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.
(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.