= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I agree: this post felt like a self-congratulatory collection of applause lights. (I wonder if the habit of linking to previous posts every other word is an indicator of this. Most people aren't going to follow those links, they're just going to think, "Ah yes, a link to a Sequence post. That must be an accepted thing!")
I also think there's a worrying tendency towards ideology here. Luke suggests that "levelling up" in rationality led him to a bunch of beliefs, which are, coincidentally, fairly widely accepted views around here. Cue a round of back-slapping as we all congratulate ourselves on how rational we are.
But rationality doesn't necessarily lead you anywhere: the evidence should do that. And if the evidence starts pointing somewhere else, you should move. And so I'm a bit wary of the tendency to draw too close a link between any particular beliefs and rationality. You never want to be in the situation where you're trying to persuade someone of your views and you find yourself saying "But it's the rational thing to believe!" instead of presenting the evidence.
Also: hints of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
When genuine curiosity tore down those walls, it didn't take long for the implications of my atheism to propagate.
Woe betide you who don't come to the same conclusions as Luke: your curiousity clearly isn't genuine!
Now this may all sound a bit harsh, but frankly I really wish Luke would stop writing posts like this and start doing some hard-headed thinking about some actual problems.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Tried this last night. Interesting personal results.
I was surprised by just how difficult it was. My brain is very noisy, and I kept thinking. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on my breath, memories of earlier in the day or plans for tomorrow kept intruding. Or music loops. Or recollection of the instructions written here. Or frustration that I couldn't concentrate on my breathing, and meta-thinking about all the thinking I was doing instead of concentrating on my breathing. It was really quite shocking - I considered it a success (and a RARE one) if I could get two breaths in a row without my mind jumping to something.
But much more surprising was the repetitive nature of my thinking. It was like my brain was stuck on a loop. I kept coming back to the same 4 or 5 thoughts/memories/plans, and kept replaying the same small slices of songs. I even came back several times to being shocked/annoyed by how repetitive my thinking was. If this reflects my normal mental processes, then I waste a TON of energy simply re-thinking thoughts over and over.
I found this very interesting, and plan to keep doing this for a while. I have no idea what the term "vibrations" is supposed to mean, and it sounds very New-Age-Woo to me, so I have doubts I'll experience any of that. But the experiment was easy and produced novel results quickly.
Anyone else get anything similar?
I got similar results when I tried the more nondescript "focus on your breathing, if you get lost in your thoughts, go back to breathing, try to observe what happens in your mind" style meditation. Also, I got intense feeling of euphoria on my third try, and feelings of almost passing out under the storm of weird thoughts flowing in and out. That made me a bit scared of meditation, but this post series managed to scare me a whole lot more.