DavidM comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: DavidM 04 May 2011 10:38PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (186)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DavidM 06 May 2011 03:05:46AM *  1 point [-]

I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining / intending. Ha!)

Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?

The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that meditation addresses, I would characterize it as a distortion in the perception of or in the representation of the components of the mind. The ability to correct that is clearly (to me) not the same as the ability to correct bias. However, correcting it provides some powerful new capacities which can be applied to dealing with biases if one is so inclined.