Sentences like “you feel connected to the entire universe” or “you’re watching your mind watching your mind watching your mind think” or “it feels like your skin is on fire with golden sunlight” or “the walls will start breathing” are all sazen. In particular, they all parse just fine to a naive listener—they do indeed seem to convey something complete and comprehensible. They’re a double illusion of transparency waiting to happen.
(Unlike many people, I believe that experiences like those of a drug user can be accurately conveyed to a non-drug user; I’m not big on the concept of ineffability. But I think it takes work. Logan wrote 14,000 words just to take their eight-word description of naturalism from absolutely guaranteed to be misleading to probably still misleading but at least not actively, negligently so.)
Some of those phrases sound like the kinds of experiences that one might get from meditation as well. And at least my own experience with them makes me a little skeptical about whether it’s actually possible to convey them. It’s not only the case that I read descriptions of them and totally didn’t get them (even though I thought I did) until I ran across them in the context of meditation, though that’s true too. But it’s also my experience that getting them requires being in a certain mind-state, so the me who is in that state cannot even accurately convey them to versions of myself who are not in that state.
When in the state, I can write down a description of the experiences which is accurate but also totally fails to capture the experience for the Kaj who is in a normal state of mind; and then if I later do some meditative practice again and get back into the state, I can re-read my description and be like ooooh right this is what it meant.
Worse, there tends to be a verbal overshadowing type of effect, where trying to verbally describe the states makes it actively harder to get back into them, because the verbal description of the states starts dominating my recollection of the states, to the point of suppressing the memory of the thing that’s actually being described.
Now it’s true that I haven’t put anywhere near 14,000 words worth of effort into trying to describe them (and am unlikely to try, because the attempt of describing them tends to be so counterproductive for actually experiencing them). So I cannot directly falsify the hypothesis that I could do it given enough effort.
But the way it feels is that those kinds of states are impossible to recall because they intrinsically involve the mind going into a nonstandard configuration, and that configuration is just impossible to create with the standard settings. Like, imagine if you had a TV set that could normally only do black-and-white, but had an extra module that you could add to it in order to produce colored images. When the color module is missing, no amount of tweaking the TV signal is going to bring color back. Even when the TV signal (written description) exactly matches the signal you had when you last saw color (had altered state experiences), if the add-on module isn’t present, you’re not going to get the colored pictures.
Minor nitpick:
Some of those phrases sound like the kinds of experiences that one might get from meditation as well. And at least my own experience with them makes me a little skeptical about whether it’s actually possible to convey them. It’s not only the case that I read descriptions of them and totally didn’t get them (even though I thought I did) until I ran across them in the context of meditation, though that’s true too. But it’s also my experience that getting them requires being in a certain mind-state, so the me who is in that state cannot even accurately convey them to versions of myself who are not in that state.
When in the state, I can write down a description of the experiences which is accurate but also totally fails to capture the experience for the Kaj who is in a normal state of mind; and then if I later do some meditative practice again and get back into the state, I can re-read my description and be like ooooh right this is what it meant.
Worse, there tends to be a verbal overshadowing type of effect, where trying to verbally describe the states makes it actively harder to get back into them, because the verbal description of the states starts dominating my recollection of the states, to the point of suppressing the memory of the thing that’s actually being described.
Now it’s true that I haven’t put anywhere near 14,000 words worth of effort into trying to describe them (and am unlikely to try, because the attempt of describing them tends to be so counterproductive for actually experiencing them). So I cannot directly falsify the hypothesis that I could do it given enough effort.
But the way it feels is that those kinds of states are impossible to recall because they intrinsically involve the mind going into a nonstandard configuration, and that configuration is just impossible to create with the standard settings. Like, imagine if you had a TV set that could normally only do black-and-white, but had an extra module that you could add to it in order to produce colored images. When the color module is missing, no amount of tweaking the TV signal is going to bring color back. Even when the TV signal (written description) exactly matches the signal you had when you last saw color (had altered state experiences), if the add-on module isn’t present, you’re not going to get the colored pictures.