The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)

Trying to be post-metaphysical is often about not thinking much about metaphysis and thus in this case staying with the metaphysics of concentration, equanimity, tranquility, mindfulness and suffering without thinking about whether those are the best concepts to use.

Huh? The article's very much saying that we should think about whether the traditional concepts are useful, and then it has an extended case study where it dismantles and reconstructs the four noble truths into a form that's rather different from the common one but which it argues to support practice better. Whether its proposed new version is actually better is a question I don't have a strong opinion on, but it's certainly at least trying; the "mindlessness trainer" criticism seems off.

Neat! Could you elaborate on what the person in question "used" the idea of the Trinity for?

You both latched onto the least interesting part of the post. The part that is literally just Romeo throwing out some wild speculations.

That is not the impression given by either the post or Romeo’s replies. He seems to be making it clear that he is, indeed, making the affirmative claims that I attributed to him, and has thus far given no indication of intending to retract or weaken them.

But let me ask you this: do you think the post would stand on its own, without these “speculations” (as you call them)? By way of attempting to answer this question, I’ve taken the liberty of creating a copy of Romeo’s post on Google Docs, where I’ve crossed out every “speculative” claim for which we’ve not been given evidence.

I was fairly conservative in choosing parts to cross out; I’ve left intact, for example, almost everything that mentions or talks about forms of psychotherapy and other concepts from psychology. (Although, by rights those ought to go as well; we do not accept such claims without evidence ordinarily; why should we accept them when speaking about meditation or Buddhism? But perhaps speculating about the “softer” sciences is a lesser offense, so I mostly let these things stand.)

What is left, nevertheless, is a post that is missing any justifications or explanations of its core claims; a post essentially indistinguishable from any number of similar posts that have appeared on Less Wrong, since its relaunch almost two years ago.

The more interesting part is the general framework where he matches up the some of the processes mentioned in Buddhism with some insights from behavioral psychology, psychotherapy, and pop psychology. It gives a framework to start understanding why anecdotally people claim such big effects from extended meditation practice, and gives an insight about how one might begin to test the hypothesis that this is what’s happening, both personally and on a broader scale.

Allow me to make a suggestion, then, for anyone who writes these sorts of posts in the future:

First, enumerate, explain, and cite the “insights from behavioral psychology, psychotherapy, and pop psychology” which you intend to use as explanations. Be specific in your claims, and be diligent in your references. Consult the latest available sources, to make sure that your insights of choice have survived the replication crisis; provide these sources to your readers.

Then, having established a basis for what follows, make all the interesting connections to Buddhism, meditation, or what have you.

This approach would kill two birds with one stone: it would prevent such distracting digressions as we’re now engaged in, and it would also strengthen your own understanding of the ideas that you are presenting.

It seems to me that doing things in this way would benefit everyone involved.

The two parts I mentioned are simply the most obviously speculative and unjustified examples. I also don't have any real reason to believe the vaguer pop psychology claims about building stories, backlogs, etc.

The post would prob­a­bly have been a bit cleaner to not men­tion the few wild spec­u­la­tions he men­tions, but get­ting caught up on the tiny de­tails seems to miss the for­est from the trees.

It seems to me LW has a big epistemic hygiene problem, of late. We need to collectively stop make excuses for posting wild speculations as if they were fact, just because the same post also contains some interesting 'insight'. We should be downvoting such posts and saying to the author "go away and write this again, with the parts that you can't justify removed".

Doing so may reveal that the 'insight' either does or does not successfully stand alone when the supporting 'speculation' is removed. Either way, we learn something valuable about the alleged insight; and we benefit directly by not spreading claims that lack evidence.

Thus are theories like the four humours, the five elements, yin/yang, signatures, and astrology created. I could mischievously add System 1/2, neuromarketing, and most schools of psychotherapy to that list.

Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:

It would greatly please me if people could achieve a deeper understanding of suffering just by taking analgesics. If that were the case, perhaps we should encourage people to try them just for that purpose. However, I'm guessing that the health risks, especially cognitive side-effects (a reduction of awareness that would preclude the possibility of gaining any such insight), risks of addiction and logistical issues surrounding the distribution of drugs for non-medical purposes will render infeasible any attempt to systematically employment of analgesics for the purpose of spiritual insight. In all likelihood, we'll be stuck with the same old meditations and pranayamas and asanas for a while.

