Those of you with lots of meditation experience: How did it influence your understanding of philosophy of mind and topics such as qualia?

I have significant [LW · GW] meditative insight [LW · GW].

I feel that the quotes you use to describe Camp #1 and Camp #2 are both word salad. The Camp #1 quote is like this post [? · GW] Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote 17 years ago, except difficult to understand^[1]. Camp #2 asserts the existence of something fundamental, and then follows it with "There's no agreement on what this thing is". I feel that these postulations are not well-defined enough to deserve refutation.

How have your personal experiences influenced your understanding of western philosophy of mind. Not only on the topic of qualia; that was just the example that motivated me to post the question. For example, did anyone move from Harth's camp #1 to camp #2 or vice versa after meditation experiences, or did any of your other philosophical positions shift?

I feel that the mainstream western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, and that this is obvious to anybody who is half-decent at writing clearly. This includes both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham, neither of whom (to my knowledge) have significant meditative insight. This question is like asking "Did you stop eating garbage out of the local Safeway dumpster after you learned to cook?" I was never eating it to begin with.

To be fair, Buddhist metaphysics isn't any better. It's not uncommon for meditators with deep insight to also believe in levitation and reincarnation.

I think what you're really trying to ask is "Do you have any personal observations via insight which contradict a major philosophical school?" Yes, if you get enough meditative insight you'll transcend the concept of a self. Anything system of philosophy that begins with "I think, therefore I am" is broken at almost the axiomatic level.

You may want to have a look at Aella's survey/interviews of meditators and her writeup of it. 

I have meditated quite a lot over the last fifteen years. My understanding is that Buddhist meditation practices are intended to reduce suffering and promote equanimity. The main proposed method of action is reducing attachment. They are effective in this regard. They are not useful for doing western philosophy. 

I have perhaps 1000-1500 hours of meditation experience and have done a decent amount of psychedelics as well. I don't think meditation has given me any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness. Meditation has helped me to see different possibilities in terms of content, shape, and phenomena within the conscious space, and perhaps helped me to understand the shape of it better, but I don't really see it helping much to bridge the scientific/philosophical gap. Best I can say is that "yeah, it sort of feels like what Epistemic Depth Theory and probably Global Neuronal Workspace Theory would suggest."

To actually get what you're looking for, I think you'd need to do more studies on people who are experiencing different mental states, including those found in meditation, while using scientific instruments to probe the mind (fMRI, or BCIs--ideally much better ones than those that now exist). I think you'd need to do causal experiments specifically, not just correlational ones.

For that, you need those improved scientific instruments as well as people who are trained to interospect and report very fine-grained details of their experiences.

FWIW, I'm confused by the difference between Camp 1 and Camp 2. The crux seems to be the definition of "special." My own views on consciousness are close to physicalism (which might be Camp 2?), but I do think solving the Meta-Problem of Consciousness to sufficient depth has a good chance of leading us to those physical correlates or generators of consciousness.