The problem is, I can explain these results with fairly high probability without meditation actually working as you claim, and so the evidence provided by your testimony, especially since you cite no good tests and claim that enlightenment is impossible to communicate (an evidence-free proposition) is minimal. Just tell people to focus on experiencing any sort of sensation and many of them will experience it (imagine a toothache in your top teeth, on the right side, for 10 seconds. Now imagine being perfectly aware of your surroundings for 10 seconds). Add in cognitive dissonance after you’ve followed the advice “just keep meditating,” and you’re looking at a serious effect even without meditation doing anything novel.
Test proposal: round up some enlightened meditators who have never even heard of a bias before (maybe give them a quiz based on bias names in the literature and pick the ones who fail it) and then perform some standard bias experiments on them a few weeks later? As a control, giving the same quiz and tests to some college students would suffice.
Also, “enlightenment is impossible to communicate [about to unenlightened people]” is not a proposition which must have no evidence for it, any more than “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is.
I think that the latter proposition is true, and I believe with high probability that you do too.
The proposition “higher mathematics is useful” can be communicated to people with negligible mathematical training, along with specifics and supporting evidence. Higher math is required to describe the physics that can figure out from first principles how chemistry should work, and somewhat lower higher math can figure out the area under curves and so forth.
In particular, a person who knows no math can observe that people who know higher math are required in order to do chemistry simulations, for example.
Is there a similar easy way to make a claim that enlightenment is useful that is testable by unenlightened people?
(For the record, I’m inclined to believe you, but it would be comforting to have a concrete argument for it.)
I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.
The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it’s done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of “useful” is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it’s done to those things.
The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed to be relevant to which you consider useful, state some beliefs, see if the enlightened person says otherwise, and go from there. (This requires that the enlightened person also be rational and well-informed. An enlightened person who doesn’t know anything about the subject you want to talk about, who is uneducated, mentally ill, brain-damaged, or whatever, is probably not going to state accurate beliefs, for reasons unrelated to enlightenment.)
Just, unfortunately, not how to get access to them.
I had to search around a bit to figure out what he meant, but now I think wedrifid is mocking this sentence from the original post:
My personal belief is that it is a member of a family of closely-related meditation styles which are the most effective known styles for teaching contemporary Westerners, but establishing that convincingly requires data to which I don’t have access.
You are incorrect about me. It’s true that the shortest complete communication of some part of calculus is often to teach someone calculus, but there are shorter incomplete communications that work in that they communicate the goal without being calculus. “Integration means finding the area under a curve” is a classic example. Or, going higher, “an ‘algebra’ is the (misleading) name for a bunch of objects like numbers or vectors that can be turned into each other by addition or multiplication.”
I do agree that “enlightenment is impossible to communicate” can have evidence for it. I should have said something like “this is an assertion that you have not substantiated in any way other than claiming it.” Maybe you could make a list of possible properties of enlightenment and demonstrate that enlightenment had consistent properties by getting enlightened people to check off the same items on the list, even when subtly pressured to check off different items (to try and filter out the obvious cultural correlation).
The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.
Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. “Some mathematical training” may be analogous to “partially but not fully enlightened.” “No mathematical training” is analogous to “never effectively practiced meditation.”
I still believe with high probability that you think “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.
Aren’t numbers a human universal? Sure, it’s hard to talk about curves without defining “curve” first, but if I can just draw in the sand and say “that’s a curve,” we’re back to the option of communicating the gist of things without handing the person a textbook. Could I communicate any sort of higher math I know in this way? This is tricky because I can’t think of anything, but that’s hardly a general proof. Maybe quaternions would be hard to communicate to a hunter-gatherer, but again “hard” is a far cry from impossible.
The last time I looked this up, all results on the Piraha language are due to a single anthropologist, Daniel Everett. There’s been some debate in the literature about whether or not he was actually correct about their innumeracy; see the “Further Reading” section on the wikipedia page for some examples.
On the object level, your belief-as-stated is not conclusively known. Everett sub 1986 believed that there were words for “one”, “two” and “many”; this belief was updated in 2008 when one speaker in an n=4 study used the word for “one” when there were six things presented to them.
On the meta-level, none of Everett’s results (as far as I know) have been replicated by an independent anthropologist, which means that your belief-as-stated has one point of failure. Given the surprising nature of his results, we should demand strong evidence that his results are true and not due to, e.g., cultural/linguistic misunderstandings. In fact, the linguistics community has indeed questioned the data closely.
