In some sense, there is a “root” active blind spot predicated around the fear of death, and all active blind spots are downstream of this root one.
Our “true self” – the self that has the active blind spots, rather than erroneously identifying as the active blind spots – is more like our FDT source code than any particular instantiation of it, which is more like a platonic mathematical object than something that exists within spacetime.
When we fully believe that we will die (such as when we are actually about to die, or when a near-death experience gets triggered even in the absence of any physical cognitive impairment, like during a fall), we stop being immersed in the “root” active blind spot, and instead identify with, and take the vantage point of, the “true self” that we’d always been all along.
When this happens, a “floodgate opens” in which we un-dissociate from everything we’d been dissociating from, leading us to experience “what was really going on in our lives all along”. This is the crux of my model of why people experience life reviews.
As mentioned earlier in a previous section, we by default perceive others by empathizing with them. Any dissociation that had prevented us from empathizing with others also gets lifted, leading us to directly experience (our best guesses of) what everybody else was feeling as well.
A couple of comments I want to add:
It can be confusing how an experience so voluminous, rich, and detailed could be experienced in such short durations of time. Under the model in which attention is a filter and not a spotlight, this can happen because attention no longer needs to filter anything out to help with survival; the “floodgates open” in part because we’re relaxing the effort we’d previously been employing to keep them closed.[17]
On my current models, not everybody who undergoes a near-death experience goes far enough in the death transition to experience the “floodgates opening”, which is why some near-death experiencers report life reviews but others don’t.
The life review implies a degree of losslessness around our memories that may seem implausible. I think the extreme losslessness of minds is yet another one of those things that tends to appear plausible only to people who’ve gone deep down a journey of inner work, and repeatedly experienced for themselves the ability to access theretofore forgotten memories with very high fidelity.[18] I do think there are limits to losslessness, like in cases of brain damage or brain degeneration.
Venturing into nonstandard metaphysics – if we think of our brain states as correlates, rather than causes, of our subjective experience,[19] there’s no reason that the richness of our subjective experience must be bounded above by the complexity of our neural activity (even though the complexity of the actions we enact must still be bounded above by the complexity of our neural activity). Under this assumption, the physical correlate of someone coming to fully believe they will die could be neurons disintegrating rather than neurons firing, and it isn’t ruled out that someone would experience a life review even if their death were near-instantaneous.
While I think my handwavy model gives a plausible account for why some people experience life reviews, I think it’s vastly insufficient for justifying the claim that virtually everybody must experience a life review in the course of transitioning from life to death. My true reasons for considering the stronger claim plausible come from talking with trusted spiritual mentors with coherent and thoughtful metaphysical beliefs who believe the stronger claim is true.
Regardless of whether virtually everyone will experience a life review in the course of dying, I still think it can be a helpful heuristic to live as though one will experience a life review. It’s a pretty concrete and visceral operationalization of “live a life you’d be happy with even if you weren’t bullshitting yourself about your life”, which I interpret the perennial philosophy as saying it’s in our self-interests to do regardless, and I find that my actions don’t change much regardless of whether I anticipate actually experiencing a life review.
Perennialism and moral philosophy
I had mentioned in my previous post that I think the perennial philosophy holds the keys to solving the big problems of moral philosophy. I will close this post by briefly elaborating on why I believe this, drawing on the claims I’d articulated above:
According to a strong formulation of the “we reap what we sow” principle, there is no difference between altruistic behavior and self-interested behavior, from the perspective of who we actually are.
The reason this is not obvious is because most of us are totally immersed in our active blind spots, leading us to be totally confused about who we actually are.
This reduces metaethics to two problems: the problem of (non-confused) personal identity, and the problem of formalizing a strong version of the “we reap what we sow” principle. Both of these problems are highly nontrivial, but I think this reduction nevertheless constitutes substantial progress. Furthermore, the metaphysical dimensions of the perennial philosophy offer insight into both of these problems, which I hope to explore in a future post.
- ^
The particular metaphysical assumptions I have in mind are those we would arrive at if we successfully synthesize “everything is a construct of the mind” with “there is an objective, observer-independent reality”, and rebase our understanding of Tegmark IV on this synthesis; this roughly points at my current understanding of what the CTMU is about.
- ^
It’s important to keep in mind that “thirst” and “craving” are but English-language metaphors for making sense of a technical term in Buddhism.
