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.
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.