The problem is, I can explain these results with fairly high probability without >meditation actually working as you claim[...] Just tell people to focus on >experiencing any sort of sensation and many of them will
experience it (imagine a toothache in your top teeth, on the right side, for 10 >seconds. Now imagine being perfectly aware of your surroundings for 10 >seconds). Add in cognitive dissonance after you’ve followed the advice “just keep >meditating,” and you’re looking at a serious effect even without meditation doing >anything novel.
This is a caricature of a real attempt at explanation.
Try imagining having a full-body orgasm vibrating at 20hz (as per my definition of ‘vibration’). Let us know if imagining it produces that experience.
Better yet, before you try imagining it, give us your probability estimate that it will work 1) for you, and 2) for others.
Test proposal: round up some enlightened meditators who have never even heard >of a bias before (maybe give them a quiz based on bias names in the literature and >pick the ones who fail it) and then perform some standard bias experiments on >them a few weeks later? As a control, giving the same quiz and tests to some >college students would suffice.
I said many times that any reduction in biases is likely to happen only in the case that a person is interested in that.
I get the impression that you didn’t pay very close attention to what I’ve written. Is that true?
Try imagining having a full-body orgasm vibrating at 20hz (as per my definition of ‘vibration’).
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.
The imaginary toothache was a 10 second experiment. The duration of the above-mentioned experiments is 365 times 60 times 60 seconds. That’s a ratio of 130K to one. Assume a linear dose-response relationship. Is the 20hz orgasm less than 130K times as interesting as the imaginary toothache? Plausibly.
You might have a good meditation technique, but the argument in the parent post is pretty bad.
I said many times that any reduction in biases is likely to happen only in the case that a person is interested in that.
I see several possible explanations here:
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?
Enlightenment doesn’t give enough self awareness to see one’s biases. That’s a disappointing statement about enlightenment—wasn’t it supposed to give self awareness, among other things?
Enlightened people are aware of their biases and unable to do anything about them. That’s disappointing for a different reason—if enlightened people can’t act upon their insights, pursuing it might not be worthwhile.
Manfred’s proposed test is interesting and rejecting it was a mistake. IMO this is the most likely alternative. It is also something that would not take much time and might give a positive result.
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.
Try imagining having a full-body orgasm vibrating at 20hz (as per my definition of ‘vibration’). Let us know if imagining it produces that experience.
Better yet, before you try imagining it, give us your probability estimate that it will work 1) for you, and 2) for others.
Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It didn’t particularly vibrate, though—I don’t have a clear enough picture of what that’s even supposed to mean, possibly.
I get the impression that you didn’t pay very close attention to what I’ve written. Is that true?
Apparently I didn’t pay close enough attention. On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn’t fix the really obvious flaws in our brains, it would make it more unlikely that it fixes the less obvious ones. I mean, come on, it should at least stop Asch’s conformity experiment from working, right?
Well I mean it wasn’t that great. But it’s not that hard to get an intense feeling and involuntary muscle contractions, what’s difficult is making it feel good, as opposed to like something you’d describe as “an intense feeling and involuntary muscle contractions.”
Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It >didn’t particularly vibrate, though—I don’t have a clear enough picture of what that’s >even supposed to mean, possibly.
Today may be the day that you learn that your mind works in a very uncommon way.
What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?
On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn’t fix the really obvious flaws in our >brains, it would make it more unlikely that it fixes the less obvious ones. I mean, >come on, it should at least stop Asch’s conformity experiment from working, right?
Before I agree or disagree, why do you think so? Biases have different origins, and something that may improve some may not improve others.
(Parenthetically, the relationship between rationality and Asch’s experiment is not as straightforward as you seem to think.)
What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?
Erm, it’s not that I just read the sentence “feel X” and feel it. It’s that I looked away from the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis—and most people are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I’m not sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at self-hypnosis literature would probably give a good idea of the upper bound.
why do you think so?
Because peer pressure, the urge to conform, seems like a direct product of unnecessary attachment to the world, which seems like something meditation with a Buddhist heritage is focused on reducing.
Erm, it’s not that I just read the sentence “feel X” and feel it. It’s that I looked away
from >the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived
situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis—and most people
are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary
way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I’m not
sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at
self-hypnosis literature would probably give a good idea of the upper bound.
OK. I think I misunderstood you here and also at some points in the past (including your original response).
However, in relation to my claims about enlightenment and bias, you said:
Because peer pressure, the urge to conform, seems like a direct product of
unnecessary attachment to the world, which seems like something meditation
with a Buddhist heritage is focused on reducing.
I described what this style of meditation is focused on achieving rather explicitly. “Attachment to the world” is not anything I wrote, but is something you are imputing to me because it’s associated with Buddhism. I don’t think you’ve read what I’ve written very thoroughly, and for some reason are trying to respond to it anyway. If you want to continue this discussion, I request that you re-read my post first, and then re-state any comments or criticism.
