I’m skeptical about the value of most neurophysiological explanations in general: I think that in many cases, they just create an illusion of understanding by throwing in neurological terms that give an appearance of detail without actually contributing conceptual gears. If I say “learning to navigate a city causes structural changes in the hippocampus”, that doesn’t really tell most people anything that they could use, but does give them a feeling that they now understand this better.
Similarly, I could have quoted from the Dietrich paper
the prefrontal cortex enables the top layers of consciousness by contributing the highest-order cognitive functions to the conscious experience … evidence suggests that initial and much ensuing information processing on perception, attention, or memory occurs in other brain areas before further integration in the frontal lobes … meditation results in transient hypofrontality with the notable exception of the attentional network in the prefrontal cortex
and added something like “and thus, Looking is about learning to selectively downregulate the activity of the prefrontal cortex—which carries out the final-order cognitive functions of conscious experience—in order to get greater conscious access to inputs from other brain areas whose data has not yet undergone those final transformations”...
...but (assuming that it was true) would that really have been more informative than the cognitive-level description of the same that I actually had in the post, i.e. the bits about breaking down the experience of a sound/unhappy thought to more low-level building blocks, and noticing that something was off about the next-to-final-stage-cognitive-content?
I think it might have sounded more impressive, but conveyed fewer gears about what’s actually happening and why it’s useful.
I did find the Dietrich paper interesting earlier, back when I didn’t have the cognitive-level model yet. It didn’t tell me very much, but it did at least give me some kind of an understanding of what the heck it is that meditation does. But now that I do have the cognitive-level model, focusing on the neurophysiological model doesn’t seem so valuable anymore, since neurophysiological explanations only give a very crude level of detail compared to cognitive-level ones. (Though I do grant that it does feel nice to have some neuroscience-grounded theories about what meditation does, which are compatible with the cognitive-level ones; if the neuroscience said that the cognitive-level explanation was totally implausible, then that would be a problem.)
Adding to my other comment...
I’m skeptical about the value of most neurophysiological explanations in general: I think that in many cases, they just create an illusion of understanding by throwing in neurological terms that give an appearance of detail without actually contributing conceptual gears. If I say “learning to navigate a city causes structural changes in the hippocampus”, that doesn’t really tell most people anything that they could use, but does give them a feeling that they now understand this better.
Similarly, I could have quoted from the Dietrich paper
and added something like “and thus, Looking is about learning to selectively downregulate the activity of the prefrontal cortex—which carries out the final-order cognitive functions of conscious experience—in order to get greater conscious access to inputs from other brain areas whose data has not yet undergone those final transformations”...
...but (assuming that it was true) would that really have been more informative than the cognitive-level description of the same that I actually had in the post, i.e. the bits about breaking down the experience of a sound/unhappy thought to more low-level building blocks, and noticing that something was off about the next-to-final-stage-cognitive-content?
I think it might have sounded more impressive, but conveyed fewer gears about what’s actually happening and why it’s useful.
I did find the Dietrich paper interesting earlier, back when I didn’t have the cognitive-level model yet. It didn’t tell me very much, but it did at least give me some kind of an understanding of what the heck it is that meditation does. But now that I do have the cognitive-level model, focusing on the neurophysiological model doesn’t seem so valuable anymore, since neurophysiological explanations only give a very crude level of detail compared to cognitive-level ones. (Though I do grant that it does feel nice to have some neuroscience-grounded theories about what meditation does, which are compatible with the cognitive-level ones; if the neuroscience said that the cognitive-level explanation was totally implausible, then that would be a problem.)