My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms

I am really happy that this post was written, and mildly annoyed by the same things you're annoyed by.

To explain rather than excuse, there's a good reason that meditation teachers historically avoid giving clear answers like this. That's because their goal is not to help you intellectually understand meditation, but rather to help you do meditation.

It's very easy to mentally slip from "I intellectually understand what sort of thing this is" to "I understand the thing itself", and so meditation teachers hit this problem with a hammer by just refusing to explain it, so you're forced to try it instead. This problem is what the "get out of the car" section is talking about.

I have some worry that this post will make it easier for people to make errors like:

"I'm angry, because X is a jerk. Aha, I should try the thing Kaj was talking about, and notice that feeling angry is not helping me with my goal of utterly destroying X."

(This is exaggerated, but mistakes of this shape are really, really easy to make.)

I think it's definitely worth the cost, but it is a cost.

but before we get started on that, can we quickly step out of mythic mode/metaphor land/narrative thinking for a moment, just to make sure that we are all still on the same page as far as basic ontology goes, and agree that, for instance, physics and mathematics and logic are still true?"

Now it seems to me like there was some straight up miscommunication in that thread. My recollection is that everywhere I saw this question explicitly asked, it was explicitly answered "yes" (e.g. JenniferRM asked it at some point). I don't remember Said asking this question.

 I think that all of these are worth doubting without further evidence, and I tihnk that some of them are in fact wrong.

I'd be interested in you going into the details of which claims seem wrong and why.

Reducing the extent to which people with various world views talk past each other seems core to rationality.

Reading this comment made me feel really happy for you.

From what you've been writing here and on Facebook, I feel like I can relate to a lot of the stuff you've been going through and fixing. I'm glad that you're getting through it.

On the inside, before you Look, the thing you’re about to Look at doesn’t look on the inside like “high-level cognitive content”. It looks like how things are. This ends up with me saying things that sound kind of crazy or nonsensical, but to me are obvious once I Look at them. (E.g., there are no objects. We create objects in order to think. Because language is suffused with object-ness, though, I don’t know of any coherent way of talking about this.)

This sounds very familiar. To quote from How An Algorithm Feels From Inside:

Because we don't instinctively see our intuitions as "intuitions", we just see them as the world. When you look at a green cup, you don't think of yourself as seeing a picture reconstructed in your visual cortex—although that is what you are seeing—you just see a green cup. You think, "Why, look, this cup is green," not, "The picture in my visual cortex of this cup is green."

And in the same way, when people argue over whether the falling tree makes a sound, or whether Pluto is a planet, they don't see themselves as arguing over whether a categorization should be active in their neural networks. It seems like either the tree makes a sound, or not.

In the same post, Eliezer also wrote:

It takes a deliberate effort to visualize your brain from the outside—and then you still don't see your actual brain; you imagine what you think is there, hopefully based on science, but regardless, you don't have any direct access to neural network structures from introspection.

It sounds like Looking is a skill that lets someone have more introspective access to their own neural network structures. If this is a correct understanding, it seems perfectly compatible with LW's current approach to ontology, or at least the approach laid out in Eliezer's Sequences (with one caveat being that I think we should be careful/skeptical about whether someone purporting to be Looking is really introspecting parts of their neural network structures, or merely doing some form of epistemic wireheading). Do you agree?

Quote from Richard Feynman explaining why there are no objects here.

I've begun a STEM-compatible attempt to explain a "no objectively-given objects" ontology in "Boundaries, objects, and connections." That's supposed to be the introduction to a book chapter that is extensively drafted but not yet polished enough to publish.

Really glad you are working on this also!

I'm particularly concerned here because the culture around LW-style rationality seems to emphasize a very specific and almost mathematically precise ontology in a way that is often super useful but that I don't think is a necessary consequence of the epistemic orientation. That made me really hesitant to put a bunch of effort into spelling out what Looking might be within that favored ontology, since the whole point is to notice restrictions on epistemic strength imposed by ontological rigidity.

Yeah, this thing. In another comment I used the phrase "LW epistemic game" to describe the pattern in the local social web around deciding who's epistemically trustworthy and what flavors of arguments are epistemically acceptable. I'm not sure how to get people to Look at the game without looking like I'm defecting in the game.

