Fair points. My comment was more a result of years (looking at the “kensho” article, yep, it’s already two years) of accumulated frustration, than anything else. Sorry for that.
From my perspective, the skepticism seems surprisingly mild. Imagine a parallel reality, where a CFAR instuctor instead says he found praying to Jesus really helpful… in ways that are impossible to describe other than by analogy (“truly looking at Jesus is like finally looking up from your smartphone”) and claims that Jesus helps him at improving CFAR exercises or understanding people. -- I would have expected a reaction much stronger than “your description does not really help me to start the dialog with Jesus”.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
I may be misremembering things I have read on Slate Star Codex as having them read on Less Wrong. (I wonder how to fix this. Should I keep bookmarks every time something rubs me the wrong way, so that when it happens hundred times I can document the pattern?)
By the way, I don’t think the problem with explaining meditation/enlightenment/Buddhist stuff is going to go away soon. Like, there are entire countries that practice this stuff for thousand years, and… they have hundred schools that disagree with each other, and also nothing convicing to show. A part of that is because communicating about inner content is difficult, but I believe a significant part is that self-deception is involved at some level. I don’t believe that a brain described in Elephant in the Brain simply gets more accurate insights by doing lots of introspection regularly. (Note than in the traditional setting, those insights include remembering your previous lives. Even if no one in the rationalist community buys the part about the previous lives, they still insist that the same process—which led other people to remembering their previous lives—leads to superior insights.)
Fair points. My comment was more a result of years (looking at the “kensho” article, yep, it’s already two years) of accumulated frustration, than anything else. Sorry for that.
From my perspective, the skepticism seems surprisingly mild. Imagine a parallel reality, where a CFAR instuctor instead says he found praying to Jesus really helpful… in ways that are impossible to describe other than by analogy (“truly looking at Jesus is like finally looking up from your smartphone”) and claims that Jesus helps him at improving CFAR exercises or understanding people. -- I would have expected a reaction much stronger than “your description does not really help me to start the dialog with Jesus”.
Interestingly, clone of saturn’s comment in that debate seems like a summary of the PNSE paper:
I may be misremembering things I have read on Slate Star Codex as having them read on Less Wrong. (I wonder how to fix this. Should I keep bookmarks every time something rubs me the wrong way, so that when it happens hundred times I can document the pattern?)
By the way, I don’t think the problem with explaining meditation/enlightenment/Buddhist stuff is going to go away soon. Like, there are entire countries that practice this stuff for thousand years, and… they have hundred schools that disagree with each other, and also nothing convicing to show. A part of that is because communicating about inner content is difficult, but I believe a significant part is that self-deception is involved at some level. I don’t believe that a brain described in Elephant in the Brain simply gets more accurate insights by doing lots of introspection regularly. (Note than in the traditional setting, those insights include remembering your previous lives. Even if no one in the rationalist community buys the part about the previous lives, they still insist that the same process—which led other people to remembering their previous lives—leads to superior insights.)