See here. I read not only this post, but the last one too!
Also, I read the following:
(Will Swain)Didn’t you say that enlightenment would fix problems like attachment? Couldn’t that kind of result produce an empirical test?
(DavidM)”Attachment” has a specific nonstandard meaning in Buddhist-associated thinking, and I realized after writing Part 1 that it would have been better to omit the word altogether rather than try to explain it. So I would prefer to discuss the testable aspects of enlightenment without talking about attachment.
So I’ll not make any more claims about attachment. Would you apply similar “don’t test” restrictions to “craving” and “hatred,” which you also mentioned in part 1?
I used the word “attachment” without explaining it. “Attachment to the world” I’ve never written, though phrases like that appear constantly in Buddhist literature and are often taught as central to it (as you seem well aware of, given your use of the phrase “Buddhist heritage” in relation to this discussion).
About these terms, I seem to be having enough trouble getting across the basics, so I think triage is in order.
The problem is, I can explain these results with fairly high probability without meditation actually working as you claim, and so the evidence provided by your testimony, especially since you cite no good tests and claim that enlightenment is impossible to communicate (an evidence-free proposition) is minimal. Just tell people to focus on experiencing any sort of sensation and many of them will experience it (imagine a toothache in your top teeth, on the right side, for 10 seconds. Now imagine being perfectly aware of your surroundings for 10 seconds). Add in cognitive dissonance after you’ve followed the advice “just keep meditating,” and you’re looking at a serious effect even without meditation doing anything novel.
Test proposal: round up some enlightened meditators who have never even heard of a bias before (maybe give them a quiz based on bias names in the literature and pick the ones who fail it) and then perform some standard bias experiments on them a few weeks later? As a control, giving the same quiz and tests to some college students would suffice.
Also, “enlightenment is impossible to communicate [about to unenlightened people]” is not a proposition which must have no evidence for it, any more than “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is.
I think that the latter proposition is true, and I believe with high probability that you do too.
The proposition “higher mathematics is useful” can be communicated to people with negligible mathematical training, along with specifics and supporting evidence. Higher math is required to describe the physics that can figure out from first principles how chemistry should work, and somewhat lower higher math can figure out the area under curves and so forth.
In particular, a person who knows no math can observe that people who know higher math are required in order to do chemistry simulations, for example.
Is there a similar easy way to make a claim that enlightenment is useful that is testable by unenlightened people?
(For the record, I’m inclined to believe you, but it would be comforting to have a concrete argument for it.)
I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.
The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it’s done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of “useful” is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it’s done to those things.
The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed to be relevant to which you consider useful, state some beliefs, see if the enlightened person says otherwise, and go from there. (This requires that the enlightened person also be rational and well-informed. An enlightened person who doesn’t know anything about the subject you want to talk about, who is uneducated, mentally ill, brain-damaged, or whatever, is probably not going to state accurate beliefs, for reasons unrelated to enlightenment.)
Just, unfortunately, not how to get access to them.
I had to search around a bit to figure out what he meant, but now I think wedrifid is mocking this sentence from the original post:
I thought he was making a joke about the inadequacy of mathematics as a tool of sexual conquest.
Wow, I sound cryptic and deep. Or would if I wasn’t casually low brow. (Gabriel nailed it.)
You are incorrect about me. It’s true that the shortest complete communication of some part of calculus is often to teach someone calculus, but there are shorter incomplete communications that work in that they communicate the goal without being calculus. “Integration means finding the area under a curve” is a classic example. Or, going higher, “an ‘algebra’ is the (misleading) name for a bunch of objects like numbers or vectors that can be turned into each other by addition or multiplication.”
I do agree that “enlightenment is impossible to communicate” can have evidence for it. I should have said something like “this is an assertion that you have not substantiated in any way other than claiming it.” Maybe you could make a list of possible properties of enlightenment and demonstrate that enlightenment had consistent properties by getting enlightened people to check off the same items on the list, even when subtly pressured to check off different items (to try and filter out the obvious cultural correlation).
The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.
Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. “Some mathematical training” may be analogous to “partially but not fully enlightened.” “No mathematical training” is analogous to “never effectively practiced meditation.”
I still believe with high probability that you think “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.
Aren’t numbers a human universal? Sure, it’s hard to talk about curves without defining “curve” first, but if I can just draw in the sand and say “that’s a curve,” we’re back to the option of communicating the gist of things without handing the person a textbook. Could I communicate any sort of higher math I know in this way? This is tricky because I can’t think of anything, but that’s hardly a general proof. Maybe quaternions would be hard to communicate to a hunter-gatherer, but again “hard” is a far cry from impossible.
