I think that the only coherent way to convince us that Enlightment is real is to provide a model from a 3rd party perspective. To use your phone parable, you can send the other person a diagram of a person holding a phone, explain to them how eir current perceptions arise (e.g. the phone is a computer attached to an LCD display, the display generates light according to commands from the computer, light enters eye retina; brain controls eye muscles, neck muscles and leg muscles etc.) and then explain how the new perceptions can arise (if eye + neck muscles rotate your line of sight s.t. it doesn’t intersect phone display...) Scientific epistomology can be in principle explained in a similar way, through models such as Solomonoff induction (although in this case it took a lot of time from the invention of scientific epistemology to the invention of a sufficiently precise model.)
The model doesn’t have to be fully mathematically rigorous: as always, it can be a little fuzzy and informal. However, it must be precise enough in order to (i) correctly capture the essentials and (ii) be interpretable more or less unambigously by the sufficiently educated reader.
Now, having such a model doesn’t mean you can actually reproduce Enlightment itself. Your interlocutor can understand the diagram but still fail to understand how to use eir neck / eye muscles in the right way. Indeed, one can imagine people whose brain was atrophied so that they are physically incapable of looking up from their phone. Similarly, it is possible that you are experiencing qualia that some (or even most) people simply don’t have and I don’t see strong evidence to the contrary at the moment (the vague notion that “we already know” doesn’t strike me as strong evidence.)
However, producing such a model would give us the enormous advantages of (i) being able to come up with experimental tests for the model (ii) understanding what sort of advantages we would gain by reaching Enlightment (iii) being sure that your are talking about something that is at least a coherent possible world even if we are still unsure whether you are describing the actual world.
What if—these are probably the wrong words, but even so—thinking in terms of models and 3rd-party perspectives is part of what needs to be bypassed in order to understand the thing?
Try sinking deeper into the cell-phone world. You send someone a diagram of a person holding a phone. What does that diagram refer to, in the cell-phone world? It refers to other pictures, on the cell phone, of people holding phones. The Archimedes Chronophone game isn’t so easy to win as this.
What if—these are probably the wrong words, but even so—thinking in terms of models and 3rd-party perspectives is part of what needs to be bypassed in order to understand the thing?
This would be much more surprising than the situation with the cellphones (which, as Vanessa correctly points out, seems pretty easy for a rationalist). I would love to see a metaphor that explained how something like this could happen, even if that metaphor had to be much more of a stretch.
It looks like a normal scientific view should at least be able to talk about the experience of enlightenment in the same way that it can easily talk about the experience of “red” to a blind person, since ultimately it’s just a thing happening with a brain.
I’m using the word “understand” in a broad sense. Talking about the experience of seeing red is a far cry from actually experiencing red, which is more the relevant cluster. And for most of human history it’s been easy to show people red things even though almost nobody understood the mechanics of human color vision.
I agree that talking about experiencing red is very different from experiencing red. That doesn’t answer Vanessa’s question though.
If someone was considering investing in curing their own blindness, it would be easy to explain to them what seeing is—even if you don’t know how vision or light works, you can talk about the experience of seeing and how those experiences seem to relate to facts about an external world. If someone is considering learning to look up from their phone, it is easy to say lots of concrete things about what “looking” entails and how it works and why it might be useful.
One can tell similar stories for some of the claimed benefits of meditation. For example: there is a bunch of cognitive machinery that gives rise to our perception of reality but which humans don’t usually perceive. We can learn to perceive the action of this machinery, rather than merely experiencing its effects. That’s a simple, concrete, story about what is going on. (Though it omits the important details, e.g. what can you actually learn to perceive about this machinery and how?)
It’s interesting to ask whether there are benefits of meditation beyond those that can be explicated in this way. My default guess is no.
If someone is considering learning to look up from their phone, it is easy to say lots of concrete things about what “looking” entails and how it works and why it might be useful.
I don’t agree. In the cell phone world as I picture it, it’s actually very difficult to say anything to a cell-phone-worlder about what looking entails, because all of the referents that a cell-phone-worlder has for the relevant words refer to images on their cell phone, which are the wrong types of things entirely. I have in mind a conversation at least as frustrating as the one about getting out of the car in the SSC post on cactus people.
