Importantly, though, that still doesn’t answer whether this would be deepening wisdom or confusion. One person’s growth is another one’s value drift.
Thank you for saying this. There is a gap between “you can make your mind go X” and “making your mind go X is a good thing (according to whatever value system)”. That is a part of my objection to Buddhism—okay, there is a technology to make people’s minds go X, and there is a religion that treats X as high status, but… why should that be convincing to me? I am not religious, and I am not necessarily impressed by what religious people assign high status to. (I value “being able to make your mind go X” as a cool thing, but is that alone worth the cost?)
I also feel weird because some of these mysterious mind states are actually not unknown to me. (Or are they? That’s difficult to say; people may be using similar words to describe different things. Or different words, but just because they are not fluent in the Buddhist lingo.) I have experienced mental states when I felt okay with the idea of my own death. But why should the opinion of those mental states be preferred to the opinion of other mental states when I strongly prefer to live, to be able to experience and influence things? Some people would say that the feelings of equanimity are higher status (although they wouldn’t use these exact words), but that’s no reason for me to care. I might instead use a democratic vote weighed by time intervals, where equanimity would score worse than lizard-men. (My actual approach would probably be something like: which parts of my story make a coherent, reflectively endorsed narrative. But done intuitively, not using some explicit algorithm.)
I suspect that if people experience a weird emotion for the first time under an influence of an ideology, that makes it more difficult to evaluate the experience impartially.
Thank you for saying this. There is a gap between “you can make your mind go X” and “making your mind go X is a good thing (according to whatever value system)”. That is a part of my objection to Buddhism—okay, there is a technology to make people’s minds go X, and there is a religion that treats X as high status, but… why should that be convincing to me? I am not religious, and I am not necessarily impressed by what religious people assign high status to. (I value “being able to make your mind go X” as a cool thing, but is that alone worth the cost?)
I also feel weird because some of these mysterious mind states are actually not unknown to me. (Or are they? That’s difficult to say; people may be using similar words to describe different things. Or different words, but just because they are not fluent in the Buddhist lingo.) I have experienced mental states when I felt okay with the idea of my own death. But why should the opinion of those mental states be preferred to the opinion of other mental states when I strongly prefer to live, to be able to experience and influence things? Some people would say that the feelings of equanimity are higher status (although they wouldn’t use these exact words), but that’s no reason for me to care. I might instead use a democratic vote weighed by time intervals, where equanimity would score worse than lizard-men. (My actual approach would probably be something like: which parts of my story make a coherent, reflectively endorsed narrative. But done intuitively, not using some explicit algorithm.)
I suspect that if people experience a weird emotion for the first time under an influence of an ideology, that makes it more difficult to evaluate the experience impartially.