Meditation and Buddhism are of low interest to most rationalists who have not interacted with any of the in-person rationalist communities. My preference for how to approach these topics in the rationalist community would be: don’t, or do it in a place other than LessWrong frontpage, or do it much less than this. These hypotheses are being unreasonably privileged and overdiscussed on LessWrong relative to the ~nil amount of real knowledge that has been generated by the discussion and investigation so far.
I don’t, but… I’d like to see some indication that the real knowledge is generated by discussion or investigation of meditation or Buddhism here. For example: global workspace theory, predictive processing, cognitive psychology, EEG, neuroscience, these weren’t motivated by meditation and Buddhism, I don’t think? Yes, there are neuroscientists who will write books about meditation and talk about interesting things in these books and also about less interesting things like their profound spiritual insights and I’m afraid the latter part of these books is the one motivated by meditation and Buddhism. Sometimes these books will contain very good presentations of their subjects and rationalists will write good reviews of them and that will have value. This indicates that there’s a market for such books, not really that meditation and Buddhism generate useful knowledge. It’s not a justification for investigating meditation and Buddhism to a particularly greater degree.
these weren’t motivated by meditation and Buddhism, I don’t think?
The particular sequence that Christian linked was motivated by me starting to notice that neuroscience, therapy and meditation seemed to all be describing similar phenomena. If I hadn’t done meditation, it’s very likely that I wouldn’t have e.g. read and reviewed the book on global workspace theory and written all the subsequent posts. Since it was my experience with meditation and IFS that made GWT seem like a useful explanatory framework for both.
Kaj Sotala who wrote those posts meditates a lot. What Kaj believes about predictive processing is a combination of reading things and investigating his own mind in meditation to see how what he reads fits with what actually goes on in his head.
Meditation and Buddhism are of low interest to most rationalists who have not interacted with any of the in-person rationalist communities. My preference for how to approach these topics in the rationalist community would be: don’t, or do it in a place other than LessWrong frontpage, or do it much less than this. These hypotheses are being unreasonably privileged and overdiscussed on LessWrong relative to the ~nil amount of real knowledge that has been generated by the discussion and investigation so far.
How do you calculate that writing like https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip contains “~nil amount of real knowledge”?
I don’t, but… I’d like to see some indication that the real knowledge is generated by discussion or investigation of meditation or Buddhism here. For example: global workspace theory, predictive processing, cognitive psychology, EEG, neuroscience, these weren’t motivated by meditation and Buddhism, I don’t think? Yes, there are neuroscientists who will write books about meditation and talk about interesting things in these books and also about less interesting things like their profound spiritual insights and I’m afraid the latter part of these books is the one motivated by meditation and Buddhism. Sometimes these books will contain very good presentations of their subjects and rationalists will write good reviews of them and that will have value. This indicates that there’s a market for such books, not really that meditation and Buddhism generate useful knowledge. It’s not a justification for investigating meditation and Buddhism to a particularly greater degree.
The particular sequence that Christian linked was motivated by me starting to notice that neuroscience, therapy and meditation seemed to all be describing similar phenomena. If I hadn’t done meditation, it’s very likely that I wouldn’t have e.g. read and reviewed the book on global workspace theory and written all the subsequent posts. Since it was my experience with meditation and IFS that made GWT seem like a useful explanatory framework for both.
Kaj Sotala who wrote those posts meditates a lot. What Kaj believes about predictive processing is a combination of reading things and investigating his own mind in meditation to see how what he reads fits with what actually goes on in his head.