If someone wants to find out more about whether/which contemplative practices/schools are more than just wireheading, what’s the best (i.e., lowest cost/risk) way of doing that? Are you aware of any good evidence or arguments about this, that haven’t already been brought up here recently?
there are no summaries that I have encountered that I am truly happy with, and my guess based on past experience is that if I did, I would disagree with that assessment a year from now. Getting genre savvy in this way is apparently part of the reason teachers are mum on many aspects. My own motivation is based on an attempt to suss out upstream levers in a scope sensitive way, ie what are the modal properties of truth seeking processes. Attacking that one with an intent to dissolve misunderstandings eventually gets you out of the car. Or at least gets you a hand out the window.
Also, thanks for the useful thought: we have lots of thoughts about what counts as epistemic evidence. What counts as ontological evidence? Teleological evidence? Traditional answers are pretty low complexity: coherence, compressibility, reference class forecasting. Underspecified.
edit: I do recommend Michael Taft and Kenneth Folk’s writings as well. As well as their teacher, Shinzen Young. Though he is more old school being from the previous generation and thus having fewer or incorrectly used shibboleths.
I’ll also mention that the traditional answer is that people have to find teachers they resonate with. The mindscape is large, and the next most useful step is non-obvious from different places within it. (See: law of equal and opposite advice.) Meta-level advice is more like “you can’t do gradient descent on a flat surface” -Harrison Klaperman (ie if you can’t perceive movement in the z-axis). A good teacher should be giving you fairly non-mysterious answers. A great example is the question “Who authorized you to teach.” if you get a non-answer or you look up the person they mentioned and they seem batshit, well, no problem grabbing useful ideas from them, but definitely don’t take them super seriously. Another great example is that effective practices should show results within a few weeks. If a teacher tells you to do something, it doesn’t work, and you go back and they tell you it might take years, run away fast.
What counts as ontological evidence? Teleological evidence?
What do you mean by these terms?
Would ontological evidence be evidence about what is (in contrast to epistemic evidence being about which statements are true)? It’s not clear to me that you’d want to evaluate answers to questions about what is differently from other kinds of claims.
Ontological: heuristics that result in your dividing up the world into categories in a certain way. Descriptive, prescriptive. What are your tacit heuristics, what is the result, do you endorse this result?
Teleological: same but for intentionality, goal directed behavior.
If someone wants to find out more about whether/which contemplative practices/schools are more than just wireheading, what’s the best (i.e., lowest cost/risk) way of doing that? Are you aware of any good evidence or arguments about this, that haven’t already been brought up here recently?
there are no summaries that I have encountered that I am truly happy with, and my guess based on past experience is that if I did, I would disagree with that assessment a year from now. Getting genre savvy in this way is apparently part of the reason teachers are mum on many aspects. My own motivation is based on an attempt to suss out upstream levers in a scope sensitive way, ie what are the modal properties of truth seeking processes. Attacking that one with an intent to dissolve misunderstandings eventually gets you out of the car. Or at least gets you a hand out the window.
Also, thanks for the useful thought: we have lots of thoughts about what counts as epistemic evidence. What counts as ontological evidence? Teleological evidence? Traditional answers are pretty low complexity: coherence, compressibility, reference class forecasting. Underspecified.
edit: I do recommend Michael Taft and Kenneth Folk’s writings as well. As well as their teacher, Shinzen Young. Though he is more old school being from the previous generation and thus having fewer or incorrectly used shibboleths.
I’ll also mention that the traditional answer is that people have to find teachers they resonate with. The mindscape is large, and the next most useful step is non-obvious from different places within it. (See: law of equal and opposite advice.) Meta-level advice is more like “you can’t do gradient descent on a flat surface” -Harrison Klaperman (ie if you can’t perceive movement in the z-axis). A good teacher should be giving you fairly non-mysterious answers. A great example is the question “Who authorized you to teach.” if you get a non-answer or you look up the person they mentioned and they seem batshit, well, no problem grabbing useful ideas from them, but definitely don’t take them super seriously. Another great example is that effective practices should show results within a few weeks. If a teacher tells you to do something, it doesn’t work, and you go back and they tell you it might take years, run away fast.
What do you mean by these terms?
Would ontological evidence be evidence about what is (in contrast to epistemic evidence being about which statements are true)? It’s not clear to me that you’d want to evaluate answers to questions about what is differently from other kinds of claims.
Ontological: heuristics that result in your dividing up the world into categories in a certain way. Descriptive, prescriptive. What are your tacit heuristics, what is the result, do you endorse this result?
Teleological: same but for intentionality, goal directed behavior.