One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”
“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”
I don’t think there’s such a thing as “unmediated experience of the world”.
(I like the quotation a lot for giving a plausible, lucid reason why Zen might spurn the usual sort of analytical discourse. But it’s so clear an explanation of an idea that I think it’s revealed a basic problem with the idea, namely that it points towards a non-existent goal.)
That’s an interesting question—“mediated” should probably be modified by “of what?” and “by what?”.
It’s definitely possible for perceptions to become less mediated by focusing on small details so that prototypes aren’t dominant. It’s possible to become a lot more perceptive about color, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is about seeing angles, lengths, shading, curves, etc. rather than objects and thus being able to draw accurately.
If you get some distance on your emotions through meditation and/or CBT, is your experience of your emotions less mediated? More mediated? Wrong questions? I think meditators assume that the calm you achieve is already there—you just weren’t noticing it until you meditated enough, so your emotions are more mediated and your calm is less mediated, but now that I’ve put it into words, I’m not sure what you would use for evidence that the calm was always there rather than created by meditation.
Thank you for the evidence that it’s possible to get 12 karma points for something that doesn’t exactly make sense.
It’s like neutrality on Wikipedia. You’ll never attain neutrality, but there is such a thing as less and more, and you want to head in the “more” direction.
I think I see what you mean; if I mentally substitute “is closer to an” for “involves the”, and “that state would have” for “that state has”, the practice the quotation describes makes more sense to me. (I’m leery of the idea that it’s better to head in the direction of less mediation — taking off my glasses doesn’t give me a clearer view of the world — but that’s a different objection.)
So while the original quotation talked about not thinking at all, your revised version urges that we think as little as possible. How does it qualify as a “rationality quote”?
It can be rationally beneficial to realise now much mediation is involved in perception, in the same way it is useful to replace naive ealism with scientific realism.
Relatively unmediated perception is also aesthetically interesting, and therefore of terminal value to many.
Because causal mechanisms to relay information from the world to one’s brain are a necessary prerequisite for “experience of the world”, so one’s “experience of the world” is always mediated by those causal mechanisms.
I doubt it’s possible. I’m sceptical that one can cleanly sort every experience-related bodily mechanism into a “cognitive” category xor a “perceptual” category. Intuitively, for example, I might think of my eyes as perceptual, and the parts of my brain that process visual signals as cognitive, but if all of those bits of my brain were cut out, I’d expect to see nothing at all, not an “unmediated” view of the world — which implies my brain is perceptual as well as cognitive. So I expect the idea of just shutting down the cognitive mechanisms and leaving the perceptual mechanisms intact is incoherent.
(Often there’re also external physical mechanisms which are further mediators. You can’t see an object without light going from the object to your eye, and you can’t hear something without a medium between the source and your ear.)
(Presumably your first “that” is meant to be a “what”?) That question implies a false dichotomy too. The mistaken people might not be mistaken about what anyone thinks unmediated experience is; perhaps everyone pretty much agrees on what it is, and the mistaken people are simply misremembering or misinterpreting their own experiences.
This conversation might be more productive if you switch from Socratic questioning to simply presenting a reasonable definition of “unmediated experience” according to which unmediated experience exists. After all, your true objection seems to be that I’m using a bad definition.
Anybody can be wrong about anything, That isn’t an interesting observation, because it is general. Earlier you gave a specific reason, which you think is empirical, and I think is partly conceptual.
I believe them. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s possible to have the subjective experience of a divine presence—there’s too much agreement on the broad strokes of how one feels, across cultures and religions, for it to be otherwise. Though on the other hand, some of the more specific takes on it might be bullshit, and basic cynicism suggests that some of the people talking about feeling God’s presence are lying.
Seems reasonable to extend the same level of credulity to claims about enlightenment experiences. That’s not to say that Buddhism is necessarily right about how they hash out in terms of mental/spiritual benefits, or in terms of what they actually mean cognitively, of course.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Who knows, could be even one and the same experience which people raised in one culture interpret as God’s presence, and in another as enlightenment.
