For example, to experiment with deep breathing, etc., without having the bottom line already written? To embrace evidence with the same lightness whether it agrees or disagrees with the Buddhist scriptures?
Well, that was kind of the route that got me convinced there is something to Buddhism. The exact events happened too long ago for me recall accurately, but at some point the state of my beliefs was something like…
“Well, there seems to be science saying that meditation is beneficial. But all of these Buddhist claims about our suffering being created by a belief in a self and so on are weird. They seem like the claims of a weird religion with no understanding of psychology. But I’m told meditation is beneficial, so let me try it.”
So I did do something relatively neutral like following the breath that did not obviously seem related to those weird claims at all. But when I did that, I noticed stuff in my mind that seemed like the kind of thing that the Buddhists had been talking about, and I was like “huh, maybe they’re not totally crazy”.
And then there were various events like “my friend who I’d known since we were both teenagers and who was always quite rational and sensible found a book describing something called jhanas that was derived from old Buddhist teaching, and then he told me that he followed the meditation instructions there and started getting the kinds of mind-states that were described there, so I concluded that apparently this checks out and then later I became friends with many other people who could do jhanas as well”. (And even managed a jhana a couple of times myself, though I seem to have various psychological blockers around it that make it hard for me personally.)
And at some point if you repeatedly have the experience of “hey, there’s this Buddhist-influenced writing that claims that you can achieve an X type of mind state by doing these specific kinds of practices, and then eventually you either have that mind state yourself or talk to trustworthy-seeming people who vouch that the descriptions are legit and might also demonstrate it behaviorally”… then at some point it seems to make sense to update to “okay so maybe I should just assume that the Buddhists are correct in their claims about how the mind works and how it can be transformed”.
Could one do the same without looking into Buddhist writing? Sure, and not every Buddhist sect will even give you any theory, preferring to just have you do the meditation practices yourself! But for any skill, it’s usually beneficial to have guidance from someone more experienced who can point out what you’re doing wrong, suggest remedial techniques to fix your weak points, keep you motivated by letting you know what the fruits of the practice might be, etc. Also some practices are more risky than others, so it’s good to have someone who can make sure you’re not hurting yourself, or to warn you about any practices or stages in the process that are known to be rough.
Kind of like exercise, where you can totally just do running etc. on your own without consulting any accumulated knowledge, but many people still find beneficial to consult some physical trainer sometimes. And if they wanted to train really seriously, then it would probably be risky to never consult anyone with more accumulated knowledge.
Also, if you are interested in figuring out a serious understanding of the mind and you feel that your experienced repeatedly comes to agree with Buddhist models of the mind, then it makes sense to try to look at some of those models and see if they could improve your own theoretical understanding.
As for reincarnation, there’s some things that I could treat it as an analogy for, but mostly none of the meditation instructions I’ve found to make sense nor the teachers who I trust ever mention it. So the concept of it seems irrelevant to me and my interpretation of Buddhism.
And all of this seems pretty disanalogous to Christianity. Lots of atheists have the experience of meditating and finding that oh, this seems to trigger stuff exactly like the kind of thing that’s described in various Buddhist sources. Not many atheists, say, try to pray and find that God is answering those prayers by sending miracles their way. (Though, some Christian mystical traditions do have practice instructions and maps of progress that are quite similar to the Buddhist ones, and produce similar results.)
You seem to reduce Christianity to praying, and Buddhism to exploring mental states, which is basically comparing a layman’s version of Christianity to a nerdy version of Buddhism… and of course, in such comparison, Buddhism comes out as the intellectual one.
But there is also a layman’s version of Buddhism, which includes praying “Namo Amida Butsu” a lot, and giving money to monks in order to gain merit. And there is also a nerdy version of Christianity, containing self-exploration and self-improvement, such as the writings of the Desert Fathers, or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola; the seven capital (mental) sins, and how to overcome them.
(Perhaps some rationalists should participate in a Jesuit retreat, to learn how to overcome procrastination, so that they can become more productive at saving the world from the AI.)
.
In the things that you describe, it seems to me like you are mixing together two different kinds of statements… not entirely unrelated, but also not one straightforwardly implying the other.
One claim is that the Buddhist tradition has accumulated a lot of expertize at exploring mental states. People who can sit motionless for hours without getting bored, and who can summon feelings of great bliss on command just by using the right kind of mental muscles. I do not doubt that. And it’s cool.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. For the religious kind of Buddhist, the math would be obvious—you leave your previous life as a peasant, which probably sucked; you spend your remaining days begging and meditating; and if you do it right, you can save yourself countless reincarnations, many of them extremely unpleasant—yep, totally worth it.