It’s interesting to ask whether there are benefits of meditation beyond those that can be explicated in this way. My default guess is no.
it’s actually very difficult to say anything to a cell-phone-worlder about what looking entails, because all of the referents that a cell-phone-worlder has for the relevant words refer to images on their cell phone
The cell-phone-worlder has seen images on their phone, which comprise a model for the things outside of their phone. That model includes themselves, and all their actions and perceptions. You can tell them facts about that model, including facts about the consequences of actions they could take (though they may not have words for those actions). Yes, the cell-phone-worlder has not perceived reality (and neither have we). That’s not how models work, they aren’t supposed to be identical with the thing they are modeling, they are supposed to be used to draw inferences about the thing that they are modeling.
From my perspective your statement seems about as convincing as saying: “it’s actually very difficult to say anything to a human about what a banana is like, because all of the referents the human has for the relevant words refer to photons impinging on their retina.” That does not mean that our beliefs about the world are restricted to beliefs about photons.
If you want to talk to the cell-phone-worlder you can say:
There are parts of reality which you don’t currently perceive. Here is a picture of the world <personholdingphone.jpg>. Your perceptions are restricted to the part of the picture marked “Phone,” which is why the rest of that picture looks so alien to you. With practice, it is possible for you to exert control over what part of the world you perceive. By using that skill you will be able to have new kinds of experiences, and those experiences will be related to what is happening in the parts of the world not labeled “Phone.”
You say:
I have in mind a conversation at least as frustrating as the one about getting out of the car in the SSC post on cactus people.
If you are talking to someone in a car, you can explain to them what it means to be a car, and how their perception of reality is related to cars and how their actions result in driving the car, and about how a different set of actions could result in a very different set of experiences. I don’t see how getting out of the car is necessary to understanding that you are in a car. I don’t think that Scott is sympathetic to the big green bat (I could be wrong), though he’s probably more sympathetic than I am. I’m even less sympathetic to the teacher in the big green bat’s story, who appears to be being intentionally dense.
The diagram in itself doesn’t refer to anything, it is a representation of an abstraction, like the digits 123 are the representation of the number 123. However, the explanation that comes with the diagram shows you how to translate between qualia and concepts in your model. This is all the reference I need.
The Chronophone is not a good analogy. We are not communicating through a medium that clevery censores everything we say. We are communicating through a medium that allows transmitting rigorous mathematical constructions that we both can understand; and also less rigorous but still sufficiently inambiguous information, for the sake of convenience.
I have, in fact, given the model. Or at the very least, the generators needed and some instructions on how to build the model.
The problem is, your type signature for “model” is too low-dimensional.
…which, ironically, is literally the thing being pointed at. If you could generate more dimensions to the type of thing you’re tagging as “model”, you would be doing the thing.
Yay self-referential puzzles.
Can you imagine what it would have been like to be literally the first human to suddenly GET language? How it would have felt to try to get your fellow human beings to try language? How it would have felt a bit like it does today to talk to animals? And how insanely relieving and transcendently amazing it would be once another person GETS language and you two can have A CONVERSATION?
…and meanwhile, your non-talking tribe mates are grunting and doing ape politics and thinking you and your friend are making weird sounds and aren’t doing anything.
A dear friend of mine was with me when my kensho struck, and we were able to Look at each other. From that moment on, coordination has been trivial. He’ll go into spirals of deep depression sometimes, and I’ll be able to sit with him, caring but basically unaffected in terms of our ability to sync up. Others who care for him but haven’t had shared Looking cannot keep up with this pace, and I end up needing to support them. Which is fine and good; it’s in service of a much greater cause, and I’m happy to use my resources to pull this off. And I can give pointers to those other supporters — often about how they can be more fully themselves and kind to themselves as the means of giving support. (One person exclaimed after something like the fourth time I helped her find her own inner sense of stability, “How do you KNOW this stuff?”)
The model is really quite easy to give to you once you know how to Look.
I haven’t a damn clue how to give you a model before that.
…with apologies. I really would love to be able to.
Where exactly? Are you talking about this essay or some previous one?
The problem is, your type signature for “model” is too low-dimensional.
Can you give me a model of the correct type signature of models? Or is it Kensho all the way down?
I want an explantion on my own terms. It doesn’t have to a perfect explanation, maybe there are things which are ineffable or unknowable or whatever (although one can ask what does it mean to say that they “are”), but it has to be something like the best approximation possible in my language.
