That PNSE paper makes disturbing reading. The four locations the author identifies on a spectrum of deepness of PNSE display progressively increasing sense of well-being and equanimity. However, he also observed that this subjective sense was not evident in the subjects’ actual behaviour. Three examples from the paper:
“Over the course of a week, his father died followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth.”
“It was not uncommon for participants to state that they had gained increased bodily awareness upon their transition into PNSE. I arranged and observed private yoga sessions with a series of participants as part of a larger inquiry into their bodily awareness. During these sessions it became clear that participants believed they were far more aware of their body than they actually were.”
“Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference.”
There was also a progressively decreasing sense of agency. In the final stage, Location 4, he reports: “These participants reported having no sense of agency or any ability to make a decision. It felt as if life was simply unfolding and they were watching the process happen. Severe memory deficits were common in these participants, including the inability to recall scheduled events that were not regular and ongoing.” And yet, almost all of the subjects reported it as a positive experience.
The subjects, at whatever point they were in the scale, were often completely certain about the nature of the experience: “PNSE was often accompanied by a tremendous sense of certainty that participants were experiencing a ‘deeper’ or ‘more true’ reality. As time passed, this often increased in strength.” They also tended to be dogmatic about their PNSE being the real thing (whichever location they were at) and descriptions of other people’s different PNSEs as not the real thing. Another way to say “completely certain” is “unable to doubt”.
So we have here an experience that takes away the sense of agency and self, floods you with feelings of well-being and direct contact with a deeper reality subjectively impossible to doubt, and yet which does not change any aspect of one’s behaviour or personality visible to anyone else, except that in extreme cases it leads to memory loss and inability to handle day to day affairs.
This is not enlightenment, it is wireheading.
NB. I am talking only about PNSE as reported in that paper, not about whatever Valentine is intending to convey.
I’ve read so many reports from people claiming enlightenment that it’s become something of a genre. The common thread is that they all claim better emotional skills, but the writing doesn’t reflect any such skills. It’s like a house with broken windows that says “elite real estate”. All this time I thought it was just me, but in retrospect any incommunicable superpowers should’ve seemed fishy from the beginning. Your comment confirms that someone else got the same impression and they fact-checked it. Thank you!
Sasha Chapin has written a followup to his earlier meditation experiences, “How my day is going: report”, which struck me as being eerily like the PNSE paper’s pathologies, particularly his descriptions of derealization and being temporally adrift (and reading between the lines, other people not noticing Chapin’s new status and him overrating his improvements so he has to explain it to them).
There’s a phrase due to Joel Spolsky in the context of hiring software developers. He looked for two qualities: “smart, and gets things done”. That standard can be applied to life in general. I would be very wary of any meditative practice or drug experience that sapped either of those. Following such experiences one might want to get different things done, but smart and gets things done is the touchstone.
Whenever someone wants to convince me of the value or promise of some meditationy thing by making strong sweeping claims about mental benefits, I simply ask them “Can you name someone who’s done some practice like this, and then subsequently done something that I’d recognize as both good and impressive, and then somewhat attributed the latter to the former?”. I’m sure there must be some good answers to this question, on baserates if nothing else, but no one has ever (N=10ish?) named an example.
One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably “they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward” wouldn’t be something that you’d recognize as both good and impressive.
Do you read that report to suggest that Chapin is getting less done now? He mentions in it having three jobs, and my impression from the kinds of things he posts on Twitter has been that he seems productive, though of course one that can be fake (but if so he seems at least productive at faking productivity).
It is hard to tell. Some of Chapin’s jobs like the coaching stuff are pretty much impossible to judge externally: we couldn’t tell if they even exist short of hiring him personally. I can only say that I feel like I’ve seen his Substack writings discussed less post-PNSE (but this is also obviously confounded by, among other things, Twitter attacking Substack over a similar time period and what feels like a general Internet-wide collapse of linking/sharing); and that Nick Cammarata says he’s gotten far more productive but his DL interpretability work outputs look the same over time to me and I see no changepoint.
