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).
Have you read Steve Byrnes’ post on enlightenment/PNSE?
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.
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.
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]
But it reminds me of an analogy. There’s generally two kinds of people who find massages physically uncomfortable...
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?
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?