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novalis comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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I don't understand what neuroscience has to do with it. Nobody (enlightened or not) thinks there is a part of the brain that's the "self" part. "Self", useful or not, is in the mind. How is it that you can tell me that there are things that a neurologist would discover that would and wouldn't surprise you, but you can't tell me what those things are? Surely the neurologist would be able to explain their research to me. Wouldn't I be better off going into neurology if I wanted to learn something?
Nobody is such a small number of people. It just begs a contradiction!
If your experience includes something which you would call 'self' (whatever that means to you), some aspect of your brain's functioning is responsible for that. In various altered states of consciousness, the experience of what you would call 'self' is typically altered in various ways, which can point you in the direction of whatever you would call 'self' in normal experience if you aren't sure what I'm talking about.
So, what does it seem to you that 'self' in your experience is doing? Is it structuring your experience in some way? Is it not? Whatever you claim about its relationship and role in the operation of your mind can be translated into claims about the functioning of your brain. Enlightenment leads to different claims about the way that whatever you would call 'self' operates (or operated) in your mind, which can similarly be translated. A comparison of the translated claims will show that they are different. The different claims lead to different expectations about what tests will find.
There is no claim here that there is a "self" part of the brain.
I'm still trying to figure out what the neurologist is doing here. If all of our claims (both enlightened and non) about the self are on the mind level, then why are we worrying about what's going on at the brain level?
And out of all this, I still don't see any concrete predictions: what do you expect that a neurologist (or anyone else) would discover, that a "non-enlightened" person wouldn't expect?
Talking about the mind level is another way of talking about the brain level, though figuring out the relationship requires scientific knowledge.
I don't know enough neuroscience to translate the two contrasting assertions on the mind level into assertions on the brain level. I don't know enough about neuroscience (and perhaps today, no one does). But they are obviously translatable in principle. They are bona fide, explicit predictions about what future research in neuroscience will find. This seems to me to be a really good example of an explicit testable claim about the world that would follow from enlightenment. Do you see something wrong with it?
What happens if you taboo "self" -- what is the disagreement really about?