Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.
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 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.
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...
The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a discrete entity with fixed and unchanging terminal values, because this entity would be a fixed and unchanging self. This means that anyone employing reasoning of the form “well, it makes sense for me to feel tanha toward X, because my terminal values imply that X is bad!” is basing their reasoning on the faulty premise that they actually have terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values.
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...