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I would think that some kind of "yay field" plays a part in addiction. Even very mild addictions. I feel a "yay field" each time I go to eat a cookie or a bowl of ice cream or the like.
I often use mystical language with phenomenal empiricism in mind.
Could you please give some examples of this?
I am interested in evidence that there are large parts of society that have benefitted from mysticism in the way they benefited from quantitative reasoning (in the domain of getting things done, not in the domain of feeling good), or at least individuals who seem to have performed impressive feats I clearly care about.
Does "being happier" count as a feat that you care about?
The point, if you like, is that if you’re asked to explain some “woo” or “mysticism” or whatever, and you find yourself sounding like Morpheus sounds in the movie, you’re doing it wrong.
In my opinion this is true about most mentors in fiction. The mentoring we see on screen tends to be shitty mentoring, presumably because the writers or bosses believe that showing actual mentoring will lead to a less dramatic story.
So mentors in fiction should not be used as role models.
(Scott Alexander had a blog post where he mentioned that the thing that got him to stop believing in history cranks was reading many different history cranks who all had very convincing but mutually exclusive theories of history. Kind of like that - if you can play with many different ways of seeing the world and noticing how they all seem convincing, then they may all become less convincing as a result.)
You might be thinking of this post about learned epistemic helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don't say "I love you" to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning.
As I see it, the video is compatible with my claim. Aini argues that "I love you" is a useful emotional signal in many situations, which I agree with in my OP.
Aini also argues around 19-21 minutes in for clearer communication. Her example is that saying "I love you" is in some situations clearer communication than giving someone a platter of fruit. I agree, and I further argue that there are situations where it is better to be even clearer than that.
Thanks. I will get around to watching that video later.
If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.
Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary's room knowledge argument - no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with love.
These examples do not seem to support your conclusion. If I can already laugh at a joke, then analyzing the humour and its neuro-psychology does not diminish that. I can still laugh at the next joke just as well as I could before. Nothing is lost.
I can avoid the term love as much as possible, and I can still experience all the feelings of companionship, compassion, and attraction as before. The muddled thinking did not create those experiences, and cleaning up the muddled thinking does not ruin the experiences.
(I do suffer from a kind of anhedonia, but I had that long before I started to dissect concepts such as love.)
Am I missing something in your argument?
I speak from perspective of someone in a happy long term romantic relationship with 0 issues and best communication I can imagine, none of which came from books on either of our sides
I do not understand what I am supposed to do with this. I apologize for my harsh tone in the following, but to be honest, to me this comes off more like a humblebrag than an attempt to explain or advise. Maybe you are unusually talented at intimate communication and/or were lucky to find a partner who is unusually talented at intimate communication. Or maybe you did some specific non-book-based self-improvement work to learn this - in which case, why not say something about that?
This comes off as if I entered a discussion about poverty and said: "I speak from perspective of someone with a stable career and 0 financial troubles, none of which came from attempts to overcome glass ceilings or discrimination or other systemic issues."
"I loved her so much! How dare she dump me and start ignoring me! Now I will commit violence as revenge."
In this line of reasoning we have selfish desires masquerading as a virtue. The thing I label love is a complex of desire, attachment, and (limited) altruism. If I lump them all together as love, I can more easily convince myself that my desire and attachment are actually virtuous. Thus I can convince myself that my feeling of anger is righteous rather than petty. Thus I am more likely to act upon that anger and lash out with violence, on a small or large scale.
I believe that this kind of thing happens a lot in romantic relationships. People mistake their selfish desires for virtues. And I believe that this is party because of the muddled concept of love and our cultural glorification of it.
That's funny. :) Thanks for the recommendation.
Could I please get you to elaborate on what you think gets lost when I replace love with more well-defined terms?
I can think of one thing. It is a kind of emotional attachment to an idea due for cultural/memetic reasons. People are brought up to think that love is something super-important and valuable, even if they do not understand what it is. In this way, the term love can have a strong emotional effect. It communicates less actual meaning than a more specific term, but it communicates more emotion.
I think I covered it in my OP when I conceded that the term can be useful when I am trying to convey emotion rather than any detailed information:
When I say "I love you" to my wife, I don't intend this as a statement of fact with any well-defined meaning, but as an emotional signal like a kiss or hug.