- ^
I’d expressed in the previous post that the “trappedness” of a prior is always with respect to some more truthful and more adaptive alternative hypothesis that can’t even be considered. Part of the empirical claim here is that whenever we feel tanha toward something in reality, there exists a more truthful and more adaptive way to relate with that thing that doesn’t have tanha.
- ^
Part of why I find (charitable interpretations of) Islam so interesting is because I consider it filled with illuminating illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad walking the fine line between living up to the spiritual ideals of surrender, mercy, and grace on the one hand, and navigating the practical realities of self-defense and political leadership on the other hand.
- ^
It’s worth noting that the Goodness of Reality hypothesis doesn’t imply that one should never feel anger, which can be very helpful when protecting oneself or others, and doesn’t intrinsically come with feelings of tanha. For example, there’s context in Buddhism for enlightened expressions of anger.
- ^
I believe this is the standard Christian interpretation. I don’t personally care that much whether this interpretation is historically accurate, or even whether Jesus was actually a historical figure.
- ^
Here’s an excerpt I found particularly moving:
During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, ‘You know, I am God. I have power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends upon me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!’ So, he mocked the Christian.
Brother Grecu, in this horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I heard afterwards from Reck himself. He said, ’You don’t know what a deep thing you have said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have been persecutors like you, have come to realize like the apostle Paul—that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So, they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, ‘Ye are gods.’ Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike—to have the character of God, not a torturer.′
At that moment Reck did not pay much attention to the words of his victim, as Saul of Tarsus did not pay attention to the beautiful witness of Stephen being killed in his presence. But those words worked in his heart. And Reck later understood that this was his real calling.
- ^
I suspect the reason this happens is because “identity-agnostic shards of agency” are simply more natural abstractions in the territory than “identity-tracking components of agency”, in a way that seems analogous to why it seems more natural for toddlers to model words as having meanings shared across people, than as having meanings that are unique to individual people. This suggests that this modeling mechanism isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of human brains, but is likely to be present among any kind of agent modeling other agents of roughly similar complexity.
- ^
This might intuitively seem very implausible; I think the only way this could make sense is if e.g. we assume that the seeming injustice in the world can be chalked up to us not knowing how to carve up the world in the right ways, just like someone might think that the potential energy in a coiled-up spring mysteriously disappears when it dissolves in acid if they don’t know to track the temperature increase in the acid.
- ^
I haven’t done a very careful literature review, but this paper has the most careful analysis of life reviews among the papers I’ve come across.
- ^
Inspired by an excerpt from A Course In Miracles, a book recommended to me by Jordan Allen.
- ^
Though I am effectively espousing a mistake theory view toward evil rather than a conflict theory view, I think there are many instances in which the optimal actions to take are the same under the mistake vs conflict theory views, e.g. if someone is threatening your life, and you don’t have any efficient ways of persuading your assailant that they’re mistaken. I discuss this in greater depth in my dialogue with Ben Pace here and here.
- ^
The analogy I’m drawing with Stockholm syndrome is somewhat loose, in that the perpetrator I’m suggesting we’re “stockholmed” to is less like a specific person, and more like an amorphous sense of what people are like in general.
- ^
I’m still confused about the specifics of how to interpret “analogous way” correctly. In the case of male rapists, who usually haven’t been raped themselves, I think what’s sometimes going on is that they feel like the deepest parts of their humanity have been fundamentally violated by women.
- ^
Interventionist sky fathers don’t make any sense, infinity years of bliss / torture upon death doesn’t make any sense ethically or metaphysically, people before Jesus all going to hell doesn’t make any sense, me going to hell for thinking Muhammad / the Buddha are also great doesn’t make any sense, etc.
- ^
Insofar as we are more like our FDT source codes than any particular instantiation, and insofar as these FDT source codes exist in some sort of quasi-platonic realm outside of spacetime, and can still undergo evolution in logical time, I think one could make a case for there being a “separate realm in which we continue on even after we die” – but this is pretty different from how most people conceive of the afterlife!
- ^
Thanks to Mark Miller for the reference and the suggestion.
- ^
Iboga trips are often reported to give people a direct sense of what a life review might be like; a friend shared this illustrative trip report.
- ^
For example, if our decisions can “retrocause” our brain states, just as our decisions can “retrocause” the contents of the opaque box in Newcomb’s paradox, it wouldn’t make much sense to think of our brain states as causing our decisions. This is related to Jessica Taylor’s ideas about policy-dependent source code.
