I had a very interesting conversation with @davidad last year in which he framed the distinction between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in terms of predictive processing he drew an analogy between some ideas in predictive processing and the Theravada/Mahayana Buddhism distinction. Roughly paraphrasing:
Suppose that you have a world-model and a goal-model (where the goal-model is the same type of thing as a world-model, except representing the world you’d want not the world you think you’re in). The difference between them forces you to hold contradictory models of the world in your head. Let’s take as a premise (which I won’t defend here) that internal contradictions are a source of suffering. So in general you’d like to minimize the difference between your world-models and your goal-models. Some ways of doing so:
Action: you manipulate the world until your goals become true (and now your world-model matches your goal-model).
Delusion: you manipulate your perceptions so that you believe your goals have come true (even when they haven’t).
Acceptance: you give up on (some of) your goals, i.e. your goal-model changes to become more similar to your world-model. This can be described in terms of the stages of grief. It is IIUC what Theravada Buddhism recommends. My stereotype of Buddhism was that it told me to do something like this to discard all my goals; davidad’s idea was that this stereotype was more true of Theravada Buddhism but less true of Mahayana Buddhism.
Transformation: I’ve described suffering as being driven by the difference between world-model and goal-model, but haven’t specified what I actually mean by “difference”. This is in part because it’s possible to represent the same state of the world in many different ontologies, which will then affect how “far apart” those representations are (for any easy-to-calculate way of specifying distance). However, for the same reason, this means that two models of the world which appear to be far apart could in fact be brought “closer together” (and perhaps even arbitrarily close together) by changing the ontologies used to represent them.
IIRC, this is what Davidad claims Mahayana Buddhism recommends is somewhat analogous to. Importantly, you can do this process without changing your policy at all, since you’re still trying to move from the same world-state to the same goal-state (though in general changing your ontology will likely open up new possibilities for better policies—e.g. you might find less effortful paths from one to the other).
For example, “the current state of the world” and “world peace” might seem extremely different, causing someone who holds the latter as a goal to suffer a lot from thinking about the contrast. They might consider it very difficult to move from the former to the latter, and therefore only endorse plans which seem appropriately ambitious, like “global communism” or “put a superintelligence in charge of everything”. However, arguments like Steven Pinker’s might help them “zoom out” and see a perspective from which the current state of the world is actually very close to world peace, in terms of violent deaths per capita and other similar metrics. From within this new ontology, reaching “world peace” might merely be a matter of accelerating existing trends (and indeed, might even happen “by default” without anyone really trying to do so).
Idk if “transformation” is a good term for this though, open to suggestions for improvements.
Note that I’m being fuzzy here on what I mean by “difference” or “distance” because I don’t yet know how to pin down those terms precisely; I’m working on it, though. At the very least, we want to distinguish between how far apart they are ontologically (i.e. how different their representations are), and how far apart they are pragmatically (i.e. how hard is it to move from one to the other). When I talk about “difference” I am talking about the former, because that’s the only one that your brain can easily calculate. However, the ideal ontology might be one in which these two things approximately coincide. In such an ontology, you could always achieve your goals simply by “moving towards” your goals in some intuitive sense (instead of needing to sometimes go backwards in order to later go forwards).
Would it be terribly rude for me to point out that … you guys are making up a lot of shit about Buddhism? It’s like stumbling into a meetup of Creationists randomly speculating about physics and biology. It’s so far removed that it isn’t worth correcting you. You should just scrap it and start over. Or use very different terminology to talk about what it is you actually wish to talk about. You guys aren’t even close to describing the differences between Theravada and Mahayana.
“Dismantling your motives” is an interesting phrase, but I don’t know what it means. What does this actually entail? How does one achieve this?
I used to suffer from burnout all the time before I started Buddhist training. After a lot of effort, I did ‘dismantle’ that pattern. Does this count as dismantling my motives? Are we certain that the culture that perpetuates burnout as a common pattern among otherwise young, healthy people isn’t the cultural program that ‘dismantles your motives’?
Would it be terribly rude for me to point out that … you guys are making up a lot of shit about Buddhism?
I don’t know much about Buddhism, so it’s plausible that I garbled davidad’s original point. In particular, upon reflection I think he was more drawing a loose analogy than claiming to describe key features of either branch of Buddhism. I’ve edited the comment above to reflect this, since I don’t want to accidentally ascribe to him a less sensible position than he has.