For an atheist from a first-world country, the math is different. Your life is probably kinda okay, you do not believe in afterlife or magic superpowers, so the benefits include cool insights, a form of therapy, maybe a productivity boost; and the cost is the amount of time you have to spend meditating. For some people it is still worth it, but I expect that for some it is not, even if they did everything exactly the right way—the therapy they could receive elsewhere (if we assume a highly competent meditation teacher, we might as well assume a highly competent therapist), the productivity boost is balanced by the time spent meditating and at retreats, and the cool insights...
Well, this is the other group of claims, that the accumulated expertize of Buddhism makes its psychological claims trustworthy (unlike their claims about reincarnation, sex advice, etc). That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct. Empiricism, isn’t it?
My problem with this is that I also know people who claim getting experimental results from praying to God, or doing magic. Not in the sense of “a miracle happened, and a pile of money appeared on my table”, but in the sense of “God gave me the ability to persevere where otherwise I would have given up” or “God gave me the strength to overcome my bad habits” or “I kept visualizing the success and doing the rituals, and I also worked hard on my project, and after a few years I have succeeded”.
.
One more thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I do not remember seeing anyone put an upper bound to the benefits of meditation (and Buddhism in general). I would like to see someone in the rationalist community say “meditation can help you do X, Y, Z, and that is all it is good for”, and other rationalists agree with it. Make the list of the claims as long as you want, but make it finite. A finite list can be explored, one item at a time. I am not comfortable with keeping the list unbounded.
Why is this so important for me? First, if you make it a ratchet, if it is socially okay to make claims of “meditation helps at X” but not claims of “meditation does not help at Y”, then the list of claims will only grow after time, as the people get used to the old ones, and won’t object too hard against the new ones that are only one step further away. Specifically, I would be happy to hear at least one statement of the kind “Buddhists used to believe, a decade or two ago, that meditation helps at Z, but science shows that it is not true”. Because I find it unlikely that they never make a mistake, which makes it suspicious that I never hear about one when Buddhism/meditation is discussed among the rationalists.
Second, you can’t do the math for “is spending 1000 or 10000 hours meditating worth the results?” properly, if the cost is finite, but the benefits are potentially unlimited.
(And you can notice how for people who still on some level believe in magic, the math comes out systematically better than for people who don’t. So you should expect them to be overrepresented.)
EDIT:
Doing the math properly becomes more important when you include the probability of ending up in an abusive group. Even if most Buddhist groups are harmless, their intensity probably correlates with the harm they can do, and the taking-ideas-seriously rationalists may be more attracted to those.
Well, that was kind of the route that got me convinced there is something to Buddhism. The exact events happened too long ago for me recall accurately, but at some point the state of my beliefs was something like…
“Well, there seems to be science saying that meditation is beneficial. But all of these Buddhist claims about our suffering being created by a belief in a self and so on are weird. They seem like the claims of a weird religion with no understanding of psychology. But I’m told meditation is beneficial, so let me try it.”
So I did do something relatively neutral like following the breath that did not obviously seem related to those weird claims at all. But when I did that, I noticed stuff in my mind that seemed like the kind of thing that the Buddhists had been talking about, and I was like “huh, maybe they’re not totally crazy”.
And then there were various events like “my friend who I’d known since we were both teenagers and who was always quite rational and sensible found a book describing something called jhanas that was derived from old Buddhist teaching, and then he told me that he followed the meditation instructions there and started getting the kinds of mind-states that were described there, so I concluded that apparently this checks out and then later I became friends with many other people who could do jhanas as well”. (And even managed a jhana a couple of times myself, though I seem to have various psychological blockers around it that make it hard for me personally.)
And at some point if you repeatedly have the experience of “hey, there’s this Buddhist-influenced writing that claims that you can achieve an X type of mind state by doing these specific kinds of practices, and then eventually you either have that mind state yourself or talk to trustworthy-seeming people who vouch that the descriptions are legit and might also demonstrate it behaviorally”… then at some point it seems to make sense to update to “okay so maybe I should just assume that the Buddhists are correct in their claims about how the mind works and how it can be transformed”.
Could one do the same without looking into Buddhist writing? Sure, and not every Buddhist sect will even give you any theory, preferring to just have you do the meditation practices yourself! But for any skill, it’s usually beneficial to have guidance from someone more experienced who can point out what you’re doing wrong, suggest remedial techniques to fix your weak points, keep you motivated by letting you know what the fruits of the practice might be, etc. Also some practices are more risky than others, so it’s good to have someone who can make sure you’re not hurting yourself, or to warn you about any practices or stages in the process that are known to be rough.
Kind of like exercise, where you can totally just do running etc. on your own without consulting any accumulated knowledge, but many people still find beneficial to consult some physical trainer sometimes. And if they wanted to train really seriously, then it would probably be risky to never consult anyone with more accumulated knowledge.
