Mitchell_Porter comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: komponisto 01 July 2010 09:20PM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 02 July 2010 05:02:45AM 3 points [-]

Hi there yourself. I don't believe I've run across your website or mini-movement before. As some of your skeptical correspondents note, there is a very long prior history of people claiming enlightenment, liberation, transcendence of the self, and so forth. So even if one is sympathetic to such possibilities, one may reasonably question the judgment of "Richard" when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me, and I am simply expressing a potentiality of the human spirit which exists in all times and places, but which may assume a different character according to the state of civilization and other factors.

I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. For those who have heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian man who at an early age was picked by the Theosophists as their world-teacher, only to reject the role - this is a different guy. J.K., despite his abandonment of a readymade guru role, did go on to become an "anti-guru guru", lecturing about the stopping of time, the need to think rather than rely on dead thought, et cetera, ad infinitum. U.G. is by comparison a curious minor figure. He lived quietly and out of the way, though he picked up a few fans by the end, apparently including a few Bollywood professionals.

His schtick, first of all, is about negating the value of most forms of so-called spirituality. They seek a fictitious perpetual happiness and this activity, whether it is about anticipating a happy afterlife or striving in the here and now after a perfectly still mind, is what fills the lives of such people. He did not set up the ordinary, materialistically absorbed, emotionally driven life as a counter-ideal - he might agree with the gurus in their analysis of that existence - but maintained that what they were selling as an alternative was itself not real.

How does "Richard" look from this perspective? Well, he seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms; but he does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind. So, he gets a plus for being down-to-earth, but a minus for overrating the value of his product.

U.G. had a few other strings to his bow. He criticized scientists and philosophical materialism in terms that might have come from his namesake J.K. - for dogmatism, and for not recognizing the role of their own minds in constructing their dogmas. Also, he did claim his own version of a bodily transfiguration, as many gurus do. In his case he called it a "calamity", said it was horrible, there's no way you could want it, and there's no way to seek it even if you wanted to be like him. Whether he was serious about this, or just trying to put across an idea that is subversive in the Indian context (where there are so many superstitions about sages acquiring superpowers once they achieve philosophical enlightenment as well), I couldn't say. But if we take him literally, then U.G. also gets marked down for implausibility, though at least he didn't sell his calamity as a desirable and reproducible phenomenon.

I see also from the website that Richard is an old guy, perhaps in his late sixties. I fear that all we have here is someone who has a bit of conceptual facility when it comes to the relationship between mind, appearance and reality, some wisdom when it comes to the relationship between emotion, belief, and suffering, and who lives far enough from the manias of urban life that he can imagine that his latest intellectual high (which perhaps saw him achieve peace with respect to some metaphysical question or other, that has been bothering him for half a lifetime) really does count as an epochal event in the history of human consciousness, and who only has admirers rather than skeptics around him - no-one who is going to tell him anything different.

What is the value of such a person - to the world, to the readers of this website? Even if no-one here buys the idea that this is some sort of transcendental wisdom - absorbed as we all are in various recondite scientific metaphysical ideas and expectations of a greatly empowered transhuman future - I think we can appreciate that there may be some psychological knowledge worth acquiring from such a person. The question is whether it is anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama. If a person in such a position claims, not just that they have insight into the workings of the mind, but that attaining their insight or duplicating their experience is a pathway to a state of happiness and psychological health greater and more reliable than anything available anywhere else, we should ask whether the private happiness of that person stems from factors like (i) they're old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 July 2010 06:24:07PM 1 point [-]

...than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama.

Just an FYI, but modern technology now allows instant access to a stream of such remarks. The Dalai Lama is on Facebook.

Comment author: LucasSloan 02 July 2010 05:08:31AM 1 point [-]

I would be greatly edified if you would heed Blueberry's plea.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 July 2010 06:03:05AM * 0 points [-]

Which plea is that?

Comment author: Blueberry 02 July 2010 06:07:25AM 3 points [-]

Please don't feed the trolls!

Comment author: wedrifid 02 July 2010 08:51:33AM 4 points [-]

Whether or not his comments are desirable, this poster does not seem to qualify as a troll.

Do not feed the Unwelcome Spammer perhaps?

Comment author: naivecortex comment score below threshold [+] (3 children)

Comment author: naivecortex 02 July 2010 06:15:47AM * -3 points [-]

Hi - I will respond briefly to the various points you raised further below, but first:

What is the value of such a person - to the world, to the readers of this website?