FWIW, my best guess is people don’t really experience life reviews. The study you linked earlier in the article seemed to me like evidence against it, because they found only small numbers of people having experience life review after experiencing recuscitation, and given survey response bias and the prevalence in popular culture, my baseline guess on how many people would respond that way was honestly higher than what they got.
I’m open to the hypothesis that the life review is basically not a real empirical phenomenon, although I don’t currently find that very plausible. I do think it’s probably true that a lot of the detailed characteristics ascribed to life reviews are not nearly as universal as some near-death experience researchers claim they are, but it seems pretty implausible to me that a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one’s life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions. (That’s what I’m understanding you to be claiming, please let me know if I’m wrong.)
For example, the anecdatapoint in the link I’d shared about the guy who had a near-death experience during a fall included a life review. (“Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening.”) This fall happened in 1871, before life reviews were prevalent in popular culture, and I’m curious how you interpret anecdatapoints like these.
For what it’s worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are flashbacks to birth and/or diaper changes:
laid on a table, bare walls, bright lights you’re staring up at (unnecessary, and unpleasant for a baby, but common in hospitals and some homes)
one or more figures crowded around you (parents and/or doctors)
these figures are empathetic & warm towards you (or are at worst kind of apathetic, not malevolent)
communicating telepathically (in a way you can’t make sense of, perhaps wearing masks if doctors)
they examine your genitals (how dirty is the diaper? is there a rash?)
butt probed (wipe, diaper cream, and/or rectal thermometer)
weird equipment around (appropriate to a hospital where most babies born in 1900s when abduction stories started becoming popular)
figures have big heads and eyes (very salient features to babies, also maybe the heads are spatially closer and babies’ eyes are still doing a fisheye lens thing)
and most bizarrely, the figures are grey (newborns have bad color perception!)
This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for “alien abduction as flashback to diaper change” was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link). But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default. It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn’t heard the stories before!
Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory. The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf… but feeling terrifyingly alone). And helping other people do similar work, etc. But flashbacks are in general well-studied.
So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens. You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says “hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey”.
@habryka, responding to your agreement with this claim:
I think my real crux is that I’ve had experiences adjacent to near-death experiences on ayahuasca, during which I’ve directly experienced some aspects of phenomena reported in life reviews (like re-experiencing memories in relatively high-res from a place where my usual psychological defenses weren’t around to help me dissociate, especially around empathizing with others’ experiences), which significantly increases my credence on there being something going on in these life review accounts beyond just culturally-mediated hallucinations.
Abduction by literal physical aliens is obviously a culturally-mediated hallucination, but I suspect the general experience of “alien abductions” is an instantiation of an unexplained psychological phenomenon that’s been reported throughout the ages. I don’t feel comfortable dismissing this general psychological phenomenon as 100% chaff, given that I’ve had comparably strange experiences of “receiving teachings from a plant spirit” that nevertheless seem explainable within the scientific worldview.
In general, I think we have significantly different priors about the extent to which the things you dismiss as confabulations actually contain veridical content of a type signature that’s still relatively foreign to the mainstream scientific worldview, in addition to chaff that’s appropriate to dismiss. I’ll concede that you’re much better than I am at rejecting false positives, but I think my “epistemic risk-neutrality” makes me much better than you are at rejecting false negatives. 🙂
It wouldn’t surprise me very much if there were psychological states that seem strongly stress-mediated or can be drug-induced which feel a lot like life-reviews, or which get remembered as something like life-reviews.
The thing that I think is unlikely is that those states are particularly strongly correlated with someone actually almost dying (or like, I expect it to be a kind of specific subset of people dying, maybe indeed people who have heart-attacks in-particular). I am very skeptical that these experiences are in some sense ‘caused’ by almost dying in a way that your explanation would require:
I’m curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states.
One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it’s very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob’s affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she’d been ignoring all along.
I’m pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we’d been filtering out happening in a split second. (It’s different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)
While I am pretty skeptical of most variations on this hypothesis, I do think it makes sense to distinguish between at least two different hypotheses:
People brains meaningfully re-evaluate and propagate a huge amount of evidence in a “split second” when they are close to dying
When people get close to dying their perspective shifts in a way that causes lasting psychological change, which they in-retrospect interpret as a kind of life-review, but the actual cognitive processing going on here is happening over the course of minutes and maybe hours
I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don’t reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.
