This post is inspired by the post "Why it's so hard to talk about Consciousness" by Rafael Harth. In that post, Harth says that the people who participate in debates about consciousness can be roughly divided into two "camps":

Camp #1 tends to think of consciousness as a non-special high-level phenomenon. Solving consciousness is then tantamount to solving the Meta-Problem of consciousness, which is to explain why we think/claim to have consciousness. In other words, once we've explained the full causal chain that ends with people uttering the sounds kon-shush-nuhs, we've explained all the hard observable facts, and the idea that there's anything else seems dangerously speculative/unscientific. No complicated metaphysics is required for this approach.

Conversely, Camp #2 is convinced that there is an experience thing that exists in a fundamental way. There's no agreement on what this thing is – some postulate causally active non-material stuff, whereas others agree with Camp #1 that there's nothing operating outside the laws of physics – but they all agree that there is something that needs explaining. Therefore, even if consciousness is compatible with the laws of physics, it still poses a conceptual mystery relative to our current understanding. A complete solution (if it is even possible) may also have a nontrivial metaphysical component.

One possible avenue of explanation for this (as discussed extensively in the comment section under Harth's post) is that different people experience their own minds differently, for all sorts of reasons.

I know some people here have a lot of experience with meditation and have experienced major results and "insights" from it. Moreover, as far as I know, most western philosophers of mind are not expert meditators. It is conceivable that meditators have access to information about the human mind which most philosophers of mind lack.

So I am interested in hearing from those of you who have a decent amount of meditation experience: How have your personal experiences influenced your understanding of western philosophy of mind. Not only on the topic of qualia; that was just the example that motivated me to post the question. For example, did anyone move from Harth's camp #1 to camp #2 or vice versa after meditation experiences, or did any of your other philosophical positions shift?

(I would ask this in a Buddhist forum, and I probably will, but I fear that most people will say "stop doing philosophy of mind and go follow the Buddhist suttas"...)

I myself have about 700 hours of meditation experience, and while I have gained some useful skills (mainly emotion handling), I would not say that I have gained any significant insight yet.

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lsusr

90

I have significant meditative insight.

I feel that the quotes you use to describe Camp #1 and Camp #2 are both word salad. The Camp #1 quote is like this post Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote 17 years ago, except difficult to understand[1]. Camp #2 asserts the existence of something fundamental, and then follows it with "There's no agreement on what this thing is". I feel that these postulations are not well-defined enough to deserve refutation.

How have your personal experiences influenced your understanding of western philosophy of mind. Not only on the topic of qualia; that was just the example that motivated me to post the question. For example, did anyone move from Harth's camp #1 to camp #2 or vice versa after meditation experiences, or did any of your other philosophical positions shift?

I feel that the mainstream western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, and that this is obvious to anybody who is half-decent at writing clearly. This includes both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham, neither of whom (to my knowledge) have significant meditative insight. This question is like asking "Did you stop eating garbage out of the local Safeway dumpster after you learned to cook?" I was never eating it to begin with.

To be fair, Buddhist metaphysics isn't any better. It's not uncommon for meditators with deep insight to also believe in levitation and reincarnation.

I think what you're really trying to ask is "Do you have any personal observations via insight which contradict a major philosophical school?" Yes, if you get enough meditative insight you'll transcend the concept of a self. Anything system of philosophy that begins with "I think, therefore I am" is broken at almost the axiomatic level.


  1. When I say it is "difficult to understand", I do not mean that this is difficult to understand like math i.e. because the ideas are fundamentally difficult. I mean that it is difficult to understand because it is written badly. It uses terms like "special" without defining them. Socrates was complaining about this sort of philosophical malpractice over 2,000 years ago. ↩︎

if you get enough meditative insight you'll transcend the concept of a self

What is the notion of self that you transcend, what does it mean to transcend it, and how does meditation cause this to happen? 

