maybe you think the mainstream gurus from Osho to Eckhart Tolle are all bs?
I haven’t read any of their stuff so I don’t know. :)
Anyway, isn’t enlightenment also about losing fear, about being at ease?
“Enlightenment” is a pretty general term, with different traditions and teachers meaning different things by it; not all of the people I mentioned even use the term. Some people do say that it’s something like what you describe, others disagree (e.g. Ingram is quite vocal about his dislike for any models of enlightenment that suggest you can eliminate negative emotions), others yet might agree in part and disagree in part (e.g. they might agree that you can eliminate specific kinds of fear that are rooted in delusions, without being able to eliminate all categories of fear, or without it even necessarily being practically possible to get to all the delusions).
(There might also be some confusion going on in that “being at ease” in the sense used by meditation teachers does not necessarily mean “being without pain or negative emotions”; it might also mean that pain and negative emotions still appear, but the craving to be without them does not, so their appearance does not cause suffering. I think most of the people I mentioned wouldn’t claim you can get rid of all craving, but they would hold that you can substantially reduce it.)
However, there is something else I would like to ask you: do you think meditation can provide you with insights about the nature of consciousness? Those hard questions like “is the brain running algorithms”, “is consciousness possible to emulate or transfer into some other medium”, etc? I’d give a lot to know the answers to those questions but I don’t think that science will arrive there any soon. (And as for psychedelics I think that they just tell you what you want to hear, like dreams).
Ever had any of such kind of insights yourself? Or even about the nature of existence too.
Well, basically my whole multi-agent models of mind sequence (which talks quite a bit about the mechanisms and nature of consciousness) was motivated because I started noticing there being similar claims being made about the mind in neuroscience, psychotherapy and meditation, and wanting to put together a common framework for talking about them. So basically everything in all those posts is at least somewhat motivated by my experiences with meditation (as well as by my experiences with psychotherapy and my understanding of neuroscience).
That Wei Dai post explains little in these specific regards. Every Eastern religion, in my opinion, from Buddhism, to Induism, to Yoga, to Zen, teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence. Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence. If you’re gonna keep dribbling this fact or invoking fringe views (regardless of their value) as the dominant ones, then we might just agree to disagree. No offense!
teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence
Oh, I’m not disputing that bit. The things I was saying there’s disagreement on were:
Whether it’s practically possible for someone to always experience such extreme well-being, as opposed to just most of the time (since you brought up the example of extreme torture, and it’s true that probably nobody is enlightened enough that they wouldn’t break down eventually if tortured)
Whether that extreme well-being necessarily takes the form of having only positive emotions, as opposed to being more at peace with also having negative emotions.
Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence.
I think the teachers mean something slightly different by “the nature of existence”. The way I interpret it, “existence” is not so much a claim about the objective external world, but rather about the way your mind constructs your subjective experience. Things are confused by some of the teachers having a worldview that doesn’t really distinguish these, so they might talk of the two being one and the same.
Still, you can steelman the underlying claim to be about subjective rather than objective reality, and to say something like: “The nature of your subjective experience is that it’s entirely constructed by your mind, and that your wellbeing does not intrinsically need to depend on external factors; your mind is just hardwired to delude itself into thinking that it needs specific external conditions in order to have wellbeing. But because wellbeing is an internally computed property, based on interpretations of the world that are themselves internally computed, the mind can switch into experiencing wellbeing regardless of the external conditions.”
Note that this not require any delusion about what external reality is actually like: it would require delusion if internal wellbeing required the external universe to be good, but that’s exactly the kind of dependence on external conditions that the insight refutes. You can acknowledge that the external universe is quite bad, and then have lasting happiness anyway. In fact, this can make it easier to acknowledge that the external universe is bad, since that acknowledgment is no longer a threat to your happiness.
Though there’s also another nuance, which is that the same insight also involves noticing that your judgments of the world’s goodness or badness are also internally generated, and that considering the world intrinsically good or bad is an instance of the mind projection fallacy. And further, that the question of the world’s goodness or badness is just an internally-computed label, in a very similar kind of sense in which a thing’s bleggness is an internally computed label rather than there being an objective fact about whether something is really a blegg. Seeing that can lead to the experience that the world is actually neither good nor bad in an intrinsic sense, as its goodness or badness depends entirely on the criteria we choose for considering it good or bad; and this may be seen on a sufficiently deep level to relieve any suffering one was having due to an experience of the world being bad.
But that kind of nuance may be difficult to communicate, especially if one comes from a tradition which didn’t have terminology like “mind projection fallacy” or knowledge of neural networks, so it then gets rounded into “the world is intrinsically good”. This is because the emotional experience it creates may be similar to that which you’d have if you thought the world was intrinsically good in objective terms… even though there’s actually again no claim about what the external world is really like. You can have an internal emotional experience of feeling good about the world while simultaneously also acknowledging everything that is horrible about the world and still wanting to change it, since the key insight is again that your happiness or motivation does not need to depend on external factors (such as any specific properties of the world).