Starting from reductionist materialism to frame the question of what our brains are doing when we Look at reductionist materialism yields a strange loop that often causes the process to glitch

I don't understand why should it happen. Of course we can use reductionist materialism to reason about processes that happen in our brain when we are doing this very reasoning. It does cause confusion, which is the reason for debates surrounding "free feel" et cetera, but this confusion is solvable. I think that I no longer have this confusion, so why should Looking be an exception?

If I try to argue with a paperclip maximizer about how maximizing paperclips isn't all there is to life, it will care to listen only to the extent that listening will help it maximize paperclips. I claim that by default, human mind design generates something analogous to a bunch of paperclip maximizers. If I'm stuck talking to one of someone's paperclip maximizers, then even if I see that there are other parts of their mind that would like to engage with what I'm saying, I'm stuck talking to a chunk of their mind that will never understand what I'm saying.

The reason the paperclip maximizer won't listen is because it doesn't care, not because it doesn't understand what you're saying. So, this allegory would only make sense if, some parts of our mind don't care about the benefits of Looking while other parts do care. It still shouldn't be an impediment to understand what Looking is.

Adding to my other comment...

I'm skeptical about the value of most neurophysiological explanations in general: I think that in many cases, they just create an illusion of understanding by throwing in neurological terms that give an appearance of detail without actually contributing conceptual gears. If I say "learning to navigate a city causes structural changes in the hippocampus", that doesn't really tell most people anything that they could use, but does give them a feeling that they now understand this better.

Similarly, I could have quoted from the Dietrich paper

the prefrontal cortex enables the top layers of consciousness by contributing the highest-order cognitive functions to the conscious experience ... evidence suggests that initial and much ensuing information processing on perception, attention, or memory occurs in other brain areas before further integration in the frontal lobes ... meditation results in transient hypofrontality with the notable exception of the attentional network in the prefrontal cortex

and added something like "and thus, Looking is about learning to selectively downregulate the activity of the prefrontal cortex - which carries out the final-order cognitive functions of conscious experience - in order to get greater conscious access to inputs from other brain areas whose data has not yet undergone those final transformations"...

...but (assuming that it was true) would that really have been more informative than the cognitive-level description of the same that I actually had in the post, i.e. the bits about breaking down the experience of a sound/unhappy thought to more low-level building blocks, and noticing that something was off about the next-to-final-stage-cognitive-content?

I think it might have sounded more impressive, but conveyed fewer gears about what's actually happening and why it's useful.

I did find the Dietrich paper interesting earlier, back when I didn't have the cognitive-level model yet. It didn't tell me very much, but it did at least give me some kind of an understanding of what the heck it is that meditation does. But now that I do have the cognitive-level model, focusing on the neurophysiological model doesn't seem so valuable anymore, since neurophysiological explanations only give a very crude level of detail compared to cognitive-level ones. (Though I do grant that it does feel nice to have some neuroscience-grounded theories about what meditation does, which are compatible with the cognitive-level ones; if the neuroscience said that the cognitive-level explanation was totally implausible, then that would be a problem.)

Suppose it's true that "our minds are composed of a large number of subagents, which share information by sending various percepts into consciousness" and I realize this through meditation, it seems that "I" remain something real (namely a group of subagents) and can still be potentially harmed or helped. Why would a group be less capable of being harmed than a monolithic agent? I'm not seeing the logic here.

Right, so I'm using a very specific sense of "harmed" here.

The claim is not that the subagents couldn't be harmed or helped in the sense of e.g. brain damage damaging their function, things in the external world happening more or less according to their values, etc. They obviously can, and there's nothing delusional about that.

The "harm" that I'm referring to is the alief that there's something intrinsically bad about experiencing emotions with negative valence. For instance, I might experience stress about going to the dentist, and this is not because I would expect the dentist to do the "objective" kind of damage which you're talking about - obviously I expect the dentist to benefit me, or otherwise I wouldn't be going to in the first place. But I'm still stressed, because I expect the experience itself to be uncomfortable, and there's something about that upcoming discomfort that my mind alieves to be inherently dangerous and a thing to avoid.

