I started out as a self-identified rationalist, got fascinated by mysticism and ‘went native.’ Ever since, I have been watching the rationality from the sidelines to see if anyone else will ‘cross over’ as well.
I predict that if Romeo continues to work on methods for teaching meditation, that eventually he will also ‘go mystical’ and publicly rescind his claim that all perceived metaphysical insights can be explained as pathological disconnects with reality caused by neural rewiring. Conditional on his continuing to teach, I predict with 70% probability that it occurs within the next 10 years.
There are two theories that both lead me to make this prediction, which I call Theory M and Theory D. I ascribe probability 0.8 to Theory M and 0.15 to Theory D. I ascribe a probability of 0.02 to their intersection.
Theory M (‘Mystical’) is that there exists a truth that cannot be expressed in conventional language, and that truth has been rediscovered independently by hundreds of seekers throughout history, and that many of the most established spiritual traditions—Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Kabbalistic, Christian, Sufi, and many others—were founded for the purpose of disseminating that same truth. If Theory M is true, and conditional on Romeo continuing to teach, I predict that his role in the community will motivate him to deepen his practice and will also bring him in contact with teachers from other spiritual practices. These experiences will catalyze his own mystical insights.
Theory D (‘Delusional’) is that spiritual seekers expose themselves to mechanisms of self-delusion that are so strong that they would even convince someone who is initially highly identified with rationality and skepticism to start assigning a high probability that Theory M is true.
The main reason I place so much confidence in Theory M is similar to the reason why string theorists place so much confidence in string theory: so many aspects of reality that were previously baffling to me are suddenly very comprehensible and elegant when I understand them through Theory M. Secondary reasons are my personal experiences, but I concede that some aspect of these could be due to delusions so I will not defend them here.
The reason I have so much confidence in Theory D is that I consider myself to have a high capacity for rational thinking, that I am very well-informed in the ideas of the rationality community and I consider myself knowledgeable about a variety of disciplines necessary for understanding reality: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, statistics, philosophy, biology, physics, religious history. I hold a Ph. D. in Statistics and am currently working as a research scientist in a research institution specializing in mental health research. And yet I have daily experiences which reaffirm my confidence in Theory M. If theory M is not true, then I would conclude that the delusion I am suffering is incredibly strong, lies outside of all mental diseases which I know about and evades my own attempts to self-diagnose. I admit that I have little incentive to eliminate the delusion since it makes my life so pleasant. I admit that I perhaps could have protected myself from delusion even more solidly by embedding myself deeply in a physical social community that was dedicated to rationality. I have not done that. However, I am surrounded by scientists at my workplace.
If theory M is true, then I warmly wish all of you reading to discover its truth. If it is not true, I wish for my delusion to be eliminated so that I can stop living in a pleasant fantasy and re-align myself with rationalists who are trying to maximize their positive impact on the world.
I expect that my views will not find much support among you, but I challenge you to judge my claims by the professed standards of your own community. If you feel yourself strongly disagreeing with me, I challenge you to engage me as a fellow rationalist (or to point out how I have violated the community rules of discourse) rather than succumbing the knee-jerk reaction of dismissing a set of beliefs which make you uncomfortable.
Why no probability on “there exists a truth that is very difficult to express in conventional language, such that as contexts change, fixed written accounts of it tend to decay into uselessness, it’s so difficult that even most people who get it lack the verbal skill to express it clearly in their words in their time, this is compounded by most people needing higher-context instruction than words alone to get to the point where the words can mean anything to them, and because of this the vast majority of people trying to talk about this round it off to it being literally impossible”?
That’s basically Plato’s model, and it seems to me like the obvious hypothesis here given the extent to which people actually do try to say the thing in words, or parts of it, including people widely reputed to have “got it” such as the Buddha.
I would assign that a probability less than 0.1, and that’s because I already experienced some insights which defy verbal transmission. For instance, I feel that I am close to experientially understanding the question of “what is suffering?” The best way I can formulate my understanding into words is, “there is no such thing as suffering. It is an illusion.” I don’t think additional words or higher-context instructions would help in conveying my understanding to someone who cannot relate to the experience of feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense physical and emotional pain.
I don’t think Buddha ever attempted to describe the Truth in words. Sometimes he would give a koan to a student who just needed a little push. But most of his sutras were for giving the instructions for how students could work at the Truth, and also just practical advice on how to live skillfully.
Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:
It turns out there is painless pain: lobotomized people experience that, and “reactive dissociation” is the phrase used to describe the effects sometimes of analgesics like morphine when administered after pain has begun, and the patient reports, to quote Dennett 1978 [PDF] (emphasis in original), that “After receiving the analgesic subjects commonly report not that the pain has disappeared or diminished (as with aspirin) but that the pain is as intense as ever though they no longer mind it…if it is administered before the onset of pain…the subjects claim to not feel any pain subsequently (though they are not numb or anesthetized—they have sensation in the relevant parts of their bodies); while if the morphine is administered after the pain has commenced, the subjects report that the pain continues (and continues to be pain), though they no longer mind it……Lobotomized subjects similarly report feeling intense pain but not minding it, and in other ways the manifestations of lobotomy and morphine are similar enough to lead some researchers to describe the action of morphine (and some barbiturates) as ‘reversible pharmacological leucotomy [lobotomy]’.23”
That subjective aversiveness is separable from pain as such is a fascinating psychological/neurological phenomenon. That it is possible (if, indeed, it is, as you claim—though not you alone, of course) to induce this state of “reactive dissociation” in yourself, without the use of either opiates or a lobotomy, is also fascinating.
