A speculation on enlightenment
Epistemic status: pure speculation, generated by taking a dubious scientific theory and an uncertainly historical story and knocking them together.
I believe that simply stating in plain words the idea that I want to communicate here cannot succeed. Consider the following hypothetical utterance:
“Everyone is enlightened already. Enlightenment is no different from ordinary consciousness. There is nothing to gain, nothing to strive for: this is your ordinary state.”
Alas, these words pattern-match to frequently occurring woo. A sign that the speaker were actually doing woo would be if they went on to say that “the hard part is realising this.” But the idea that I want to communicate is, I hope, easy to understand, once I place enough Go stones to block the pattern-matching. To do that, I shall have to take a run-up to the topic.
Recall Julian Jaynes, who claimed that in the age of Homer, people were not conscious in the way we are today. They were incapable of introspection. Their left and right hemispheres did not communicate as they do now. They experienced their own motivations as hallucinated messages from gods. At some later point, this no longer happened, because people had become conscious of themselves as selves. They could think about their thoughts.
I am not sure how seriously the theory is taken these days, or ever was, outside of a dedicated group that keeps the flame burning. But never mind, I am referencing these ideas only as context. This is the “dubious scientific theory” I mentioned up top.
The “uncertainly historical story” is that of the Buddha’s awakening. Jaynes does not discuss or (I think) even mention the Buddha in his book, but give or take a few centuries, the Buddha lived at a similar time to the supposed development of consciousness in ancient Greece. So let’s run with the idea that consciousness also appeared then in India. What might this have looked like in that culture? It might have looked like the Buddha’s awakening. There were many who practiced various sorts of meditation and asceticism in the Buddha’s time. The Buddha (according to the story) was the one who finally succeeded at what they were blindly groping for, by achieving consciousness. His title means “the awakened one”. Then he spent the rest of his life helping others to achieve the same thing.
Nowadays, we get it just by being brought up in a culture where everyone has it.[1]
The historical accuracy of the story of the Buddha’s achievement is not the point here. It does not matter whether the story tells how it happened, or if it was invented afterwards to explain what had happened. Something happened. The speculation that I am presenting is that the Buddha’s awakening was exactly the development of consciousness. The ordinary consciousness, the awareness of our own selves, our thoughts, our presence, that we take for granted. In the Buddha’s time, this was an enormous revelation. Now, it’s Tuesday.
There is no “enlightened” state beyond that.
That is the idea that my opening quotation could not succeed in conveying.
I don’t necessarily believe this idea, but it’s a hypothesis that is always in my mind when reading about “enlightenment”.
- ↩︎
Except radical behaviourists, of course.
A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states. We don’t have a map that would allow us to tell people “you are here, and in order to get here you need to do this”. We just kinda stumble into mental states randomly (sometimes by copying other people we spend a lot of time with, sometimes by having a solitary epiphany), unaware how we got there, and unable to lead others there. We can’t even verify whether two people are in the same state, other than if they both agree that they seem to have the same vibes.
There were some attempts to classify things. For example, the Kegan’s stages and other attempts. I haven’t studied them closely, so I don’t know how much of my disappointment is with actual problems of the classifications, and how much is just a bad luck of having met people who use them incorrectly. But my impression was that the classification is very subjective, and there is no simple test to tell us who is where.
The traditional solution seems to be that people who are on the higher level recognize whether someone is on the same level or below them. An enlightened person can judge whether someone is or isn’t enlightened, in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who is not. A person at Kegan level 5 can judge whether someone is or isn’t at Kegan level 5, in a way that is difficult for a Kegan level 4 person to understand.
Obviously, this system seems to be vulnerable to bluffing and prejudice. (But that’s exactly what an unenlightened / Kegan level 4 person would say, right?) Like, imagine that I invent a new Kegan level 6, and I insist that I am the only person there. You say that it’s bullshit; I say that this is exactly what a person at Kegan level below 6 would say. Would it be more convincing if I had a group of dozen high-status friends, and we all testified that we are all at Kegan level 6 and no one else is? On the other hand, imagine that there actually is a Kegan level 6 and I am the first person to achieve it, and you accept that as a fact. But also, I happen to be a racist. So when the next day a black guy achieves the same thing, I say: “nope; I agree that this guy is kinda impressive, but that is not true level 6; trust me, as an expert on level 6, I recognize the difference, even if I can’t explain it”. Is there a way for that guy to prove me wrong?