When you make the no-self update... well, this is getting to the territory where it's very hard to convey in words why exactly getting an insight to the nature of the self would change that alief. Much of our conceptual system is subtly built on those incorrect assumptions, and the whole update comes from forcing the mind to confront the contradiction between its existing conceptual assumptions and the thing that it is actually experiencing when it Looks at its own operation very closely. But I'll try nevertheless:

What triggered my "kensho" experience (scare quotes because I may again be somewhat misusing a technical term) was something like... I was trying to let go of all doing and simply observe my mind, but then "trying to simply observe my mind" was by itself a form of doing; whenever a thought like this crossed my mind, I sort of just mentally shrugged and went "well okay, if my mind wants to do something, then I will let it do so, because that by itself is also a form of letting my mind do whatever it wants and let go of doing". And then I would feel like my mind start doing something again, and I would try not to interfere with that... and all of this gave rise to the question of "so what exactly is the 'I' that is doing things here, and what does it mean for me to 'let go of doing'? If all of these are just different subprocesses getting access to consciousness, then what does this 'sense of doing' mean?"

At which point, suddenly, my mind flashed back to the conceptual model given in The Mind Illuminated, of the feeling of a sense of self being just another sense percept that was added to the experience as a final processing step... and suddenly on some level I knew and felt that the "I" that was doing things was not any particular privileged subprocess that was doing things, but that it was just whichever subprocess the narrating mind chose to highlight as the current protagonist of the story it was telling. Kind of like the author of a novel changing the viewpoint character between chapters. The sense of "I" was just a tag for "which subprocess has the narrating mind chosen to highlight at this given moment".

Now why did that lead to a (temporary) feeling that pain and discomfort were nothing to be afraid of?

It was something like... when I struggle against pain, there's an element of identifying (fusing together) with the subprocess that is fighting against the pain, rather than with the subprocess that's producing the pain. If I'm thinking of going to the dentist and stressing out about that, then I'm fusing together with the subprocess that finds the thought of pain to be something that it wants to avoid, and there is a thought that the "I" which will experience the pain is the same subprocess which is currently active and struggling against the thought of experiencing the pain. But if there is in fact no privileged "I" and the sense of an "I" is just a tag for a subprocess from whose perspective a narrative is currently being constructed, then that makes it plausible that the subprocesses which will be active during the visit to the dentist won't be the same ones which are currently struggling against the thought of going to the dentist. And the whole concept of the "same" subprocess is kind of arbitrary anyway and if my mind just switches to an ontology which doesn't even include that kind of an equivalence relation for subprocesses or different mind-states, then it's impossible to think that the "me" which will experience the dentist visit will be the same me as the one which is currently active, because there isn't even any ontologically basic me, just different configurations of subprocesses, some of which will sometimes happen to be labeled with an arbitrary XML tag.

(But there is of course still the entirety of the system of subagents which is privileged in the sense of being the one of which future predictions can most reliably be made, and whose body is the one whose actions are the most directly influenced by whatever this system of subagents ends up deciding to do. So in that sense it's useful to keep one version of the concept of "me" around: it's just a useful theoretical fiction, rather than an ontological primitive.)

Did that make any sense?

Also, I'm surprised that you give no mention to transient hypofrontality, which you've blogged about before. (See also this TEDx talk.)

I didn't reference that paper for two reasons:

1) While the paper's hypothesis still seems plausible to me, my amount of neuroscience knowledge is limited, so I don't have high confidence in my ability to evaluate how true its claims actually are. For this post, I wanted to restrict myself only to claims which I feel reasonably certain about. Aside for the thing about the long-term nature of enlightenment, which I explicitly flagged as something I'm uncertain about, everything else in this post is something of which I can that "I'm confident that this is a thing that happens". For that paper, my epistemic position is more like "well that sure does sound plausible".