But concluding from this that “there’s no such thing as suffering” is a conceptual confusion of the highest order—and not some insight into deep Truth.
ETA: And it seems to me to be far from obvious, that it is good or desirable to voluntarily induce in yourself a state akin to a morphine high or a lobotomy… especially if doing so has the additional consequence of leading you into the most elementary conceptual errors.
[1] Physical, anyway. Emotional? Perhaps, but that seems not to be as well-studied.
Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:
It would greatly please me if people could achieve a deeper understanding of suffering just by taking analgesics. If that were the case, perhaps we should encourage people to try them just for that purpose. However, I’m guessing that the health risks, especially cognitive side-effects (a reduction of awareness that would preclude the possibility of gaining any such insight), risks of addiction and logistical issues surrounding the distribution of drugs for non-medical purposes will render infeasible any attempt to systematically employment of analgesics for the purpose of spiritual insight. In all likelihood, we’ll be stuck with the same old meditations and pranayamas and asanas for a while.
But the reason you bring up the topic of analgesics, if I am not mistaken, is to challenge the legitimacy of my insight by an argument that boils down to: “the experience you describe could be obtained through drugs, so it must not be that profound”. I do not know if you were also expecting to rely on a negative halo effect of “drug usage” to augment your rhetoric, but as you may have guessed from the preceding paragraph, my opinion is that the negative connotations of drug-induced states is due to irrational associations. If we ignore the drugs, then the remaining constituent of your rhetoric is the underlying assumption that “any easily obtained insight must be trivial.” That is far from the truth. I believe there are many simple things that people could do, which would profoundly increase their wisdom at a very low cost [1]. But precisely because these things are so simple, people wouldn’t take them seriously even if somebody suggested it to them. (The chance is a bit higher, but still not terribly high, if it’s said by the teacher of an expensive paid workshop, or their guru, or their psychotherapist. But the most effective way so far to get people to do these kinds of simple things is to integrate them inside some elaborate social ritual.)
But concluding from this that “there’s no such thing as suffering” is a conceptual confusion of the highest order—and not some insight into deep Truth.
I agree that the statement “there’s no such thing as suffering” is false, and not any kind of insight into deep Truth.
That’s because I am not claiming that “there’s no such thing as suffering.” I claim to have an insight which can’t be described in words, but the best verbal description of this insight is something like “suffering is an illusion.”
I don’t even consider this insight to be particularly deep. Like you said, maybe you could get it by taking painkillers. Certainly not an insight into deep Truth. That is not to say that I don’t take other people’s suffering seriously—far from it, it concerns me greatly. However if you were to compare the difficulty of understanding suffering and the difficulty of understanding consciousness, I think suffering is a far easier problem to resolve.
ETA: And it seems to me to be far from obvious, that it is good or desirable to voluntarily induce in yourself a state akin to a morphine high or a lobotomy… especially if doing so has the additional consequence of leading you into the most elementary conceptual errors
You are wise to be cautious, because neural self-modification could potentially lead to states where one loses all concern for one’s own well-being. However, just because an altered state of consciousness is similar to a drug-induced state or a state of neurological impairment doesn’t, by itself, imply that it should be avoided. It all depends on whether you’ve taken appropriate steps to control the risk (e.g. by only accessing the state under the guidance of an experienced teacher), and what insight you stand to gain by experiencing that state. The states of consciousness may be the same, but the intentions and degree of control makes all the difference. Recreational drug users pursue these states with little or no understanding of the process, little or no control over the outcomes, and out of the intention of thrill-seeking, social bonding, or alleviating boredom. Mystics pursue these states, often backed up by a tradition which has precise knowledge of how to attain these states, are equipped with mental tools to control the process, and seek these states with the intention of obtaining insights that will be of enduring value to their lives.
[1] Such as: take just one hour to think and reflect. Dance with abandon. Volunteer to take care of children. Go to the forest, just to look around. Play in the mud. Fast for one day. Learn and go see where your food comes from, how your clothes are made.
It seems obvious that your change in relationship with suffering constitutes a kind of value shift, doesn’t it?
What’s your relationship with value drift? Are you unafraid of it? That gradual death by mutation? The infidelity of your future self? Do you see it as a kind of natural erosion, a more vital aspect of the human telos than the motive aspects it erodes?
It seems obvious that your change in relationship with suffering constitutes a kind of value shift, doesn’t it?
This is not obvious to me. In the first place, I never had the value “avoid suffering” even before I started my practices. Since before I even knew the concept of suffering, I have always had the compulsion of avoiding suffering, but the value to transcend it.
What’s your relationship with value drift? Are you unafraid of it? That gradual death by mutation? The infidelity of your future self?
I am afraid of value drift, but I am even more afraid that the values that I already have are based on incoherent thinking and false assumptions, which, once exposed, would lead me to realize that I have been spending my life in pursuing the wrong things entirely.