He may have decided to revise it all. He left a long reply to my followup question about whether he had read the PNSE paper before he wrote this post (since his first reply was ambiguous, and someone could reasonably wonder if the PNSE paper had framed his expectations and so this anecdote is not as parallel & independent confirmation of the PNSE syndrome as it looked), but then by the time I clicked on the link in the email version, his reply (but not the post) had been deleted.
About a year and a half ago I listened to Loch Kelly for the first time. I instantly glimpsed the nondual nature of reality. Besides becoming a parent, it is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. The last year and a half has been a process of stabilising this glimpse and it is going extremely well. I relate deeply to the things that Sasha is describing here. Thanks for sharing ❤️
I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings. He has a website for writing about these things, two organisations for researching them, and a string of books on the subject on Amazon.
The same four stages appear in the preface to one of these books, “The God Formula” (“A simple scientifically proven blueprint that has transformed millions of lives”). They are described in glowing terms. Producing those experiences is the very purpose of the book. And yet the book was published in 2013, and references his research on PNSEs, which was carried out over many years previous to that. I can’t see enough of the book for free to see how he reconciles these drastically different views.
Apart from a two-volume work on Reiki (of which he is a “world renowned master”), his other books are a science-fictionalised account of what he calls the “Fourth Awakening”. I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case. From the blurbs: “For the past 500 or so years, the political power of religion has waned while the power of science has flourished. With videos of Space Shuttles exploding on cable news, both sides politicizing environmental science to serve their personal agenda and “safe” nuclear power plants melting down, science is now in retreat. When the big ideas from the previous Awakening start to collapse, a new Awakening is on the horizon.”
I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings.
From viewing a couple of his interviews on YouTube, I gathered that there are two possible explanations for this. One is the he was initially motivated to study PNSE because he wasn’t feeling happy despite achieving conventional success and saw PNSE as a possible way to achieve sustained happiness and well-being, so that could explain why he’s not too bothered by PNSE being more like wireheading than making a person more effective at achieving real-world objectives. Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case.
I wouldn’t read too much into those books, because according to the interviews they were almost entirely written by a co-author, for the purpose of trying to reach people with PNSE and gathering them as subjects for his research project.
Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
So even when he knew it was wireheading (or at least, had observed all the parts of that concept without necessarily having a word for it), he got sucked in when he had the experience himself.
Harper’s has a new article on meditation which delves into some of these issues. It doesn’t mention PNSE or Martin by name, but some of the mentioned results parallel them, at least:
...Compared with an eight-person control group, the subjects who meditated for more than thirty minutes per day experienced shallower sleep and woke up more often during the night. The more participants reported meditating, the worse their sleep became… A 2014 study from Carnegie Mellon University subjected two groups of participants to an interview with openly hostile evaluators. One group had been coached in meditation for three days beforehand and the other group had not. Participants who had meditated reported feeling less stress immediately after the interview, but their levels of cortisol—the fight-or-flight hormone—were significantly higher than those of the control group. They had become more sensitive, not less, to stressful stimuli, but believing and expecting that meditation reduced stress, they gave self-reports that contradicted the data.
Britton and her team began visiting retreats, talking to the people who ran them, and asking about the difficulties they’d seen. “Every meditation center we went to had at least a dozen horror stories,” she said. Psychotic breaks and cognitive impairments were common; they were often temporary but sometimes lasted years. “Practicing letting go of concepts,” one meditator told Britton, “was sabotaging my mind’s ability to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple things, like what words mean, what colors mean.” Meditators also reported diminished emotions, both negative and positive. “I had two young children,” another meditator said. “I couldn’t feel anything about them. I went through all the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff, but there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead.”
...Britton’s research was bolstered last August when the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a systematic review of adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies. Sixty-five percent of the studies included in the review found adverse effects, the most common of which were anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment. “We found that the occurrence of adverse effects during or after meditation is not uncommon,” the authors concluded, “and may occur in individuals with no previous history of mental health problems.” I asked Britton what she hoped people would take away from these findings. “Comprehensive safety training should be part of all meditation teacher trainings,” she said. “If you’re going to go out there and teach this and make money off it, you better take responsibility. I shouldn’t be taking care of your casualties.”
The question of whether enlightenment is wireheading is really interesting (and perhaps important) to me. Would love to hear Val’s explicit take on that.