2) You say that transient hypofrontality sounds like a more plausible explanation of what happens, but I don't see them as two different explanations, but rather as looking at the same thing at different levels of explanation. If I'm giving an explanation of the development of expertise, I might say something like "you become an expert by developing increasingly detailed mental representations of a domain" or I could say "developing a skill causes a (possibly temporary) increase in the amount of neurons in the regions of the brain dedicated to that skill". Neither is wrong, one is just using a cognitive framework and the other is using a neurophysiological one.

Similarly, it's been a while since I last read it, but I believe that the Dietrich paper is explaining on a neurophysiological level basically the same process that this post gave a cognitive explanation of. It might have been interesting to cover that angle as well (assuming that I was convinced about the correctness of that angle), but this article was quite long already, and I didn't think that the neurophysiological side would have added enough value to justify its inclusion.

I'm still not 100% sure I understand Val's definition of Looking, so I'm not quite willing to commit to the claim that it's the same as Kaj's definition. But I do think it's not that hard to square Kaj's definition with those quotes, so I'll try to do that.

Kaj's definition is:

being able to develop the necessary mental sharpness to notice slightly lower-level processing stages in your cognitive processes, and study the raw concepts which then get turned into higher-level cognitive content, rather than only seeing the high-level cognitive content.

Everything you experience, no matter the object, is experienced via your own cognitive processes. When you're doing math, or talking to a friend, or examining the world, that is an experience you are having, which is being filtered by your cognitive processes, and therefore to which the structure of your mind is relevant.

As Kaj describes, the part of your thought processes you normally have conscious access to are a tiny fragment of what is actually happening. When you practice the skill of making more of it conscious and making finer and finer discriminations in mental experience, you find that there is a lot of information that your conscious mind would normally skip over. This includes plenty of information about "the world".

So consider the last quote as an example:

A while back I was interacting with a friend of a friend (distant from this community). His demeanor was very forceful as he pushed on wanting feedback about how to make himself more productive. I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented, so I Looked at him. My sense of him as an experiencing being deepened, and I started noticing sensations in my own body/emotion system that were tagged as "resonant" (which is something I've picked up mostly from Circling). I also could clearly see the social dynamics he was playing at. When my mind put the pieces together, I got an impression of a person whose social strategies had his inner emotional world hurting a lot but also suppressed below his own conscious awareness. This gave me some things to test out that panned out pretty on-the-nose.

A fictionalized expansion of that, based on my experiences, might be:

"I was running my usual algorithms for helping someone, but I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented. In the past I would have just kept trying, or maybe just jumped over to a coping mechanism like trying to get out of the situation. However, I had enough mental sharpness to notice the feeling as it arose, so instead I decided to study my experience of the situation. Specifically, I tried to pay attention to how my mind was constructing the concept of "him". (Though since my moment-to-moment experience doesn't distinguish between "him" and "my concept of him", and since I have no unmediated access to the "him" that is presumably a complex quantum wavefunction, that mental motion might better be described as just "paying attention to my experience of him", or even "paying attention to him".) When I did that, I was able to see past the slightly dehumanizing category I was subconsciously putting him in, and was able to pick up on the parts of my mind that were interacting with him on a more human, agent-to-agent level. I was able to notice somatic markers in my body that were part of a process of modeling and empathizing with him, from which I derived both more emotional investment in him and also more information about the social dynamics of the situation, as processed by my system 1, which my conscious mind had been mostly ignoring. I was able to use all of this information to put together an intuitively appealing story about why he was acting this way, and what was going on beneath the surface. This hypothesis immediately suggested some experiments to try, which panned out as the hypothesis predicted."

I wonder whether long-term thinking is a smaller/partial example of this "no self" concept.

I mean, overcoming short-term desires (in order to better satisfy long-term desires) requires realizing that these short-term desires are not you. That e.g. "having your desire to eat chocolate frustrated" doesn't mean that you are being harmed, because "the desire to eat chocolate" is not you; it is possible to frustrate the desire, while benefiting (the other aspects of) you.

It's just that the typical method of breaking this identification is to replace it by identification with something else. Because it is easier to redirect the desire to identify, than to abandon it. So instead of identifying with your short-term goals, you are encouraged to identify with your longer-term goals. The "real you" is no longer the desire to eat chocolate, but e.g. the desire to be healthy, fit, and attractive. Maybe better, but not fundamentally different.

