Hi David! This whole meditation thing sounds interesting, though I’m having trouble figuring out exactly why. (That’s probably a question about my brain rather than about meditation. I’m mentioning it as a hint to why I’m asking what I’ll ask below, not as a subject for discussion.)

I generally dismiss all new-agey stuff immediately as unworthy of attention. AFAIK my reasoning is something like 1) this is associated with obviously wrong theories; 2) thus, people involved have wrong thinking; 3) thus, their statements have negligible evidential value; 4) even if some of the stuff happens to be true (i.e., work), given (3), the probability of that is nearly the same as that of just about any random thing I could pick being true; so 5) pretty much any other method of picking something to devote attention to would be at least as good.

Your two posts did a very good job of separating the particular brand of meditation you discuss from the silly theories around them, so I’m paying attention at least to what you’re saying. But that only means that your statements don’t have obviously negligible evidential value, not that they are significant evidence, which means I have to actually think about it.

The factory & lenses metaphor seems like a good argument for why meditation should work in the sense of allowing a flawed process to discover and improve itself despite its own flaws. But: the key part of that metaphor is that using a flawed lens one can discover the flaws of the lens, by confronting contradictory evidence caused by flaw; and people are notoriously prone to not reaching the correct conclusion when presented with contradictory evidence. Cases like Aristotelian physics and Descartes conclusion on God make me wary of conclusions gotten to based just on what happens inside one’s own mind. This doesn’t mean that I immediately discount such conclusions—we did eventually think about the scientific method—but still, I do get uncomfortable with just in-brain processes.

Which is my problem with your posts. You discuss meditation in what appears to be an empirical way, but as far as I can determine (almost) all empirical observations involved happen inside the mind of the one experimenting. They aren’t quite verifiable by others. (You explicitly say that you can’t communicate lots of it; I’m not arguing that you’re hiding the testability of the claims or something.) You say that different people tend to describe similar internal observations and effects after following various similar processes. But that’s different from different people describing similar observations after witnessing the same process.

In your analogy, two different factories (initially constructed by the same method) that discover their own flaws, communicate with each other, and noticing that they discover the same kind of defect in their own lenses is interesting, but is less conclusive than exchanging their lenses and confirming their observations, and even less conclusive than obtaining lenses that are not generated by their kind of factory. Barring the latter methods of testing, factories are still vulnerable to some defect that causes (many or all of) them to systematically reach wrong conclusions. (As a real-life example, consider the N-rays experiment. Note that the definitive conclusion was reached not after Wood reproduced the experiment on his own (unsuccessfuly), but when he interfered with the experiment run by Blondlot—who, incidentally, wasn’t quite convinced even then.)

OK, sorry for the long introduction. I wanted to give a background for what I’m asking below, and I’m really bad at summarizing.

What I’m looking for is if you can think of consequences of meditation that are observable by others than the one meditating.

This definition is quite wider than I’d like it to be, but it’s hard to express my precise meaning (mainly because I’m not quite sure I understand the claims), which is partly the reason for the big text above; I’m hoping you can figure out the kind of observations I’m talking about.

As a trivial example, it’s obvious that someone who meditates is likely to be observed to meditate, which is not what I’m talking about.

You claim that a benefit is happiness, which is also observable by others (with some fuzziness), but isn’t that big a deal; one can probably be happier with a steady diet of drugs, and it’s not quite obvious that the costs are bigger than an hour or so daily for a long period. (I’m a bit fuzzy on the cost here: you seem to claim that after achieving enlightenment the changes become permanent, but it’s not clear if that means “as long as you keep meditating an hour a day” or not; people into meditation seem to do it more-or-less until they stop being interested in meditation, but it’s not obvious if they stop because it didn’t work or because they’re done—and, as I said, I pay attention to statements from people like you but not to most practitioners of such methods.)

The rest of the benefits all seem to be only introspectively observable. I’d like those benefits, but I wouldn’t trust my own introspection to judge if I gained them or not. Being divorced from all the usual mumbo-jumbo, your procedure seems like something I’d like to try, but only if I can ask someone else to judge the results. (I’m thinking of asking a friend to observe some things about me, not knowing exactly what I’m doing, and judging the effectiveness by his observations. I’m aware this still wouldn’t be a double-blind test, but it’s still much better than judging myself.)

Note that I’m not asking you to come up with an experimental protocol or anything even close to that. I’m quite willing to do that myself, but I’m just not sure if you claim among the effects of meditation anything that is (a) quantifiable by someone else than the meditator and (b) that I’m reasonably sure is an effective benefit.

I’m not quite sure of how to express this, but let me give some concrete examples:

Being less attached to things might pass (a); my friend could observe that I get less angry or sad about things. But it doesn’t quite pass (b), as I’m not quite convinced that would help me to achieve goals. (There are persuading pro and con arguments.)

Understanding the limits of my own conceptual apparatus passes (b); I’m quite sure that’s helpful. But it doesn’t pass (a), as my friend can’t quite tell if I correctly found my limits or not.

For contrast, something like “acting for bigger long term gains rather than short term ones” pass both (a) and (b). (As long as the effect is strong enough.) I’m aware that it’s not enough for a scientific confirmation of the benefits of meditation (e.g., something else might cause the change). It’s just a minimum to at least attempt the experiment. (Also, note that this minimum would be very different for an experiment that didn’t involve my own mental processes.)