The problem with higher levels (assuming that they exist) is that there would be fewer people there, which means less data about them. Also, if the higher levels are truly difficult to explain to people at lower levels, then the highest levels will have descriptions that don’t make any sense to 99% of the population. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable system. If something makes only sense to 1% or maybe 0.1% of the population, it would be possible for some other 1% or 0.1% to coordinate and make up their own alternative level, and even most of the experts couldn’t say who is right or wrong.
Furthermore, it is kinda suspicious that the system is a linear hierarchy. On lower levels it makes sense that the higher level includes all of the lower level, similarly to how an average 12 years old child is better at almost everything than an average 6 years old child. But maybe on higher levels there should be some specialization? Like, one person succeeds to unlock a skill X, another person succeeds to unlock a different skill Y, neither is obviously superior to the other?
In some sense, rationality, as we know it at Less Wrong, is an example of this. It is a mental state some people are naturally prone to, and reading the Sequences helps them grok it. I believe that I am an example of this. I was already mostly there before I found Less Wrong, I just didn’t have a concept of “there” that I could verbally explain, I just felt that I was doing some things differently in a way that felt reasonable to me, but for some mysterious reasons other people didn’t share this opinion. After reading the Sequences, I felt like screaming: “this guy also gets it—and unlike me, he is much better at describing it”. So I thought the problem was with the verbal explanation, and I translated the entire Sequences to my language, shared the translation with people around me… and they mostly remained unimpressed. So, apparently, putting it in words is helpful when you are already kinda there, but unhelpful if you are not? And it seems to support the hypothesis that people who are “there” or “mostly there” can recognize each other? I am not saying that it has to be reliable. Or that “there” has a clear boundary. But there seems to be a sense in which some people are “there” and some other people are missing something that is obvious to those who are “there”.
I guess my hypothesis on “enlightenment” is somewhere halfway to yours. I don’t think that most people in our culture are already there, but I suspect that the distance between our average educated person and the enlightenment is much smaller than it used to be historically. We are taught to self-reflect. We are taught to sit quietly. We are taught to control our emotions, even specifically to calm down by breathing deeply. This is why people can reach “enlightenment” by reading a book, doing some exercises at home, and then spending a week or more at a retreat. They don’t have to leave their homes and become full-time monks for years.
And I find it plausible that someone could just stumble upon “enlightenment” spontaneously. I imagine this would be difficult to verify, because we are not used to describe our mental states verbally, and because the person wouldn’t be familiar with the Buddhist lingo. So maybe the Buddhists would dismiss him as not having the true thing. But maybe the parts he would be missing wouldn’t be load-bearing?
Or maybe it actually wouldn’t be the same thing. Maybe it’s not a linear model, and there are a few different attractors in the space of mental states, and this hypothetical guy would find an attractor that is similar, yet different. Something that may or may not have a description in the Buddhist tradition.
And now that I think about it, maybe modern Buddhists are reaching a different attractor than Buddha did. They would probably disagree, but to put it bluntly, if they don’t remember their previous reincarnations (which Buddha claimed to do), then it doesn’t seem like the same thing. Again, Buddhism seems to suggest that there is a linear hierarchy of mental states, from the “stream entry” to “nirvana”, but from my perspective, that’s just what they believe; that doesn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe within Buddhism everyone follows fundamentally the same training, so everyone ends up in the same mental state. But maybe in Buddha’s time the space of self-reflective mental states was just insufficiently explored. Exploring them was a privilege of a few monks who came from the same religious background. Now we have a greater population that is more educated, has more time to think about things (although we also have many powerful distractions), and has a different cultural background. It would make sense if they discovered new unusual mental states.
Perhaps someone should invent a sensor that you can put on your head, and it will display a dot on display, representing where you are in the space of possible mental states. And then we could experiment with the sensor, keep discovering and naming various areas, with greater agreement on what is and what isn’t the same thing.
I’m not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of “enlightenment” came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There’s also the issue of “not-self”, “non-duality”, “impermanence” etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.
