I am an experienced sleeper with years of intensive practice for hours every night. I routinely experience states where the perception of anything at all goes away, states where not only “no decision” is ever taken, but where nothing even “happens”.
But I do not mistake this for a deep insight into the nature of the mind. It just tells me that it can turn on and off.
Meditators, it seems, have learned to shut off parts of their mind, while leaving enough still running to be able to report on the experience afterwards. That does not mean that those parts do not exist. It just means that they have turned them off.
FWIW, I do also meditate from time to time, although I am not sure that the thing that I do that I am calling meditation is the same as the things that other people do that they call meditation (or that the things that other people do are the same as each other). Be that as it may, I don’t see any more reason to credit the diminished, enhanced, or weird states that some report with any insight into reality, any more than I would credit drug experiences with the same, spontaneous episodes of religious revelation (see the case of John C. Wright), or “strokes of insight” (Jill Bolte Taylor).
The difference with sleep is that meditation increases perceptual clarity instead of decreasing it. The experience of seeing your mind turn off and on while seeing clearly everything that is happening is actually one of the most profound things that can happen in meditation because you can see in real time the different parts of the mind shutting down one by one, giving you insight into what those parts actually are.
Experiences of a lack of free will are relevant to understanding the nature of the mind because the usual presumption is that free will is somehow a property of decision-making itself, not a weird tacked-on module of the brain that can easily be dispensed with. If free will is just a thin coat of paint over the decision making module, then it’s not really free will at all. Advanced meditation lets you experience making eggs in the morning, taking a jog, talking to your spouse, writing your emails all without the experience you might usually have called “free will”. What was intuitively thought to be a crucial part of decision making is seen to be not necessary at all. But it’s more than that, because it doesn’t feel like “the free will module stopped”, it feels more like “what I thought was the free will module is actually 5 other different modules, and my lack of perceptual clarity was kind of blending the 5 together in a confused mess”.
Does a “free will” module in a brain make any more sense than a “speed” module in a car?
How do you tell from within whether you have shut down a module or merely averted your mental eye from the phenomenon? “There is no light,” says the sceptic, turning it off. “See?”
The car does have a speed module that happens to be a good analog for a hypothetical free-will module in humans. The speedometer produces an output based on the internal workings of the vehicle. It is also an excellent example of how maps can give outputs that are not necessarily grounded in the state of the territory.
How many conditions can you think of where a driver should ignore the report of the speedometer?
It sounds like you put a higher weight of probability on “meditators can turn off or ignore a brain module that let’s them sense their free will” than “meditators can learn to turn off or ignore a brain module that applies a narrative of free will to a deterministic process”.
I don’t put any weight of probability (including 0) on either of these. Both depend on presuppositions about brain “modules” that I judge to be so far from making sense that taking either of them seriously would be privileging the hypothesis.
I am an experienced sleeper with years of intensive practice for hours every night. I routinely experience states where the perception of anything at all goes away, states where not only “no decision” is ever taken, but where nothing even “happens”.
But I do not mistake this for a deep insight into the nature of the mind. It just tells me that it can turn on and off.
Meditators, it seems, have learned to shut off parts of their mind, while leaving enough still running to be able to report on the experience afterwards. That does not mean that those parts do not exist. It just means that they have turned them off.
FWIW, I do also meditate from time to time, although I am not sure that the thing that I do that I am calling meditation is the same as the things that other people do that they call meditation (or that the things that other people do are the same as each other). Be that as it may, I don’t see any more reason to credit the diminished, enhanced, or weird states that some report with any insight into reality, any more than I would credit drug experiences with the same, spontaneous episodes of religious revelation (see the case of John C. Wright), or “strokes of insight” (Jill Bolte Taylor).
The difference with sleep is that meditation increases perceptual clarity instead of decreasing it. The experience of seeing your mind turn off and on while seeing clearly everything that is happening is actually one of the most profound things that can happen in meditation because you can see in real time the different parts of the mind shutting down one by one, giving you insight into what those parts actually are.
Experiences of a lack of free will are relevant to understanding the nature of the mind because the usual presumption is that free will is somehow a property of decision-making itself, not a weird tacked-on module of the brain that can easily be dispensed with. If free will is just a thin coat of paint over the decision making module, then it’s not really free will at all. Advanced meditation lets you experience making eggs in the morning, taking a jog, talking to your spouse, writing your emails all without the experience you might usually have called “free will”. What was intuitively thought to be a crucial part of decision making is seen to be not necessary at all. But it’s more than that, because it doesn’t feel like “the free will module stopped”, it feels more like “what I thought was the free will module is actually 5 other different modules, and my lack of perceptual clarity was kind of blending the 5 together in a confused mess”.
Does a “free will” module in a brain make any more sense than a “speed” module in a car?
How do you tell from within whether you have shut down a module or merely averted your mental eye from the phenomenon? “There is no light,” says the sceptic, turning it off. “See?”
The car does have a speed module that happens to be a good analog for a hypothetical free-will module in humans. The speedometer produces an output based on the internal workings of the vehicle. It is also an excellent example of how maps can give outputs that are not necessarily grounded in the state of the territory.
How many conditions can you think of where a driver should ignore the report of the speedometer?
It sounds like you put a higher weight of probability on “meditators can turn off or ignore a brain module that let’s them sense their free will” than “meditators can learn to turn off or ignore a brain module that applies a narrative of free will to a deterministic process”.
Is that correct? If so, why?
I don’t put any weight of probability (including 0) on either of these. Both depend on presuppositions about brain “modules” that I judge to be so far from making sense that taking either of them seriously would be privileging the hypothesis.
Where is the “speed” module in a car?
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