Words are used to point to places. The thing that comes to your mind when you hear the words “unmediated experience of the world” might not exist. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t using people who use that phrase to point to something real.
Couldn’t you say exactly that to anyone who doubts the existence of anything?
You could. And the way to resolve a dispute over the existence of, say, unicorns, would be to determine what is being meant by the word, in terms of what observations their existence implies that you will be more likely to see. Then you can go and make those observations.
The problem with talk of mental phenomena like “unmediated perception” is that it is difficult to do this, because the words are pointing into the mind of the person using them, which no-one else can see. Or worse, the person isn’t pointing anywhere, but repeating something someone else has said, without having had personal experience. How can you tell whether a disagreement is due to the words being used differently, the minds being actually different, or the words and the minds being much the same but the people having differing awareness of their respective minds?
This is a problem I have with pretty much everything I have read about meditation. I can follow the external instructions about sitting, but if I cannot match up the description of the results to be supposedly obtained with my experience, there isn’t anywhere to go with that.
Couldn’t you say exactly that to anyone who doubts the existence of anything?
The assumptions in that sentence are interesting. It presupposes that a debate is an interaction
where you compete against other person by proving them wrong. I rather want to offer friendly way to improve understanding. Whether or not the other person accept it is their choice.
In cases like this it’s very useful to think about what people mean with words and not go with your first impression of what they might mean.
It presupposes that a debate is an interaction where you compete against other person by proving them wrong.
I don’t think so. I just meant to point out that what you said was a triviality. If you intended it as a protreptic triviality, that’s fine, I have no objection and that’s justification enough for me.
I mean something which follows from anything. I don’t intend it as a term of disapprobation: trivialities are often good ways of expressing a thought, if not literally what was said. If you intended this: “In cases like this it’s very useful to think about what people mean with words and not go with your first impression of what they might mean” then I agree with you, and with the need to say it. I just missed your point the first time around (and if you were to ask me, you put the point much better when you explained it to me).
Yes, that roughly what I mean. However there might be no way for you to know what they mean if you lack certain experiences.
If a New Agey person speaks about how the observer effect in Quantum physics means X, his problem is that he doesn’t have any idea what “observer” means for a physicist. Actually getting the person to understand what “observer” means to a physicist isn’t something that you accomplish in an hour if the person has a total lack of physics background. .
The same is true in reverse. It’s not straightforward for the physicist to understand what the New Agey person means. Understanding people with a very different mindset then you is hard.
Actually getting the person to understand what “observer” means to a physicist isn’t something that you accomplish in an hour if the person has a total lack of physics background....It’s not straightforward for the physicist to understand what the New Agey person means.
This entails that it is possible to simply explain what you mean, even across very large inferential gaps.
However there might be no way for you to know what they mean if you lack certain experiences.
Yet here you seem to entertain the idea that it’s sometimes impossible to explain what you mean, because a certain special experience is necessary.
I endorse the first of these two points, and I’m extremely skeptical about the second. It also seems to me that physicists tend to hold to the first, and new agers tend to hold to the second, and that this constitutes much of the difference in their epistemic virtue.
Yet here you seem to entertain the idea that it’s sometimes impossible to explain what you mean
I said impossible in an hour not impossible in general. It simple might take a few years. There a scene in Neuromancer where at the end one protagonist asks the AI why another acted the way they did. The first answer is: It’s unexplainable. Then the answer is, it’s not really unexplainable but would take 37 years to explain. (my memory on the exact number might not be accurate)
On the other hand the idea that teaching new phenomenological primitives is extremely hard. It takes more than an hour to teach a child that objects don’t fall because they are heavy but because of gravity. Yes, you might get some token agreement but when you ask questions the person still thinks that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because they haven’t really understand the concept on a deep level. In physics education it’s called teaching phenomenological primitives.
This entails that it is possible to simply explain what you mean, even across very large inferential gaps.