(To use an analogy, it is like abandoning a religion, by converting to a different religion. You no longer believe in god X, because now you believe in god Y instead. Now contrast it with atheism, which means you no longer believe in god X, but there is no replacement for him; you stop having the concept of god. Things that you previously attributed to gods, remain; but they are now seen as natural.)

So it seems to me that this "no self" means realizing that you are neither your short-term goals, nor your long-term goals, not your body, but also not your social group, or religion, or nation, or whatever replacements people use. There is a brain. It works in certain ways. It lives in a body. It generates the process of consciousness. It creates models of itself. It does all of this as a mechanism consisting of parts. One of the things it does, is that it generates a desire to appear internally consistent; it actually sometimes actively works to reduce some great inconsistencies (because regulating the body, which includes the brain itself, is what brains do). But there is no "true you" that this brain is trying to obey or approximate, other than its own content.

But realizing this doesn't effectively turn you into a some p-zombie aware of being a mere zombie, just like being able to reduce your chocolate consumption doesn't erase your propensity to like chocolate. The brain doesn't stop working just because its contents represent the understanding of how it works.

These are good questions... unfortunately, in my current state of mind, I don't feel confident in my ability to answer them accurately.

Several of the paragraphs describing my experience, were written based off notes that I made while in that kind of state, as well as memories of the explanations that I thought up while in that state. But even while in that state, I recognized that there's probably a bit of a verbal overshadowing effect going on, with the verbal description mostly but not quite matching my actual experience of the state, with that not-quite-it version nevertheless becoming the main thing that I'd recall from the state when no longer in it.

So, while I remember enough of that state to say that my descriptions here are probably roughly right, the level of detail that your question is trying to tease out is too precise for me to produce a reliable answer, in my current mostly-normal-again state.

I'll see if I can give you a better answer the next time I end up in a state like that. :-)

For what it's worth I've addressed this issue a bit here. A relevant quote from it:

If we include experiences of experiences of experiences in our ontology rather than compressing them into experiences of experiences, thus making a systems-level demand for ontological complexity, we can understand contentment as an experience of happiness towards all experiences of experiences and use it to direct tranquilist axiological reasoning. In this way contentment wraps happy and sad experiences in an experience of happiness, making it of a different type and avoiding apparent contradiction by adding happiness to rather than changing the original experience from pleasure or suffering.

Having deconstructed contentment and understood tranquilism precisely, it appears my original concerns about feedback being suffering were confused because if suffering, a negative valence experience, is something we can be content with, then in this context suffering must be an experience of experience and thus feedback cannot necessarily be suffering because feedback can exist as a direct experience not just a meta-experience.

Yeah, it's certainly very easy to confuse defusion and dissociation. Dissociation is something like trying not to let something in at all (a sensory experience or an emotion or a memory), whereas defusion is something like letting it in fully but then - not sure how to describe this part - feeling whatever you feel about it, and feeling calm one meta level up about whatever that is?

That puzzles me too!

I've experienced both this stuff and mild dissociative states on occasion, and yeah, they're indeed different in the way that you describe. And I don't have a model which would explain the difference.

My best guess that the pattern of defusion is different, and that in dissociation you're somehow defused from your normal sense of self while still remaining fused with the conceptual structures that say that having a sense of self is important.

Or something. :)

I should note that I didn't say that suffering wouldn't be aversive, I said that pain isn't aversive. My model is basically that suffering is aversion (to e.g. pain), so it wouldn't make sense to say that suffering isn't aversive. So I would reword your #1 as "I'm compelled to avoid pain, which is maladaptive".

That said, based on what I've been able to observe so far, there are at least three things that happen:

1. Something like pain asymbolia, where pain that is currently being experienced ceases to be aversive both in a behavioral and experiental sense: its neither feels subjectively unpleasant, nor do I do anything to disengage myself from the situation with it.

2. An effect where, if #1 happens often enough, my anticipations about the unpleasantness of painful experiences update: the anticipation of a painful event ceases to be aversive (in both the experiental and behavioral senses).

