Q1: I think waking up out of social reality is a mini enlightenment, one many people have gone through (esp. those who exited a religious or quasi-religious community). A downside is that it is now more difficult to be fully bought in to any social reality, including much healthier ones.
My take on interacting more harmoniously with others was touched on by the representational flexibility stuff. It’s a skill set that feels strongly related to empathy for me. E.g. providing safe trails of retreat for people when they aren’t ready for too many degrees of freedom on a load bearing belief yet.
Q2: Not really. Reports of greater well being are almost universal past certain milestones. IIRC Jeffrey Martin’s survey data set included 4-5 people who found the experience neutral and 4-5 who found it actively negative, but notably the active negative cases were all cases of people who had stumbled into such things on their own and hadn’t had any guidance on working with the common failure modes. On being put in touch with others like them who gave them some advice, reportedly all of them were able to resolve the negative valence stuck points.
So I don’t doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously.
But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I’m expecting here, consider that a child who doesn’t learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.
In which case, I wonder, if you don’t have these common delusions about the mind (or you’re ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially?
(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)
Q1: I think waking up out of social reality is a mini enlightenment, one many people have gone through (esp. those who exited a religious or quasi-religious community). A downside is that it is now more difficult to be fully bought in to any social reality, including much healthier ones.
My take on interacting more harmoniously with others was touched on by the representational flexibility stuff. It’s a skill set that feels strongly related to empathy for me. E.g. providing safe trails of retreat for people when they aren’t ready for too many degrees of freedom on a load bearing belief yet.
Q2: Not really. Reports of greater well being are almost universal past certain milestones. IIRC Jeffrey Martin’s survey data set included 4-5 people who found the experience neutral and 4-5 who found it actively negative, but notably the active negative cases were all cases of people who had stumbled into such things on their own and hadn’t had any guidance on working with the common failure modes. On being put in touch with others like them who gave them some advice, reportedly all of them were able to resolve the negative valence stuck points.
re Q2-
So I don’t doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously.
But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I’m expecting here, consider that a child who doesn’t learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.
In which case, I wonder, if you don’t have these common delusions about the mind (or you’re ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially?
(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)
I expect it to be dangerous in low openness environments with strong religious norms.