I have perhaps 1000-1500 hours of meditation experience and have done a decent amount of psychedelics as well. I don’t think meditation has given me any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness. Meditation has helped me to see different possibilities in terms of content, shape, and phenomena within the conscious space, and perhaps helped me to understand the shape of it better, but I don’t really see it helping much to bridge the scientific/philosophical gap. Best I can say is that “yeah, it sort of feels like what Epistemic Depth Theory and probably Global Neuronal Workspace Theory would suggest.”
To actually get what you’re looking for, I think you’d need to do more studies on people who are experiencing different mental states, including those found in meditation, while using scientific instruments to probe the mind (fMRI, or BCIs—ideally much better ones than those that now exist). I think you’d need to do causal experiments specifically, not just correlational ones.
For that, you need those improved scientific instruments as well as people who are trained to interospect and report very fine-grained details of their experiences.
FWIW, I’m confused by the difference between Camp 1 and Camp 2. The crux seems to be the definition of “special.” My own views on consciousness are close to physicalism (which might be Camp 2?), but I do think solving the Meta-Problem of Consciousness to sufficient depth has a good chance of leading us to those physical correlates or generators of consciousness.
I have perhaps 1000-1500 hours of meditation experience and have done a decent amount of psychedelics as well. I don’t think meditation has given me any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness. Meditation has helped me to see different possibilities in terms of content, shape, and phenomena within the conscious space, and perhaps helped me to understand the shape of it better, but I don’t really see it helping much to bridge the scientific/philosophical gap. Best I can say is that “yeah, it sort of feels like what Epistemic Depth Theory and probably Global Neuronal Workspace Theory would suggest.”
To actually get what you’re looking for, I think you’d need to do more studies on people who are experiencing different mental states, including those found in meditation, while using scientific instruments to probe the mind (fMRI, or BCIs—ideally much better ones than those that now exist). I think you’d need to do causal experiments specifically, not just correlational ones.
For that, you need those improved scientific instruments as well as people who are trained to interospect and report very fine-grained details of their experiences.
FWIW, I’m confused by the difference between Camp 1 and Camp 2. The crux seems to be the definition of “special.” My own views on consciousness are close to physicalism (which might be Camp 2?), but I do think solving the Meta-Problem of Consciousness to sufficient depth has a good chance of leading us to those physical correlates or generators of consciousness.