You touched on something meditators (buddha, lao tzu, etc) were talking about:
The brain detects a plausibly threatening sensation and generates mild pain
We become afraid this pain signals tissue damage (often due to prior experience or general anxiety)
This fear directly increases the brain’s threat assessment and attention to the sensations
The brain produces more pain as a protective response
-->Increased pain confirms our fear, amplifying it and repeating the cycle
Unwinding this process completely all around within your entire body and mind these figures would call ‘enlightment’. This concerns not just chronic pain. There is a sense in which we all have chronic pain. continuously. Furthermore, even the pain of stubbing your toe is 95% the above process (claims).
Meditation is resolving these predictive processing errors through various techniques down to the cellular level through top-down predictive rewiring (a few of which you talked about). Once you do so you will feel genuinely free from most of the pain generating processes within yourself and also be much healthier physically.
I’m on board with most of this, but I get stuck at the “cellular‑level” part.
It is useful to ask how far meditation (or any mental practice) can actually influence the body at the cellular scale. In one sense everything we do is “cellular” because we are made of cells. I assume you mean something narrower, but I’m not sure what.
For context: there is roughly one nervous‑system cell for every 100 000 other cells in the body. So any mental intervention can only act on most tissues indirectly. Are you talking only about neurons and glia, or do you think the effects propagate further?
I think the answer is yes: it necessarily propagates further. An analogy is kind of like how not every human in society watches the news but the news generally diffuses through the entire network (I think increasing the connectivity of this is itself one of the things I expect meditation to do)
This is my intuitive understanding, you may find a more rigorous answer here in the theory of vasocomputation:
You touched on something meditators (buddha, lao tzu, etc) were talking about:
The brain detects a plausibly threatening sensation and generates mild pain
We become afraid this pain signals tissue damage (often due to prior experience or general anxiety)
This fear directly increases the brain’s threat assessment and attention to the sensations
The brain produces more pain as a protective response
-->Increased pain confirms our fear, amplifying it and repeating the cycle
Unwinding this process completely all around within your entire body and mind these figures would call ‘enlightment’. This concerns not just chronic pain. There is a sense in which we all have chronic pain. continuously. Furthermore, even the pain of stubbing your toe is 95% the above process (claims).
Meditation is resolving these predictive processing errors through various techniques down to the cellular level through top-down predictive rewiring (a few of which you talked about). Once you do so you will feel genuinely free from most of the pain generating processes within yourself and also be much healthier physically.
I’m on board with most of this, but I get stuck at the “cellular‑level” part.
It is useful to ask how far meditation (or any mental practice) can actually influence the body at the cellular scale. In one sense everything we do is “cellular” because we are made of cells. I assume you mean something narrower, but I’m not sure what.
For context: there is roughly one nervous‑system cell for every 100 000 other cells in the body. So any mental intervention can only act on most tissues indirectly. Are you talking only about neurons and glia, or do you think the effects propagate further?
I think the answer is yes: it necessarily propagates further. An analogy is kind of like how not every human in society watches the news but the news generally diffuses through the entire network (I think increasing the connectivity of this is itself one of the things I expect meditation to do)
This is my intuitive understanding, you may find a more rigorous answer here in the theory of vasocomputation:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2og6RReKD47vseK8/how-i-started-believing-religion-might-actually-matter-for?commentId=xxudw3eh4cLAApvSL