The second is much more plausible to me, and I do expect near-death experience to have a large psychological effect on people, both because it is probably frequently accompanied by damage to your brain, and because it is somewhat objectively a big deal and you should update your behavior a bunch in response to it.
And while I think it’s not implausible that this processing here somewhat reliably gets misremembered and compressed into a memory of a “split second”, my best guess is to mostly just defy the data of the “split second” reports and to make the prediction that while of course near-death experiences will cause someone to reflect on their life a lot, this does not generally happen in split seconds (and to make further predictions that if you somehow asked people right after their near-death experience that they would not mention the life-review stuff if there wasn’t a strong cultural phenomenon here, and also that if you dug into the “split second” thing it would probably disappear, if any of this whole life-review phenomenon holds up).
My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I’d thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of “thinking”, or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis.
However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it’s the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to “unsee” something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it’s something you’re supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of “unseeing”. What I’m proposing is that all the work that goes into “unseeing” halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.
This is related to the hypothesis I’d mentioned in the original post about attention being a filter, rather than a spotlight. On this view, we filter stuff out to help us survive, but this filtration process actually takes more energy than directly experiencing everything unfiltered. This would counterintuitively imply that having high precision on (/ paying attention to) a bajillion things at once might actually require less cognitive effort than our default moment-to-moment experience, and the reason this doesn’t happen by default is because we can’t navigate reality well enough to survive in this lower-cognitive-effort state.
I think we’d still need an explanation for how the memo to stop dissociating could propagate throughout one’s whole belief network so quickly. But I can pretty easily imagine non-mysterious explanations for this, e.g. something analogous to a mother’s belief network near-instantaneously getting the memo to put ~100% of their psychological and physiological effort into lifting a car off of their child. The Experience of Dying From Falls by Noyes and Kletti (sci-hub link here) describes somewhat similar experiences occurring during falls on the top of page 4.
I should also mention that on my current models, just because someone experiences a dump of all their undissociated experiences doesn’t mean that they’ll remember any of it, or that any more than a tiny minority of these undissociated experiences will have a meaningful impact on how they’ll live their lives afterward. I think it can be a lot like having a “life-changing peak experience” at a workshop and then life continuing as usual upon return.
That doesn’t seem to match the account in the trip report you linked, though, which seems to involve processing a lot of things in a time-consuming linear fashion. E.g.:
A big problem with this post is that I don’t have a clear idea of “tanha” is/isn’t, so can’t really tell how broad various claims are. With that in mind, I want to lay out the closest sane-sounding interpretation I see of that section, and hopefully get feedback on what that interpretation does/doesn’t capture about the points you’re trying to make.
Jaynes talks about the “mind projection fallacy”, in which people interpret subjective aspects of their own models as properties of the world. An example: people interpret their own lack of knowledge/understanding about a phenomenon as the phenomenon itself being inherently mysterious or irreducibly complex. I think mind projection especially happens with value judgements—i.e. people treat “goodness” or “badness” as properties of things out in the world.
Cognitively speaking, treating value as a property of stuff in the world can be useful for planning: if I notice that e.g. one extra counterfactual gallon of milk would be high-value (where the counterfactual intuitively says “all else equal”), then I go look for plans which get me that extra gallon of milk, and I can factor that search apart from much of the rest of my planning-process. But the flip side of assigning value to counterfactuals over stuff-in-the-world is fabricated options: I do not actually have the ability to make a gallon of milk magically appear before me without doing anything else, that’s a fabricated option useful as an intermediate cognitive step in planning, it’s not a real option actually available to me. The only things a real plan can counterfact over are my own actions, and only insofar as those actions are within my realistic possibility space.
Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.
How well does that capture the thing you’re trying to point to?
I haven’t read OP yet, just a quick translation note:
The Sanskrit word “tanha” shares an etymology with English words like “tenacious”, “tendency”, and “tenet”. The PIE root means “grip” or “hold”.
I think most folk in my social circles who use “tanha” these days are referencing Romeo’s “(mis)Translating the Buddha”:
I also tried to outline a model of tanha in my posts about explaining suffering in Buddhist context [1, 2].
I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I’m claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I’m basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it’s making the error of projecting value into the world.