It seems that my post was not written carefully, and led some to mistake it for religious spam. I've been visiting LW for a while, and practicing actualism (AF) for more than year. The value of the AF method (not person) personally to me is increased well-being / light-heartedness / carefreeness without having to believe in a God or some other metaphysical concept. I have virtually no belief system; Actualism is an -ism like tour-ism, not the -ism in philosophy. That said, the value to the reader of this forum focused on human rationality is of course a challenge (food for thought) to our widely held perception about feelings/emotions (eg: life without feelings is barren and sterile) and, even more, their relationship to all the sorrow and malice which forms the basis for many scientific endeavours; studies related to stress, for instance.

It is quite simple: in a PCE, one's sense of identity and feelings temporarily vanish, leaving only sensations and thoughts, thereby paving wave for a magical sensuosity that is engendered by everyday events.

Now onto your specific points:

one may reasonably question the judgment of "Richard" when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me

The reason he doesn't say "what I have was probably achieved by others before me" is simply that his experience is different. If you go through his personal history article, he writes about his several-month reading of all peoples experiences before arriving at the conclusion that his experience is unique. And for the rest of us, it shouldn't be difficult to understand as in an Actual Freedom - feelings are non-existent (everyone who've had a PCE confirms this), whereas in any form of spiritual Enlightenment known to us, feelings not only continue to exist but often transmorgify into the divine feelings of Love/Compassion. In the CRO, you will find several discussion related to this titled "Actualism is not new" and "The actualism method is not unique".

I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. [...] Richard seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms

Yes, phantom as in "something apparently sensed but having no physical reality". Precisely, what he is saying is that - the states of mind experienced by Enlightened people are fuelled by instinctual passions / feelings, and as such have no basis on the actual/physical world. Even though hormonal/chemical substances are actual, the feelings they give rise to are considered to be non-actual (emergent phenomena would be another way to put it, but with the added factor of 'imagination' to it).

Richard does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind.

Purged of the identity and feelings. In other words, a Pure Consciousness Experience. Those who have not had a PCE, can think it of as a sensuous delight.

As for 'universalizable formuala', the method promulgated by Richard and other actually free people is indeed repeatable (verifyable on one's own) and thus satisfies the scientific method.

You say "Richard gets a minus for overrating the value of his product". If a PCE results in 24x7 sensuous delight marked by no sorrow/malice (as feelings no longer arise), how could it be anything but enabling perpetual (until the death of the body) peace of mind?

Richard has admirers rather than skeptics around him - no-one who is going to tell him anything different.

Have you read the CRO page? If so, you wouldn't be making this remark. There were (and still are) far too many objections during the time he promulgated his method (10 years).

Is [what Richard says] anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama

As already mentioned, spiritual attainments ends in a delusion (Love/Compassion) and never uproots the root of sorrow/malice itself. Attained Zen Buddhist, for instance, are known to get sorrowful -- spirituality transcends suffering (in a metaphysical realm, perhaps), but never eliminates it.

What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.

Does the private happiness of that person (Richard) stem from factors like [...]

If I may interject - Richard's happiness does not stem from the factors you mention below. It is a 24x7 sensuous delight (marked by no affective feelings) not dependent on any life situation.

(i) they're old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and

Richard, and other actually free people, have not given up on the various physical pleasures/comforts of life. You may want to read his journal entry on sex.

[...] (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!

Until recently Richard was living alone. He have had companions; mingles with people ... does things that normal human beings do.

If you're interested, may I suggest two articles: 180 Degress Opposite briefly mentions the various differences from spirituality, and Attentiveness and Sensuousnesds and Appercetiveness describes the quality of the condition of PCE/AF.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 02 July 2010 12:05:56PM 2 points [-]

I had a closer look at the AF website. The guy's biography was interesting. He starts out juxtaposing himself as a young conscript in the Vietnam war, facing a Buddhist priest burning himself alive, and feeling that both these sides are wrong. He struggles with the meaning of life, for some years falls into spiritual-savior consciousness, seeking to be or feeling that he is an enlightened teacher. Then he eventually he abandons that too, in favor of "the actual world". Thus, the ordinary ego-self he used to have was false, but so was the metaphysical no-self of his enlightened stage. Having woken up to reality itself, as he sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.

I was, however, disturbed by what happened to Daniel Ingram. I found on the web an old email discussion between yourself, Ingram, and Harmanjit Singh. In that discussion, Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about. But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused. It's also intriguing that Harmanjit himself has rejected AF since that discussion.

What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.