Is Kensho amenable to mathematical description? If not, how is it possible, given that your brain understands Kensho and your brain is governed by mathematical laws? Or, do you claim to have discovered new physics? I understand that the map is not the territory and understanding a mathematical model is not the same thing as experiencing something first hand, but all I’m asking for is the 3rd party perspective.
Okay. What is a “mathematical description”? What does it mean that “your brain is governed by mathematical laws”? How and where are those facts encoded, such that you emit those words?
I think that the only coherent way to convince us that Enlightment is real is to provide a model from a 3rd party perspective. To use your phone parable, you can send the other person a diagram of a person holding a phone, explain to them how eir current perceptions arise (e.g. the phone is a computer attached to an LCD display, the display generates light according to commands from the computer, light enters eye retina; brain controls eye muscles, neck muscles and leg muscles etc.) and then explain how the new perceptions can arise (if eye + neck muscles rotate your line of sight s.t. it doesn’t intersect phone display...) Scientific epistomology can be in principle explained in a similar way, through models such as Solomonoff induction (although in this case it took a lot of time from the invention of scientific epistemology to the invention of a sufficiently precise model.)
The model doesn’t have to be fully mathematically rigorous: as always, it can be a little fuzzy and informal. However, it must be precise enough in order to (i) correctly capture the essentials and (ii) be interpretable more or less unambigously by the sufficiently educated reader.
Now, having such a model doesn’t mean you can actually reproduce Enlightment itself. Your interlocutor can understand the diagram but still fail to understand how to use eir neck / eye muscles in the right way. Indeed, one can imagine people whose brain was atrophied so that they are physically incapable of looking up from their phone. Similarly, it is possible that you are experiencing qualia that some (or even most) people simply don’t have and I don’t see strong evidence to the contrary at the moment (the vague notion that “we already know” doesn’t strike me as strong evidence.)
However, producing such a model would give us the enormous advantages of (i) being able to come up with experimental tests for the model (ii) understanding what sort of advantages we would gain by reaching Enlightment (iii) being sure that your are talking about something that is at least a coherent possible world even if we are still unsure whether you are describing the actual world.
What if—these are probably the wrong words, but even so—thinking in terms of models and 3rd-party perspectives is part of what needs to be bypassed in order to understand the thing?
Try sinking deeper into the cell-phone world. You send someone a diagram of a person holding a phone. What does that diagram refer to, in the cell-phone world? It refers to other pictures, on the cell phone, of people holding phones. The Archimedes Chronophone game isn’t so easy to win as this.
This would be much more surprising than the situation with the cellphones (which, as Vanessa correctly points out, seems pretty easy for a rationalist). I would love to see a metaphor that explained how something like this could happen, even if that metaphor had to be much more of a stretch.
It looks like a normal scientific view should at least be able to talk about the experience of enlightenment in the same way that it can easily talk about the experience of “red” to a blind person, since ultimately it’s just a thing happening with a brain.
I’m using the word “understand” in a broad sense. Talking about the experience of seeing red is a far cry from actually experiencing red, which is more the relevant cluster. And for most of human history it’s been easy to show people red things even though almost nobody understood the mechanics of human color vision.
I agree that talking about experiencing red is very different from experiencing red. That doesn’t answer Vanessa’s question though.
If someone was considering investing in curing their own blindness, it would be easy to explain to them what seeing is—even if you don’t know how vision or light works, you can talk about the experience of seeing and how those experiences seem to relate to facts about an external world. If someone is considering learning to look up from their phone, it is easy to say lots of concrete things about what “looking” entails and how it works and why it might be useful.
One can tell similar stories for some of the claimed benefits of meditation. For example: there is a bunch of cognitive machinery that gives rise to our perception of reality but which humans don’t usually perceive. We can learn to perceive the action of this machinery, rather than merely experiencing its effects. That’s a simple, concrete, story about what is going on. (Though it omits the important details, e.g. what can you actually learn to perceive about this machinery and how?)
It’s interesting to ask whether there are benefits of meditation beyond those that can be explicated in this way. My default guess is no.
I don’t agree. In the cell phone world as I picture it, it’s actually very difficult to say anything to a cell-phone-worlder about what looking entails, because all of the referents that a cell-phone-worlder has for the relevant words refer to images on their cell phone, which are the wrong types of things entirely. I have in mind a conversation at least as frustrating as the one about getting out of the car in the SSC post on cactus people.
