DavidM

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 4:25 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: ksvanhorn’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I suggested 3 months to a year for achieving partial enlightenment.

  If you consider seeing progress according to the four stage model that I gave (or another more detailed model) to be something that reduces the uncertainty of the value of the pursuit, then obviously you will be in a position to better evaluate whether it is a worthwhile pursuit much sooner than that.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 4:17 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: luminosity’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  If you meditate frequently, you might (should?) reach a state of enlightenment. This will take probably at least a year to reach.

  I wrote that a year is a good upper bound.

  After you have reached ‘enlightenment’, you likely still have to keep investing significant hours into meditation to prevent sliding back into the period of mental degradation.

  I explicitly stated that enlightenment is permanent. I should also have explicitly stated that partial enlightenment is permanent (in the sense of not regressing to non-enlightenment or a lesser category of enlightenment).

  You can’t describe to us what enlightenment is, how it works, or what benefits it brings.

  I have provided a metaphor about how it works and described numerous potential benefits.

  You have no empirically tested benefits of enlightenment to share with us.

  My claims about the benefits of enlightenment are on the basis of empirical observation; you simply don’t have access to the evidence on which those benefits are claimed. I explicitly stated that too.

  What do you think the causes of your mischaracterization of what I’ve written are?

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 4:08 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Will_Sawin’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  “Attachment” has a specific nonstandard meaning in Buddhist-associated thinking, and I realized after writing Part 1 that it would have been better to omit the word altogether rather than try to explain it. So I would prefer to discuss the testable aspects of enlightenment without talking about attachment.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 3:38 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  Erm, it’s not that I just read the sentence “feel X” and feel it. It’s that I looked away from >the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis—and most people are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I’m not sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at self-hypnosis literature would probably give a good idea of the upper bound.

  OK. I think I misunderstood you here and also at some points in the past (including your original response).

  However, in relation to my claims about enlightenment and bias, you said:

  Because peer pressure, the urge to conform, seems like a direct product of unnecessary attachment to the world, which seems like something meditation with a Buddhist heritage is focused on reducing.

  I described what this style of meditation is focused on achieving rather explicitly. “Attachment to the world” is not anything I wrote, but is something you are imputing to me because it’s associated with Buddhism. I don’t think you’ve read what I’ve written very thoroughly, and for some reason are trying to respond to it anyway. If you want to continue this discussion, I request that you re-read my post first, and then re-state any comments or criticism.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 3:05 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: TimFreeman’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining /​ intending. Ha!)

  Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?

  The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that meditation addresses, I would characterize it as a distortion in the perception of or in the representation of the components of the mind. The ability to correct that is clearly (to me) not the same as the ability to correct bias. However, correcting it provides some powerful new capacities which can be applied to dealing with biases if one is so inclined.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 1:58 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: TimFreeman’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.

  The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it’s done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of “useful” is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it’s done to those things.

  The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed to be relevant to which you consider useful, state some beliefs, see if the enlightened person says otherwise, and go from there. (This requires that the enlightened person also be rational and well-informed. An enlightened person who doesn’t know anything about the subject you want to talk about, who is uneducated, mentally ill, brain-damaged, or whatever, is probably not going to state accurate beliefs, for reasons unrelated to enlightenment.)

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 1:46 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: TimFreeman’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  The right control is to spend an hour every day for a year imagining the orgasm, >since that’s the approximate duration of the proposed experiment with pursuing >enlightenment.

  I see your point.

  What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?

  For what it’s worth, I tried Manfred’s experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand “imagining a toothache” to mean imagining a visual or abstract image that I associate with toothaches, and allowing my attention to shift very quickly between the imagined object and the non-imagined location of the teeth where the toothache is supposed to be.)

  Enlightenment gives the meditator enough self awareness to see their biases, and >they don’t care enough to reduce them. I can’t imagine this alternative, are you >really proposing it?

  I can’t imagine why you can’t imagine that this alternative might be true.

  Biases don’t come with tags that say “bias” on them. “Biases” is a term that people have created to refer to cognitive tendencies which they judge not to reliably lead to accurate beliefs. To effectively determine whether something is a bias you have to at least have an understanding of what it means for a belief to be accurate and have a means by which you could determine whether a belief is likely to be accurate. Obtaining these depends at least on intelligence, cultural background, education, and personality /​ cognitive style. An interest in spending a large amount of time working out whether something is a bias or not, or searching for things that are biases, depends at least on personality /​ cognitive style and goal structure.

