Authentic Buddhism is basically a guide to wireheading. If you follow Buddhism really strictly, you become a monk who sits and meditates all day and eats one bowl of rice. There’s no magic, you’re not restoring karma to the universe, you have just found a way to be very happy. But it’s not obvious to say what part of yourself you’re willing to part with to be happy.
I want to push back a bit against this perspective, since it’s one of several that I think take an overly narrow view of Buddhism and is fairly widespread. Buddhism is very wide and deep with a lot of very different practices that may share a common history but are very spread out in idea space. Some forms of Buddhism are arguably about wireheading, to be fair, but many are not.
For example, my own practice with Zen falls within the Mahayana branch of Buddhism which explicitly rejects the notion that it’s appropriate to practice only to achieve nirvana (liberation from suffering) and instead that the purpose of practice is to help all suffer less. Each of us is, of course, part of “all” and so we contribute to all suffering less by liberating ourselves from suffering, and we will often act unskillfully to help others so long as we are caught by our own suffering-inducing delusions, so we must focus on ourselves enough to be able to actually help others. But this focus on self is limited by an equal valuing of all beings, thus there is no attempt to attain nirvana except in the limit when perhaps all beings could attain it together.
This doesn’t even begin to get into some of the weirder stuff that is even farther away from looking like wireheading, but I think should give enough sense of the fact that thinking that “Buddhism is a guide to wireheading” is missing out on a lot of what goes on under the label of “Buddhism”.
I want to push back a bit against this perspective, since it’s one of several that I think take an overly narrow view of Buddhism and is fairly widespread. Buddhism is very wide and deep with a lot of very different practices that may share a common history but are very spread out in idea space. Some forms of Buddhism are arguably about wireheading, to be fair, but many are not.
For example, my own practice with Zen falls within the Mahayana branch of Buddhism which explicitly rejects the notion that it’s appropriate to practice only to achieve nirvana (liberation from suffering) and instead that the purpose of practice is to help all suffer less. Each of us is, of course, part of “all” and so we contribute to all suffering less by liberating ourselves from suffering, and we will often act unskillfully to help others so long as we are caught by our own suffering-inducing delusions, so we must focus on ourselves enough to be able to actually help others. But this focus on self is limited by an equal valuing of all beings, thus there is no attempt to attain nirvana except in the limit when perhaps all beings could attain it together.
This doesn’t even begin to get into some of the weirder stuff that is even farther away from looking like wireheading, but I think should give enough sense of the fact that thinking that “Buddhism is a guide to wireheading” is missing out on a lot of what goes on under the label of “Buddhism”.