Well, I would say that is completely (100%) bullshit - as are your references to "24x7 sensuous delight". You do not achieve that just by getting rid of "malice and sorrow" - unless we are using the word "delight" in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world. Before and above the suffering that human beings create for each other, and the suffering that human beings create psychologically for themselves, the very condition of embodiment already exposes you to horrendous hazards, which reveal something like AF to be nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy. It may in fact be possible for purely psychological maneuvers to change the qualitative feel of even the worst pain into merely intense sensation without emotional valence; the burning monk that Richard encountered during his tour of duty in Vietnam is already evidence of this. Then again, those monks train a lifetime in order to acquire the ability for such gestures, and the fact that their bodies are already falling apart due to old age may help some of them over the line.

The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit. The idea that the capacity for suffering is linked to the capacity for happiness is one of the simplest, least welcome, and yet most plausible of the cliches in the Buddhist catechism. I know very well that there are lots of people who think they can have their happiness and their enlightenment at the same time, by just being "unattached" to the happiness that comes to them. And probably a sophisticated aesthete who knows their own mind (has a high degree of luminosity, in the local jargon) and who can anticipate that getting too wrapped up in a particular pleasure will harm them later on, can learn to make judgment calls about the degree and manner of engagement with a particular experience that will be the most pleasurable. That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods. But please don't kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin' world utopia. If everyone adopted AF the world would be so much happier? Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too. Any such homogeneity of outlook and of understanding would have that effect. For a while.

Comment author: naivecortex 02 July 2010 08:42:56PM * -2 points [-]

Having woken up to reality itself, as [Richard] sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.

Two things:

The reality that you speak of is referred to as actuality (the sensory experience, minus the affect) in the AF lingo; where the word 'reality' is used to refer to the affective inner reality (the emotive cloud surrounding the actual sensations).
The 'meaning' that you speak is found only in a PCE or other lesser forms of experiences (feeling good/carefree/etc). There is no meaning in "theory" (AF is not a theory; it is a repeatable/verifyable condition). And the only meaning of the "method" is to facilitate more and more felicitous experiences leading to PCEs.

Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about

Indeed he did. I too was (intellectually) aware of the spiritual experience that he was referring to, which is in a word called "acceptance" of things as they are.

But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused.

"very confused", eh? How on earth can what he wrote so clearly, especially the following extract, sound like an expression of high confusion?

[Daniel] One of the interesting things about arahatship is that is conveys this fantastic clarity about that particular form of unclarity, once one has a proper contrast between it and the PCE, and having gone back and forth probably 100 times in the last 4 months between the two, I think I get the two pretty well at this point, though there may yet be surprises and fine points, and I suspect there are.

Well, I would say that [the possibility of completely eradicating the root of all misery/mayhem of the world] is completely (100%) bullshit - as are your references to "24x7 sensuous delight". You do not achieve that just by getting rid of "malice and sorrow" -

The word malice and sorrow refers to the feelings, and not unfortunate life situations (such as losing a large portion of one's financial wealth).

The 'sensual delight' I speak of is an inherent quality of PCE - sensuous experience bereft of identity/feelings.

[...] unless we are using the word "delight" in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world.

Physical pain is not extirpated in an actual freedom; for otherwise one could sit on a hot stove and still not know that one's bum is on fire. What is extirpated is the affective reaction to this physical pain.

Richard, and other actually free people, have spoken of this delight being uninterrupted even in the presence of physical pain.

AF [is] nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy.

Yet Rational emotive bevariour theraphy does not eliminate the feelings and identity. Further to the point, here is a gem about REBT from Wikipedia: Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind — a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind — of thought. - which perhaps explains why it doesn't go that deeper. (Mr LeDoux's studies shows clearly the feelings come prior to thought; evidenced from the fast neural connections to the amygdala, compared to those to the neo-cortex)

The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit.

I have no idea as to where you got this information from. What the AF method suggests is to increase the moments of felitious feelings, and minimize the 'good' (trusting/loving) and 'bad' (hateful/fearful) feelings ... so as to facilitate a PCE to arise (only in a PCE there are no feelings/identity). Until then - and like Daniel too suggests - the idea is to imitate it in one's affective sphere.

[...] That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods.

Being there no feelings to begin with, the condition of PCE has got nothing to do with hedonism at all.

But please don't kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin' world utopia.

No, not at all. I know perfectly well that I am the only person I can change. Global peace and harmoney (what you call as 'world utopia') is of course only possible when each and every one of us uproots the cause of sorrow/malice (i.e., a sufficient number of people get actually free as to stir the motivation in others)

Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too.

It is beyond me as to what relation you see between the condition of living without sorrow/malice and nazism.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 03 July 2010 04:06:44AM 0 points [-]

I recommend that you read the weird old novel A Voyage to Arcturus and contemplate the figure of Gangnet. And I will say no more.

Mitchell_Porter comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong

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