On the question of blocking thoughts, may I offer a personal anecdote, conscious that readers of Overcoming Bias will read it heterophenomenologically?
Years ago, when my health was good, I had a Buddhist meditation practice of great vigour and depth. Sitting on my cushion, noticing my train of thought pull into the station of consciousness, refusing to board the train and watching the thoughts leave, I would become more and more aware that it was the same old crap coming round again and again.
Forcibly stopping my thoughts had always worked badly. I coined a meditation slogan encapsulating what I had learned: When thoughts spin round in your head, like the wheels on a bicycle, don’t apply the breaks, just stop peddling.
There was little pleasure to be had, peddling away, only to see the same old crap coming back into view yet again. No peddling. No thought.
That was bloody scary. I was an intellectual. All these clever thoughts? They were me, my identity, my core. Without them, who was I? Did I still like cats? Did I still like music?
I needn’t have worried. After I few days Mara noticed that my mind was calm and free from distraction. Did He concede defeat, admitting that another human had gained enlightenment and slipped from his grasp? No, ofcourse not. I had seen through the old familiar crap, but it was crap and there was no problem about improving the quality. I had learned to resist the temptations of low quality distracting thoughts, but all that happened was that my mind came up with more creative, more clever, more insightful, and more distracting thoughts.
Soon I was caught up in them, back to business as usual.
I see a secular moral to this tale. If you want more insightful and creative thoughts all you have to do is stop recycling the usual crud. You would guess that withdrawing your mental energy from the pumps that circulate the usual shit round your head would leave an empty silence, but the mind doesn’t work like that.
There is an awful lot of history. Preliminary to whether we imagine the past vividly enough for it to carry proper weight, we must select a cannon of ``important″ events to which we turn our attention.
In a recent thread on Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/2k77b/comments/c2k80o
I drew attention to Argentina because the story of Argentina’s 20th century economic disappointments jars uncomfortably with the cultural tradition in which I swim. I swim in a cultural stream in which the misfortunes which may befall a country live in a hierarchy. At the top are the bad misfortunes, losing wars, and fighting wars. Somewhere near the bottom are petty misfortunes: many countries are under the thumb of absolute rulers and if the caudillo retains power by pursuing popular policies then his rule is not so bad.
I know little of Argentinian history and understand it even less. What little I know threatens my hierarchy of misfortune. It looks as though well meaning but economically unsophisticated absolute rulers are the top misfortune. They are much worse than wars, which are intense, but brief.
I want to overcome my bias by learning about Argentinian history. I find myself struggling. There is a standard way of looking at recent history with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Great War etc. I notice that I’m very dependent on social support and just get sucked into that looking at history from that point of view because it is the common one.
So there is a second sense in which History may or may not be available. Frist it is important to feel the force of history sufficiently strongly. But this could make things worse if we cultivate our feeling for a limited selection of history, chosen to support our standard narratives. The second requirement is for breadth, and this is very difficult if the people around you aren’t interested.