(Context: I am more-or-less convinced that there is a repeatable phenomenon called enlightenment, and also that both meditation and CFAR-style introspection have the potential to trigger it. I also meditate moderately regularly and find it very beneficial and insight-provoking. I currently suspect englightenment might be wireheading.)
Edit: This theory only makes sense if “the enlightenment experience” is a distinct thing from “the clarity of sight that accompanies a lot of meditation”. I definitely think the latter is a good thing and is clearly not wireheading. But I am confused/turned off by stuff like the “everything is ok” paragraph, and that seems to be an important part of most enlightenment experiences.
That PNSE paper makes disturbing reading. The four locations the author identifies on a spectrum of deepness of PNSE display progressively increasing sense of well-being and equanimity. However, he also observed that this subjective sense was not evident in the subjects’ actual behaviour. Three examples from the paper:
“Over the course of a week, his father died followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth.”
“It was not uncommon for participants to state that they had gained increased bodily awareness upon their transition into PNSE. I arranged and observed private yoga sessions with a series of participants as part of a larger inquiry into their bodily awareness. During these sessions it became clear that participants believed they were far more aware of their body than they actually were.”
“Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference.”
There was also a progressively decreasing sense of agency. In the final stage, Location 4, he reports: “These participants reported having no sense of agency or any ability to make a decision. It felt as if life was simply unfolding and they were watching the process happen. Severe memory deficits were common in these participants, including the inability to recall scheduled events that were not regular and ongoing.” And yet, almost all of the subjects reported it as a positive experience.
The subjects, at whatever point they were in the scale, were often completely certain about the nature of the experience: “PNSE was often accompanied by a tremendous sense of certainty that participants were experiencing a ‘deeper’ or ‘more true’ reality. As time passed, this often increased in strength.” They also tended to be dogmatic about their PNSE being the real thing (whichever location they were at) and descriptions of other people’s different PNSEs as not the real thing. Another way to say “completely certain” is “unable to doubt”.
So we have here an experience that takes away the sense of agency and self, floods you with feelings of well-being and direct contact with a deeper reality subjectively impossible to doubt, and yet which does not change any aspect of one’s behaviour or personality visible to anyone else, except that in extreme cases it leads to memory loss and inability to handle day to day affairs.
This is not enlightenment, it is wireheading.
NB. I am talking only about PNSE as reported in that paper, not about whatever Valentine is intending to convey.
ETA: I think it’s pretty obvious what Eliezer’s Cognitive Trope Therapy would have to say.
I’ve read so many reports from people claiming enlightenment that it’s become something of a genre. The common thread is that they all claim better emotional skills, but the writing doesn’t reflect any such skills. It’s like a house with broken windows that says “elite real estate”. All this time I thought it was just me, but in retrospect any incommunicable superpowers should’ve seemed fishy from the beginning. Your comment confirms that someone else got the same impression and they fact-checked it. Thank you!
Sasha Chapin has written a followup to his earlier meditation experiences, “How my day is going: report”, which struck me as being eerily like the PNSE paper’s pathologies, particularly his descriptions of derealization and being temporally adrift (and reading between the lines, other people not noticing Chapin’s new status and him overrating his improvements so he has to explain it to them).
I brought the similarity up and he replied:
Thanks for posting that.
There’s a phrase due to Joel Spolsky in the context of hiring software developers. He looked for two qualities: “smart, and gets things done”. That standard can be applied to life in general. I would be very wary of any meditative practice or drug experience that sapped either of those. Following such experiences one might want to get different things done, but smart and gets things done is the touchstone.
Whenever someone wants to convince me of the value or promise of some meditationy thing by making strong sweeping claims about mental benefits, I simply ask them “Can you name someone who’s done some practice like this, and then subsequently done something that I’d recognize as both good and impressive, and then somewhat attributed the latter to the former?”. I’m sure there must be some good answers to this question, on baserates if nothing else, but no one has ever (N=10ish?) named an example.
One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably “they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward” wouldn’t be something that you’d recognize as both good and impressive.
Do you read that report to suggest that Chapin is getting less done now? He mentions in it having three jobs, and my impression from the kinds of things he posts on Twitter has been that he seems productive, though of course one that can be fake (but if so he seems at least productive at faking productivity).
