[Re-asking a question i phrased awkwardly] You have previously described your pre-enlightenment state as being full of suffering you were unaware of. Do you have externally legible reasons to think that your current perspective is correct and the perspective of your past-self about his experience is not? Or, how a different commenter phrased it:
You’re like:
T=0: “I’m fine” T=1: Meditation T=2: “Oh, I actually wasn’t fine, it was a torment!”
Hypothesis 1: You suffered but somehow this information never arrived to verbal thoughts Hypothesis 2: You didn’t suffer, but after T=1 your perception changed and now the same things make you suffer.
Why do you think it’s the first one that is correct?
Not a conclusive answer, but I’ve had cases where I’ve gone “oh I didn’t realize how bad I was feeling” for more mundane reasons. Like not realizing how tired I was before I managed to take a nap, not realizing how hungry I was before I got some food, and not realizing how uncomfortable I found some social situation before I got out of it. It seems like a default tendency of the mind to suppress awareness of discomfort it can’t currently do anything about.
Thanks, I think this could be what is happening. But: 1. Your examples that illustrate confusion/mistakes about one’s mental state are, how to put it, small-scale. I feel like there’s a huge leap between “Sometimes a person doesn’t realize how tired they are for a few hours (maybe days)” or “Some fraction of people who get depressed don’t realize it for months (maybe years)” and “Basically everyone’s default state is suffering they’re unaware of, and they don’t realize this during their whole lives”. Maybe you could come up with examples where misconceptions about one’s mental state are more severe, longer-lasting or more common than in my depression example, but I think there would probably be a huge gap between that and the “default state is suffering” hypothesis. 2. My understanding is that the typical reported experience of high school is mostly negative valence, but as people grow up they start to look back on that time in their lives ever more fondly. I don’t have a great model of how this works psychologically, but, when it happens, I’m inclined to think that the changed perspective is wrong. That the high-school-version of a person was more correct about his mental state than the current-version. All of which is to say that when one thinks “My past-self was unaware (or mistaken) of important parts of their conscious experience”, in most cases, this is correct, but in the high school and constant-suffering cases, it seems likely to me that one is wrong.
Are you confident that those are cases where you were actually having the feeling, but were unaware of it? I think sometimes it’s more a case of “my body needed [food/sleep], and this explains why I was feeling [irritable/weak/distracted/sad]”, rather than literally “I was feeling [hungry/tired] but didn’t notice it”.
I’d say it was something like “feeling [weak/confused/etc.] but having temporarily forgotten what not having those feelings is like, so thinking that I feel normal”.
I’m also interested in an answer to this question. I read the exchange here, and I found lsusr’s response very reasonable in isolation, but not really an answer to the main question: if past-you didn’t think he was suffering, and present-you disagrees, why should we take the side of present-you? To me, it’s natural to trust hindsight in some domains, but when it comes to the question of what you were directly experiencing at a specific time, the most natural explanation of your changed opinion is that you either have adopted a new definition of ‘suffering’ or are recalling your memories through a new lens which is distorting your view of what you were actually experiencing in the moment. (I think the latter is quite common, e.g. when we nostalgically look back on a time that now represents hope and excitement, but actually consisted largely of frustration and anxiety.)
What do you mean by “externally legible”? “Understandable by someone who has not had the experience” or “provable, despite being a difficullt-to-verify internal mental state”?
[EDIT Actually, nevermind. After reading answers downstream of this comment, it’s clear to me that when I asked about ‘suffering’ I meant something quite different from your conception of suffering. I’m no longer confused about why you would say that non-enlightenment is constant suffering, but I don’t see why it would be worth getting rid of.]
The latter option would be a very tall order. What I meant was that among
Hypothesis 1: You suffered but somehow this information never arrived to verbal thoughts Hypothesis 2: You didn’t suffer, but after T=1 your perception changed and now the same things make you suffer.
Hypothesis 1. strikes me as very implausible a priori, for reasons I mentioned in my answer to Kaj. So, do you have an argument that it is not as unlikely as I think, that would be, indeed, “Understandable by someone who has not had the experience”.
[Re-asking a question i phrased awkwardly]
You have previously described your pre-enlightenment state as being full of suffering you were unaware of. Do you have externally legible reasons to think that your current perspective is correct and the perspective of your past-self about his experience is not?
Or, how a different commenter phrased it:
Not a conclusive answer, but I’ve had cases where I’ve gone “oh I didn’t realize how bad I was feeling” for more mundane reasons. Like not realizing how tired I was before I managed to take a nap, not realizing how hungry I was before I got some food, and not realizing how uncomfortable I found some social situation before I got out of it. It seems like a default tendency of the mind to suppress awareness of discomfort it can’t currently do anything about.
Thanks, I think this could be what is happening. But:
1. Your examples that illustrate confusion/mistakes about one’s mental state are, how to put it, small-scale. I feel like there’s a huge leap between “Sometimes a person doesn’t realize how tired they are for a few hours (maybe days)” or “Some fraction of people who get depressed don’t realize it for months (maybe years)” and “Basically everyone’s default state is suffering they’re unaware of, and they don’t realize this during their whole lives”. Maybe you could come up with examples where misconceptions about one’s mental state are more severe, longer-lasting or more common than in my depression example, but I think there would probably be a huge gap between that and the “default state is suffering” hypothesis.
2. My understanding is that the typical reported experience of high school is mostly negative valence, but as people grow up they start to look back on that time in their lives ever more fondly. I don’t have a great model of how this works psychologically, but, when it happens, I’m inclined to think that the changed perspective is wrong. That the high-school-version of a person was more correct about his mental state than the current-version. All of which is to say that when one thinks “My past-self was unaware (or mistaken) of important parts of their conscious experience”, in most cases, this is correct, but in the high school and constant-suffering cases, it seems likely to me that one is wrong.
Are you confident that those are cases where you were actually having the feeling, but were unaware of it? I think sometimes it’s more a case of “my body needed [food/sleep], and this explains why I was feeling [irritable/weak/distracted/sad]”, rather than literally “I was feeling [hungry/tired] but didn’t notice it”.
I’d say it was something like “feeling [weak/confused/etc.] but having temporarily forgotten what not having those feelings is like, so thinking that I feel normal”.
I’m also interested in an answer to this question. I read the exchange here, and I found lsusr’s response very reasonable in isolation, but not really an answer to the main question: if past-you didn’t think he was suffering, and present-you disagrees, why should we take the side of present-you? To me, it’s natural to trust hindsight in some domains, but when it comes to the question of what you were directly experiencing at a specific time, the most natural explanation of your changed opinion is that you either have adopted a new definition of ‘suffering’ or are recalling your memories through a new lens which is distorting your view of what you were actually experiencing in the moment. (I think the latter is quite common, e.g. when we nostalgically look back on a time that now represents hope and excitement, but actually consisted largely of frustration and anxiety.)
What do you mean by “externally legible”? “Understandable by someone who has not had the experience” or “provable, despite being a difficullt-to-verify internal mental state”?
[EDIT Actually, nevermind. After reading answers downstream of this comment, it’s clear to me that when I asked about ‘suffering’ I meant something quite different from your conception of suffering. I’m no longer confused about why you would say that non-enlightenment is constant suffering, but I don’t see why it would be worth getting rid of.]
The latter option would be a very tall order. What I meant was that among
Hypothesis 1. strikes me as very implausible a priori, for reasons I mentioned in my answer to Kaj. So, do you have an argument that it is not as unlikely as I think, that would be, indeed, “Understandable by someone who has not had the experience”.