Is that what you have in mind?
Most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to progress.
As far as I can tell, a lot of romantic relationships are highly dysfunctional, and it is widely agreed that good communication is vital in a relationship. Given that, I think a lot of people would benefit from thinking more clearly about what love is supposed to be and what they expect from it.
If you mean "most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to procreate", then I agree. But I think we can aim higher than that.
Is the thing that you are talking about clearly distinct from this thing from my OP?
Love as giving: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)
Most people aren't confused, because they're not trying to be clear and rational.
It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication.
Are you saying that most people only use term love as "poetry" and never when they are trying to be clear? I think this is a strong over-generalization.
Of course people are not always trying to be clear, but the concept of love also appears often when people are doing their best to be clear. In my experience, people will often say things like "is that really love?" and "that's not true love".
When trying to be clear, people will double down and keep talking about love. They will semi-silently insist on their unspoken intuition about what it means instead of stepping back and trying to clearly define their terms.
This kind of confusion is not unique to love, of course. But IMO it happens much more often than people realize.
In my experience, when I am tempted to fail with abandon, it has to do with resentment against some rule which I - in that moment at least - consider stifling and unfair. As you also cover in your article about "Should considered harmful".
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pFatcKW3JJhTSxqAF/p/HqQ3CpMqQyaaLLKew
I found the opening parts quite interesting.
I found your usage of the terms yin and yang confusing. Skimming the Wikipedia article about it did not help. In my opinion it would help if you would lead with a link to an article that explains yin and yang in the sense you use them and in a relatively concise way. (If such an article exists. If it does not, you might want to consider writing it.)
Likewise the term God. You seem to be using it to refer to something ineffable that you cannot describe adequately. It was not obvious to me that this concept was coherent.
EDIT: The article about yin/yang that I was hoping for appears to be the one about deep atheism which you did in fact link to: https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/01/04/deep-atheism-and-ai-risk
You seem to assume as a matter of course that boredom equals suffering.
Buddhists will say that it is possible to learn to stop craving constant stimulation, such that you will no longer suffer when bored.
Buddhists will agree that you should not take damage from moving or working, but I think Buddhists will also say that you should not take damage from being idle.
(I am not a Buddhist, but I practice Buddhist-inspired meditation and other practices, and so far it taught me to take less damage from work and boredom alike.)
Originally I felt happy about these, because “mostly agreeing” is an unusually positive outcome for that opening. But these discussions are grueling. It is hard to express kindness and curiosity towards someone yelling at you for a position you explicitly disclaimed. Any one of these stories would be a success but en masse they amount to a huge tax on saying anything about veganism, which is already quite labor intensive.
The discussions could still be worth it if it changed the arguer’s mind, or at least how they approached the next argument. But I don’t get the sense that’s what happens. Neither of us have changed our minds about anything, and I think they’re just as likely to start a similar fight the next week.
May I ask what your motivation was when you decided to spend your time on the aforementioned discussions? Were you hoping to learn something or to persuade the other, or both?
It sounds to me as though the solution here is to be more cautious before spending time arguing. Sometimes (often) it is IMO wiser to cut your losses and stop replying.
What have you tried?
In my experience, meditation works wonders to improve focus. Some people might recommend exercise as a way to improve energy. (Meditation and exercise also takes time, of course.)
Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
Huh. This is an interesting read. Your mind seems to work in a very different way than mine.
Have you read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? I have not read the whole thing, but I have read summaries of it, and your description reminds me of it. :)
Do you do painful things with no reward in the near future?
For example, do you exercise even if you don't want to? (Here I am assuming that you hate exercise like I do. If you enjoy exercise, this question is not really relevant.)
Do you refrain from eating tasty but unhealthy food?
If so, how do you motivate yourself?
Thanks for the links. I will look at those.
You seem to be one of the relatively few people who have some understanding of my problem.
Demotivation is only a problem when it comes to tasks that I do not want to do - typically because there is a great delay between the action and the reward. It is easy to motivate myself to eat breakfast because it is an easy task with a swift reward. It is much harder to motivate myself to exercise, for example, because it is a painful task with no reward in the near future.
