So I was doing insight meditation and noticing inconsistencies between my experience and my mental models of what things in my experience meant (stuff like “this feeling means that I’m actively and consciously spending effort… but wait, I don’t really feel like it’s under my control, so that can’t be right”), and feeling like parts of my brain were getting confused as a result...
And then I noticed that if I thought of a cognitive science/psychology-influenced theory of what was going on instead, those confused parts of my mind seemed to grab onto it, and maybe replace their previous models with that one.
Which raised the obvious question of, wait, am I just replacing one set of flawed assumptions with another?
But that would explain the thing which Scott writes about in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/ , where e.g. a Muslim who gets enlightened will adopt an Islamic framework to explain it and experience it as a deep truth. Insight meditation involves making the mind confused about what’s going on, and when a mind gets confused, it will grab onto the first coherent explanation it finds.
But if you’re aware of that, and don’t mistake your new set of assumptions for a universal truth, then you can keep investigating your mind and uncovering new inconsistencies in your models, successively tearing each one apart in order to replace them with ever-more accurate ones.
So I was doing insight meditation and noticing inconsistencies between my experience and my mental models of what things in my experience meant (stuff like “this feeling means that I’m actively and consciously spending effort… but wait, I don’t really feel like it’s under my control, so that can’t be right”), and feeling like parts of my brain were getting confused as a result...
And then I noticed that if I thought of a cognitive science/psychology-influenced theory of what was going on instead, those confused parts of my mind seemed to grab onto it, and maybe replace their previous models with that one.
Which raised the obvious question of, wait, am I just replacing one set of flawed assumptions with another?
But that would explain the thing which Scott writes about in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/ , where e.g. a Muslim who gets enlightened will adopt an Islamic framework to explain it and experience it as a deep truth. Insight meditation involves making the mind confused about what’s going on, and when a mind gets confused, it will grab onto the first coherent explanation it finds.
But if you’re aware of that, and don’t mistake your new set of assumptions for a universal truth, then you can keep investigating your mind and uncovering new inconsistencies in your models, successively tearing each one apart in order to replace them with ever-more accurate ones.