Strange7 comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 September 2008 07:28PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 10 December 2015 02:40:10AM 0 points [-]

Because otherwise you are at risk of being obnoxiously rude, and you are likely to be wrong.

I think norms of conversation that prevent honest communication by labeling it as rude are not useful for discussions that are about learning about the world. You should express different beliefs because your beliefs are rude kills an atmosphere of learning.

Of course managing the resulting emotions with empathy is something that's much easier in person and it might very well prevent anything positive to happen in this online conversation.

I'm afraid you are still failing to be clear. (Whether the problem is that you aren't expressing yourself clearly, or that you aren't thinking clearly, I don't know.)

The problem is that I'm refering to concepts that are likely not in your map. I know that various people have taken months of in person teaching to get the concepts to which I'm refering, so it's not suprising to me that the ideas don't feel clear to you. If what I'm saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I'm saying. Successfully pointing somewhere that's outside of your present map feels inherently unclear. For me it's a success that you don't feel like I'm meaning of those those things that are inside your map.

Whether I'd call any of the possibilities 'perceiving the sound of silence', I don't know; would you care to say more about what you mean by that?"

At one of the meditations I lead in an LW context I made the point to focus on perception of silence as something besides simply absence of sound. Afterwards I checked with the person in the room where I was predicting that they least likely got something from the experience and they did experience a silence that was distinct from the absence of sound.

It's no big shiny effect, but I would suspect that many committed naturalists think silence = absence of sound and any suggestion that it isn't is emitting deep-sounding word salad. The person developed a new phenomological category for listening to silence that's distinct from not hearing sounds.

Now, that's an experience I gave the person in a 20 minute meditation and it wasn't the only thing I did in that 20 minutes. In multiple days, especially with a teacher that has more skill than I have at the moment, more new experiences are possible.

Comment author: Strange7 10 December 2015 05:39:30AM 0 points [-]

If what I'm saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I'm saying.

We're all empiricists here, so let's run an experiment. You've got this theory that gjm won't understand if you try to explain. How 'bout you stop rehashing that, actually try to explain some of those technical terms you mentioned earlier, and see how your theory holds up?