Because I am afraid of both value drift and value incoherence, I place a high priority in learning how I can upgrade my understanding of my own values, while at the same time being very cautious about which sources I trust and learn from. I cannot seek to improve value coherence without making myself vulnerable to value drift. Therefore, I only invest in learning from sources authored by people who appear to be aligned with my values.
Do you see it as a kind of natural erosion, a more vital aspect of the human telos than the motive aspects it erodes?
No, I do not think that value drift is inevitable, nor do I think the “higher purpose”, if such a thing exists, involves constantly drifting. My goal is to achieve a state of value constancy.
I’ve had multiple religious experiences (total reality dissolution, contact with seeming entities of infinite benevolence etc.) and I guess I’m just narcissistic enough to still be a Quinean naturalist and say ‘yep, that is also me.’
I’d say I basically endorse Theory M already? I posit that words (and images, and felt senses) are low dimensional projections of many-dimensional objects.
I’m reducing my subjective probability that you will abandon rationality...
I suppose what you are attempting is similar to what Buddha did in the first place. The sages of his time must have felt pained to see their beautiful non-dualism sliced and diced into mass-produced sutras, rather than the poems and songs and mythology which were, up until then, the usual vehicle of expression for these truths.
I guess I’m just narcissistic enough to still be a Quinean naturalist and say ‘yep, that is also me.’
Considering God to be part of yourself is very elevated and good. The only problem is the things that you don’t consider to be part of yourself. So I guess what I am saying is that you should amplify your narcissism :)
This seems hard to engage with, given that you’ve said little about the mystical truth in question, and in fact stated that it can’t be expressed in conventional language. How can I evaluate the claim that M is true, if I don’t know what M is?
Have you read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss? I think it has a good discussion of the nature of esoteric knowledge. I would think that the term mystic as snarles used it is very near the term esoteric.
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Just as there exists a specialized language that accurately conveys General Relativity, there similarly exists a specialized language (mythological language) for conveying mystical truths. However, I think the wrong approach would be to try to understand that language without having undergone the necessary spiritual preparation. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
This echoes countless similar statements in other traditions, the most famous (and probably oldest) being “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
That is not to say that one cannot approximate the truth by means of analogy, You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.” This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity, because they understand an approximate version of it, which in turn intuitively explains phenomena such as the Hubble Space telescope photo of a horseshoe Einstein ring.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
One consequence of this approximation is that the feeling that we are separate individuals must be flawed. I will take another analogy from physics: the four fundamental forces are in fact different aspects of the same unified force, but they become distinct at lower energy levels. At higher energy levels, they become clearly unified.
Similarly, I have experienced that at high levels of awareness, my feeling of distinctness from other people and from the rest of the universe is reduced. It starts to seem like “my thoughts” and “my feelings” are not mine, they are just the thoughts generated by one particular mind, and furthermore I feel like I can start to feel what others are feeling. I have encountered others who appear to be even higher on the “energy scale.” One day I was greeted extremely warmly out of the blue by a homeless man who was just working on the street. I responded to him in kind.
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them. I find it plausible that such people exist, both from my reading and my encounters with people such as the homeless man. But it does bother me that there exists no known scientific mechanism that would enable us to read each other’s minds, other than some very speculative ideas about consciousness being based on quantum phenomenon.
I do not expect that this particular example should be particularly convincing to a skeptic. I know that there exist non-mystical theories for explaining non-dualistic states, for instance Jill Bolte Taylor’s theory that it is caused by a switch in dominance from the left to the right hemisphere. What ultimately convinced me to ‘cross over’ was not a single experience or insight but rather the aggregation of many experiences: listing all of these would distract from the point I am trying to making. I suggest any curious individuals to consult the much richer collection of data on personal experiences that exists in the religious studies literature; my own experiences are nothing special in comparison.
My aim for now was just to address your question about how a claim can be evaluated in the absence of the necessary cognitive framework to understand its content. To summarize, one limited form of evaluation can be obtained by learning of the different approximations of the truth, and then evaluating consequences of those approximations in comparison to empirical data.
That said, at a certain stage of maturity, one who is seeking the truth should stop bothering with approximations, because the approximations will not give you that necessary cognitive framework to really understand the truth. Reading popular science books can never give you the understanding that a Ph. D. physicist has obtained from rigorous training. You have to “sit down and learn the math”, or in the case of spirituality, to follow your chosen path. If the approximations have any value, it would only be in giving the hope that the skeptic needs before they can make the commitment to seek the real thing.
[1] Another approximation, equally valid in my view, would be that “God created you and loves you.” Note that combining with the first approximation yields the near-tautology that “You love yourself.” Still, even a statement such as “God loves you” which might be parsed to something logically trivial can take a new profoundness to one who has undergone the proper cultivation.
Another approximation is “there is no self.” Or that “everything is nothing.” Combine those two, and you get “everything is self.” The name of the Hindu god Shiva, literally means “No-thing.”
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.”
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity …
Once again, this is delusion. Eliezer wrote an entire sequence about this.
Basically your entire set of claims and comments is mostly “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”.
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
Not sure whether we disagree here, my guess is I am slightly unsure what you intend to say. I do think there are statements like “time will pass more slowly relative to a stationary observer if you move close to the speed of light” that are highly specific predictions that can be verified (given sufficient investments in experiments) without deeply understanding the theory of relativity. Such a statement does definitely capture some aspect of the truth of general relativity.