"I" control my choices in a sense, but this "I" is deterministic.
And I am not making any particular distinction between small and large events. Suppose I am hesitating over whether or not to eat a piece of cake. One part of me wants the cake; another part of me wants to skip the cake for the sake of my future health.
The part of me that wants the cake will use this argument: "Eat the cake. In the end, it's predetermined whether you're going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You'll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it's because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice."
I find this hard to refute.
In the end, it comes down to being able to train yourself to purposefully pick and choose the aspects of life you choose to judge with fierce rationality and the aspects in which you allow a little leeway... or maybe just tweaking your definition of rationality as a whole to maximize long-term happiness.
Can you say something about how you did this?
A practical exercise I like is asking "If I had to bring myself to face the most 'makes me feel bad about myself' cause of my demotivation, what would it be?".
Could you please explain that again? This sounds like it could be useful, but I don't completely understand it.
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
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of "nonduality", it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
A consequence of the statement "we are all One" is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them.
Why merely "others around them"? If "we are all One", I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
> 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".
Neat! Could you elaborate on what the person in question "used" the idea of the Trinity for?
Your link has since rotted. But I found this other article which also paraphrases Batchelor's paraphrase of the parable: https://thebuddhistcentre.com/westernbuddhistreview/does-it-float-stephen-batchelors-secular-buddhism
It references Batchelor's book Secular Buddhism.
Because that was not the purpose of my post. I did not mean to invite people to "cast a quick glance at the occult community and come up with an explanation". I was fishing for people who already knew something about the topic.
If they are trying to sell something - authors, bloggers, influencers - then I agree that this is a major concern.
When it's just people posting on social media, I don't expect there to be that many overt liars. Although self-deception is very much a possibility.
Very good points! Thanks.
Did you ever write that post? :)
Thanks.
As for a community, have you tried r/StreamEntry on Reddit? There might be some. I don't know. I am no Finder.
Thanks! Apparently his first name is spelled Jeffery.
Interesting! Have you written about this experience - i.e., where concentration practices stopped working? (If it's something personal I won't pry, but if you've written about it before I am very curious to read it.)
Which book is that? I tried to search and found several authors with that name and variants of it.
This response makes it sound as though you are trying to win a fight rather than interested in understanding something.
ask them if they think that's really fair given everyone else is paying $20. What makes them different/special such that they should only pay $5?
This might be effective social pressure, but it doesn't seem particularly rational. If someone else volunteers to pay you more than they need - and more than YOU need - then why should that obligate me to do the same?
What article or book is that quote from?
What is your sample size here? How many "enlightened" people have you examined for cognitive bias?
This was a great post!
You included some speculation about the stages of TMI. May I ask you what stage of TMI you were in at the time when you wrote this? (If you've been doing enough TMI practice that the question makes sense.)
And in case you've mastered more of the stages since the time you wrote this, do you still believe your speculation in this article was correct?
Expert meditators have been known to sometimes ignore extreme physical pain that should have caused them to seek medical aid. And they probably would have sought help, if not for their ability to drop their resistance to pain and experience it with extreme equanimity.
Interesting. Can you cite any examples of this?
In her book "Get Off Your Cushion", Li-Anne Tang cites one anecdote with Culadasa a year before his death where he did something like this. But that's the only example I know of.
Outside view: data suggests that conscientiousness is the least impacted of the big 5 by meditation (neither up nor down).
Interesting! Can you recommend me any good reading about how meditation interacts with the Big 5 personality traits?
I hope you are still reading replies here. 🙂
This was a very thought-provoking post. But I don't fully understand what you are trying to say.
You say that Buddhist meditation developed in a context of severe inequality and poverty - which are obviously not good things. Then you say that Buddhist meditation should not be divorced from its cultural context. I did not understand exactly what context you believe we need to preserve. Could you please elaborate on that?
As far as I understand, "the (mistaken) belief in a permanent self or soul" is one of the Ten Fetters that one must break free of in order to achieve the stages of enlightenment.
On the other hand, the woman who fought back against the alien might also be less submissive to the man that reclaims her. That may be a virtue or a flaw depending on what he values in women.