It is hard to tell. Some of Chapin’s jobs like the coaching stuff are pretty much impossible to judge externally: we couldn’t tell if they even exist short of hiring him personally. I can only say that I feel like I’ve seen his Substack writings discussed less post-PNSE (but this is also obviously confounded by, among other things, Twitter attacking Substack over a similar time period and what feels like a general Internet-wide collapse of linking/sharing); and that Nick Cammarata says he’s gotten far more productive but his DL interpretability work outputs look the same over time to me and I see no changepoint.
Huh, the post is down now, and also not available on the internet archive or archive.is.
He may have decided to revise it all. He left a long reply to my followup question about whether he had read the PNSE paper before he wrote this post (since his first reply was ambiguous, and someone could reasonably wonder if the PNSE paper had framed his expectations and so this anecdote is not as parallel & independent confirmation of the PNSE syndrome as it looked), but then by the time I clicked on the link in the email version, his reply (but not the post) had been deleted.
There is an archived version here.
No, just a general point. I do not know Sasha Chapin.
About a year and a half ago I listened to Loch Kelly for the first time. I instantly glimpsed the nondual nature of reality. Besides becoming a parent, it is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. The last year and a half has been a process of stabilising this glimpse and it is going extremely well. I relate deeply to the things that Sasha is describing here. Thanks for sharing ❤️
I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings. He has a website for writing about these things, two organisations for researching them, and a string of books on the subject on Amazon.
The same four stages appear in the preface to one of these books, “The God Formula” (“A simple scientifically proven blueprint that has transformed millions of lives”). They are described in glowing terms. Producing those experiences is the very purpose of the book. And yet the book was published in 2013, and references his research on PNSEs, which was carried out over many years previous to that. I can’t see enough of the book for free to see how he reconciles these drastically different views.
Apart from a two-volume work on Reiki (of which he is a “world renowned master”), his other books are a science-fictionalised account of what he calls the “Fourth Awakening”. I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case. From the blurbs: “For the past 500 or so years, the political power of religion has waned while the power of science has flourished. With videos of Space Shuttles exploding on cable news, both sides politicizing environmental science to serve their personal agenda and “safe” nuclear power plants melting down, science is now in retreat. When the big ideas from the previous Awakening start to collapse, a new Awakening is on the horizon.”
From viewing a couple of his interviews on YouTube, I gathered that there are two possible explanations for this. One is the he was initially motivated to study PNSE because he wasn’t feeling happy despite achieving conventional success and saw PNSE as a possible way to achieve sustained happiness and well-being, so that could explain why he’s not too bothered by PNSE being more like wireheading than making a person more effective at achieving real-world objectives. Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
I wouldn’t read too much into those books, because according to the interviews they were almost entirely written by a co-author, for the purpose of trying to reach people with PNSE and gathering them as subjects for his research project.
So even when he knew it was wireheading (or at least, had observed all the parts of that concept without necessarily having a word for it), he got sucked in when he had the experience himself.
Wireheading does that.
those books had such bad reviews that I didn’t bother with them.
Harper’s has a new article on meditation which delves into some of these issues. It doesn’t mention PNSE or Martin by name, but some of the mentioned results parallel them, at least:
Scott discusses whether enlightenment (or at least, the jhanas that people may be mistaking for enlightenment) can be interpreted as wireheading of free energy minimization: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem
I wonder if Jill Bolte Taylor was temporarily enlightened? (Incidentally, The God Formula is now on Libgen.)
Holy crap wow.
The question of whether enlightenment is wireheading is really interesting (and perhaps important) to me. Would love to hear Val’s explicit take on that.
(Context: I am more-or-less convinced that there is a repeatable phenomenon called enlightenment, and also that both meditation and CFAR-style introspection have the potential to trigger it. I also meditate moderately regularly and find it very beneficial and insight-provoking. I currently suspect englightenment might be wireheading.)
Edit: This theory only makes sense if “the enlightenment experience” is a distinct thing from “the clarity of sight that accompanies a lot of meditation”. I definitely think the latter is a good thing and is clearly not wireheading. But I am confused/turned off by stuff like the “everything is ok” paragraph, and that seems to be an important part of most enlightenment experiences.