bgaesop's Shortform

I'd assumed what I posted was the LW meditator consensus, or at least compatible with it.

Note that I already discussed this paper a bit at the end of my earlier post on meditation [LW · GW]; (this kind of) enlightenment removing your subjective suffering over your incompetence and otherwise leaving most of your behavior intact is as predicted and would still be considered valuable by many people. Also, enlightenment is only one of the things you can develop via meditation, and if you want practical benefits there are other axes that you can focus on.

I am currently very skeptical that the PNSE paper has anything of worth, given that Jeffery Martin's Finder's Course is basically a scam according to this review and some others. (I don't know if the paper is based on Finder's Course participants.) It would be valuable for someone to do a fact check on the paper.

If you take the paper at face value, wouldn't you expect a lot of the chronically depressed rats to be jumping at the chance to trade off the ability to remember appointments with no longer subjectively suffering from depression?

I don't see why, it seems that the paper doesn't challenge the assumption that the "enlightened" state or the "dmn reduced activation" sate or whatever you want to call it results in less happiness.

Even more so, a lot of the effects described could also fall under aging and might be confounded by the fact that most of these people have aged during the time they trained (e.g. not being able to remember appointments).

Finally, you don't have to bring meditation/introspection practices to the point where you get that "enlightened" state a constant in your life. I think there's a fair argument to be made for dzogchen-like practices (e.g. the kind of quackery people like Sam Harris and Loch Kelly expose), if done in moderation, can allow you to "silence the dmn" or "separate awareness/attention/consciousness", in a selective way rather than all the time. I.e. get to a point where your brain is able to experience something close to a small-medium dose of psilocybin for a short amount of time.

But, again, this final point is based on empirical quackery,but then again, so is most of the "research" around meditation when you compare it to other types of research (Note: I'm not blaming the way the research is done, I'm saying that the thing that they are trying to observer in combination with the tools they have means they will get very little insight... you can only do so many diffusion tensor MRIs on healthy people until it becomes unethical and the data you get from is very broad compare to, say, that you would get about kidney function from a biopsy + blood/urine testing using a broad range of separation techniques and chemical assays within reasonable cost)

Maybe. This is a very narrow definition of "enlightenment" in my opinion, as in Scott is claiming PNSE is enlightenment whereas I would say it's one small part of it. I think of it differently, as a combination of psychological development plus some changes to how the brain operates that seemingly includes PNSE but I'm not convinced that's the whole story.

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Meta-point: I noticed almost falling into the defensive, trying to refute your sentiment without even reading the paper.

I don't hold you responsible for that, but a less polemic tone would probably get you a better response at least from me.

I am happy that someone finally brought into rationalist community some skepticism about meditation, in a way that won't get dismissed as "nah, u jelly, cos u have no jhanas, u full of dukkha and need some metta to remove your bad karma, bro."

I was already getting quite nervous about the lack of skepticism. Especially in a community that used to dismiss not only all religion and supernatural claims, but also all kinds of mysterious answers such as quantum woo or emergence... and suddenly went like "look, here is a religion that is totes different, because it's from the opposite side of the planet, and here is a religious practice that has all benefits and no problems, let's do it every day" and everyone seems to jump on the bandwagon, and then people start using words from foreign languages and claim to have mysterious experiences that are in principle incommunicable to mere muggles... and I'm like "what the fuck, is this still the Less Wrong I used to know, or have these people been kidnapped and brainwashed?"

To answer you question, if they have been successfully Dunning-Kruger'ed, they'll probably just be like: "nope, I have an unmediated direct perception of reality, and I know it's all okay". Also, if there is any problem with enlightenment, obviously those people Scott mentions have not been truly enlightened.