There’s certainly versions of Buddhism that can fuck up your mind, and Soryu’s version certainly sounds like one, but you’re painting too broad of a brush. Nothing in the Sequences is really an argument against many of the Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them. (Or if there’s really fragrantly violating basic rationalist principles there, people haven’t really pointed that out on the various occasions when I’ve posted my interpretations of Buddhist models.)
I find it weird that if I made a similar argument for Christianity (that if we strip it of the supernatural stuff, what remains are often beneficial lessons, therefore rationalists should embrace such version), people would probably start screaming at me that (1) even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff, one piece after another, after serious examination, and (2) that human minds do not work that way; that even embracing the Christianity-without-the-supernatural too much will lead you to reading religious texts with certain connotations, and soon you will find yourself believing things that you have no rational reason to believe.
But suggest the same for Buddhism and suddenly it becomes a rational thing to do.
By the way, to get Buddhism-without-the-supernatural, we first have to agree on what the supernatural is. I mean, reincarnation seems like one of the core concepts of Buddhism, so… does your favorite version contain it, or reject it as nonsense? (Or treat it as a metaphor for… genealogy, or something?) Does it not concern you that the other ideas are coming from the same source? Wouldn’t it make more sense to abandon the entire project as hopelessly epistemically contaminated, and start from scratch instead? 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?
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But the thing I was actually trying to do here is something like the “five whys” technique.
So the situation we got here is that there is an organization that seems quite abusive. How do I even know that it exists? Because once in a while someone mentions it on LessWrong.
Okay, so why would anyone mention MAPLE on LessWrong? I mean, there are many religious organizations out there, abusive or not. What makes this one so special that it keeps coming to my attention, even if I am not especially interested in monasteries on the other side of the planet. Seems like the answer is that because some people see it somehow compatible with the rationalist community.
Okay, why, out of all the religious organizations that exist on this planet, some people see specifically MAPLE as somehow related to the rationalist community. (As opposed to e.g. some Hare Krishna group, that I suppose also exist in the Bay Area.) I do not see the details clearly, but seems to me that there basically some members of the rationalist community are vouching for them.
Okay, but why do we take some members of the rationalist community vouching for a Buddhist monastery seriously? I mean, if someone in the community tried to vouch for a Hare Krishna group, the most likely result would be that people would laugh at them, instead of saying “yeah, if these specific Hare Krishna guys says that their prayers can protect us from the apocalypse, I guess their goals are generally compatible with the goals of the rationalist community, even if we disagree on some specific details of their epistemology”. No, people would just laugh. So why are they not laughing at the idea of a Buddhist monastery being somehow rationality-adjacent.
In my opinion… simply because it is Buddhist, and because some people are spreading the meme that Buddhism is somehow rational. More than just “you can abandon 99% of Buddhism and make something rational out of the remaining 1%”, because you could do the same thing with e.g. Freud, but that Buddhism is somehow inherently much closer to rationality. Hare Krishna is low status in the rationalist community, Freud is low status, Christianity is low status, Buddhism is high status… essentially because it is a fargroup instead of outgroup. Christianity is a religion of your boring parents, Buddhism is a religion of your cool friends. (Somewhere on a different part of the planet, people are producing anime that depicts boring Buddhist priests, and a cool Pope who is a young guy with a big sword riding a dragon.)
I try to get to the route of the cause. When a guy comes knocking on your door telling you that he has a deep wisdom that can save the world (as long as you start obeying him and stop questioning him), there is absolutely no reason to assign him higher credibility if he is a Buddhist, than if he was a Hare Krishna or Catholic or Scientologist leader. But the average Bay Area rationalist will take him more seriously, will perceive spiritual claims associated with Buddhism as more plausible, and that makes me endlessly frustrated. This used to be an atheist website, where people were skeptical about things! Including washed-down versions of religion, such as “belief in belief” etc.
I am curious about your answer to why would ever a rationalist consider a group such as MAPLE to be somehow more credible than… an analogical organization of a different religion.
EDIT:
To put it shortly: What kind of mental gymnastics makes people in the rationalist community believe that “I should join a religious monastery for a few weeks” is a rational course of action?
My answer: because we are taught by association that things related to Buddhism are somehow adjacent to rationality. I want to push back against that.
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.)
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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”.
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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.
even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff
Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I’m not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That’s not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences.