You can’t explain a blind man what red looks like. There are discussions that are about qualia.
but when you ask questions the person still thinks that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because they haven’t really understand the concept on a deep level.
No, they think that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because that’s how it actually works for most familiar objects falling through air.
If you’ve just been telling without demonstrating, this is pure reliance on authority.
If you’ve just been telling without demonstrating, this is pure reliance on authority.
(Or taking a hypothetical seriously.)
An important factor is just understanding the details of how everything supposedly fits together. Even if you don’t know from observation that it’s the way things work in our world, there is evidence in seeing a coherent theory, as opposed to contradictory lies and confusion. Inventing a robust description of a different world is hard, more likely it’s just truth about ours.
No, they think that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because that’s how it actually works for most familiar objects falling through air.
Empty water bottles don’t exactly fall faster than full water bottles.
But my point isn’t about whether you rely or authority or don’t but on how people actually make decisions. There literature on phenomenological primitives in physics.
The one time we tested the theory of gravity experimentally in school I did not get numbers that the Newtonian formula predicted. At the same time I don’t think those formula are wrong. I believe them because smart people tell me that they are true and I don’t care enough about physics to investigate the matter further.
Empty water bottles don’t exactly fall faster than full water bottles.
Through air full water bottles do fall faster than empty ones.
The one time we tested the theory of gravity experimentally in school I did not get numbers that the Newtonian formula predicted. At the same time I don’t think those formula are wrong. I believe them because smart people tell me that they are true and I don’t care enough about physics to investigate the matter further.
LOL. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Through air full water bottles do fall faster than empty ones.
A bit maybe but I think they should have roughly the same speed. How much faster do you think they would fall?
LOL. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Sometimes you have to make hard choices...
There was a time were I thought it was about picking sides and being for empiricism or against it. I’m well past that point. There are times when believing the authority is simply the right choice.
A bit maybe but I think they should have roughly the same speed. How much faster do you think they would fall?
If the fall is sufficiently long, they reach different terminal velocities, which are proportional to the square root of their masses. According to the Teh Interwebz, an average 0.5 litre empty plastic bottle weights about 13 g. A full bottle weights 513 g. Therefore, at terminal velocity it falls about 6.3 times faster.
It depends on the drag coefficient and forward projected surface area of the bottle. My mildly informed guess is that it would take between 20 and 30 seconds.
EDIT:
Actually, I’ve just tried dropping 1.5 litre bottles from an height of about 1.8 m. Even if the fall lasts perhaps one second, the empty bottle starts to tumble much more than the full one, and hits the ground a noticeably later.
Information isn’t free and there are many cases where gathering more information is too expensive and who have to go with the best authority that’s available.
On the other hand it’s worthwhile to be conscious of the decision that one makes in that regard. Most people follow authorities for all the wrong reasons.
It takes more than an hour to teach a child that objects don’t fall because they are heavy but because of gravity.
“Because of gravity” isn’t any better an explanation than “because they are heavy”. Why does “gravity” accelerate all masses the same? Really thinking about that leads to general relativity, so it actually takes many years to explain why things fall, and it can’t be done without going through calculus, topology, and differential geometry.
Just being able to recite “because of gravity” is not enough for many purposes. I myself did well in physics at school and finished best in class in it but I haven’t studied any physics since then and I’m well aware that I don’t understand advanced physics.
“Because of gravity” isn’t any better an explanation than “because they are heavy”.
It’s not perfect but it is better. Airplanes fly well based on Newtonian physics.
The principle of charity relates to what people mean by what they say. Unmitigated experience might be empirically nonexistent under one interpretation of unmediated but not under another. If someone claims to have had unmediated experience , that is evidence relating to what they mean by their words.
David Chess
I don’t think there’s such a thing as “unmediated experience of the world”.
(I like the quotation a lot for giving a plausible, lucid reason why Zen might spurn the usual sort of analytical discourse. But it’s so clear an explanation of an idea that I think it’s revealed a basic problem with the idea, namely that it points towards a non-existent goal.)
