I feel that the quotes you use to describe Camp #1 and Camp #2 are both word salad. The Camp #1 quote is like this post Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote 17 years ago, except difficult to understand[1]. Camp #2 asserts the existence of something fundamental, and then follows it with “There’s no agreement on what this thing is”. I feel that these postulations are not well-defined enough to deserve refutation.
How have your personal experiences influenced your understanding of western philosophy of mind. Not only on the topic of qualia; that was just the example that motivated me to post the question. For example, did anyone move from Harth’s camp #1 to camp #2 or vice versa after meditation experiences, or did any of your other philosophical positions shift?
I feel that the mainstream western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, and that this is obvious to anybody who is half-decent at writing clearly. This includes both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham, neither of whom (to my knowledge) have significant meditative insight. This question is like asking “Did you stop eating garbage out of the local Safeway dumpster after you learned to cook?” I was never eating it to begin with.
To be fair, Buddhist metaphysics isn’t any better. It’s not uncommon for meditators with deep insight to also believe in levitation and reincarnation.
I think what you’re really trying to ask is “Do you have any personal observations via insight which contradict a major philosophical school?” Yes, if you get enough meditative insight you’ll transcend the concept of a self. Anything system of philosophy that begins with “I think, therefore I am” is broken at almost the axiomatic level.
When I say it is “difficult to understand”, I do not mean that this is difficult to understand like math i.e. because the ideas are fundamentally difficult. I mean that it is difficult to understand because it is written badly. It uses terms like “special” without defining them. Socrates was complaining about this sort of philosophical malpractice over 2,000 years ago.
I think it’s unfair to conclude that western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, based on the writings of amateurs like Harth, Graham and Yudkowsky. You need to critique Dennet, Chalmers,Kim, Stawson, etc
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the “self” are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of “transcending” the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It’s not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else?
I’ve got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion “there’s a red apple on that table”, you might start thinking “my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table”. You’ll still assume there’s probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you’re meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion “I’m a person who’s awake, aware and feeling experiences”, and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.
But the representation “me, in this body here which I’m aware of” within your sensory landscape isn’t the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.
I don’t the experience of no-self contradicts any of the above.
In general, I think you could probably make some factual statements about the nature of consciousness that’s true and that you learn from attaining no-self, if you phrased it very carefully, but I don’t think that’s the point.
The way I’d phrase what happens would be mostly in terms of attachment. You don’t feel as implicated by things that affect you anymore, you have less anxiety, that kind of thing. I think a really good analogy is just that regular consciousness starts to resemble consciousness during a flow state.
I have significant meditative insight.
I feel that the quotes you use to describe Camp #1 and Camp #2 are both word salad. The Camp #1 quote is like this post Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote 17 years ago, except difficult to understand[1]. Camp #2 asserts the existence of something fundamental, and then follows it with “There’s no agreement on what this thing is”. I feel that these postulations are not well-defined enough to deserve refutation.
I feel that the mainstream western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, and that this is obvious to anybody who is half-decent at writing clearly. This includes both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham, neither of whom (to my knowledge) have significant meditative insight. This question is like asking “Did you stop eating garbage out of the local Safeway dumpster after you learned to cook?” I was never eating it to begin with.
To be fair, Buddhist metaphysics isn’t any better. It’s not uncommon for meditators with deep insight to also believe in levitation and reincarnation.
I think what you’re really trying to ask is “Do you have any personal observations via insight which contradict a major philosophical school?” Yes, if you get enough meditative insight you’ll transcend the concept of a self. Anything system of philosophy that begins with “I think, therefore I am” is broken at almost the axiomatic level.
When I say it is “difficult to understand”, I do not mean that this is difficult to understand like math i.e. because the ideas are fundamentally difficult. I mean that it is difficult to understand because it is written badly. It uses terms like “special” without defining them. Socrates was complaining about this sort of philosophical malpractice over 2,000 years ago.
I think it’s unfair to conclude that western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, based on the writings of amateurs like Harth, Graham and Yudkowsky. You need to critique Dennet, Chalmers,Kim, Stawson, etc
What is the notion of self that you transcend, what does it mean to transcend it, and how does meditation cause this to happen?
It is the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model that Steven Byrnes describes in detail.
This is correct.
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the “self” are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of “transcending” the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
This is correct.
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It’s not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else?
I’ve got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion “there’s a red apple on that table”, you might start thinking “my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table”. You’ll still assume there’s probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you’re meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion “I’m a person who’s awake, aware and feeling experiences”, and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.
But the representation “me, in this body here which I’m aware of” within your sensory landscape isn’t the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.
I don’t the experience of no-self contradicts any of the above.
In general, I think you could probably make some factual statements about the nature of consciousness that’s true and that you learn from attaining no-self, if you phrased it very carefully, but I don’t think that’s the point.
The way I’d phrase what happens would be mostly in terms of attachment. You don’t feel as implicated by things that affect you anymore, you have less anxiety, that kind of thing. I think a really good analogy is just that regular consciousness starts to resemble consciousness during a flow state.
Thanks!