Like, if you already know that there is no soul, that people are made of atoms, and that our mental activity is a result of interacting neurons… maybe you already have more insight on “not-self” than Buddha did.
(It is possible for someone with modern knowledge to provide a much shorter explanation of something, because you can leverage powerful concepts. For example, Gödel wrote hundred pages on why every mathematical statement or proof can be encoded as an integer. To a high-school student today, you could just say “you can write the statement or the proof in a plain-text file, save it on disk, and treat it as an integer in base 256”. Similarly, halting theorem can be explained by “suppose we have a Python method that receives a source code and input, and returns whether this program halts for this input; here is a simple program that calls the method, what would it output?”.)
Maybe the problem is just that we expect the insights to feel magical, and the insights we already have feel mundane, so we conclude that they couldn’t possibly be the real thing.
In such situation it would make sense that different schools disagree on what is the real thing, only agree that it is mysterious and very important.
This is so funny because I once heard enlightenment described as “the final disappointment.”
Before I start, I have a lot respect for Buddhism, I think that there are good lessons that we can take from it but considering the historical connect where you had this religious nobility preaching to their literal slaves that the source of their suffering is actually their fault for “wanting things” to begin with. Then you have zen masters in WW2 imperial japan teaching their soldiers techniques to disassociate themselves from what they were being forced to do which is the exact same thing Himmler did with the Bjahagavad Gita which is about a soldier who sissy want to go to eat but must go to war. All very self-serving.
Are these things inherently bad? Fruit from a poisonous tree and all that, maybe that’s just a cliche or maybe its like a knife, it can be a tool or a weapon depend on who’s using it.
Fwiw I think this is close to reversing the udnerstanding of enlightenment
Oh yes! That is exactly what it does!
In other words, classically, enlightenment would be much more in the direction of removing the causes and conditions of consciousness—see E. G. dependent origination
And in the idea I presented, consciousness was the achievement. And now, people trying to make sense of the old stories think that the point is to extinguish it. Independently of the truth of my speculation, I cannot see that as a thing worth doing.
It’s obviously impossible to argue the facts about the life of the Buddha too hard because we only know them from second-hand accounts that were written down centuries after the events (though note this is true of many historical facts we take for granted).
So that in mind, assuming the stories written down in the Pali cannon are true, they fail to paint the picture of someone having the big insights of gaining consciousness, but rather, as Matt says, someone figuring out how to deal with the self-inflicted pain consciousness causes.
For your theory to be true, it would require that:
The Buddha is some real guy who lived circa 500 BCE
His big insight was gaining consciousnesses (or I think more properly, self-awareness)
In the following 500 years, his followers also figured out what we now understand to be awakening/enlightenment (the self we are aware of is not separate from others), and mythologized their findings into the story of the Buddha figuring it all out at once
I think 3 is pretty unlikely, as it would be more likely that someone else, let’s call him Buddha Prime, would get the credit for awakening on top of the Buddha’s original insight into self-awareness, but that’s not the story we get. Instead evidence seems to suggest it’s more likely that self-awareness appeared earlier (my guess would be >=12 kya), though I am sympathetic to the idea that it took until the Axial Age for almost all humans to be self-aware, as it seems to be a mental technology we have to pass from one to another rather than something that naturally happens to all humans (cf. feral children).
Huh. So under this interpretation enlightenment is basically what we would call metacognition, or self-modelling. That’s interesting. What happens when people seem to achieve enlightenment and report different qualitative experiences today, then? Presumably they start with metacognition and then “wake up” to… whatever the next level is, according to their own experience.
That’s what keeps this a speculation, the testimony of those who say they have achieved such a thing. Until I have such an experience myself, I cannot take any definite view on what they are talking about.
Have you read Steve Byrnes’ post on enlightenment/PNSE? I think it provides a pretty decent mechanical explanation without much need to be awakened yourself to understand it (although that’s just me guessing since by the time I read it I was already experience PNSE/awakened).
I probably noticed it and the sequence it belongs to as it went by, but didn’t pay it much attention. I just find the whole paradigm there vaguely irritating. For the specific one you linked, in section 6.2.1 I see the same sort of thing I identified in CstineSublimes’s question to me, and I see also in the headology of martial arts instructors teaching the “unbendable arm” by first bamboozling the students into doing it wrong and then teaching them the woo version, when you can actually just do the thing and bypass all that. In this case the “Conventional Intuitive Self-Model” is the thing the writer is first persuading us we all have, then he knocks that down and presents the “PNSE intuitive self-model” to fill the hole.