There is such a thing as a less mediated experience of the world.
Can you give some examples of more and less mediated experiences?
That’s an interesting question—“mediated” should probably be modified by “of what?” and “by what?”.
It’s definitely possible for perceptions to become less mediated by focusing on small details so that prototypes aren’t dominant. It’s possible to become a lot more perceptive about color, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is about seeing angles, lengths, shading, curves, etc. rather than objects and thus being able to draw accurately.
If you get some distance on your emotions through meditation and/or CBT, is your experience of your emotions less mediated? More mediated? Wrong questions? I think meditators assume that the calm you achieve is already there—you just weren’t noticing it until you meditated enough, so your emotions are more mediated and your calm is less mediated, but now that I’ve put it into words, I’m not sure what you would use for evidence that the calm was always there rather than created by meditation.
Thank you for the evidence that it’s possible to get 12 karma points for something that doesn’t exactly make sense.
Reasoning inductively rather than deductively, over uncompressed data rather than summaries.
Mediated: “The numbers between 3 and 7” Unmediated: “||| |||| ||||| |||||| |||||||”
It’s like neutrality on Wikipedia. You’ll never attain neutrality, but there is such a thing as less and more, and you want to head in the “more” direction.
I think I see what you mean; if I mentally substitute “is closer to an” for “involves the”, and “that state would have” for “that state has”, the practice the quotation describes makes more sense to me. (I’m leery of the idea that it’s better to head in the direction of less mediation — taking off my glasses doesn’t give me a clearer view of the world — but that’s a different objection.)
So while the original quotation talked about not thinking at all, your revised version urges that we think as little as possible. How does it qualify as a “rationality quote”?
It can be rationally beneficial to realise now much mediation is involved in perception, in the same way it is useful to replace naive ealism with scientific realism.
Relatively unmediated perception is also aesthetically interesting, and therefore of terminal value to many.
You tell me; I have to squint pretty hard to make it read as telling me something useful about rationality.
Because? People who claim it are lying? You dont have it, and your mind is typical?
Or maybe they and satt mean different things by “unmediated”.
Because causal mechanisms to relay information from the world to one’s brain are a necessary prerequisite for “experience of the world”, so one’s “experience of the world” is always mediated by those causal mechanisms.
And it’s not possible for just the cognitive mechanisms to shut down, and leave the perceptual ones?
If you shut down the cognitive mechanisms completely, would you even remember what you have perceived? Or even that you have perceived something?
Maybe not. That matches some reports of nonordinary experience.
I doubt it’s possible. I’m sceptical that one can cleanly sort every experience-related bodily mechanism into a “cognitive” category xor a “perceptual” category. Intuitively, for example, I might think of my eyes as perceptual, and the parts of my brain that process visual signals as cognitive, but if all of those bits of my brain were cut out, I’d expect to see nothing at all, not an “unmediated” view of the world — which implies my brain is perceptual as well as cognitive. So I expect the idea of just shutting down the cognitive mechanisms and leaving the perceptual mechanisms intact is incoherent.
(Often there’re also external physical mechanisms which are further mediators. You can’t see an object without light going from the object to your eye, and you can’t hear something without a medium between the source and your ear.)
So are people who claim unmediated experience lying?
Or using a different definition of “unmediated”, or confused about their experience, or...
My best guess is that the vast majority of them are sincere. Being correct vs. being a liar is a false dichotomy.
So are they sincerely ,mistaken about that they think unmediated experience is, or about what you think it is?
(Presumably your first “that” is meant to be a “what”?) That question implies a false dichotomy too. The mistaken people might not be mistaken about what anyone thinks unmediated experience is; perhaps everyone pretty much agrees on what it is, and the mistaken people are simply misremembering or misinterpreting their own experiences.
This conversation might be more productive if you switch from Socratic questioning to simply presenting a reasonable definition of “unmediated experience” according to which unmediated experience exists. After all, your true objection seems to be that I’m using a bad definition.