  If these factors don’t align before enlightenment, why would you expect that the mere ability to see many cognitive processes clearly (“seeing one’s biases”, i.e. seeing some of the processes that are biases, not necessarily seeing that those processes are biases) would make them align afterwards? Do you think I’m claiming that enlightenment magically tags all biases with the tag “bias”?

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 1:18 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It >didn’t particularly vibrate, though—I don’t have a clear enough picture of what that’s >even supposed to mean, possibly.

  Today may be the day that you learn that your mind works in a very uncommon way.

  What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?

  On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn’t fix the really obvious flaws in our >brains, it would make it more unlikely that it fixes the less obvious ones. I mean, >come on, it should at least stop Asch’s conformity experiment from working, right?

  Before I agree or disagree, why do you think so? Biases have different origins, and something that may improve some may not improve others.

  (Parenthetically, the relationship between rationality and Asch’s experiment is not as straightforward as you seem to think.)

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 1:12 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  The orthodox Buddhist position seems to be that ‘impermanence’ is both gross (the breakdown of macro-level objects) and subtle (fluctuations in all the objects of one’s experience).

  FYI, “Sayadaw” is a title /​ honorific, so googling just that won’t help much.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 1:05 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.

  Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. “Some mathematical training” may be analogous to “partially but not fully enlightened.” “No mathematical training” is analogous to “never effectively practiced meditation.”

  I still believe with high probability that you think “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 12:56 AM

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I’m not sure how one goes about finding a good meditation instructor in person. That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it?

  I hear that if you go to a retreat center or monastery run by someone who endorses the methods I’ve described, they approach and teach meditation in a very serious way. (You might ask something like “are these teachings in the style of Mahasi Sayadaw’s methods?”, though I have no idea whether that’s a gross faux pas or not.) I believe there are a number of Burmese monks who run organizations in various parts of the world who could help you (no idea what their geographical distribution is). And this assumes you want a method similar to what I’ve described, and that you want to deal with monks at all.

  Outside of Burmese Theravada, there are lots of traditions with their own beliefs, methods, dogma, etc. and evaluating whether they can do anything to help you is much harder. They are highly unlikely to frame meditation or enlightenment in the ways I have, for better or worse.

  I would suggest that a good way to tell whether an instructor is likely to be helpful as a meditation teacher is not much different from how you would tell whether they would be helpful as teachers of any other hands-on skill. Do their explanations make sense to you? Can you ask questions? Do they give feedback? Have other people successfully learned from them what you want to learn? I imagine these are especially important if you’re looking at a tradition that you have minimal information about.

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 12:33 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I have no idea whether an experiment like one you describe would show a difference. I think there is probably some kind of bottleneck in the data the retina sends to the brain, and I imagine that could stand in the way of testing my attention in the way you describe. But the basic point is interesting.

  I could imagine lots of experiments which I believe would likely show a difference in perception and attention between people who meditate in the way I’ve described and people who don’t. For example, I claimed that mode four perception has “wide attentional width”. It seems likely that this implies that a person in that mode of perception would be much better at attentional tasks involving simultaneous recognition of objects in different parts of the visual field. (For example, imagine watching a large computer screen that flashes two images, at the far left and right sides simultaneously, and having to explicitly say something about what properties those images had.) And since I can get into mode four perception when I want to, I should be better at these tasks.

  On the other hand, most low-level cognitive processes are inaccessible to introspection, so without any knowledge of cognitive psychology, I have no idea whether the feature of experience I call “wide attentional width” would translate into this particular finding, or not do so because of some detail about human cognition that cognitive psychologists know about but I don’t.

  So, ultimately, I expect that a variety of tests along these lines would find obvious differences, but I don’t have enough knowledge to pick out any particular one.

  Risto Saarelma mentions EEG readings, and I imagine that meditating in the way I describe would produce obvious effects there, though I don’t know enough about EEG readings to predict what they would be.