If some process (like a physicist or a research lab) repeatedly generates highly surprising predictions like this that turn out to come true, someone might be said to meaningfully be “convinced of the veracity of general relativity” without a concrete understanding of the underlying theory.
> The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying “language”.
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of “nonduality”, it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them.
Why merely “others around them”? If “we are all One”, I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
Hm, I think there might be something really interesting here.
If I were to try to phrase this claim about God in terms of LDT’s synchronicity, and the incoherence of the notion of any metaphysical continuity between observer-moments (or, vessels of anthropic measure), would you agree that we’re talking about the same thing? (Are you familiar with these terms?)
Basically: LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists, it is one way of saying “all is one, you are not separate from others”. It could even be framed as a paraphrasing of a constrained notion of karma, in a way (“your policy will be reflected back at you by others”). What’s extraordinary about it is it says these things in the most precise, pragmatic terms.
Metaphysical continuity of measure.. you’re probably familiar with the concept even if you wouldn’t have a name for it.. like.. you know how people worry that being teleported would be a kind of death? Because there’s an interruption, a discontinuity between selves? And then one may answer, “but there is a similar, perhaps greater discontinuity every night, during sleep, but you don’t seem to fear that.” I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time. If we want to draw a line connecting observer-moments, it’s artificial.
So what I’m getting at is, that substance of experience can’t really be divided into a bunch of completely separate lines of experience. If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience. We don’t have to, of course, because of the orthogonality thesis, but I think most people will once they get it.
I am familiar with the concept of superrationality, which seems similar with what you are describing. The lack of special relationship between observer moments—let’s call it non-continuity—is also a common concept in many mystical traditions. I view both of these concepts as different than the concept of unity, “we are all one”.
Superrationality combines a form of unity with a requirement for rationality. I could think that “we are all one” without thinking that we should behave rationally. If I thought, “we are all one” and and also that “one ought to be rational”, the behavior that results might be described as superrational.
Non-continuity is orthogonal to unity. I could think “we are distinct” and still think “I only exist in the moment”. This might have been the view of Heraclitus. But I could also think “we are one” and also think “we only exist in the moment.” This might be a natural view to have if you think of the universe as an amplitude distribution over a large number of quantum states that is evolving according to some transition function. If you identify with a particular quantum state, then there is no sense in which you have a unique “past” or “future” path, because all “moments” (states) are concurrent: the only thing that is changing is the amplitude flow.
This sort of “everyone who understands my ideas agrees with me, and everyone who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand” is never not annoying, even if you tack on a “most” or “almost”. Even if the ideas you describe were perfectly sensible, it would still be highly irritating to be faced with such a smug presentation of them.
However, in this case, what you say also seems incoherent.
In particular:
LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists
In this description of LDT, the phrase “similarly rational” is being forced to do almost all the work; and it is much too vague to be up to the task. The specific claim of LDT is:
Logical decision theory asserts that the principle of rational choice is “Decide as though you are choosing the logical output of your decision algorithm.”
That is very far from any notion of karma, any notion of “all is one”, etc. So even if we find logical decision theories to be attractive, and their claims convincing, that does not get us to any of the “spiritual” claims you seem to want to make on those theories’ basis.
I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time.
This does not actually seem to be a coherent sentence, much less a coherent thought, so I assume that you’ve accidentally omitted some words; I’ll comment on this once you’ve had a chance to rewrite it.
If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you. Its purpose was to name some ideas for snarles that they’re probably already largely familiar with. It isn’t supposed to teach or to expound enough detail that someone who didn’t know a lot of what I was talking about would be able to refute any of it. That is not what we’re doing in this thread. There is a time and place for that. Seriously, I’m probably going to have to write about this stuff properly at some point, and I hope you’ll find it precise and coherent enough to engage with without frustration, when the time comes.
We are still a long way from arriving at the “interesting” thing that I alluded to, if we’re ever going to (I’m not even totally sure I’ll be able to recover that thought).
In this description of LDT
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
That is very far from any notion of karma
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
That paragraph was about anthropic measure continuity, not LDT
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you.
I read the ancestor comments as well (and every other comment on this post, too). Whatever purpose or subtext was contained therein is available to me also, and to anyone else reading this public forum thread. If you prefer that something you write be read and responded to only by a single recipient, Less Wrong does have a private messaging system.
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
What do you mean by “it’s an entailment”? What entails what?
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
Are you suggesting a strategy of publicly professing positions we do not actually hold, and making claims we do not actually believe, in order to better persuade people (whom we believe to be in the grip of a supersition) to accept our ideas?
I hope I do not have to enumerate the profound problems with such a plan. I will name only one: it’s fundamentally dishonest and deceptive, and intellectually disrespectful of one’s interlocutors. I strongly urge against attempting to employ any such tactics.