I haven’t read any of their stuff so I don’t know. :)
“Enlightenment” is a pretty general term, with different traditions and teachers meaning different things by it; not all of the people I mentioned even use the term. Some people do say that it’s something like what you describe, others disagree (e.g. Ingram is quite vocal about his dislike for any models of enlightenment that suggest you can eliminate negative emotions), others yet might agree in part and disagree in part (e.g. they might agree that you can eliminate specific kinds of fear that are rooted in delusions, without being able to eliminate all categories of fear, or without it even necessarily being practically possible to get to all the delusions).
(There might also be some confusion going on in that “being at ease” in the sense used by meditation teachers does not necessarily mean “being without pain or negative emotions”; it might also mean that pain and negative emotions still appear, but the craving to be without them does not, so their appearance does not cause suffering. I think most of the people I mentioned wouldn’t claim you can get rid of all craving, but they would hold that you can substantially reduce it.)
However, there is something else I would like to ask you: do you think meditation can provide you with insights about the nature of consciousness? Those hard questions like “is the brain running algorithms”, “is consciousness possible to emulate or transfer into some other medium”, etc? I’d give a lot to know the answers to those questions but I don’t think that science will arrive there any soon. (And as for psychedelics I think that they just tell you what you want to hear, like dreams).
Ever had any of such kind of insights yourself? Or even about the nature of existence too.
Well, basically my whole multi-agent models of mind sequence (which talks quite a bit about the mechanisms and nature of consciousness) was motivated because I started noticing there being similar claims being made about the mind in neuroscience, psychotherapy and meditation, and wanting to put together a common framework for talking about them. So basically everything in all those posts is at least somewhat motivated by my experiences with meditation (as well as by my experiences with psychotherapy and my understanding of neuroscience).
That Wei Dai post explains little in these specific regards. Every Eastern religion, in my opinion, from Buddhism, to Induism, to Yoga, to Zen, teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence. Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence. If you’re gonna keep dribbling this fact or invoking fringe views (regardless of their value) as the dominant ones, then we might just agree to disagree. No offense!
Oh, I’m not disputing that bit. The things I was saying there’s disagreement on were:
Whether it’s practically possible for someone to always experience such extreme well-being, as opposed to just most of the time (since you brought up the example of extreme torture, and it’s true that probably nobody is enlightened enough that they wouldn’t break down eventually if tortured)
Whether that extreme well-being necessarily takes the form of having only positive emotions, as opposed to being more at peace with also having negative emotions.
I think the teachers mean something slightly different by “the nature of existence”. The way I interpret it, “existence” is not so much a claim about the objective external world, but rather about the way your mind constructs your subjective experience. Things are confused by some of the teachers having a worldview that doesn’t really distinguish these, so they might talk of the two being one and the same.
Still, you can steelman the underlying claim to be about subjective rather than objective reality, and to say something like: “The nature of your subjective experience is that it’s entirely constructed by your mind, and that your wellbeing does not intrinsically need to depend on external factors; your mind is just hardwired to delude itself into thinking that it needs specific external conditions in order to have wellbeing. But because wellbeing is an internally computed property, based on interpretations of the world that are themselves internally computed, the mind can switch into experiencing wellbeing regardless of the external conditions.”
Note that this not require any delusion about what external reality is actually like: it would require delusion if internal wellbeing required the external universe to be good, but that’s exactly the kind of dependence on external conditions that the insight refutes. You can acknowledge that the external universe is quite bad, and then have lasting happiness anyway. In fact, this can make it easier to acknowledge that the external universe is bad, since that acknowledgment is no longer a threat to your happiness.
Though there’s also another nuance, which is that the same insight also involves noticing that your judgments of the world’s goodness or badness are also internally generated, and that considering the world intrinsically good or bad is an instance of the mind projection fallacy. And further, that the question of the world’s goodness or badness is just an internally-computed label, in a very similar kind of sense in which a thing’s bleggness is an internally computed label rather than there being an objective fact about whether something is really a blegg. Seeing that can lead to the experience that the world is actually neither good nor bad in an intrinsic sense, as its goodness or badness depends entirely on the criteria we choose for considering it good or bad; and this may be seen on a sufficiently deep level to relieve any suffering one was having due to an experience of the world being bad.
But that kind of nuance may be difficult to communicate, especially if one comes from a tradition which didn’t have terminology like “mind projection fallacy” or knowledge of neural networks, so it then gets rounded into “the world is intrinsically good”. This is because the emotional experience it creates may be similar to that which you’d have if you thought the world was intrinsically good in objective terms… even though there’s actually again no claim about what the external world is really like. You can have an internal emotional experience of feeling good about the world while simultaneously also acknowledging everything that is horrible about the world and still wanting to change it, since the key insight is again that your happiness or motivation does not need to depend on external factors (such as any specific properties of the world).