3. An effect where anticipations which have not updated become less aversive, in such a way that I no longer experience the anticipations themselves as being unpleasant. This seems to be a special case of #1, since the pain from anticipated pain is by itself an instance of pain. However, this doesn't necessarily affect my behavior with regard to moving towards the painful thing: the anticipation of something unpleasant still acts as a behavioral disincentive.

The last one probably needs some elaboration. As an example, there's one somewhat unpleasant thing that I should be doing, which I've now been procrastinating on for several weeks. What stuff like Looking has achieved, is that I'm capable of holding the sense of I should be doing this but the thought feels unpleasant in my mind and keep staring right at it, as opposed to feeling compelled to drown it out of my mind completely, by e.g. engaging in entertainment that would dull my experience of it.

This seems indirectly useful, since if I'd be flinching away from the very thought of needing to do this thing, then I couldn't even try to troubleshoot the issue. Now, I'm capable of at least holding the thought in my mind, which still hasn't caused me to actually do the thing, but at least it has enabled me to try to figure out where the problem is, as well as helping me use the thought for structured procrastination (as opposed to my day being entirely wasted because I try to just play a game or something to get the whole thing out of my mind).

Someone for whom suffering isn't aversive could, for example, regularly experience extreme pain just to prove the efficacy of their techniques or earn a small stipend.

There are a few studies documenting something like this, but the ones that I'm aware of seem to be few in number and have all the standard caveats related to psychological research. Still, e.g. this review seems plausible to me, because it reports studies which found that what it calls "open monitoring"-style meditation seemed to reduce pain sensitivity (even when its practitioners were not actively meditating) while "focused attention"-style meditation did not have the same kind of effect; of these two, "open monitoring" roughly means "Looking-style practices", so the results are what I'd expect.

Thank you for sharing. :) I feel touched from hearing that my article affected you in such a major way.

Would be happy to hang out with you in case we're ever on the same country and continent!

But is the flinching away intrinsically bad? Or is it also possible to defuse from the flinching in a way that makes it less unpleasant?

I'm confused about what you mean by "intrinsically bad" here, and especially given the relationship of the second question to the first question, suspect that your concept of "intrinsically bad" conflates at least two things. Your second question is much easier to answer: yes, you can defuse from flinching, and yes, that makes it less unpleasant.

Is there a mental motion of turning towards, or welcoming an experience, which is ultimately responsible for seeing pleasurable experiences as good? And if the flinching away is in some way intrinsically bad, is this opposite motion intrinsically good?

Yes, there is a mental motion of welcoming an experience, and you can do it to any experience, not just pleasurable ones; you can even find joy in welcoming any experience, not just pleasurable ones. I am still confused about what you mean by "intrinsically good."

Now, once you get that pain is not equal to suffering, and you've thus managed to eliminate suffering for you personally, what reasons remain to try to change something about what you expect to experience in the future?

Because you want to. (I'm not sure how to explain what I mean by this. For me the internal experience of "I want this" is quite different from the experience of "I am chasing after this in order to escape from pain / suffering," but the distinction may not be experientially clear for many / most people.)

Then, suppose we somehow managed that all people (or conscious entities) no longer experience the flinching from pain suffering. Would there still be reasons to make the world "better", or would we be content with things just unfolding however, because as long as we don't suffer over it, nothing is intrinsically bad?

Yes, lots. I used to flinch away from pain constantly; I do it less now, which means I'm more free to do things that I want to do, like make music and hug people and generally flourish and encourage human flourishing. Also, I increasingly suspect you have some confusion wrapped up in your concept of "intrinsically good / bad."

Is the kind of suffering that comes from the flinching away from pain maybe the only thing that is bad in a morally relevant way?

Nope.

Once suffering is out of the picture, what kinds of wants, preferences, reasons or values remain, that actually make a difference to how the world is supposed to look?

Uh... all of... the other ones?

Or is the correct conclusion that yes, once nobody suffers anymore, it doesn't matter if the rest of the world looks really bad?

I'm confused about what you mean by this and what it would mean to answer this question, mostly because I don't know what you mean by "matter."

I feel like I may be mixing together some things here that are actually separate.