Also, if you are interested in figuring out a serious understanding of the mind and you feel that your experienced repeatedly comes to agree with Buddhist models of the mind, then it makes sense to try to look at some of those models and see if they could improve your own theoretical understanding.
As for reincarnation, there’s some things that I could treat it as an analogy for, but mostly none of the meditation instructions I’ve found to make sense nor the teachers who I trust ever mention it. So the concept of it seems irrelevant to me and my interpretation of Buddhism.
And all of this seems pretty disanalogous to Christianity. Lots of atheists have the experience of meditating and finding that oh, this seems to trigger stuff exactly like the kind of thing that’s described in various Buddhist sources. Not many atheists, say, try to pray and find that God is answering those prayers by sending miracles their way. (Though, some Christian mystical traditions do have practice instructions and maps of progress that are quite similar to the Buddhist ones, and produce similar results.)
You seem to reduce Christianity to praying, and Buddhism to exploring mental states, which is basically comparing a layman’s version of Christianity to a nerdy version of Buddhism… and of course, in such comparison, Buddhism comes out as the intellectual one.
But there is also a layman’s version of Buddhism, which includes praying “Namo Amida Butsu” a lot, and giving money to monks in order to gain merit. And there is also a nerdy version of Christianity, containing self-exploration and self-improvement, such as the writings of the Desert Fathers, or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola; the seven capital (mental) sins, and how to overcome them.
(Perhaps some rationalists should participate in a Jesuit retreat, to learn how to overcome procrastination, so that they can become more productive at saving the world from the AI.)
.
In the things that you describe, it seems to me like you are mixing together two different kinds of statements… not entirely unrelated, but also not one straightforwardly implying the other.
One claim is that the Buddhist tradition has accumulated a lot of expertize at exploring mental states. People who can sit motionless for hours without getting bored, and who can summon feelings of great bliss on command just by using the right kind of mental muscles. I do not doubt that. And it’s cool.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. For the religious kind of Buddhist, the math would be obvious—you leave your previous life as a peasant, which probably sucked; you spend your remaining days begging and meditating; and if you do it right, you can save yourself countless reincarnations, many of them extremely unpleasant—yep, totally worth it.
For an atheist from a first-world country, the math is different. Your life is probably kinda okay, you do not believe in afterlife or magic superpowers, so the benefits include cool insights, a form of therapy, maybe a productivity boost; and the cost is the amount of time you have to spend meditating. For some people it is still worth it, but I expect that for some it is not, even if they did everything exactly the right way—the therapy they could receive elsewhere (if we assume a highly competent meditation teacher, we might as well assume a highly competent therapist), the productivity boost is balanced by the time spent meditating and at retreats, and the cool insights...
Well, this is the other group of claims, that the accumulated expertize of Buddhism makes its psychological claims trustworthy (unlike their claims about reincarnation, sex advice, etc). That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct. Empiricism, isn’t it?
My problem with this is that I also know people who claim getting experimental results from praying to God, or doing magic. Not in the sense of “a miracle happened, and a pile of money appeared on my table”, but in the sense of “God gave me the ability to persevere where otherwise I would have given up” or “God gave me the strength to overcome my bad habits” or “I kept visualizing the success and doing the rituals, and I also worked hard on my project, and after a few years I have succeeded”.
.
One more thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I do not remember seeing anyone put an upper bound to the benefits of meditation (and Buddhism in general). I would like to see someone in the rationalist community say “meditation can help you do X, Y, Z, and that is all it is good for”, and other rationalists agree with it. Make the list of the claims as long as you want, but make it finite. A finite list can be explored, one item at a time. I am not comfortable with keeping the list unbounded.
Why is this so important for me? First, if you make it a ratchet, if it is socially okay to make claims of “meditation helps at X” but not claims of “meditation does not help at Y”, then the list of claims will only grow after time, as the people get used to the old ones, and won’t object too hard against the new ones that are only one step further away. Specifically, I would be happy to hear at least one statement of the kind “Buddhists used to believe, a decade or two ago, that meditation helps at Z, but science shows that it is not true”. Because I find it unlikely that they never make a mistake, which makes it suspicious that I never hear about one when Buddhism/meditation is discussed among the rationalists.
Second, you can’t do the math for “is spending 1000 or 10000 hours meditating worth the results?” properly, if the cost is finite, but the benefits are potentially unlimited.
(And you can notice how for people who still on some level believe in magic, the math comes out systematically better than for people who don’t. So you should expect them to be overrepresented.)
EDIT:
Doing the math properly becomes more important when you include the probability of ending up in an abusive group. Even if most Buddhist groups are harmless, their intensity probably correlates with the harm they can do, and the taking-ideas-seriously rationalists may be more attracted to those.