Why?
The cell-phone-worlder has seen images on their phone, which comprise a model for the things outside of their phone. That model includes themselves, and all their actions and perceptions. You can tell them facts about that model, including facts about the consequences of actions they could take (though they may not have words for those actions). Yes, the cell-phone-worlder has not perceived reality (and neither have we). That’s not how models work, they aren’t supposed to be identical with the thing they are modeling, they are supposed to be used to draw inferences about the thing that they are modeling.
From my perspective your statement seems about as convincing as saying: “it’s actually very difficult to say anything to a human about what a banana is like, because all of the referents the human has for the relevant words refer to photons impinging on their retina.” That does not mean that our beliefs about the world are restricted to beliefs about photons.
If you want to talk to the cell-phone-worlder you can say:
You say:
If you are talking to someone in a car, you can explain to them what it means to be a car, and how their perception of reality is related to cars and how their actions result in driving the car, and about how a different set of actions could result in a very different set of experiences. I don’t see how getting out of the car is necessary to understanding that you are in a car. I don’t think that Scott is sympathetic to the big green bat (I could be wrong), though he’s probably more sympathetic than I am. I’m even less sympathetic to the teacher in the big green bat’s story, who appears to be being intentionally dense.
Taboo the word “understand”.
The diagram in itself doesn’t refer to anything, it is a representation of an abstraction, like the digits 123 are the representation of the number 123. However, the explanation that comes with the diagram shows you how to translate between qualia and concepts in your model. This is all the reference I need.
The Chronophone is not a good analogy. We are not communicating through a medium that clevery censores everything we say. We are communicating through a medium that allows transmitting rigorous mathematical constructions that we both can understand; and also less rigorous but still sufficiently inambiguous information, for the sake of convenience.
See also my reply to Valentine.
I have, in fact, given the model. Or at the very least, the generators needed and some instructions on how to build the model.
The problem is, your type signature for “model” is too low-dimensional.
…which, ironically, is literally the thing being pointed at. If you could generate more dimensions to the type of thing you’re tagging as “model”, you would be doing the thing.
Yay self-referential puzzles.
Can you imagine what it would have been like to be literally the first human to suddenly GET language? How it would have felt to try to get your fellow human beings to try language? How it would have felt a bit like it does today to talk to animals? And how insanely relieving and transcendently amazing it would be once another person GETS language and you two can have A CONVERSATION?
…and meanwhile, your non-talking tribe mates are grunting and doing ape politics and thinking you and your friend are making weird sounds and aren’t doing anything.
A dear friend of mine was with me when my kensho struck, and we were able to Look at each other. From that moment on, coordination has been trivial. He’ll go into spirals of deep depression sometimes, and I’ll be able to sit with him, caring but basically unaffected in terms of our ability to sync up. Others who care for him but haven’t had shared Looking cannot keep up with this pace, and I end up needing to support them. Which is fine and good; it’s in service of a much greater cause, and I’m happy to use my resources to pull this off. And I can give pointers to those other supporters — often about how they can be more fully themselves and kind to themselves as the means of giving support. (One person exclaimed after something like the fourth time I helped her find her own inner sense of stability, “How do you KNOW this stuff?”)
The model is really quite easy to give to you once you know how to Look.
I haven’t a damn clue how to give you a model before that.
…with apologies. I really would love to be able to.
Where exactly? Are you talking about this essay or some previous one?
Can you give me a model of the correct type signature of models? Or is it Kensho all the way down?
I want an explantion on my own terms. It doesn’t have to a perfect explanation, maybe there are things which are ineffable or unknowable or whatever (although one can ask what does it mean to say that they “are”), but it has to be something like the best approximation possible in my language.
Is Kensho amenable to mathematical description? If not, how is it possible, given that your brain understands Kensho and your brain is governed by mathematical laws? Or, do you claim to have discovered new physics? I understand that the map is not the territory and understanding a mathematical model is not the same thing as experiencing something first hand, but all I’m asking for is the 3rd party perspective.
Okay. What is a “mathematical description”? What does it mean that “your brain is governed by mathematical laws”? How and where are those facts encoded, such that you emit those words?