Anybody can be wrong about anything, That isn’t an interesting observation, because it is general. Earlier you gave a specific reason, which you think is empirical, and I think is partly conceptual.
There are also people who claim that they feel God’s presence in their heart, you know.
I believe them. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s possible to have the subjective experience of a divine presence—there’s too much agreement on the broad strokes of how one feels, across cultures and religions, for it to be otherwise. Though on the other hand, some of the more specific takes on it might be bullshit, and basic cynicism suggests that some of the people talking about feeling God’s presence are lying.
Seems reasonable to extend the same level of credulity to claims about enlightenment experiences. That’s not to say that Buddhism is necessarily right about how they hash out in terms of mental/spiritual benefits, or in terms of what they actually mean cognitively, of course.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Who knows, could be even one and the same experience which people raised in one culture interpret as God’s presence, and in another as enlightenment.
The research summarized in this book seems to suggest that this is indeed the case.
And people who claim to see cold fusion and canals on mars.
There is a happy medium between treating empirical evidence as infallible, and dismissing it as not conforming to your favourite theory.
Words are used to point to places. The thing that comes to your mind when you hear the words “unmediated experience of the world” might not exist. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t using people who use that phrase to point to something real.
Couldn’t you say exactly that to anyone who doubts the existence of anything?
You could. And the way to resolve a dispute over the existence of, say, unicorns, would be to determine what is being meant by the word, in terms of what observations their existence implies that you will be more likely to see. Then you can go and make those observations.
The problem with talk of mental phenomena like “unmediated perception” is that it is difficult to do this, because the words are pointing into the mind of the person using them, which no-one else can see. Or worse, the person isn’t pointing anywhere, but repeating something someone else has said, without having had personal experience. How can you tell whether a disagreement is due to the words being used differently, the minds being actually different, or the words and the minds being much the same but the people having differing awareness of their respective minds?
This is a problem I have with pretty much everything I have read about meditation. I can follow the external instructions about sitting, but if I cannot match up the description of the results to be supposedly obtained with my experience, there isn’t anywhere to go with that.
The assumptions in that sentence are interesting. It presupposes that a debate is an interaction where you compete against other person by proving them wrong. I rather want to offer friendly way to improve understanding. Whether or not the other person accept it is their choice.
In cases like this it’s very useful to think about what people mean with words and not go with your first impression of what they might mean.
I don’t think so. I just meant to point out that what you said was a triviality. If you intended it as a protreptic triviality, that’s fine, I have no objection and that’s justification enough for me.
Could you define what you mean with “triviality”?
I mean something which follows from anything. I don’t intend it as a term of disapprobation: trivialities are often good ways of expressing a thought, if not literally what was said. If you intended this: “In cases like this it’s very useful to think about what people mean with words and not go with your first impression of what they might mean” then I agree with you, and with the need to say it. I just missed your point the first time around (and if you were to ask me, you put the point much better when you explained it to me).
Yes, that roughly what I mean. However there might be no way for you to know what they mean if you lack certain experiences.
If a New Agey person speaks about how the observer effect in Quantum physics means X, his problem is that he doesn’t have any idea what “observer” means for a physicist. Actually getting the person to understand what “observer” means to a physicist isn’t something that you accomplish in an hour if the person has a total lack of physics background. .
The same is true in reverse. It’s not straightforward for the physicist to understand what the New Agey person means. Understanding people with a very different mindset then you is hard.
You seem to be saying two things here:
This entails that it is possible to simply explain what you mean, even across very large inferential gaps.
Yet here you seem to entertain the idea that it’s sometimes impossible to explain what you mean, because a certain special experience is necessary.
I endorse the first of these two points, and I’m extremely skeptical about the second. It also seems to me that physicists tend to hold to the first, and new agers tend to hold to the second, and that this constitutes much of the difference in their epistemic virtue.
