Yes, if we’re talking about some of the more mystical practices within Christianity, then many of those do seem potentially valuable to explore. Many of the Christian mystic practices converge with ones from Buddhism and other religions, which is nice independent validation that they seem to be doing something beneficial and also a sign that you can just adopt the practices without any of the more religious metaphysics, given that religions with drastically differing metaphysics have similar practices.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. [...] 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...
I agree that a universal claim of “this is worth everyone’s time” is wrong, and that it’s worth it for some people and not others. I myself haven’t spend very much time meditating in the last several years, because other things have felt more valuable for me right now.
That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct
Well, that’s a bit strong—I wouldn’t say it must be correct, any experimental outcome is compatible with an infinite number of explanatory theories. But it’s certainly evidence in favor of the underlying theory being correct enough to be useful.
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”.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
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.
That’s fair. I don’t want to commit to a definite list on the spot, but things that I’d personally say off the top of my head:
Things meditation can do:
Make you happier
Give you a source of okayness/pleasure that’s independent of circumstances
Make you more aware of subconscious motivations and other subconscious material
Align your behavior more with your endorsed values rather than momentary feelings/cravings
Also, meditation can fuck you up in various ways, but I assume you’re more interested in me listing the positives.
Things meditation can’t do:
Give you supernatural powers
Give you any knowledge that isn’t otherwise causally available for your mind (if you never studied physics, you’re not going to learn it by meditating)
Generally affect anything outside your mind that your mind doesn’t have an effect on (so it might make people like you more—or less! - by changing your behavior and demeanor, but it won’t affect people who never interact with you, nor inanimate objects that are the same regardless of how your mind is)
Fix all of your psychological problems
Eliminate negative feelings
Eliminate pain
Raise your general intelligence to any significant extent
Make you entirely free of bias
Make you always follow ethics perfectly
Make you into a pure saint who never experiences one selfish thought
Give you certainty about metaphysical claims
Let you know the fully correct action for some situation (except for some non-standard definitions of “fully correct”)
Substitute for your reasoning
Make you reason fully correctly
Make you aware of all your mental processes
Make you aware of all your motivations
Tell you what you want
Be able to observe pure reality without it being filtered through any concepts
Make you aware of certain dormant but easily wake-up-able motor pathways like the ones controlling the muscles around your ears.
This happened to me when I was 17ish, after a few years of playing around with meditation-y things, and in particular trying to focus my attention in the middle of my skull.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
Thank you for the lists!
I notice that for some items in the list, I have also heard opposite evidence… I can’t find a link now, but someone complained that meditation reduced their ability to feel love and joy, so they stopped. I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people, the question is how many of which. The list could in theory be a starting point to a series of experiments, if we could operationalize the statements.
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
I’d assume that the theory by itself is either so simple as to potentially be true (“visualizing my success will make more likely to work for it”—yeah sounds plausible?) or to have claims that seem implausible for some reason (“visualizing my success will cause magic to bring me what I want”—requires a supernatural magic so seems sus) . The Buddhist teachings I’m talking about don’t have anything that’d sound obviously implausible in the same way, they largely only talk about things that you can directly experience in your own mind.
I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people
Oh definitely, and different techniques also have different effects—I included stuff from a number of different practices and I’d expect very few people to get all of these. You may not get much in the way of extra visualization abilities if you don’t do any visualization practices, for instance.
Yes, if we’re talking about some of the more mystical practices within Christianity, then many of those do seem potentially valuable to explore. Many of the Christian mystic practices converge with ones from Buddhism and other religions, which is nice independent validation that they seem to be doing something beneficial and also a sign that you can just adopt the practices without any of the more religious metaphysics, given that religions with drastically differing metaphysics have similar practices.
I agree that a universal claim of “this is worth everyone’s time” is wrong, and that it’s worth it for some people and not others. I myself haven’t spend very much time meditating in the last several years, because other things have felt more valuable for me right now.