I understand your viewpoint. I’ve always been a rationalist but being raised while being exposed to topics of taoism and buddhism always made me doubt that it’s everything. Then, after understanding more and more of how the reality works but after looking ‘mystic’ and talking about it to people who did psychedelics I realised that they’re saying the same things. Then I took some and even tho I still have doubt, I know the truth is what it is. The Gateway Experience by the CIA describes diving into ‘subspace’ or ‘taking off this reality blanket’ pretty nicely. If you can dive into the zone deep enough then your consciousness gets pulled up into a state of uninterrupted connection to the one—it’s the brain that makes us human, that give us the ego, but it’s also what renders this reality for our consciousness in this life. Everyone is trying to talk about the same thing, but it’s hard when people are so stuck onto words and status and images. I believe that with higher entropy and complexity of technology, we’ll all achieve being the one on both this plane or create a new universe so we can be everything again. We don’t have to waste time describing it constantly.
I started out as a self-identified rationalist, got fascinated by mysticism and ‘went native.’ Ever since, I have been watching the rationality from the sidelines to see if anyone else will ‘cross over’ as well.
I predict that if Romeo continues to work on methods for teaching meditation, that eventually he will also ‘go mystical’ and publicly rescind his claim that all perceived metaphysical insights can be explained as pathological disconnects with reality caused by neural rewiring. Conditional on his continuing to teach, I predict with 70% probability that it occurs within the next 10 years.
There are two theories that both lead me to make this prediction, which I call Theory M and Theory D. I ascribe probability 0.8 to Theory M and 0.15 to Theory D. I ascribe a probability of 0.02 to their intersection.
Theory M (‘Mystical’) is that there exists a truth that cannot be expressed in conventional language, and that truth has been rediscovered independently by hundreds of seekers throughout history, and that many of the most established spiritual traditions—Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Kabbalistic, Christian, Sufi, and many others—were founded for the purpose of disseminating that same truth. If Theory M is true, and conditional on Romeo continuing to teach, I predict that his role in the community will motivate him to deepen his practice and will also bring him in contact with teachers from other spiritual practices. These experiences will catalyze his own mystical insights.
Theory D (‘Delusional’) is that spiritual seekers expose themselves to mechanisms of self-delusion that are so strong that they would even convince someone who is initially highly identified with rationality and skepticism to start assigning a high probability that Theory M is true.
The main reason I place so much confidence in Theory M is similar to the reason why string theorists place so much confidence in string theory: so many aspects of reality that were previously baffling to me are suddenly very comprehensible and elegant when I understand them through Theory M. Secondary reasons are my personal experiences, but I concede that some aspect of these could be due to delusions so I will not defend them here.
The reason I have so much confidence in Theory D is that I consider myself to have a high capacity for rational thinking, that I am very well-informed in the ideas of the rationality community and I consider myself knowledgeable about a variety of disciplines necessary for understanding reality: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, statistics, philosophy, biology, physics, religious history. I hold a Ph. D. in Statistics and am currently working as a research scientist in a research institution specializing in mental health research. And yet I have daily experiences which reaffirm my confidence in Theory M. If theory M is not true, then I would conclude that the delusion I am suffering is incredibly strong, lies outside of all mental diseases which I know about and evades my own attempts to self-diagnose. I admit that I have little incentive to eliminate the delusion since it makes my life so pleasant. I admit that I perhaps could have protected myself from delusion even more solidly by embedding myself deeply in a physical social community that was dedicated to rationality. I have not done that. However, I am surrounded by scientists at my workplace.
If theory M is true, then I warmly wish all of you reading to discover its truth. If it is not true, I wish for my delusion to be eliminated so that I can stop living in a pleasant fantasy and re-align myself with rationalists who are trying to maximize their positive impact on the world.
I expect that my views will not find much support among you, but I challenge you to judge my claims by the professed standards of your own community. If you feel yourself strongly disagreeing with me, I challenge you to engage me as a fellow rationalist (or to point out how I have violated the community rules of discourse) rather than succumbing the knee-jerk reaction of dismissing a set of beliefs which make you uncomfortable.
Why no probability on “there exists a truth that is very difficult to express in conventional language, such that as contexts change, fixed written accounts of it tend to decay into uselessness, it’s so difficult that even most people who get it lack the verbal skill to express it clearly in their words in their time, this is compounded by most people needing higher-context instruction than words alone to get to the point where the words can mean anything to them, and because of this the vast majority of people trying to talk about this round it off to it being literally impossible”?
That’s basically Plato’s model, and it seems to me like the obvious hypothesis here given the extent to which people actually do try to say the thing in words, or parts of it, including people widely reputed to have “got it” such as the Buddha.
I would assign that a probability less than 0.1, and that’s because I already experienced some insights which defy verbal transmission. For instance, I feel that I am close to experientially understanding the question of “what is suffering?” The best way I can formulate my understanding into words is, “there is no such thing as suffering. It is an illusion.” I don’t think additional words or higher-context instructions would help in conveying my understanding to someone who cannot relate to the experience of feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense physical and emotional pain.
I don’t think Buddha ever attempted to describe the Truth in words. Sometimes he would give a koan to a student who just needed a little push. But most of his sutras were for giving the instructions for how students could work at the Truth, and also just practical advice on how to live skillfully.
Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:
(From Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning on gwern.net)
That subjective aversiveness is separable from pain as such is a fascinating psychological/neurological phenomenon. That it is possible (if, indeed, it is, as you claim—though not you alone, of course) to induce this state of “reactive dissociation” in yourself, without the use of either opiates or a lobotomy, is also fascinating.
