So this completes Vervaeke’s account (for now) of what’s going on with mystical experiences. They don’t do the thing we might want them to (give us access to propositional knowledge), but they give us some sort of non-propositional guidance through a way to vary our internals in a way that lets us experiment with things / untrap our priors.
This also explains some about why it would be ineffable: consider the difference between describing an idealized algorithm and describing a pernicious bug you found in your code. The first is simple and formal, with many of the details abstracted; the second is almost entirely about the details. Most of these experiences are more like exposing psychological bugs so that they can be reimplemented, in a way that’s not going to generalize between people (as everyone’s implementation of that bit of their psychology will likely be different).
But… I’m not convinced it’s an asymmetric weapon, yet. The thing where you randomly increase variation sometimes breaks you out of bad spots, but it sometimes puts you into bad spots. I think Vervaeke would respond: that’s what the whole practice and community built around it is for! Someone who goes on a trip supported by other people, who know how to cultivate wisdom and challenge foolishness, is much better off than an autodidact who tries it on their own, maybe missing a core preparatory step or foolishness-challenging skill. Also, maybe this is just ‘for extreme cases’; for example, you might want to give psychedelics to almost everyone with PTSD, but almost no one without PTSD.
[I’m not sure why I’m focusing on psychedelics here, since part of the point of meditation is to get to these states, and he seems pretty bullish on everyone doing meditation. I think it’s that the risk for psychedelics seems much higher, and so the story has to be more convincing?]
So this completes Vervaeke’s account (for now) of what’s going on with mystical experiences. They don’t do the thing we might want them to (give us access to propositional knowledge), but they give us some sort of non-propositional guidance through a way to vary our internals in a way that lets us experiment with things / untrap our priors.
This also explains some about why it would be ineffable: consider the difference between describing an idealized algorithm and describing a pernicious bug you found in your code. The first is simple and formal, with many of the details abstracted; the second is almost entirely about the details. Most of these experiences are more like exposing psychological bugs so that they can be reimplemented, in a way that’s not going to generalize between people (as everyone’s implementation of that bit of their psychology will likely be different).
But… I’m not convinced it’s an asymmetric weapon, yet. The thing where you randomly increase variation sometimes breaks you out of bad spots, but it sometimes puts you into bad spots. I think Vervaeke would respond: that’s what the whole practice and community built around it is for! Someone who goes on a trip supported by other people, who know how to cultivate wisdom and challenge foolishness, is much better off than an autodidact who tries it on their own, maybe missing a core preparatory step or foolishness-challenging skill. Also, maybe this is just ‘for extreme cases’; for example, you might want to give psychedelics to almost everyone with PTSD, but almost no one without PTSD.
[I’m not sure why I’m focusing on psychedelics here, since part of the point of meditation is to get to these states, and he seems pretty bullish on everyone doing meditation. I think it’s that the risk for psychedelics seems much higher, and so the story has to be more convincing?]