6Gunnar_Zarncke
It is the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model that Steven Byrnes describes in detail.
6lsusr
This is correct.
5SpectrumDT
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the "self" are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.  Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind. The benefits of "transcending" the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
4lsusr
This is correct.
3Mitchell_Porter
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It's not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else? 
2Rafael Harth
I don't the experience of no-self contradicts any of the above. In general, I think you could probably make some factual statements about the nature of consciousness that's true and that you learn from attaining no-self, if you phrased it very carefully, but I don't think that's the point. The way I'd phrase what happens would be mostly in terms of attachment. You don't feel as implicated by things that affect you anymore, you have less anxiety, that kind of thing. I think a really good analogy is just that regular consciousness starts to resemble consciousness during a flow state.
1rsaarelm
I've got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion "there's a red apple on that table", you might start thinking "my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table". You'll still assume there's probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you're meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion "I'm a person who's awake, aware and feeling experiences", and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table. But the representation "me, in this body here which I'm aware of" within your sensory landscape isn't the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.

Thanks!

Gordon Seidoh Worley

5-1

I basically don't care about philosophy of mind anymore, mostly because I don't care about philosophy anymore.

Philosophy, as a project, is usually about two things. One, figure out metaphysics. Two, figure out a correct ontology for reality.

Both of these are flawed projects. Metaphysics is that which we can't know from experience, so it's all speculative and also unnecessary, because we can model the world adequately without supposing to know how it works beyond our ability to observe it. Fake metaphysics is helpful contingently because it lets you have fake models that are easier to reason about, but that's the main use case.

As for finding a correct ontology, we know the map is not the territory, and further there are many possible maps. All models are wrong, some are useful.

I did still care about philosophy a lot right up until "I" switched into PNSE, which happened after several thousands hours of meditation practice, and a lot of other things, too.

Basically what I can say is, the whole idea of philosophy of mind is confused, because it supposes mind to be something separate from reality itself. But the world is only known through mind, and so the world is mind. The appearance of an external world is a useful model for predicting future experiences, and it works well to think and behave as if there is an external reality, because that's a metaphysical belief that pays substantial rent. But, epistemologically speaking, external reality is not prior to experience, and thus deeper questions about consciousness are mostly confused because they mix up causal dependency in one's ontology.

Thanks. What is PNSE? "Persistent non-symbolic experience"?

3Gordon Seidoh Worley
Yes

Gunnar_Zarncke

40

You may want to have a look at Aella's survey/interviews of meditators and her writeup of it. 

Neat! Thanks!

sapphire

*

42

I have meditated quite a lot over the last fifteen years. My understanding is that Buddhist meditation practices are intended to reduce suffering and promote equanimity. The main proposed method of action is reducing attachment. They are effective in this regard. They are not useful for doing western philosophy. 

Curt Tigges

30

I have perhaps 1000-1500 hours of meditation experience and have done a decent amount of psychedelics as well. I don't think meditation has given me any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness. Meditation has helped me to see different possibilities in terms of content, shape, and phenomena within the conscious space, and perhaps helped me to understand the shape of it better, but I don't really see it helping much to bridge the scientific/philosophical gap. Best I can say is that "yeah, it sort of feels like what Epistemic Depth Theory and probably Global Neuronal Workspace Theory would suggest."

To actually get what you're looking for, I think you'd need to do more studies on people who are experiencing different mental states, including those found in meditation, while using scientific instruments to probe the mind (fMRI, or BCIs--ideally much better ones than those that now exist). I think you'd need to do causal experiments specifically, not just correlational ones.

For that, you need those improved scientific instruments as well as people who are trained to interospect and report very fine-grained details of their experiences.

FWIW, I'm confused by the difference between Camp 1 and Camp 2. The crux seems to be the definition of "special." My own views on consciousness are close to physicalism (which might be Camp 2?), but I do think solving the Meta-Problem of Consciousness to sufficient depth has a good chance of leading us to those physical correlates or generators of consciousness.

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Just chiming in to say that I'm also interested in the correlation between camps and meditation. Especially from people who claim to have experienced the jhanas.

You meditated for 700 hours and don't feel like you gained any 'insight'! That is a lot of hours. Why did you keep going?

Good question!

I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.

I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.