But the reason you bring up the topic of analgesics, if I am not mistaken, is to challenge the legitimacy of my insight by an argument that boils down to: "the experience you describe could be obtained through drugs, so it must not be that profound". I do not know if you were also expecting to rely on a negative halo effect of "drug usage" to augment your rhetoric, but as you may have guessed from the preceding paragraph, my opinion is that the negative connotations of drug-induced states is due to irrational associations. If we ignore the drugs, then the remaining constituent of your rhetoric is the underlying assumption that "any easily obtained insight must be trivial." That is far from the truth. I believe there are many simple things that people could do, which would profoundly increase their wisdom at a very low cost [1]. But precisely because these things are so simple, people wouldn't take them seriously even if somebody suggested it to them. (The chance is a bit higher, but still not terribly high, if it's said by the teacher of an expensive paid workshop, or their guru, or their psychotherapist. But the most effective way so far to get people to do these kinds of simple things is to integrate them inside some elaborate social ritual.)

But concluding from this that “there’s no such thing as suffering” is a conceptual confusion of the highest order—and not some insight into deep Truth.

I agree that the statement "there’s no such thing as suffering" is false, and not any kind of insight into deep Truth.

That's because I am not claiming that "there's no such thing as suffering." I claim to have an insight which can't be described in words, but the best verbal description of this insight is something like "suffering is an illusion."

I don't even consider this insight to be particularly deep. Like you said, maybe you could get it by taking painkillers. Certainly not an insight into deep Truth. That is not to say that I don't take other people's suffering seriously--far from it, it concerns me greatly. However if you were to compare the difficulty of understanding suffering and the difficulty of understanding consciousness, I think suffering is a far easier problem to resolve.

ETA: And it seems to me to be far from obvious, that it is good or desirable to voluntarily induce in yourself a state akin to a morphine high or a lobotomy… especially if doing so has the additional consequence of leading you into the most elementary conceptual errors

You are wise to be cautious, because neural self-modification could potentially lead to states where one loses all concern for one's own well-being. However, just because an altered state of consciousness is similar to a drug-induced state or a state of neurological impairment doesn't, by itself, imply that it should be avoided. It all depends on whether you've taken appropriate steps to control the risk (e.g. by only accessing the state under the guidance of an experienced teacher), and what insight you stand to gain by experiencing that state. The states of consciousness may be the same, but the intentions and degree of control makes all the difference. Recreational drug users pursue these states with little or no understanding of the process, little or no control over the outcomes, and out of the intention of thrill-seeking, social bonding, or alleviating boredom. Mystics pursue these states, often backed up by a tradition which has precise knowledge of how to attain these states, are equipped with mental tools to control the process, and seek these states with the intention of obtaining insights that will be of enduring value to their lives.

[1] Such as: take just one hour to think and reflect. Dance with abandon. Volunteer to take care of children. Go to the forest, just to look around. Play in the mud. Fast for one day. Learn and go see where your food comes from, how your clothes are made.

The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.

Not sure whether we disagree here, my guess is I am slightly unsure what you intend to say. I do think there are statements like "time will pass more slowly relative to a stationary observer if you move close to the speed of light" that are highly specific predictions that can be verified (given sufficient investments in experiments) without deeply understanding the theory of relativity. Such a statement does definitely capture some aspect of the truth of general relativity.

If some process (like a physicist or a research lab) repeatedly generates highly surprising predictions like this that turn out to come true, someone might be said to meaningfully be "convinced of the veracity of general relativity" without a concrete understanding of the underlying theory.

> The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?

Yes. Of course you do.

I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying "language".

LDT doesn't seem to be an abbreviation that's common enough to make it to Wikipedia. Can you spell it out?

I am not familiar with those concepts. References would be appreciated. 🙏

it may help the individual who makes that choice [to shut up and go practice more]

I'll just reiterate that I think this is wrong. Correct instruction (and sufficient amount of it!) not only makes the practice much more productive, it results in much higher chance of the person actually sticking to the practice, because they are more motivated, because they understand what they're doing and exactly how it will lead to progress.

This is true not only of meditation, but from my experience e.g. of weightlifting. Anecdote time: When I started weightlifting, I spent about three minutes on research, picked up the first beginner routine that seemed to make sense, and followed it for ~two years with minor adjustments here and there. Only then I seeked detailed understanding of what I'm doing, the anatomy and the science behind resistance training etc. After that, my practice became much more productive, much more enjoyable, and therefore much more consistent. I now understand what the fuck I'm doing.

