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ChristianKl comments on How to teach to magical thinkers? - Less Wrong
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Comments (79)
What do you mean with those techniques if you would have to taboo "scientific method"?
Sistematized curiosity, carefully doubt-filtered and confirmation-dependent.
Could you explain that a bit more in detail?
I think a Buddhist who seeks enlightenment might practice systematized curiosity. He doubts a lot of things that I take for granted. He only believes things that are in some sense confirmed by his perception.
Wow. That's an unexpected view into myself. I happen to be a Theravada Buddhist.
Of course, I wouldn't expect Buddhist meditation techniques to be necessarily useful for alien species.
I'm not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances. It is not a cosmic system of morality, but a way of reminding you to be mindful of how what you do affects others and, potentially, your future selves.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
I have to preface by not saying that I'm not a Buddhist myself but that I do my meditation in a non-Buddhist framework. That means I do have my fair share of experiences but I do have to translate between frameworks.
Of course karma is all about causal changes but a lot of the causal changes that Buddhists see don't really lend itself to materialist reductionism.
More importantly if you say karma is the effect of your intentions rippling through causal changes, that doesn't answer the question of why the whole "goal" of Buddhism is to move beyond karma and become enlightened. It doesn't even tell you what that "goal" is supposed to mean.
To me your answer looks like you are just reciting the teachers password. If I would go to an advanced Buddhist teacher I doubt that he would tell me that karma is about influencing your future circumstances because Buddhism is about being in the now, being in the moment.
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life. In some sense it's a valid Buddhist position to not seek for a source but if you a a reductionist, then part of that means actually breaking things down and not just stopping at saying that the karma comes from somewhere.
From the actions of other people? One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of 'self', so the difference between "good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to future reincarnations of me" and "good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to other people in the future" might be smaller than it would seem at first sight.
Buddhism does not de-emphasize "self" to focus on other people.
Buddhism de-empahsizes "self" in the meaning of the continuity of identity -- the classic Buddhist view looks at the mind/soul as beads on a string (of time) -- the beads are similar but they are not just one bead.
Yeah. It reminds me of questions like what if, 5 seconds from now, I will be Britney Spears?. I'm a little unclear on exactly what parts of "you" continue into the next incarnation (metaphors like "a lamp lighting another lamp" are not very precise)---I think you don't get memories, but you do get mental habits and inclinations?
I could imagine a Less Wronger taking the position that "supposing for the sake of argument that everything in Buddhist metaphysics is correct, the similarities between two reincarnations are not great enough to preserve your personal identity in the philosophical/moral/my-utility-function sense. So you have no reason to care more about your future incarnation than about any other person".
Furthermore, I could also imagine a Buddhist making that argument. Two recurring themes seem to be that it's bad to focus on what you want, and that in fact you should abandon the idea that there is a "you" that wants things. If you follow that advice it seems you should not care about what will happen to "your" reincarnation in particular.