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Will_Sawin comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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Didn't you say that enlightenment would fix problems like attachment? Couldn't that kind of result produce an empirical test?
"Attachment" has a specific nonstandard meaning in Buddhist-associated thinking, and I realized after writing Part 1 that it would have been better to omit the word altogether rather than try to explain it. So I would prefer to discuss the testable aspects of enlightenment without talking about attachment.
Certainly. And I would bet on a positive result at reasonable odds. Personal experience and what I know of theory supports it rather strongly. (Where 'fix' is taken to mean 'tend to cause some improvement' in.)
Could someone elaborate on what the correct parameters of the empirical test would be?
Identify a stimulus that prompts the undesired attachment response. Most simply talking about a circumstance where the incongruence between the desired outcome and the actual outcome causes emotional distress of some kind.
Then, as a primitive metric you could wire them and measure their pulse, blood pressure and skin conductivity. Do this before and after a few weeks of meditation. Contrast with a control group that does nothing and another that does an alternative form of personal development.
(That's just what I thought of in the time it took me to type as someone with absolutely no qualification for doing that sort of study. If I knew what I was doing and had time to make a plan and new what the typical protocol in this kind of situation was I would likely do something entirely different.)