If true, that would be evidence that meditation changes one, but since suppressing one’s startle reflex does not in itself have significant positive effect on a human life, it says nothing about whether the changes considered as a whole are positive or negative.
This is the thing I was talking about in my previous comments. The simple stuff that actually can be tested easily doesn’t generally imply anything very impressive taken as it is. What we can do is try to guess at what other cognitive changes are probably going on that bring about the measurable effect, and what other, harder-to-measure effects they might have. I don’t have a really good idea on where to go from, say, the startle reflex thing correlated with the accounts on meditation, but someone with better cognitive science expertise might.
My impression at age 50 is that the self-improvement advice I took to heart was helpful in some ways and harmful in others with no significant net-positive benefit.
What self-improvement advice are you talking about here? Meditation instructions, self-improvement in general?
I believe that for people with certain chronic illnesses, specifically certain kinds of infections, meditating an hour a day would be very harmful because it would supress the immune system for a number of hours after the meditation session.
Link to this? All I find with a quick googling is stuff about meditation boosting the immune system.
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just ‘raw numbers’) to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization, but I cannot recall ever having heard of one. (I would love for someone to correct that deficiency.)
There’s David Lynch, but whether he’s improved our civilization is debatable. It is definitely interesting that there’s the widespread mythos of LSD contributing to scientific and technological innovation, but none about meditation. One factor here is that dropping acid is a very quick way to get into a very strange mental state, while, based on the accounts here, meditation takes at least months of deliberate, concentrated, high-volume effort, with good instructions being very sparse. There just might not be that much of an overlap between people who have successfully put the time into meditation and people who are predisposed to making scientific discoveries, often due to spending their spare time working on their skills on their field of choice rather than in concentrated meditative practice. It’s also not easy to tell exactly how much basis in fact LSD’s reputation has, due to it having been illegal to actually do research with it.
Ben Goertzel does share your sentiment though, I recall him telling that he used to be much into meditation and enlightenment thing, but then started thinking that he hadn’t heard of enlightened folk making notable scientific discoveries and decided to try to attain notable scientific results instead of enlightenment.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
Greg Egan has spelled out this suspicion with Buddhist thought in detail in a couple of places. In Diaspora, it was portrayed as a sort of memetic dead end that made the upload people fold into solipsism and permanently cease interactions with the surrounding world. In TAP, I got the idea it was promoted by a government as a way to make the populace stay content in the crappy conditions they lived in, instead of rocking the boat and demanding things to be better.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
That’s a good point and appears plausible to me. Changing a problem in your own mind in such a way that it doesn’t need fixing in the external world anymore seems fairly common among meditators in general (myself included). There’s probably a strong (but not necessarily intentional) overlap with wire-heading and its usual implications.
However, science as a social game (including very tight career paths), weirdness filters and some of the bad woo clustering around meditation seems more likely as a general explanation.
Still, there are some more-or-less scientifically trained meditators (e.g. Shinzen Young, B. Alan Wallace and they all tend to focus on their own lives or on teaching meditation afaik.
Much of humanity’s progress depended on being unreasonable and willing to suffer for questionable gains (see Jared Diamond). Enlightenment might not be useful for that.
This is the thing I was talking about in my previous comments. The simple stuff that actually can be tested easily doesn’t generally imply anything very impressive taken as it is. What we can do is try to guess at what other cognitive changes are probably going on that bring about the measurable effect, and what other, harder-to-measure effects they might have. I don’t have a really good idea on where to go from, say, the startle reflex thing correlated with the accounts on meditation, but someone with better cognitive science expertise might.
What self-improvement advice are you talking about here? Meditation instructions, self-improvement in general?
Link to this? All I find with a quick googling is stuff about meditation boosting the immune system.
There’s David Lynch, but whether he’s improved our civilization is debatable. It is definitely interesting that there’s the widespread mythos of LSD contributing to scientific and technological innovation, but none about meditation. One factor here is that dropping acid is a very quick way to get into a very strange mental state, while, based on the accounts here, meditation takes at least months of deliberate, concentrated, high-volume effort, with good instructions being very sparse. There just might not be that much of an overlap between people who have successfully put the time into meditation and people who are predisposed to making scientific discoveries, often due to spending their spare time working on their skills on their field of choice rather than in concentrated meditative practice. It’s also not easy to tell exactly how much basis in fact LSD’s reputation has, due to it having been illegal to actually do research with it.
Ben Goertzel does share your sentiment though, I recall him telling that he used to be much into meditation and enlightenment thing, but then started thinking that he hadn’t heard of enlightened folk making notable scientific discoveries and decided to try to attain notable scientific results instead of enlightenment.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
Greg Egan has spelled out this suspicion with Buddhist thought in detail in a couple of places. In Diaspora, it was portrayed as a sort of memetic dead end that made the upload people fold into solipsism and permanently cease interactions with the surrounding world. In TAP, I got the idea it was promoted by a government as a way to make the populace stay content in the crappy conditions they lived in, instead of rocking the boat and demanding things to be better.
That’s a good point and appears plausible to me. Changing a problem in your own mind in such a way that it doesn’t need fixing in the external world anymore seems fairly common among meditators in general (myself included). There’s probably a strong (but not necessarily intentional) overlap with wire-heading and its usual implications.
However, science as a social game (including very tight career paths), weirdness filters and some of the bad woo clustering around meditation seems more likely as a general explanation.
Still, there are some more-or-less scientifically trained meditators (e.g. Shinzen Young, B. Alan Wallace and they all tend to focus on their own lives or on teaching meditation afaik.
Much of humanity’s progress depended on being unreasonable and willing to suffer for questionable gains (see Jared Diamond). Enlightenment might not be useful for that.
(Also, checking out Egan.)