But concluding from this that “there’s no such thing as suffering” is a conceptual confusion of the highest order—and not some insight into deep Truth.
ETA: And it seems to me to be far from obvious, that it is good or desirable to voluntarily induce in yourself a state akin to a morphine high or a lobotomy… especially if doing so has the additional consequence of leading you into the most elementary conceptual errors.
[1] Physical, anyway. Emotional? Perhaps, but that seems not to be as well-studied.
It would greatly please me if people could achieve a deeper understanding of suffering just by taking analgesics. If that were the case, perhaps we should encourage people to try them just for that purpose. However, I’m guessing that the health risks, especially cognitive side-effects (a reduction of awareness that would preclude the possibility of gaining any such insight), risks of addiction and logistical issues surrounding the distribution of drugs for non-medical purposes will render infeasible any attempt to systematically employment of analgesics for the purpose of spiritual insight. In all likelihood, we’ll be stuck with the same old meditations and pranayamas and asanas for a while.
But the reason you bring up the topic of analgesics, if I am not mistaken, is to challenge the legitimacy of my insight by an argument that boils down to: “the experience you describe could be obtained through drugs, so it must not be that profound”. I do not know if you were also expecting to rely on a negative halo effect of “drug usage” to augment your rhetoric, but as you may have guessed from the preceding paragraph, my opinion is that the negative connotations of drug-induced states is due to irrational associations. If we ignore the drugs, then the remaining constituent of your rhetoric is the underlying assumption that “any easily obtained insight must be trivial.” That is far from the truth. I believe there are many simple things that people could do, which would profoundly increase their wisdom at a very low cost [1]. But precisely because these things are so simple, people wouldn’t take them seriously even if somebody suggested it to them. (The chance is a bit higher, but still not terribly high, if it’s said by the teacher of an expensive paid workshop, or their guru, or their psychotherapist. But the most effective way so far to get people to do these kinds of simple things is to integrate them inside some elaborate social ritual.)
I agree that the statement “there’s no such thing as suffering” is false, and not any kind of insight into deep Truth.
That’s because I am not claiming that “there’s no such thing as suffering.” I claim to have an insight which can’t be described in words, but the best verbal description of this insight is something like “suffering is an illusion.”
I don’t even consider this insight to be particularly deep. Like you said, maybe you could get it by taking painkillers. Certainly not an insight into deep Truth. That is not to say that I don’t take other people’s suffering seriously—far from it, it concerns me greatly. However if you were to compare the difficulty of understanding suffering and the difficulty of understanding consciousness, I think suffering is a far easier problem to resolve.
You are wise to be cautious, because neural self-modification could potentially lead to states where one loses all concern for one’s own well-being. However, just because an altered state of consciousness is similar to a drug-induced state or a state of neurological impairment doesn’t, by itself, imply that it should be avoided. It all depends on whether you’ve taken appropriate steps to control the risk (e.g. by only accessing the state under the guidance of an experienced teacher), and what insight you stand to gain by experiencing that state. The states of consciousness may be the same, but the intentions and degree of control makes all the difference. Recreational drug users pursue these states with little or no understanding of the process, little or no control over the outcomes, and out of the intention of thrill-seeking, social bonding, or alleviating boredom. Mystics pursue these states, often backed up by a tradition which has precise knowledge of how to attain these states, are equipped with mental tools to control the process, and seek these states with the intention of obtaining insights that will be of enduring value to their lives.
[1] Such as: take just one hour to think and reflect. Dance with abandon. Volunteer to take care of children. Go to the forest, just to look around. Play in the mud. Fast for one day. Learn and go see where your food comes from, how your clothes are made.
It seems obvious that your change in relationship with suffering constitutes a kind of value shift, doesn’t it?
What’s your relationship with value drift? Are you unafraid of it? That gradual death by mutation? The infidelity of your future self? Do you see it as a kind of natural erosion, a more vital aspect of the human telos than the motive aspects it erodes?
This is not obvious to me. In the first place, I never had the value “avoid suffering” even before I started my practices. Since before I even knew the concept of suffering, I have always had the compulsion of avoiding suffering, but the value to transcend it.
I am afraid of value drift, but I am even more afraid that the values that I already have are based on incoherent thinking and false assumptions, which, once exposed, would lead me to realize that I have been spending my life in pursuing the wrong things entirely.
Because I am afraid of both value drift and value incoherence, I place a high priority in learning how I can upgrade my understanding of my own values, while at the same time being very cautious about which sources I trust and learn from. I cannot seek to improve value coherence without making myself vulnerable to value drift. Therefore, I only invest in learning from sources authored by people who appear to be aligned with my values.
No, I do not think that value drift is inevitable, nor do I think the “higher purpose”, if such a thing exists, involves constantly drifting. My goal is to achieve a state of value constancy.
I’ve had multiple religious experiences (total reality dissolution, contact with seeming entities of infinite benevolence etc.) and I guess I’m just narcissistic enough to still be a Quinean naturalist and say ‘yep, that is also me.’
I’d say I basically endorse Theory M already? I posit that words (and images, and felt senses) are low dimensional projections of many-dimensional objects.
I’m reducing my subjective probability that you will abandon rationality...