I think this probably brings us back to:
A couple of additional pointers that might be helpful:
I think of tanha as corresponding to the phenomenology of resisting an update because of a trapped prior.
I think tanha is present whenever we get triggered, under the standard usage of the word (like in “trigger warning”), and I think of milder forms of tanha as being kind of like micro-triggers.
Whenever we’re suffering, and there’s a sense of rush and urgency coming from lower subsystems that override higher cognition in service of trying to make the suffering go away, there’s tanha involved.
(Note that I don’t consider myself an expert on Buddhism, so take these pointers with a grain of salt.)
I think it might be helpful if you elaborated on specific confusions you have around the concept of tanha.
Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...
It’s worth noting, I think, that Steve Byrnes has done a great job describing and analyzing this phenomenon in Section 2.2 of his post on Valence & Normativity. I have mentioned before that I think his post is excellent, so it seems worthwhile to signal-boost it here as well.
Also mentioned and analyzed in Section 2.3 of Byrnes’s post :)
Do you believe or allow for a distinction between value and ethics? Intuitively it feels like metaethics should take into account the Goodness of Reality principle, but I think my intuition comes from a belief that if there’s some objective notion of Good, ethics collapses to “you should do whatever makes the world More Gooder,” and I suppose that that’s not strictly necessary.
I do draw a distinction between value and ethics. Although my current best guess is that decision theory does in some sense reduce ethics to a subset of value, I do think it’s a subset worth distinguishing. For example, I still have a concept of evaluating how ethical someone is, based on how good they are at paying causal costs for larger acausal gains.
I think the Goodness of Reality principle is maybe a bit confusingly named, because it’s not really a claim about the existence of some objective notion of Good that applies to reality per se, and is instead a claim about how our opinions about reality are fundamentally distorted by false conceptions of who we are. I think metaethics crucially relies on us not being confused about who we are, which is how I see the two relating.
From the report:
😅
I generally liked the “Goodness of Reality” section quite a bit, and this part especially made me go “oh, of course!”:
I was less convinced about several of the other sections. I agree that there’s a loose sense in which we reap what we sow, in that actions that are derived from tanha tend to create more tanha, whereas non-tanha-based motivation tends to create more non-tanha-based motivation. But I thought the suggestion that everyone inevitably experiences a life review felt unconvincing (largely due to similar reasons as habryka).
It also felt to me like the post was trying to argue for everyone’s morality converging in the end, which I’m skeptical of. I do think that there are some paths that do converge, but also others that do not. One big example would be the ideological difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada tends to lean toward just ending your own personal suffering and “noping out” of reality, whereas Mahayana tends to have more of a “get enlightened and remain around to help all sentient beings” ideal. A meditation teacher I recently spoke with mentioned that this divergence tends to be reflected in his students. Some of them become increasingly dedicated to helping everyone else as a result of their practice, while others take more of a “well if everything is just arbitrary sensations, I might as well spend the rest of my life just playing video games” type approach (even if he actively tries to nudge them toward the more compassionate route). He speculated that the divergence seems to be driven by personality factors, but he hadn’t identified which ones exactly.
A bias only makes your responses suboptimal if the bias is wrong for the situation; if it biases you toward good responses, it makes your behavior more optimal. I touched upon this in my old post on insight meditation:
Tanha seems to cause cognitive fusion/fixation on narrow aspects of the situation, and it seems probable to me that it evolved to do that because there are many situations where that’s beneficial. If you get attacked, the tanha may help focus your attention on the need to defend yourself and how to best do that.
Of course, a lot of the ways we’re attacked today are a poor fit to the kinds of situations tanha evolved to be adaptive for (e.g. getting very upset when someone verbally assaults you on social media is probably not the optimal response). But there are still quite a few purely physical fights happening in the world, and in those I’d guess tanha to be more likely to be adaptive than not.
An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I’ve been chewing on, that I haven’t written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat “reward” as fundamental and then use phrases like “intrinsic reward” to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But “reward” is not the fundamental one, it’s built on fruit.
The difference:
if you don’t get caught, you don’t get punished
a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.
