All of this is not to be confused with the Buddhist doctrine that every form of negative internal experience is your own fault for not being Buddhist enough.
Not really, but it’s a long explanation and at this point I’m pretty sure some of the inference steps have to be confirmed by laborious trained processes. Nor is this process about reality (as many delusional Buddhists seem to insist), but more like choosing to run a different OS on ones hardware. The size of the task and the low probability of success makes it not worth the squeeze for many afaict. For the record, in case it is helpful to anyone at all, there are three types of dukkha, and painful sensations are explicitly the ones one can do nothing about (other than mundane skillful action). It is the dukkha of change (stuck priors) and the dukkha of fabrications (much more complicated) that Buddhist training eliminates.
But the thing I actually want to comment about is related to a point I’ve had a really hard time communicating to people about the deciding to be sane thing. It’s a kind of scale-free mental move where people seem to have a really hard time with self-reference, thinking it’s some sort of gotcha when it isn’t. Not quite on the level of ‘if you kill a murderer the number of murderers remains the same’ but close. Like ‘don’t negotiate with internal processes that are acting like terrorists’ must, in the limit, turn you into an internal terrorist. It seems motivated by a strong aversive distaste for any top down mental moves, because their training data for that kind of move was always used adversarially. For example, in school, to disrupt and gaslight their own sense making, learning function, and value seeking, rather than helping them cultivate their own. Thus people seem to have a deep prior to regard all such with suspicion and not engage with the idea that a non-horrible version of this move is available.
I’ve spent a lot of time with the self-therapy modality of Core Transformation for this reason as it seems to cut directly at it, and the short version is something I think that most people can see the value of, Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic style:
What is the situation I am confronting?
What are my beliefs about myself and the situation?
What are my attitudes and feelings about the situation?
What do I want to do (not necessarily what I can, or should do)?
For what purpose do I want that?
What would having that mean for me?
Recurse (5,6) until terminal goal is uncovered (if objections come up, rebase the stack on the objection)
Who wants that?
Credit to Opening the Heart of Compassion by Martin Lowenthal and Lar Short for this version. To me, this is a generator that eventually can help cut at the root of ‘unable to do recursive sanity checks’ as the moves are more deeply internalized and the internal processes come to trust the resultant structure more.
Nor is this process about reality (as many delusional Buddhists seem to insist), but more like choosing to run a different OS on ones hardware.
(I kind of wanted to give some nuance on the reality part from the OS Swapping perspective. You’re of course right with some overzealous people believing they’ve found god and similar but I think there’s more nuance here)
If we instead take your perspective of OS swap I would say it is a bit like switching from Windows to Linux because you get less bloatware. To be more precise one of the main parts of the swap is the lessening of the entrenchments of your existing priors. It’s gonna take you a while to set up a good distro but you will be less deluded as a consequence and also closer to “reality” if reality is the ability to see what happens with the underlying bits in the system. As a consequence you can choose from more models and you start interpreting things more in real time and thus you’re closer to reality, what is happening now rather than the story of your last 5 years.
Finally on the pain of the swap, there are also more gradual forms of this, you can try out Ubuntu (mindfulness, loving kindness) before switching over. Seeing through your existing stories can happen in degrees, you don’t have to become enlightened to enjoy the benefits?
This is an appealing story, but I haven’t really observed anyone get noticeably better at epistemology as a result of their practice. I remain confused about this for similar reasons to this story.
I think part of the issue is that epistemology is largely a question of mindware, and practice does not fix missing or bad mindware any more than it can teach a person calculus if they’ve never studied it.
Not really, but it’s a long explanation and at this point I’m pretty sure some of the inference steps have to be confirmed by laborious trained processes. Nor is this process about reality (as many delusional Buddhists seem to insist), but more like choosing to run a different OS on ones hardware. The size of the task and the low probability of success makes it not worth the squeeze for many afaict. For the record, in case it is helpful to anyone at all, there are three types of dukkha, and painful sensations are explicitly the ones one can do nothing about (other than mundane skillful action). It is the dukkha of change (stuck priors) and the dukkha of fabrications (much more complicated) that Buddhist training eliminates.
But the thing I actually want to comment about is related to a point I’ve had a really hard time communicating to people about the deciding to be sane thing. It’s a kind of scale-free mental move where people seem to have a really hard time with self-reference, thinking it’s some sort of gotcha when it isn’t. Not quite on the level of ‘if you kill a murderer the number of murderers remains the same’ but close. Like ‘don’t negotiate with internal processes that are acting like terrorists’ must, in the limit, turn you into an internal terrorist. It seems motivated by a strong aversive distaste for any top down mental moves, because their training data for that kind of move was always used adversarially. For example, in school, to disrupt and gaslight their own sense making, learning function, and value seeking, rather than helping them cultivate their own. Thus people seem to have a deep prior to regard all such with suspicion and not engage with the idea that a non-horrible version of this move is available.
I’ve spent a lot of time with the self-therapy modality of Core Transformation for this reason as it seems to cut directly at it, and the short version is something I think that most people can see the value of, Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic style:
What is the situation I am confronting?
What are my beliefs about myself and the situation?
What are my attitudes and feelings about the situation?
What do I want to do (not necessarily what I can, or should do)?
For what purpose do I want that?
What would having that mean for me?
Recurse (5,6) until terminal goal is uncovered (if objections come up, rebase the stack on the objection)
Who wants that?
Credit to Opening the Heart of Compassion by Martin Lowenthal and Lar Short for this version. To me, this is a generator that eventually can help cut at the root of ‘unable to do recursive sanity checks’ as the moves are more deeply internalized and the internal processes come to trust the resultant structure more.
(I think I may have asked you a similar question before, sorry if I forgot your answer:) Are there a couple compelling examples of someone who
did something you’d identify as roughly this procedure;
then did something I’d consider impressive (like a science or tech or philosophy or political advance);
and attributed 2 to 1?
Not directly attributable, no. I think of most of these things as bringing up the floor rather than raising the ceiling.
Ohhhh ok. That’s helpful, thanks.
(I kind of wanted to give some nuance on the reality part from the OS Swapping perspective. You’re of course right with some overzealous people believing they’ve found god and similar but I think there’s more nuance here)
If we instead take your perspective of OS swap I would say it is a bit like switching from Windows to Linux because you get less bloatware. To be more precise one of the main parts of the swap is the lessening of the entrenchments of your existing priors. It’s gonna take you a while to set up a good distro but you will be less deluded as a consequence and also closer to “reality” if reality is the ability to see what happens with the underlying bits in the system. As a consequence you can choose from more models and you start interpreting things more in real time and thus you’re closer to reality, what is happening now rather than the story of your last 5 years.
Finally on the pain of the swap, there are also more gradual forms of this, you can try out Ubuntu (mindfulness, loving kindness) before switching over. Seeing through your existing stories can happen in degrees, you don’t have to become enlightened to enjoy the benefits?
This is an appealing story, but I haven’t really observed anyone get noticeably better at epistemology as a result of their practice. I remain confused about this for similar reasons to this story.
I think part of the issue is that epistemology is largely a question of mindware, and practice does not fix missing or bad mindware any more than it can teach a person calculus if they’ve never studied it.