The right control is to spend an hour every day for a year imagining the orgasm, >since that’s the approximate duration of the proposed experiment with pursuing >enlightenment.
I see your point.
What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?
For what it’s worth, I tried Manfred’s experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand “imagining a toothache” to mean imagining a visual or abstract image that I associate with toothaches, and allowing my attention to shift very quickly between the imagined object and the non-imagined location of the teeth where the toothache is supposed to be.)
Enlightenment gives the meditator enough self awareness to see their biases, and >they don’t care enough to reduce them. I can’t imagine this alternative, are you >really proposing it?
I can’t imagine why you can’t imagine that this alternative might be true.
Biases don’t come with tags that say “bias” on them. “Biases” is a term that people have created to refer to cognitive tendencies which they judge not to reliably lead to accurate beliefs. To effectively determine whether something is a bias you have to at least have an understanding of what it means for a belief to be accurate and have a means by which you could determine whether a belief is likely to be accurate. Obtaining these depends at least on intelligence, cultural background, education, and personality / cognitive style. An interest in spending a large amount of time working out whether something is a bias or not, or searching for things that are biases, depends at least on personality / cognitive style and goal structure.
If these factors don’t align before enlightenment, why would you expect that the mere ability to see many cognitive processes clearly (“seeing one’s biases”, i.e. seeing some of the processes that are biases, not necessarily seeing that those processes are biases) would make them align afterwards? Do you think I’m claiming that enlightenment magically tags all biases with the tag “bias”?
What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?
25-90 percent, with a wide range because I don’t know if men can do it or what fraction of women can learn to do it. Web pages Google finds for “orgasm on command” or publicly available reference material, among other sources, claim fairly consistently that some women can be trained to do this, and the gist of it is that it takes months rather than years. There are specific instructions to follow, different in detail but not different in kind from the ones you give in the original post. I have not yet seen a video of the cervical motions that would prove they aren’t faking it, and I haven’t seen mention of training men, and I haven’t spent enough time on it with my wife to confirm or disconfirm it firsthand. Furthermore I haven’t actually read the Amazon book I cite above; I read another detailed procedure that you’ll have to find on your own, and people there indicated that the two were similar.
(I cringe too when I see people give pretentious names to themselves like “Lord Prophett”. Yuck.)
For what it’s worth, I tried Manfred’s experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand “imagining a toothache” to mean imagining a visual or abstract image that I associate with toothaches, and allowing my attention to shift very quickly between the imagined object and the non-imagined location of the teeth where the toothache is supposed to be.)
I had success with it. My procedure was to think “What if my tooth hurt” and pay attention to my tooth as though I were concerned about it, and in a few seconds it started hurting when it didn’t before.
Enlightenment gives the meditator enough self awareness to see their biases, and they don’t care enough to reduce them. I can’t imagine this alternative, are you really proposing it?
I can’t imagine why you can’t imagine that this alternative might be true.
Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?
In any case, I agree with you in that I can imagine that someone who is self aware but doesn’t have the concept of an unbiased estimate of reality might not have the motive or conceptual tools to identify the bias.
I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining / intending. Ha!)
Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is
like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the
distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?
The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that meditation addresses, I would characterize it as a distortion in the perception of or in the representation of the components of the mind. The ability to correct that is clearly (to me) not the same as the ability to correct bias. However, correcting it provides some powerful new capacities which can be applied to dealing with biases if one is so inclined.
I see your point.
What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?
For what it’s worth, I tried Manfred’s experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand “imagining a toothache” to mean imagining a visual or abstract image that I associate with toothaches, and allowing my attention to shift very quickly between the imagined object and the non-imagined location of the teeth where the toothache is supposed to be.)
I can’t imagine why you can’t imagine that this alternative might be true.
Biases don’t come with tags that say “bias” on them. “Biases” is a term that people have created to refer to cognitive tendencies which they judge not to reliably lead to accurate beliefs. To effectively determine whether something is a bias you have to at least have an understanding of what it means for a belief to be accurate and have a means by which you could determine whether a belief is likely to be accurate. Obtaining these depends at least on intelligence, cultural background, education, and personality / cognitive style. An interest in spending a large amount of time working out whether something is a bias or not, or searching for things that are biases, depends at least on personality / cognitive style and goal structure.
If these factors don’t align before enlightenment, why would you expect that the mere ability to see many cognitive processes clearly (“seeing one’s biases”, i.e. seeing some of the processes that are biases, not necessarily seeing that those processes are biases) would make them align afterwards? Do you think I’m claiming that enlightenment magically tags all biases with the tag “bias”?
25-90 percent, with a wide range because I don’t know if men can do it or what fraction of women can learn to do it. Web pages Google finds for “orgasm on command” or publicly available reference material, among other sources, claim fairly consistently that some women can be trained to do this, and the gist of it is that it takes months rather than years. There are specific instructions to follow, different in detail but not different in kind from the ones you give in the original post. I have not yet seen a video of the cervical motions that would prove they aren’t faking it, and I haven’t seen mention of training men, and I haven’t spent enough time on it with my wife to confirm or disconfirm it firsthand. Furthermore I haven’t actually read the Amazon book I cite above; I read another detailed procedure that you’ll have to find on your own, and people there indicated that the two were similar.
(I cringe too when I see people give pretentious names to themselves like “Lord Prophett”. Yuck.)
I had success with it. My procedure was to think “What if my tooth hurt” and pay attention to my tooth as though I were concerned about it, and in a few seconds it started hurting when it didn’t before.
Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?
In any case, I agree with you in that I can imagine that someone who is self aware but doesn’t have the concept of an unbiased estimate of reality might not have the motive or conceptual tools to identify the bias.
I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining / intending. Ha!)
The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that meditation addresses, I would characterize it as a distortion in the perception of or in the representation of the components of the mind. The ability to correct that is clearly (to me) not the same as the ability to correct bias. However, correcting it provides some powerful new capacities which can be applied to dealing with biases if one is so inclined.