Some thoughts that came up for me while reading this piece (THANK YOU for putting this all together!!):
I suspect that the principles you describe around the “experience of tanha” go well beyond human or even mammalian psychology. If I am not mistaken, they arise out of a failure to appropriately incorporate the non-life-matter sort of conflicts (between elements of a whole and the whole) as part of life. The cells in my body all have different “cultures” (needs of chemical milieus, whether or not bacteria are needed for the “gut” process, or are absolutely prohibitive for the “brain” process). And each organ has integrated into its internal processes some way of registering signals of other organs; each part “knows” (is able to appropriately respond to) signals of the other, such as the brain responding to an empty stomach/digestive tract, and the stomach responding to the brain’s detection of outside threat. When the processes by which parts experience the signals of other parts making a whole are not sufficiently evolved or calibrated, the pattern of conflict (lack of wisdom of balance) is already present within a part but then is expressed as outside conflict.
In my own psychology, this manifests as rejection of patterns that are simply part of reality as “wrong,” because I have not sufficiently understood the nature of these patterns. If I had, I could, indeed, be fairly equanimous in their presence, while still being able to defend myself optimally, and by signaling my preferences without the need for further aggravation or escalation. I still make so very many mistakes on that front, because I lack the awareness of how my experiences about external situations are, in fact, related to a lack of internal integration. If, for instance, I had a much better awareness around how and when scarcity in my organism’s evolutionary past led to certain experiences (of desperation and urgent action seeking), I could now respond very differently in the momentary presence of that as a stimulus, without regurgitating the evolutionary programming I am left with on the unconscious level. I both know that I am acting sub-optimally (the evolutionary landscape has changed!) and that I am still stuck with my programming. That, to me, is a bit source of confusion, irritation, and anger. I feel that my intuitive response is inadequate, but cannot really “think” of a better one—without first understanding the true nature of all that comes up in my (parts of) mostly unconscious experience...
As for modeling differences between self and other, Stephen Fleming argues (in my mind fairly well) that our meta-cognitive modeling is “closer” to our inputs than to the inputs we receive from others, making it more noisy (and less reliable) to model/understand others, which leads us often to over- and under-estimating impact/intentions, given the overall bias for safety (negative/threat-oriented over positive/attraction-oriented emotion); see https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08F4ZMZQW/ and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078VXFZCX/
Your mentioning of short-term vs. long-term benefits (expected from choice) also brings up for me that this is likely a function of the different “levels of reality” interaction. That is, long-term benefit implies a balancing of preferences of elements on a lower level across larger spans of time. The way in which I imagine the karmic law of “reaping what one sows” being true has more to do with the nature of the patterns that make up life. Insofar the reasons for me acting out my lack of integration (imbalance) are similar to the reasons other people act out their respective lack of integration, whatever I project onto others will “return to me in kind.” It is thus in my selfish interest to learn to integrate better, which then prevents me from projecting, and allows me to respond to others’ projections in novel ways.
Overall, I have an assumption that “optimal morality” is context (environment) dependent. If I step away from human experience of moral behavior, life seems to flourish in different contexts by pursuing quite different strategies, one big ingredient to the choice/path life takes being the level of relative resource abundance vs. scarcity. This is, for me, reflected in large-scale cultural variation across the globe, which makes certain cultural “choices” (evolved behaviors) more fit to (and acceptable in) certain situations than others. In a situation where killing a person’s horse meant condemning that person to death, the “punishment” (without feeling tanha!) for such person might be quite different than if killing a person’s horse only meant some kind of premature taking of an animal life (still “bad”, but a different kind of bad from my human experience anyway). The extent to which a human experiences (tanha-free) “need” or drive to protect himself from some threat may well depend on the extent of intrinsic coping reservoir...
Forgiveness (non-judgment?) may then need a clear definition: are you talking about a person’s ability not to seek “tanha-originating revenge,” while still being able to act out of caring self-protection?
I haven’t thought sufficiently deeply about the concept of an “afterlife,” and will refrain from commenting on that part :)
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! A couple of thoughts in response:
That’s how I see it too. Buddhism says tanha is experienced by all non-enlightened beings, which probably includes some unicellular organisms. If I recall correctly, some active inference folk I’ve brainstormed with consider tanha a component of any self-evidencing process with counterfactual depth.
Yes, this pretty much aligns exactly with how I think about forgiveness!
(This text should be understood as written from within the frame of OP: I do not endorse it fully, I just accept the premise and infer conclusions)
The reason why extreme suffering and injustice exist is interpersonal justification of Goodness of Reality hypothesis: the first thing upon hearing it is to dismiss it as naive, romantic, squamish, lacking skin in the game. It is easy to forgive when you have never been wronged. Enduring extreme suffering gives the possibility to answer: “We suffered and we forgive, why can’t you?”