As for PNSE itself, some years earlier I commented on a paper on PNSE by one of its advocates, Jeffery A. Martin. The paper’s own description of PNSE made it look like dysfunctional wireheading.
Poisoned chalice, miraculous draught of enlightenment, or ordinary tap water?
Yes, there are bunch of people who get to PNSE via what is often called spiritual bypassing, where they Goodhart/wirehead their way to it, which is technically possible but also a failure mode, and it has a bunch of negative consequences for the person if they find themselves outside the context under which they are able to remain safely “enlightened”. Or at least I and Zen consider it to be a failure mode; some traditions consider wireheading a success and I stay away from that part of Buddhism.
As to the conventional intuitive self-model, like, yes, this is just an accurate description of how I and many people think about themselves prior to reading Byrnes series. Maybe you don’t conceptualize yourself this way, in which case maybe you don’t have the same kind of problems to deal with. It’s also possible you do but are selfing so hard you can’t see the model. I don’t know your mind, so can’t tell you.
But it reminds me of an analogy. There’s generally two kinds of people who find massages physically uncomfortable (more may find them psychologically uncomfortable). One are the people who have so much muscle tension that massage hurts because they are resisting too much. The other are people who have so little muscle tension that massage hurts because they aren’t resisting enough. The trouble is, if you don’t know your own body well, all you know is that massage hurts, and that’s not enough information to tell you if your muscles are too tense or too relaxed.
Maybe I can convey something by taking one of Steven Byrnes’s examples in that series, the perception of someone saying a word such as “smile”, in section 2.3 of this post. He presents an obviously wrong account, that he claims everyone wrongly believes. I shrug and say “consciousness of abstraction”. More fully, there is a whole process of how acoustic waves enter the ears, are transformed into brain signals, and after various processes that no-one knows much about and no-one has any conscious access to, there arises, by some process that is still an unresolved mystery, a perception of the word that has just been said. The perception is not the thing, the process by which the perception arose is not the perception, I do not mistake my subjective experience of the perception for an account of how that perception was created, and so on. The “intuitive model” that he uses this thought experiment to refute is to me so, so… I just can’t even.
I attribute this to reading Korzybski during the golden age of science fiction, i.e. aged fifteen.[1]
I don’t find it uncomfortable, once I’ve concentrated hard enough to get past my ticklishness, but I’ve never seen the point. I’ve tried receiving it a couple of times (in one-off contexts like a workshop at a sci-fi convention) but it doesn’t do anything for me. Neither do hugs. Where hugs are the custom, ok, I’ll go along, but a handshake does me fine.
Having seen him mentioned in stories by Heinlein and Van Vogt, I found “Science and Sanity” in the public library. It also had many volumes of Bourbaki, from which I learned point-set topology, and an old, leatherbound copy of Spengler’s “Decline of the West”, from which I cannot say I learned anything. How many public libraries have books like that nowadays?
I suspect that “enlightenment” is probably a bundle of different things rather than one discrete thing, and maybe what it means depends on the culture and even how an individual relates to the world. This is based on the heuristic that when you dig into the nature of mental states, they tend to not fall into neat categories that are the same from person to person.
However, there are people existing today who claim to be “awakened” who were certainly self-aware, and still describe a dramatic change in their perception of the world. The descriptions tend to fall along similar lines, and include:
A dissolving of the boundary between “self” and “other”.
A sense of fundamental peace/ok-ness that in independent of current thoughts and emotions.
The ability to rest in some space that is “beyond thought” (or something along those lines, it sounds like a sazen).
A natural and automatic removal of anxiety, fear and other negative emotions.
Unlearning something about thought and the self-model that most people implicitly take to be true without realising it.
This sounds like there’s something more going on than gaining consciousness, and in some ways points in the opposite direction. It is often described as more of an “unlearning” than a learning.
Sure, okay, while we’re speculating about ancient religious transitions — if Buddha invented consciousness, then Jesus invented deliberate community-building and high-trust culture.