I suppose what you are attempting is similar to what Buddha did in the first place. The sages of his time must have felt pained to see their beautiful non-dualism sliced and diced into mass-produced sutras, rather than the poems and songs and mythology which were, up until then, the usual vehicle of expression for these truths.
Considering God to be part of yourself is very elevated and good. The only problem is the things that you don’t consider to be part of yourself. So I guess what I am saying is that you should amplify your narcissism :)
yeah, intimacy with aversions is one decent compression of the path.
This seems hard to engage with, given that you’ve said little about the mystical truth in question, and in fact stated that it can’t be expressed in conventional language. How can I evaluate the claim that M is true, if I don’t know what M is?
Have you read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss? I think it has a good discussion of the nature of esoteric knowledge. I would think that the term mystic as snarles used it is very near the term esoteric.
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Just as there exists a specialized language that accurately conveys General Relativity, there similarly exists a specialized language (mythological language) for conveying mystical truths. However, I think the wrong approach would be to try to understand that language without having undergone the necessary spiritual preparation. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14
This echoes countless similar statements in other traditions, the most famous (and probably oldest) being “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
That is not to say that one cannot approximate the truth by means of analogy, You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.” This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity, because they understand an approximate version of it, which in turn intuitively explains phenomena such as the Hubble Space telescope photo of a horseshoe Einstein ring.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
One consequence of this approximation is that the feeling that we are separate individuals must be flawed. I will take another analogy from physics: the four fundamental forces are in fact different aspects of the same unified force, but they become distinct at lower energy levels. At higher energy levels, they become clearly unified.
Similarly, I have experienced that at high levels of awareness, my feeling of distinctness from other people and from the rest of the universe is reduced. It starts to seem like “my thoughts” and “my feelings” are not mine, they are just the thoughts generated by one particular mind, and furthermore I feel like I can start to feel what others are feeling. I have encountered others who appear to be even higher on the “energy scale.” One day I was greeted extremely warmly out of the blue by a homeless man who was just working on the street. I responded to him in kind.
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them. I find it plausible that such people exist, both from my reading and my encounters with people such as the homeless man. But it does bother me that there exists no known scientific mechanism that would enable us to read each other’s minds, other than some very speculative ideas about consciousness being based on quantum phenomenon.
I do not expect that this particular example should be particularly convincing to a skeptic. I know that there exist non-mystical theories for explaining non-dualistic states, for instance Jill Bolte Taylor’s theory that it is caused by a switch in dominance from the left to the right hemisphere. What ultimately convinced me to ‘cross over’ was not a single experience or insight but rather the aggregation of many experiences: listing all of these would distract from the point I am trying to making. I suggest any curious individuals to consult the much richer collection of data on personal experiences that exists in the religious studies literature; my own experiences are nothing special in comparison.
My aim for now was just to address your question about how a claim can be evaluated in the absence of the necessary cognitive framework to understand its content. To summarize, one limited form of evaluation can be obtained by learning of the different approximations of the truth, and then evaluating consequences of those approximations in comparison to empirical data.
That said, at a certain stage of maturity, one who is seeking the truth should stop bothering with approximations, because the approximations will not give you that necessary cognitive framework to really understand the truth. Reading popular science books can never give you the understanding that a Ph. D. physicist has obtained from rigorous training. You have to “sit down and learn the math”, or in the case of spirituality, to follow your chosen path. If the approximations have any value, it would only be in giving the hope that the skeptic needs before they can make the commitment to seek the real thing.
[1] Another approximation, equally valid in my view, would be that “God created you and loves you.” Note that combining with the first approximation yields the near-tautology that “You love yourself.” Still, even a statement such as “God loves you” which might be parsed to something logically trivial can take a new profoundness to one who has undergone the proper cultivation.
Another approximation is “there is no self.” Or that “everything is nothing.” Combine those two, and you get “everything is self.” The name of the Hindu god Shiva, literally means “No-thing.”
Yes. Of course you do.
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
Once again, this is delusion. Eliezer wrote an entire sequence about this.
Basically your entire set of claims and comments is mostly “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”.
Not sure whether we disagree here, my guess is I am slightly unsure what you intend to say. I do think there are statements like “time will pass more slowly relative to a stationary observer if you move close to the speed of light” that are highly specific predictions that can be verified (given sufficient investments in experiments) without deeply understanding the theory of relativity. Such a statement does definitely capture some aspect of the truth of general relativity.
If some process (like a physicist or a research lab) repeatedly generates highly surprising predictions like this that turn out to come true, someone might be said to meaningfully be “convinced of the veracity of general relativity” without a concrete understanding of the underlying theory.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying “language”.
https://xkcd.com/808/
(Also, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZawRiFR8ytvpqfBPX/the-hard-work-of-translation-buddhism#DM8CCgSb3KvyjknqH )
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of “nonduality”, it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
Why merely “others around them”? If “we are all One”, I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
Hm, I think there might be something really interesting here.
If I were to try to phrase this claim about God in terms of LDT’s synchronicity, and the incoherence of the notion of any metaphysical continuity between observer-moments (or, vessels of anthropic measure), would you agree that we’re talking about the same thing? (Are you familiar with these terms?)
LDT doesn’t seem to be an abbreviation that’s common enough to make it to Wikipedia. Can you spell it out?