That touches on a view I’ve been holding for a while now. One often hears the phrase, those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it (or close to that). But it struck me one that that many seem to hold on to the past, never letting it go and so dooming themselves and everyone else to continued living in that past. When we’re never getting past the injustices of the past we keep them in the present and keep living them. I think this might be part of why we see many of the existing conflicts in the world—from the racial issues in the USA, the wars and strife in the Middle East, the escalating conflict between China and the west, its threats of forceful reunification of Taiwan, the ongoing conflict on the Korean penensula and probably a host of other cases in Africa and Central/South America.
Making it worse, the attachment to the past gives some levers to then manipulate behavior and actions of many for political or personal goals and purposes. I think if we could forgive the past in which none of us were actually alive and focused on solving the current problems, rather than addressing the crimes of people long dead peace might be a bit easier to achieve.
But I think the “We suffered and we forgive, why can’t you?” is not the way to present the idea.
I really like the directions that both of you are thinking in.
I agree. I think of it more as like “We suffered and we forgave and found inner peace in doing so, and you can too, as unthinkable as that may seem to you”.
I think the turbo-charged version is “We suffered and we forgave, and we were ultimately grateful for the opportunity to do so, because it just so deeply nourishes our souls to know that we can inspire hope and inner peace in others going through what we had to go through.” I think Jesus alludes to this in the Sermon on the Mount:
Thanks for writing! This really is an insightful post, and I look forward to reading more!
If you’ll indulge my curiosity, I wanted to probe your views on Catholicism. You claim you considered converting, but quickly concluded that the standard arguments against it, which you list on a footnote, still seemed correct to you.
What exactly do you feel doesn’t make sense about the concept of eternal damnation? To draw a parallel, my understanding is that the standard punishment for felonies was traditionally death (the idea of prison as the punishment itself, rather than just a place to wait for trial, is a relatively new one AFAIK). Still today in a few countries, the US among them, some felonies are punishable by death, and many countries worldwide do somewhat often sentence people to lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole. From a secular perspective, both of those are permanent punishments. Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating for either, but do you similarly claim they do not make “any sense”?
Likewise, what doesn’t make sense about refusing to believe in God damning one to hell? Refusing to accept the authority of a king/emperor, or claiming they’re not the legitimate or true such, has again through most of humankind’s existence been punishable by death or at the very least exile, which from a secular perspective are also permanent punishments.
Finally, what doesn’t make sense about people before Jesus going to hell? Do note it’s different from all those before Jesus going to hell AND staying there forever being tortured, the second part of which is not supported by the Church’s teachings. See CCC 633.
One way of thinking about the Goodness of Reality hypothesis is that if we look at an agent in the world, its world model and utility function/preferences are fully a property of that agent/its internals rather than reality-at-large. Reality is value-neutral—it requires additional structure (utility function, etc.) to assign value to states of reality (and these utility functions, to the extent that they’re real, are parts of reality itself).
Also, from the 0th-person perspective/POV of awareness, via meditation practices, one can observe how value judgments are being constructed and go “beyond” value judgments about reality.
Nitpick: Is reality “Good” or is it beyond good and … evil?
Interesting to see this entry this week, as it dovetails very closely with a lot of conclusions I’ve come up with myself of late.
You use the term “Stockholm”, as in identifying with your oppressors, be they individuals or organizations, if not the entirety of human society. Me, I’ve used the term “institutionalized”, from the film Shawshank Redemption:
• Red: These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.
• Heywood: Sh*t. I could never get like that.
• Ernie: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.
Whether you ascribe to this happening over many incarnations, or just the one, all the duality in this world gets to be a habit, no matter how painful or dead-ended it gets. The familiarity of the suffering becomes preferable to the unknown territory of total radical transformation, and that assumes one even perceives such an out as the whole culture continues to gaslight you that such a way out doesn’t even exist in the first place.
It thus takes a VERY strong will, typically rejecting the social milieu one finds onself in and its assumptions and coercions both subtle and overt, to overcome said conditioning.
Several of the wisdom traditions make it very clear that such downward forces work on a moment-to-moment basis, and not just (putatively) before any physical rebirth. Thus physical death likewise doesn’t necessarily provide any sort of “out” as all those inimical forces in one’s psyche are still at work trying to pull one down once again (be it moment-to-moment or incarnation-to-incarnation). So one doesn’t really “go” anywhere (such as heaven or hell) other than the mental “space” one has become habutuated to.