Because the instruction I followed in the beginning was a bit more detailed than what J- gives for meditation, I was able to make some progress—I imagine that if I received instruction from someone who viewed weightlifting like J- views meditation, I wouldn't get anywhere and I would get myself seriously injured—but if I had in the beginning the level of instruction I have now, I would look like fucking Schwarzenegger by now. I wasted a lot of time in the gym by not operating with correct instruction.

And exactly the same goes for my personal experience with meditation: I started off my practice with one of those 10-day Goenka retreats, so I had some instruction, so I made some progress, but only after I started reading The Mind Illuminated did I start practicing consistently, diligently, with joy, and making steady progress.

I don't agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.

A good example of evaporative cooling. :) 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs [LW · GW] 

[meditation technical stuff]

The breath isn't a solid sensation, it's made up of many smaller sensations. Some instructions suggest investigating the "start", "middle" or "end" of the breath. Try to find the very specific part of that and generally the instructions suggest that you won't find it because there is no such thing. Owing in the direction of impermanence.

There is a possible meditation method that makes/assumes "permanent" the breath and then practices concentration on the breath as an assumed permanent object. This is important because with increased concentration skill we can then investigate (investigate = insight practice, not concentration practice) and discover the breath is not quite "real" in the permanent bounded conceptual entity that we want it to be when we study it.

There is a possible method of studying the thought stream and the way it changes when the breath changes. This can be seen in simple ways by holding the breath, breathing very quickly, but also noticing the way the breath changes when talking about significant or important matters. Or the way the breath takes shape when angry or anxious. Or excited. There is an interesting breath movement that I see (personal experience here) in theraputic contexts that looks something like a big sigh out. It seems to be that when people are working with an issue and are ready to let go of the issue they breathe out. (in my personal experience) there's something weird and interesting in the way that the breath ends a thought stream like that.

From a Pranayama book (translated as "breath of life") was a suggestion that the thought stream is like a bird tethered to a post via a string. The mind can float around but is always pulled back to where the breath is.

Studying the breath happens either at the nose/mouth or at the chest region of the body, this happens to also be the physical location where a large number of emotional reactions are experienced through bodily sensations (book: "the body keeps score" is excellent). With intimate knowledge of the breath comes intimate knowledge of the subtle emotions floating around. That includes many of the tiny reactions that (personal experience) I might feel when I react to some experience in the world. If I want to better shape my experience, interfacing with my own body-based emotional reactions is pretty handy.

There are holotropic breathwork experiences, there are Wim Hoff breathing methods. There are a lot of breath based meditation concepts to explore.

Dan Brown in "pointing out the great way" adds to follow the in breath, and the out breath and in between shift the attention to the body sensations, so that there are no distractions to carry the mind away (as informed by a branch of Tibetan tradition)

(personal stuff:)

When I watch my breath, I notice when my posture is out, when there's even so much as a sheet of extra weight on my chest. When I'm leaning to the side.

I notice when I run, I can breath clearer.

I can notice when I'm getting distracted from the task at hand.

I notice when I'm overwhelmed with juggling too many things because of the way that adrenaline-feel in my body changes my breathing pattern.

I notice when I'm playing favourites (read: have a crush) with someone because my breathing does (something or other that I don't have pinned to specifics).

I (recently) notice other people's breath, and if I'm in contact with their body can read their emotions very accurately. I'd claim to be able to tell when someone is lying, but that's not quite it. I would claim to be able to read someone's mind but it's more like, "I can tell when someone changes their mind" based on the way their breathing changes, I can't read actual content (however for example: if we are in the same place and there's a sudden loud noise I can tell somewhat what their internal reactions are based on their breathing change)

Now what?

There's a lot of options of interesting things of value from studying the breath. Good books are "The Mind Illuminated" or "The Attention Revolution".

I would suggest you are not done. You sure did finish discovering a boring corner of meditation, don't stay there. There's plenty of valuable things to learn about the inside of the mind.

I would suggest that LW'ers are pretty good and can hurry up with the instructions. Definitely read a book about it because the ability to pick up a map, and follow it - will come easy to LW'ers.