  In general I worry that this is not a helpful line of thinking to pursue. Finding these effects would show that the time I’ve invested in meditating has affected the functioning of my brain with respect to attention and perception. Would this really be a surprising result to you? I would expect that a person who pursues any exercise in attention and perception is likely to show differences in attention and perception compared to a person who doesn’t, simply due to neuroplasticity, even if they aren’t exercises in attention and perception that would ever lead to enlightenment. I don’t see that being able to demonstrate these differences would have a very large bearing on the claims I’ve made that people here have found controversial (though it would have some bearing on them).

  What links here?

  • DavidM's comment on Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 1 of 3) by DavidM (May 16, 2011, 4:17 AM; 1 point)

• DavidMMay 6, 2011, 12:09 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  This is a very good question.

  Here is one way that enlightenment can change what one anticipates. Someone was talking with me recently about whether enlightenment and the end of delusions concerning ‘self’ is desirable or not. As I understood it, they believe that ‘self’ may well be a delusion (something produced by a cognitive process, having no ontological reality beyond that), but it ties experiences together in a useful way, and experience minus the structure produced by that cognitive process is likely to be confusing or inefficient.

  On the contrary, I say that, were they enlightened, they would believe that ‘self’ is not a process that structures adult human experience in any way relevant to efficiently and effectively dealing with sense data and cognitive content, and further, the process which does structure experience in such a way is not the one responsible for the everyday impression of being or having a ‘self’ (or whatever it is that people think concerning ‘self’).

  This is not yet a precise claim about the world. For a first stab at what ‘responsible’ means, I’d say something like “in the normal human brain, not sufficient for the impression of being or having a ‘self,’ and not necessarily inoperative when impressions concerning ‘self’ no longer arise.” A first stab at what ‘structures’ or ‘normal’ or ‘process’ (etc.) mean is beyond the scope of this response. And until neuroscience advances in the right ways and until an enlightened person learns about those advances, they will not be able to translate their belief into an assertion about the functioning of human brains.

  Despite that, once the relevant work in neuroscience is done, I know what this person would be surprised to see or not see in light of their actual beliefs, I know what they would be surprised to see or not see in light of what I say they would believe if they were enlightened, and I know that these expectations are very different.

  What links here?

  • DavidM's comment on Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3) by DavidM (May 6, 2011, 1:58 AM; 2 points)

• DavidMMay 5, 2011, 3:08 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  Also, “enlightenment is impossible to communicate [about to unenlightened people]” is not a proposition which must have no evidence for it, any more than “higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training” is.

  I think that the latter proposition is true, and I believe with high probability that you do too.

• DavidMMay 5, 2011, 3:03 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  The problem is, I can explain these results with fairly high probability without >meditation actually working as you claim[...] Just tell people to focus on >experiencing any sort of sensation and many of them will experience it (imagine a toothache in your top teeth, on the right side, for 10 >seconds. Now imagine being perfectly aware of your surroundings for 10 >seconds). Add in cognitive dissonance after you’ve followed the advice “just keep >meditating,” and you’re looking at a serious effect even without meditation doing >anything novel.

  This is a caricature of a real attempt at explanation.

  Try imagining having a full-body orgasm vibrating at 20hz (as per my definition of ‘vibration’). Let us know if imagining it produces that experience.

  Better yet, before you try imagining it, give us your probability estimate that it will work 1) for you, and 2) for others.

  Test proposal: round up some enlightened meditators who have never even heard >of a bias before (maybe give them a quiz based on bias names in the literature and >pick the ones who fail it) and then perform some standard bias experiments on >them a few weeks later? As a control, giving the same quiz and tests to some >college students would suffice.

  I said many times that any reduction in biases is likely to happen only in the case that a person is interested in that.

  I get the impression that you didn’t pay very close attention to what I’ve written. Is that true?

• DavidMMay 5, 2011, 2:21 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: Zetetic’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  I would say that the most common and general benefit is likely to be an increased ability to observe and act against habitual biases. One effect of cultivating attention and perception to the degree necessary for enlightenment is that many cognitive processes which were previously murky or hard to see or ‘subconscious’ become rather clear. A person interested in improving this facet of rationality would likely find it extremely advantageous to be able to clearly see some of the garbage coursing through their mind, either masquerading as ‘my belief’ or connected to processes which generate beliefs that are not reliably accurate. Seeing it is likely to allow one to guard themselves against acting on such things or against regarding them as anything more than cognitive babble of questionable provenance.