Yes, I think so too. Can you try paying a lot of attention to what comes up when you think about the concept of "intrinsically good" or "intrinsically bad" (edit: also "suffering" and "mattering") and just write down literally everything that pops into your head, including words or sentences that sound outrageous or too dramatic or whatever?

In this post, Nate Soares outlines a thing he calls "Moving Towards the Goal", which feels incredibly relevant to this conversation.

This leads us to my second trick for avoiding akrasia: I am not Trying Really Hard. People who are Trying Really Hard give themselves rewards for progress or punishments for failure. They incentivize the behavior that they want to have. They keep on deciding to continue doing what they're doing, and they engage in valiant battle against akrasia. I don't do any of that.

Instead, I simply Move Towards the Goal.

I'd highly recommend Nate's Replacing Guilt sequence. In a very concrete, "traditional LW" way, he lays out how you can still do cool stuff, yet not think in terms of shoulds, guilt, or intrinsically good or bad.

And then, is there also an equivalent for good experiences? Pain is to suffering as pleasure is to…? Is there a mental motion of turning towards, or welcoming an experience, which is ultimately responsible for seeing pleasurable experiences as good? And if the flinching away is in some way intrinsically bad, is this opposite motion intrinsically good?

I wonder about this too. If there is pleasure and the mental experience of welcoming a pleasure, then what happens if you stop 'welcoming a pleasure'?

Wouldn't you no longer be motivated to pursue pleasure? How would you ever feel happy? Would pleasure feel 'bland' or unsatisfying? I also wonder if it's possible to mistakenly decouple pleasure and 'welcoming a pleasure' without ever meditating?

It's a little complicated, but my current model is something like "learning to Look at suffering is going to make a visible change in your behavior, but the gains from some of the later-stage steps aren't necessarily as large as you'd expect from what a naive suggestion of 'overcoming suffering' might imply".

But to use your example of long-term relationships, I've definitely noticed improvements in my ability to e.g. just be okay with things that cause tension with my relationships with other people, in a way that lets me accept those tensions rather than react with an unhealthy need to "fix" the other person. (Because obviously if something about my relationship with someone else doesn't work the way I'd like, it's the other person that needs fixing... or at least, so some parts of my mind seem to think. But they've been a lot less vocal about this recently.)

This sounds like a criticism of me speculating about the nature of enlightenment. I acknowledge that my hypothesis is based on very early-stage data and might be wrong / is the weakest part of my article (and I flagged it as such). But I felt like some speculation was necessary, in order to address the evidence brought up in the earlier threads which suggested that this whole enlightenment thing is just wireheading with no real benefit. It would have felt logically rude to simply write an article about the benefits of insight without making at least some attempt to square my current understanding of its usefulness with the evidence that had previously been offered for it being just useless wireheading.

If you think that my speculation is just blatantly wrong, as you seem to be implying, then I would appreciate a summary of a position that's more correct while also engaging with those criticisms.

Yeah, some Buddhist traditions do make those claims. The teachers and practitioners who I'm the most familiar with and trust the most tend to reject those models, sometimes quite strongly (e.g. Daniel Ingram here). Also near the end of his life, Culadasa came to think that even though it might at one point have seemed like he had predominantly positive emotions in the way that some schools suggested, in reality he had just been repressing them with harmful consequences.

Culadasa: As a result of my practice, I had reached a point where emotions would arise but they really had no power over me, but I could choose to allow those emotions to express themselves if they served a purpose. Well, it’s sort of a downweighting of emotions – negative emotions were strongly downweighted, and positive emotions were not downweighted at all. So this was the place I was coming from as a meditation teacher. I just never really experienced anger; when something would cause some anger to arise, I’d notice it and let go of it, and, you know, it wasn’t there. Negative emotions in general were just not part of my life anymore. So it was a process of getting in touch with a  lot of these emotions that, you know, I hadn’t been making space for because I saw them as unhealthy, unhelpful, so on and so forth.

Michael: So, in essence, you had bypassed them.

Culadasa: Yes, it’s a bypassing. I think it’s a very common bypassing, too, when somebody reaches this particular stage on the path. I mean, this is a big of a digression, but I think it maybe helps to put the whole thing into perspective, the rest of our conversation into perspective…

Michael: Please digress.