I had a very interesting conversation with @davidad last year in which
he framed the distinction between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in terms of predictive processinghe drew an analogy between some ideas in predictive processing and the Theravada/Mahayana Buddhism distinction. Roughly paraphrasing:Suppose that you have a world-model and a goal-model (where the goal-model is the same type of thing as a world-model, except representing the world you’d want not the world you think you’re in). The difference between them forces you to hold contradictory models of the world in your head. Let’s take as a premise (which I won’t defend here) that internal contradictions are a source of suffering. So in general you’d like to minimize the difference between your world-models and your goal-models. Some ways of doing so:
Action: you manipulate the world until your goals become true (and now your world-model matches your goal-model).
Delusion: you manipulate your perceptions so that you believe your goals have come true (even when they haven’t).
Acceptance: you give up on (some of) your goals, i.e. your goal-model changes to become more similar to your world-model. This can be described in terms of the stages of grief.
It is IIUC what Theravada Buddhism recommends.My stereotype of Buddhism was that it told me to do something like this to discard all my goals; davidad’s idea was that this stereotype was more true of Theravada Buddhism but less true of Mahayana Buddhism.Transformation: I’ve described suffering as being driven by the difference between world-model and goal-model, but haven’t specified what I actually mean by “difference”. This is in part because it’s possible to represent the same state of the world in many different ontologies, which will then affect how “far apart” those representations are (for any easy-to-calculate way of specifying distance). However, for the same reason, this means that two models of the world which appear to be far apart could in fact be brought “closer together” (and perhaps even arbitrarily close together) by changing the ontologies used to represent them.
IIRC, this is what Davidad claims Mahayana Buddhism
recommendsis somewhat analogous to. Importantly, you can do this process without changing your policy at all, since you’re still trying to move from the same world-state to the same goal-state (though in general changing your ontology will likely open up new possibilities for better policies—e.g. you might find less effortful paths from one to the other).For example, “the current state of the world” and “world peace” might seem extremely different, causing someone who holds the latter as a goal to suffer a lot from thinking about the contrast. They might consider it very difficult to move from the former to the latter, and therefore only endorse plans which seem appropriately ambitious, like “global communism” or “put a superintelligence in charge of everything”. However, arguments like Steven Pinker’s might help them “zoom out” and see a perspective from which the current state of the world is actually very close to world peace, in terms of violent deaths per capita and other similar metrics. From within this new ontology, reaching “world peace” might merely be a matter of accelerating existing trends (and indeed, might even happen “by default” without anyone really trying to do so).
Idk if “transformation” is a good term for this though, open to suggestions for improvements.
Note that I’m being fuzzy here on what I mean by “difference” or “distance” because I don’t yet know how to pin down those terms precisely; I’m working on it, though. At the very least, we want to distinguish between how far apart they are ontologically (i.e. how different their representations are), and how far apart they are pragmatically (i.e. how hard is it to move from one to the other). When I talk about “difference” I am talking about the former, because that’s the only one that your brain can easily calculate. However, the ideal ontology might be one in which these two things approximately coincide. In such an ontology, you could always achieve your goals simply by “moving towards” your goals in some intuitive sense (instead of needing to sometimes go backwards in order to later go forwards).
Would it be terribly rude for me to point out that … you guys are making up a lot of shit about Buddhism? It’s like stumbling into a meetup of Creationists randomly speculating about physics and biology. It’s so far removed that it isn’t worth correcting you. You should just scrap it and start over. Or use very different terminology to talk about what it is you actually wish to talk about. You guys aren’t even close to describing the differences between Theravada and Mahayana.
“Dismantling your motives” is an interesting phrase, but I don’t know what it means. What does this actually entail? How does one achieve this?
I used to suffer from burnout all the time before I started Buddhist training. After a lot of effort, I did ‘dismantle’ that pattern. Does this count as dismantling my motives? Are we certain that the culture that perpetuates burnout as a common pattern among otherwise young, healthy people isn’t the cultural program that ‘dismantles your motives’?
I don’t know much about Buddhism, so it’s plausible that I garbled davidad’s original point. In particular, upon reflection I think he was more drawing a loose analogy than claiming to describe key features of either branch of Buddhism. I’ve edited the comment above to reflect this, since I don’t want to accidentally ascribe to him a less sensible position than he has.