I said impossible in an hour not impossible in general. It simple might take a few years. There a scene in Neuromancer where at the end one protagonist asks the AI why another acted the way they did. The first answer is: It’s unexplainable. Then the answer is, it’s not really unexplainable but would take 37 years to explain. (my memory on the exact number might not be accurate)
On the other hand the idea that teaching new phenomenological primitives is extremely hard. It takes more than an hour to teach a child that objects don’t fall because they are heavy but because of gravity. Yes, you might get some token agreement but when you ask questions the person still thinks that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because they haven’t really understand the concept on a deep level. In physics education it’s called teaching phenomenological primitives.
You can’t explain a blind man what red looks like. There are discussions that are about qualia.
No, they think that a heavy object ought to fall faster than a light one because that’s how it actually works for most familiar objects falling through air.
If you’ve just been telling without demonstrating, this is pure reliance on authority.
(Or taking a hypothetical seriously.)
An important factor is just understanding the details of how everything supposedly fits together. Even if you don’t know from observation that it’s the way things work in our world, there is evidence in seeing a coherent theory, as opposed to contradictory lies and confusion. Inventing a robust description of a different world is hard, more likely it’s just truth about ours.
Empty water bottles don’t exactly fall faster than full water bottles.
But my point isn’t about whether you rely or authority or don’t but on how people actually make decisions. There literature on phenomenological primitives in physics.
The one time we tested the theory of gravity experimentally in school I did not get numbers that the Newtonian formula predicted. At the same time I don’t think those formula are wrong. I believe them because smart people tell me that they are true and I don’t care enough about physics to investigate the matter further.
Through air full water bottles do fall faster than empty ones.
LOL. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
A bit maybe but I think they should have roughly the same speed. How much faster do you think they would fall?
Sometimes you have to make hard choices...
There was a time were I thought it was about picking sides and being for empiricism or against it. I’m well past that point. There are times when believing the authority is simply the right choice.
If the fall is sufficiently long, they reach different terminal velocities, which are proportional to the square root of their masses.
According to the Teh Interwebz, an average 0.5 litre empty plastic bottle weights about 13 g. A full bottle weights 513 g. Therefore, at terminal velocity it falls about 6.3 times faster.
What does sufficiently long mean in practice?
It depends on the drag coefficient and forward projected surface area of the bottle. My mildly informed guess is that it would take between 20 and 30 seconds.
EDIT:
Actually, I’ve just tried dropping 1.5 litre bottles from an height of about 1.8 m. Even if the fall lasts perhaps one second, the empty bottle starts to tumble much more than the full one, and hits the ground a noticeably later.
In epistemic matters? I don’t think so.
Information isn’t free and there are many cases where gathering more information is too expensive and who have to go with the best authority that’s available.
On the other hand it’s worthwhile to be conscious of the decision that one makes in that regard. Most people follow authorities for all the wrong reasons.
“Because of gravity” isn’t any better an explanation than “because they are heavy”. Why does “gravity” accelerate all masses the same? Really thinking about that leads to general relativity, so it actually takes many years to explain why things fall, and it can’t be done without going through calculus, topology, and differential geometry.
Cf. Feynman on explanations (07:10–09:05).
Just being able to recite “because of gravity” is not enough for many purposes. I myself did well in physics at school and finished best in class in it but I haven’t studied any physics since then and I’m well aware that I don’t understand advanced physics.
It’s not perfect but it is better. Airplanes fly well based on Newtonian physics.
You can construe the goal as non existent, but that is an uncharitable reading.
Whether the goal exists is an empirical question, no...? I don’t understand where (a lack of) charity enters into it.
The principle of charity relates to what people mean by what they say. Unmitigated experience might be empirically nonexistent under one interpretation of unmediated but not under another. If someone claims to have had unmediated experience , that is evidence relating to what they mean by their words.
I see. What more charitable interpretation of “unmediated experience” would you prefer?
Maybe the PoC would be an easier sell if it were phrased in terms of the “typical semantics fallacy”.