I added a link https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
I am not familiar with those concepts. References would be appreciated. 🙏
I’m not sure if these articles try to convey the personal, spiritual dimension of LDT’s claims about agency, but they describe what it is https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
Basically: LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists, it is one way of saying “all is one, you are not separate from others”. It could even be framed as a paraphrasing of a constrained notion of karma, in a way (“your policy will be reflected back at you by others”). What’s extraordinary about it is it says these things in the most precise, pragmatic terms.
Metaphysical continuity of measure.. you’re probably familiar with the concept even if you wouldn’t have a name for it.. like.. you know how people worry that being teleported would be a kind of death? Because there’s an interruption, a discontinuity between selves? And then one may answer, “but there is a similar, perhaps greater discontinuity every night, during sleep, but you don’t seem to fear that.” I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time. If we want to draw a line connecting observer-moments, it’s artificial.
So what I’m getting at is, that substance of experience can’t really be divided into a bunch of completely separate lines of experience. If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience. We don’t have to, of course, because of the orthogonality thesis, but I think most people will once they get it.
Thanks for the link MakoYass.
I am familiar with the concept of superrationality, which seems similar with what you are describing. The lack of special relationship between observer moments—let’s call it non-continuity—is also a common concept in many mystical traditions. I view both of these concepts as different than the concept of unity, “we are all one”.
Superrationality combines a form of unity with a requirement for rationality. I could think that “we are all one” without thinking that we should behave rationally. If I thought, “we are all one” and and also that “one ought to be rational”, the behavior that results might be described as superrational.
Non-continuity is orthogonal to unity. I could think “we are distinct” and still think “I only exist in the moment”. This might have been the view of Heraclitus. But I could also think “we are one” and also think “we only exist in the moment.” This might be a natural view to have if you think of the universe as an amplitude distribution over a large number of quantum states that is evolving according to some transition function. If you identify with a particular quantum state, then there is no sense in which you have a unique “past” or “future” path, because all “moments” (states) are concurrent: the only thing that is changing is the amplitude flow.
This sort of “everyone who understands my ideas agrees with me, and everyone who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand” is never not annoying, even if you tack on a “most” or “almost”. Even if the ideas you describe were perfectly sensible, it would still be highly irritating to be faced with such a smug presentation of them.
However, in this case, what you say also seems incoherent.
In particular:
In this description of LDT, the phrase “similarly rational” is being forced to do almost all the work; and it is much too vague to be up to the task. The specific claim of LDT is:
(From “Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Analytic Philosophers” on Arbital. Italics in original.)
That is very far from any notion of karma, any notion of “all is one”, etc. So even if we find logical decision theories to be attractive, and their claims convincing, that does not get us to any of the “spiritual” claims you seem to want to make on those theories’ basis.
This does not actually seem to be a coherent sentence, much less a coherent thought, so I assume that you’ve accidentally omitted some words; I’ll comment on this once you’ve had a chance to rewrite it.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you. Its purpose was to name some ideas for snarles that they’re probably already largely familiar with. It isn’t supposed to teach or to expound enough detail that someone who didn’t know a lot of what I was talking about would be able to refute any of it. That is not what we’re doing in this thread. There is a time and place for that. Seriously, I’m probably going to have to write about this stuff properly at some point, and I hope you’ll find it precise and coherent enough to engage with without frustration, when the time comes.
We are still a long way from arriving at the “interesting” thing that I alluded to, if we’re ever going to (I’m not even totally sure I’ll be able to recover that thought).
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
That paragraph was about anthropic measure continuity, not LDT
I read the ancestor comments as well (and every other comment on this post, too). Whatever purpose or subtext was contained therein is available to me also, and to anyone else reading this public forum thread. If you prefer that something you write be read and responded to only by a single recipient, Less Wrong does have a private messaging system.
What do you mean by “it’s an entailment”? What entails what?
Are you suggesting a strategy of publicly professing positions we do not actually hold, and making claims we do not actually believe, in order to better persuade people (whom we believe to be in the grip of a supersition) to accept our ideas?
I hope I do not have to enumerate the profound problems with such a plan. I will name only one: it’s fundamentally dishonest and deceptive, and intellectually disrespectful of one’s interlocutors. I strongly urge against attempting to employ any such tactics.
There are a few of us that have “crossed over” as you call it.
From my journey it seems to be a developmentally relevant stage.
I understand your viewpoint. I’ve always been a rationalist but being raised while being exposed to topics of taoism and buddhism always made me doubt that it’s everything. Then, after understanding more and more of how the reality works but after looking ‘mystic’ and talking about it to people who did psychedelics I realised that they’re saying the same things. Then I took some and even tho I still have doubt, I know the truth is what it is. The Gateway Experience by the CIA describes diving into ‘subspace’ or ‘taking off this reality blanket’ pretty nicely. If you can dive into the zone deep enough then your consciousness gets pulled up into a state of uninterrupted connection to the one—it’s the brain that makes us human, that give us the ego, but it’s also what renders this reality for our consciousness in this life. Everyone is trying to talk about the same thing, but it’s hard when people are so stuck onto words and status and images. I believe that with higher entropy and complexity of technology, we’ll all achieve being the one on both this plane or create a new universe so we can be everything again. We don’t have to waste time describing it constantly.