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.
A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states.
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.
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.