Well, that’s a bit strong—I wouldn’t say it must be correct, any experimental outcome is compatible with an infinite number of explanatory theories. But it’s certainly evidence in favor of the underlying theory being correct enough to be useful.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
That’s fair. I don’t want to commit to a definite list on the spot, but things that I’d personally say off the top of my head:
Things meditation can do:
Make you happier
Give you a source of okayness/pleasure that’s independent of circumstances
Help you concentrate
Experience bliss states
Reduce your attentional blink
Increase your sensory resolution
Make you more sensitive to the beauty of art, music, nature, etc.
Reduce or eliminate rumination
Widen the gap between stimulus and response
Increase tolerance for uncertainty and unknowns
Improve your within-mind feedback processes
Increase your emotional range, make you suffer less
Reduce some kinds of cognitive and emotional biases (I’d have to think harder to give a more specific list)
Make you less defensive
Allow you to ignore pain
Reduce internal conflict and increase alignment between your mental subagents
Help you drop bad habits
Allow you to think about unpleasant things without flinching away from them
Make you less defensive/inclined to take things personally
Give you control over physiological processes that are normally outside conscious control
Improve your intuitions of other people (by better processing of subconsciously collected information, not by magic)
Get you to appreciate other people and enjoy their company more
Feel more love
Make you more okay with negative sensations and feelings
Get you to cling things less
Shorten emotional recovery time
Reduce background anxiety
Be able to go on psychedelic journeys without taking any drugs
Improve your ability to visualize or imagine things with other senses
Improve your memory
Slow down age-related decline for some cognitive processes
Heal past traumas
Reduce or eliminate your fear of death
Stop the automatic identification to the contents of your thoughts or to an entity experiencing them
Change your subjective rate of time
Generally transform your consciousness in various weird ways
Make you feel your body more vividly
Make you notice “energy phenomena” in your body
Make you more aware of subconscious motivations and other subconscious material
Align your behavior more with your endorsed values rather than momentary feelings/cravings
Also, meditation can fuck you up in various ways, but I assume you’re more interested in me listing the positives.
Things meditation can’t do:
Give you supernatural powers
Give you any knowledge that isn’t otherwise causally available for your mind (if you never studied physics, you’re not going to learn it by meditating)
Generally affect anything outside your mind that your mind doesn’t have an effect on (so it might make people like you more—or less! - by changing your behavior and demeanor, but it won’t affect people who never interact with you, nor inanimate objects that are the same regardless of how your mind is)
Fix all of your psychological problems
Eliminate negative feelings
Eliminate pain
Raise your general intelligence to any significant extent
Make you entirely free of bias
Make you always follow ethics perfectly
Make you into a pure saint who never experiences one selfish thought
Give you certainty about metaphysical claims
Let you know the fully correct action for some situation (except for some non-standard definitions of “fully correct”)
Substitute for your reasoning
Make you reason fully correctly
Make you aware of all your mental processes
Make you aware of all your motivations
Tell you what you want
Be able to observe pure reality without it being filtered through any concepts
Make you aware of certain dormant but easily wake-up-able motor pathways like the ones controlling the muscles around your ears.
This happened to me when I was 17ish, after a few years of playing around with meditation-y things, and in particular trying to focus my attention in the middle of my skull.
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
Thank you for the lists!
I notice that for some items in the list, I have also heard opposite evidence… I can’t find a link now, but someone complained that meditation reduced their ability to feel love and joy, so they stopped. I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people, the question is how many of which. The list could in theory be a starting point to a series of experiments, if we could operationalize the statements.
I would guess you mean this (with Kaj’s comment just below the post).
I’d assume that the theory by itself is either so simple as to potentially be true (“visualizing my success will make more likely to work for it”—yeah sounds plausible?) or to have claims that seem implausible for some reason (“visualizing my success will cause magic to bring me what I want”—requires a supernatural magic so seems sus) . The Buddhist teachings I’m talking about don’t have anything that’d sound obviously implausible in the same way, they largely only talk about things that you can directly experience in your own mind.
Oh definitely, and different techniques also have different effects—I included stuff from a number of different practices and I’d expect very few people to get all of these. You may not get much in the way of extra visualization abilities if you don’t do any visualization practices, for instance.