But the “outs” (transformative perspectives) likewise are always latent, even if the dissolution of the physical form may provide the best path out of said patterns.
If I get some engagement here I can go a bit into my personal journey along the above lines.
In response to your Goodness of Reality discussion I’d like to quote this from Leibneiz’s “Monadology”. Here, his reference to “God” could be substituted with what you call “Reality”.
I read this a while ago and it seemed self-evidently true. Since then I’ve only gained more and more experiential realisations around why this is true. From a more neutral perspective, rather than my own personal perspective, this really does seem like the truth, even beyond any kind of axiomatic argument.
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Also, regarding your discussion of what you call tanha, I think you’re misusing this term and conflating too many different concepts together.
It seems like you’re generally discussing the barriers in the way of Goodness of Reality and you highlight how what you call tanha, contributes to a separation between us and the Goodness of Reality.
If we look at the first example you gave:
Seems like here, you’re talking about the desire to change the current situation. I don’t believe this is tanha. I think these discussion of semantics are important beyond just pedantry so please bear with me. Tanha more refers to desire and greed beyond what is necessary, and obviously that causes suffering in real life. However, by the way in which you use the term, it’s clear you don’t mean this. You’re more talking about the dynamic whereby people need to stand up for themselves and confront reality without suffering. I believe the word you’re looking for is actually dukkha, which roughly translates to suffering but has a more nuanced meaning which is “poor understanding resulting in instability, unsatisfactoriness and suffering.”
There are many causes of dukkha, one of which is a dynamic of people’s fundamental desire to seek self-interest and avoid harm. In a situation where one is being treated unjustly, it would be foolish to not do everything in one’s power to resolve that situation. Totally natural and not something which is necessarily negative.
If one was in a situation where they could do something, or say something to resolve the situation, and they don’t, that’s just foolishness. That’s basically what your 2nd point is talking about.
But in a situation like you described, where there is nothing the victim can do to stop the perpetrator, then the victim must stop generating suffering internally, through their own fundamental desire to seek self-interest and avoid harm. Let me explain. If one is perceptive, one will notice that this natural desire to avoid harm actually causes suffering itself, because it causes physiological changes in the body that cause certain hormonal responses. These physiological changes could be described as cortisol and adrenaline being released in the body but I think this view is overly reductionist, nonetheless, it’s a good way to view it. This dynamic actually causes the person to subtly shift around in their own body, which is a contributor to the instability and poor understanding (in the literal sense of the word) that is described by the word dukkha. Similarly, if we look at the dynamic of self-interest, there are different physiological responses that are different. If I were to oversimplify, I would point to the transformation of glycogen into glucose, and what is called in pop psychology, the “fight response”. This also causes the body to shift around, creating suffering when the energy generated is impotent. When we want to do something (self-interest), there is an immediate physiological response, and the degree of this want varies from very subtle to very extreme, in the form of rage or hatred.
So in the situation of the monk being tortured, it would be unwise to continue to be in this dynamic and generate one’s own suffering. This also applies in real life too. Most of us, thankfully won’t ever be in a situation which is even remotely close to what Jesus, this monk, or countless other martyrs have been subject to throughout history. However, most people react in ways that unnecessarily cause themselves suffering, over things which would be considered trivial in comparison. For example, people were melting down over Trump being elected in 2016 and causing themselves suffering over a nothing burger. Additionally, when conservatives eat meat or drive fuel guzzling cars to “own the libs” and these “libs” start melting down, that’s a classic example of suffering which could be avoided with some meditative training and introspection—not easy btw. I’m not advocating for or against conservatives or liberals, this is just an example.
There are other causes of dukkha too, one of which you call unresolved priors. Yet again, it seems like the term samskara would be more apt here, because it describes the concept of unresolved emotional, mental and physical patterns which just replay based off similar (but obviously not the same), sense inputs. Samskaras contributing to dukkha is distinct from seeking self-interest and avoiding harm contributing to dukkha.
Basically, I totally agree with you in the sense that it does seem like reality is perfect, and the only thing that is imperfect are our internal incomplete models of reality. But there are so many things that contribute to dukkha, one simply needs to continue to investigate and be curious in order to tease out the others.