Culadasa: Okay. So this is a stage at which the sense of being a separate self completely disappears. I mean, prior to that, at stream entry, you know, there’s no more attachment to the ego, the ego becomes transparent, but you still have this feeling that I’m a separate self; it still produces craving; you have to work through that in the next path, and so on and so forth. But this is a stage where that very primitive, that very primal sense of being a separate self falls away. Now, what I know about this from a neuroscience point of view is that there’s a part of the brainstem which was the earliest concentration of neurons that was brain-like in the evolution of brains, and there are nuclei there that were responsible for maintaining homeostasis of the body, and they still do that today. One of their major purposes is to regulate homeostasis in the body, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygenation of the blood, you name it, just every aspect of internal bodily maintenance. With the subsequent development of the emotional brain, the structures that are referred to as the limbic system, evolution provided a way to guide animals’ behaviors on the basis of emotions and so these same nuclei then created ascending fibers into this limbic system, from the brainstem into these new neural structures that constituted the emotional brain.

Michael: So this very old structure that regulated the body linked up with the new emotional structures.

Culadasa: Right. It linked up with it, and the result was a sense of self. Okay? You can see the enormous value of this to an animal, to an organism. A sense of self. My goodness. So now these emotions can operate in a way that serves to improve the survival, reproduction, everything else of this self, right? Great evolutionary advance. So now we have organisms with a sense of self. Then the further evolution of cerebral cortex, all of these other higher structures, then that same sense of self became integrated into that as well. So there we have the typical human being with this very strong, very primal sense that “I am me. I am a separate self.” We can create all kinds of mental constructs around this, but even cats and dogs and deer and mice and lizards and things like that have this sense of self. We elaborate an ego on top of it. So there’s these two aspects to self in a human being. One is the ego self, the mental construct that’s been built around this more primal sense of self. So this is a stage at which that primal sense of self disappears and what usually seems to happen is, at the same time, there is a temporary disappearance of all emotions. I think that we’ll probably eventually find out that the neural mechanism by which we bring about this shift, that these two things are linked, because the sense of self is – its passageway to the higher brain centers, which constitute the field of conscious awareness that we live in and all of the unconscious drives that we’re responding to, the limbic system, the emotional brain, is the link.

Michael: Yes.

Culadasa: So something happens that interrupts that link. The emotions come back online, but they come back online in a different way from that point. So instead of being overcome by fear, anger, lust, joy, whatever, these things arise and they’re something that you can either let go of or not. [laughs] That’s the place where I was.

Michael: They seem very ephemeral…

Culadasa: Yes, right. They’re very ephemeral, and very easy to deal with, and there is a tendency for other people to see you as less emotional and truly you are because you’ve downregulated a lot of more negative emotions. But you’re by no means nonemotional; you’re still human, you still have the full gamut of human emotions available to you. But you do get out of the habit of giving much leeway to certain kinds of emotions. And the work that I was doing with Doug pushed me in the direction of, “Let’s go ahead and let’s experience some of those emotions. Let’s see what it feels like to experience the dukkha of wanting things to be different than the way they are.” So that’s what we did. And I started getting in touch with these emotions and their relationship to my current life situation where I wasn’t fulfilling my greatest aspirations because I was doing a lot of things that – stuff that had to be done, but that I had no interest in, but I had to do it and that’s what occupied my time.

I'm guessing that something similar is what's actually happening for a lot of the schools claiming complete elimination of all negative feelings. Insight practices can be used in ways that end up bypassing or suppressing a lot of one's emotions, but actually negative feelings are still having effects in the person, they just go unnoticed.

If you think about it, you can't be sad and not mind it. You can't be angry but not mind it. 

This disagrees with my experience, and with the experience of several other people I know.

Good question, I haven't really encountered anything that would provide a very good and comprehensive explanation in third-person terms. The sources that I've seen are more concerned with giving you pointers to things in your own experience that you can investigate and then come to experience them directly, as that's the thing that actually causes your mind to update, whereas simply getting a conceptual description of them doesn't.