  If a person is not interested in this kind of self-improvement, all bets are off.

  (I mentioned the above in Part 1 already.)

  “Making it easier to achieve certain types of goals” is so easy a target to hit that you should be surprised if I said “no.” What kinds of goals do you have in mind?

  Assuming that enlightenment really is a more accurate understanding of what you now regard as your ‘self,’ you will be able to select goals that are more in line with what you would select if you were smarter and knew more. (Cf. CEV). I don’t know if this falls under what you mean by “intelligent goals.” I also mentioned this in Part 1.

  I would explicitly disclaim improvements in akrasia or in organizational abilities related to goal-setting as being likely to follow from this method or from enlightenment.

  I imagine that there are some benefits you might receive from enlightenment which are too idiosyncratic for me to predict.

  I think there are numerous benefits to well-being /​ mental health, but I am torn between seeing those as “manifesting in idiosyncratic ways, dependent on personality” and “reasonably common.” Part of my hesitation is that I realized that I know a good bit about what people who self-select as interested in enlightenment for its own sake ultimately say about enlightenment with respect to their mental health, but nothing much about what people who are interested in enlightenment specifically in order to improve their rationality say about it, AND that the benefits which translate into mental health improvements are described in a way which seems highly dependent on a particular personality and goal structure (so would not necessarily be expected to universalize across different types of people).

• DavidMMay 5, 2011, 12:23 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  Through the experiences of people who have tried it themselves, which have informally been collected by communities of people interested in this and other methods.

  You are welcome to find out through direct experience whether it is effective for you.

  If enough LWers try it, maybe some psychologist who reads LW will do a formal study, where one group meditates like this and another group does whatever. (Probably wouldn’t get IRB approval, given what I wrote about stages two and three.)

• DavidMMay 4, 2011, 11:38 PM

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

  The earliest contemporary tradition which emphasizes meditation in a style like this that I know of goes back to Mahasi Sayadaw, a Burmese Theravada monk, and then to whoever taught him. Mahasi Sayadaw’s impact on Theravada Buddhism has been very large, though his tradition is certainly not the only one in contemporary Theravada Buddhism.

  “Vibrations” is a term you won’t see in any Buddhist literature. Where I write “pay attention to vibrations,” Buddhists would write “pay attention to the impermanence characteristic of phenomena.” In Buddhism, “impermanence” (Pali: anicca) is one of the three characteristics of everything that exists. “Vibrations” is a term that suits the positivist in me better. (Note: I didn’t invent the term. It’s common in contemporary secular communities interested in enlightenment.)

  What you’re describing doesn’t sound like vibrations; there are other [for lack of a better word] “pulsatory” phenomena in experience. But you can make an educated guess under the following assumption: if you can see them that easily, you should be able to see them in lots of places. So, look at part of your visual field and see if it has any property that you would describe as ‘vibratory.’ Or touch your skin and see if the sensation has any vibratory property.

  I don’t know what’s up with the particular numbers. There may be some relationship between the frequencies of vibrations and the frequencies of brain waves, but I wouldn’t know. Vibrations typically present at frequencies around there (5,7, 10, whatever), and it is true that certain frequencies are more predominant in certain stages. It would be interesting to know whether there is an interesting association between the stages, their typical cognitive /​ emotional /​ attentional /​ perceptual manifestations, and brainwave activity.

  EDITED FOR CLARITY: I didn’t see that you wrote alpha waves. Vibrations often present slower and faster than alpha waves. I’ve seen 3-4hz often enough. Stage two often has really high frequency vibrations (20hz+) if your concentration is strong or you’re deep enough into it.

  I’ve been through the stages I’ve described, yes.

Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 2 of 3)

• DavidMMay 1, 2011, 3:10 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: ksvanhorn’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 1 of 3)

  I would say that the methods leading to enlightenment will help with stress, but only indirectly. Once you’ve begun to do away with the delusions that cause you suffering, life starts to go a lot more smoothly. But the practice that most directly aims at that is not a relaxing one and is not one that I would ever recommend to someone to control their stress levels for immediate relief.

  Parenthetically, some people find that, with partial enlightenment, the practices that directly improve mood and stress levels become ridiculously easy (for those who care to indulge). Most beginners typically find the same practices hard to execute successfully.