No. The Pirahã, for example, have no concept of exact numbers, only of smaller and larger amounts.
The last time I looked this up, all results on the Piraha language are due to a single anthropologist, Daniel Everett. There’s been some debate in the literature about whether or not he was actually correct about their innumeracy; see the “Further Reading” section on the wikipedia page for some examples.
I see nothing there that contradicts what I said, but it does seem most of the links are dead.
On the object level, your belief-as-stated is not conclusively known. Everett sub 1986 believed that there were words for “one”, “two” and “many”; this belief was updated in 2008 when one speaker in an n=4 study used the word for “one” when there were six things presented to them.
On the meta-level, none of Everett’s results (as far as I know) have been replicated by an independent anthropologist, which means that your belief-as-stated has one point of failure. Given the surprising nature of his results, we should demand strong evidence that his results are true and not due to, e.g., cultural/linguistic misunderstandings. In fact, the linguistics community has indeed questioned the data closely.
This is a caricature of a real attempt at explanation.
Try imagining having a full-body orgasm vibrating at 20hz (as per my definition of ‘vibration’). Let us know if imagining it produces that experience.
Better yet, before you try imagining it, give us your probability estimate that it will work 1) for you, and 2) for others.
I said many times that any reduction in biases is likely to happen only in the case that a person is interested in that.
I get the impression that you didn’t pay very close attention to what I’ve written. Is that true?
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.
The imaginary toothache was a 10 second experiment. The duration of the above-mentioned experiments is 365 times 60 times 60 seconds. That’s a ratio of 130K to one. Assume a linear dose-response relationship. Is the 20hz orgasm less than 130K times as interesting as the imaginary toothache? Plausibly.
You might have a good meditation technique, but the argument in the parent post is pretty bad.
I see several possible explanations here:
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?
Enlightenment doesn’t give enough self awareness to see one’s biases. That’s a disappointing statement about enlightenment—wasn’t it supposed to give self awareness, among other things?
Enlightened people are aware of their biases and unable to do anything about them. That’s disappointing for a different reason—if enlightened people can’t act upon their insights, pursuing it might not be worthwhile.
Manfred’s proposed test is interesting and rejecting it was a mistake. IMO this is the most likely alternative. It is also something that would not take much time and might give a positive result.
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.
Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It didn’t particularly vibrate, though—I don’t have a clear enough picture of what that’s even supposed to mean, possibly.
Apparently I didn’t pay close enough attention. On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn’t fix the really obvious flaws in our brains, it would make it more unlikely that it fixes the less obvious ones. I mean, come on, it should at least stop Asch’s conformity experiment from working, right?
You’re either the greatest imagineer I’ve ever met, or a big fat liar.
Well I mean it wasn’t that great. But it’s not that hard to get an intense feeling and involuntary muscle contractions, what’s difficult is making it feel good, as opposed to like something you’d describe as “an intense feeling and involuntary muscle contractions.”
EDIT: Googling this topic is tricky.
Not at all. It just comes with all sorts of bonus ‘imagination aids’. ;)
Today may be the day that you learn that your mind works in a very uncommon way.
What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?
Before I agree or disagree, why do you think so? Biases have different origins, and something that may improve some may not improve others.
(Parenthetically, the relationship between rationality and Asch’s experiment is not as straightforward as you seem to think.)
Erm, it’s not that I just read the sentence “feel X” and feel it. It’s that I looked away from the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis—and most people are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I’m not sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at self-hypnosis literature would probably give a good idea of the upper bound.
Because peer pressure, the urge to conform, seems like a direct product of unnecessary attachment to the world, which seems like something meditation with a Buddhist heritage is focused on reducing.
OK. I think I misunderstood you here and also at some points in the past (including your original response).
However, in relation to my claims about enlightenment and bias, you said:
I described what this style of meditation is focused on achieving rather explicitly. “Attachment to the world” is not anything I wrote, but is something you are imputing to me because it’s associated with Buddhism. I don’t think you’ve read what I’ve written very thoroughly, and for some reason are trying to respond to it anyway. If you want to continue this discussion, I request that you re-read my post first, and then re-state any comments or criticism.
See here. I read not only this post, but the last one too!
Also, I read the following:
So I’ll not make any more claims about attachment. Would you apply similar “don’t test” restrictions to “craving” and “hatred,” which you also mentioned in part 1?
I used the word “attachment” without explaining it. “Attachment to the world” I’ve never written, though phrases like that appear constantly in Buddhist literature and are often taught as central to it (as you seem well aware of, given your use of the phrase “Buddhist heritage” in relation to this discussion).
About these terms, I seem to be having enough trouble getting across the basics, so I think triage is in order.