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
There’s certainly versions of Buddhism that can fuck up your mind, and Soryu’s version certainly sounds like one, but you’re painting too broad of a brush. Nothing in the Sequences is really an argument against many of the Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them. (Or if there’s really fragrantly violating basic rationalist principles there, people haven’t really pointed that out on the various occasions when I’ve posted my interpretations of Buddhist models.)
I find it weird that if I made a similar argument for Christianity (that if we strip it of the supernatural stuff, what remains are often beneficial lessons, therefore rationalists should embrace such version), people would probably start screaming at me that (1) even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff, one piece after another, after serious examination, and (2) that human minds do not work that way; that even embracing the Christianity-without-the-supernatural too much will lead you to reading religious texts with certain connotations, and soon you will find yourself believing things that you have no rational reason to believe.
But suggest the same for Buddhism and suddenly it becomes a rational thing to do.
By the way, to get Buddhism-without-the-supernatural, we first have to agree on what the supernatural is. I mean, reincarnation seems like one of the core concepts of Buddhism, so… does your favorite version contain it, or reject it as nonsense? (Or treat it as a metaphor for… genealogy, or something?) Does it not concern you that the other ideas are coming from the same source? Wouldn’t it make more sense to abandon the entire project as hopelessly epistemically contaminated, and start from scratch instead? 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?
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But the thing I was actually trying to do here is something like the “five whys” technique.
So the situation we got here is that there is an organization that seems quite abusive. How do I even know that it exists? Because once in a while someone mentions it on LessWrong.
Okay, so why would anyone mention MAPLE on LessWrong? I mean, there are many religious organizations out there, abusive or not. What makes this one so special that it keeps coming to my attention, even if I am not especially interested in monasteries on the other side of the planet. Seems like the answer is that because some people see it somehow compatible with the rationalist community.
Okay, why, out of all the religious organizations that exist on this planet, some people see specifically MAPLE as somehow related to the rationalist community. (As opposed to e.g. some Hare Krishna group, that I suppose also exist in the Bay Area.) I do not see the details clearly, but seems to me that there basically some members of the rationalist community are vouching for them.
Okay, but why do we take some members of the rationalist community vouching for a Buddhist monastery seriously? I mean, if someone in the community tried to vouch for a Hare Krishna group, the most likely result would be that people would laugh at them, instead of saying “yeah, if these specific Hare Krishna guys says that their prayers can protect us from the apocalypse, I guess their goals are generally compatible with the goals of the rationalist community, even if we disagree on some specific details of their epistemology”. No, people would just laugh. So why are they not laughing at the idea of a Buddhist monastery being somehow rationality-adjacent.
In my opinion… simply because it is Buddhist, and because some people are spreading the meme that Buddhism is somehow rational. More than just “you can abandon 99% of Buddhism and make something rational out of the remaining 1%”, because you could do the same thing with e.g. Freud, but that Buddhism is somehow inherently much closer to rationality. Hare Krishna is low status in the rationalist community, Freud is low status, Christianity is low status, Buddhism is high status… essentially because it is a fargroup instead of outgroup. Christianity is a religion of your boring parents, Buddhism is a religion of your cool friends. (Somewhere on a different part of the planet, people are producing anime that depicts boring Buddhist priests, and a cool Pope who is a young guy with a big sword riding a dragon.)
I try to get to the route of the cause. When a guy comes knocking on your door telling you that he has a deep wisdom that can save the world (as long as you start obeying him and stop questioning him), there is absolutely no reason to assign him higher credibility if he is a Buddhist, than if he was a Hare Krishna or Catholic or Scientologist leader. But the average Bay Area rationalist will take him more seriously, will perceive spiritual claims associated with Buddhism as more plausible, and that makes me endlessly frustrated. This used to be an atheist website, where people were skeptical about things! Including washed-down versions of religion, such as “belief in belief” etc.
I am curious about your answer to why would ever a rationalist consider a group such as MAPLE to be somehow more credible than… an analogical organization of a different religion.
EDIT:
To put it shortly: What kind of mental gymnastics makes people in the rationalist community believe that “I should join a religious monastery for a few weeks” is a rational course of action?
My answer: because we are taught by association that things related to Buddhism are somehow adjacent to rationality. I want to push back against that.
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.)
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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”.
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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.
Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I’m not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That’s not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
Hmm. Do you disagree with Chapman that western Buddhism is largely Sutra-derived, and the ultimate goal of Sutra is renunciation of worldly concerns (the stuff that’s considered indispensable in the west)?
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.