I haven’t achieved any state profound enough that I’d consider it enlightenment, but I’ll answer based on my understanding and what I’ve experienced so far.
I don’t think there is a trivially-verifable power conferred by enlightenment, but I would wager that people who have experienced enlightened will perform systematically better at certain tasks, including:
Maintaining emotional stability and wellbeing regardless of circumstance, e.g. intense stress, uncertainty, tragic loss.
Better ability to stare directly at uncomfortable truths, and resultantly, less motivated cognition.
It’s a useful state to achieve if you plan to wake up each day, confront the sheer magnituted of the suffering that exists in the world, or carry the burden of trying to ensure the far future is as good as it could be, while hoping to be a psychologically well-adjusted and effective human. All the more so if the tasks you carry out push you to your limits[1].
It’d take resource-intensive experiments to measure these effects, but I’d still wager on their existence. Much of my confidence is because each time I feel myself move along theses dimensions, I reap marginal benefits.
[1] I think many EA’s suffer because they take on these tasks without the mental infrastructure required to bear them and still flourish.
Interesting! This is starting to sound quite a bit like something resembling verifiable claims (not quite, but much closer than most other stuff in this vein!).
Could you say a bit more about what sorts of experiments you envision, that could verify the effects you allude to? (Or, to put it another way: you said you’d wager on the existence of these effects—do you mind sketching out in more detail how we might construct the conditions of such a bet, with sufficient rigor to make it definitely resolvable?)
In any case, I very much appreciate this sort of response, thanks.
Likewise, I really appreciate Ruby’s replies here. I haven’t reflected deeply enough on the “perceptual-emotional shift” thing to know whether I fully agree, but it seems very plausible to me, and the claims he’s putting forward sound right to me.
Psychological resilience and motivated cognition are difficult to measure, but I’m very certain they’re real things. Not everything real and which has a large causal effect on the world is easily measured. I’m not inclined to sketch out protocols for measuring these things in this comment thread, but I’d recommend How To Measure Anything as the book I’d turn to if I was to try.
I haven’t achieved any state profound enough that I’d consider it enlightenment, but I’ll answer based on my understanding and what I’ve experienced so far.
I don’t think there is a trivially-verifable power conferred by enlightenment, but I would wager that people who have experienced enlightened will perform systematically better at certain tasks, including:
Maintaining emotional stability and wellbeing regardless of circumstance, e.g. intense stress, uncertainty, tragic loss.
Better ability to stare directly at uncomfortable truths, and resultantly, less motivated cognition.
It’s a useful state to achieve if you plan to wake up each day, confront the sheer magnituted of the suffering that exists in the world, or carry the burden of trying to ensure the far future is as good as it could be, while hoping to be a psychologically well-adjusted and effective human. All the more so if the tasks you carry out push you to your limits[1].
It’d take resource-intensive experiments to measure these effects, but I’d still wager on their existence. Much of my confidence is because each time I feel myself move along theses dimensions, I reap marginal benefits.
[1] I think many EA’s suffer because they take on these tasks without the mental infrastructure required to bear them and still flourish.
Interesting! This is starting to sound quite a bit like something resembling verifiable claims (not quite, but much closer than most other stuff in this vein!).
Could you say a bit more about what sorts of experiments you envision, that could verify the effects you allude to? (Or, to put it another way: you said you’d wager on the existence of these effects—do you mind sketching out in more detail how we might construct the conditions of such a bet, with sufficient rigor to make it definitely resolvable?)
In any case, I very much appreciate this sort of response, thanks.
Likewise, I really appreciate Ruby’s replies here. I haven’t reflected deeply enough on the “perceptual-emotional shift” thing to know whether I fully agree, but it seems very plausible to me, and the claims he’s putting forward sound right to me.
Glad it’s helpful!
Psychological resilience and motivated cognition are difficult to measure, but I’m very certain they’re real things. Not everything real and which has a large causal effect on the world is easily measured. I’m not inclined to sketch out protocols for measuring these things in this comment thread, but I’d recommend How To Measure Anything as the book I’d turn to if I was to try.