It is occasionally said to me,
"Have you considered meditation and buddhism? Enlightenment is really powerful."
This feels similar to saying
"Have you considered giving up a massive resource - one of your scarce slots for a life-long habit, a daily time-sink with week-long retreats - to Buddhist meditation? It supposedly makes you feel funny at the end, as though you've had a major epistemological insight (but you aren't able to produce corresponding output as a result)."
Given the amount of people offering me something like the above, my background skepticism is very high.
The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result. If, for example, you wrote sequence of recognisably useful insights unrelated to enlightenment (example), and then afterwards told me that it was due to your having felt enlightenment, I'd consider that interesting evidence. But I do predict that I find your subsequent post not much evidence either way.
I will mention that I have some notion of a thing you might be pointing towards: I've experienced ontological updat...
Bemused exasperation here. I'm grinning as I write this. I wondered if this post would produce this kind of effect… and I hoped not, but it's not unexpected!
The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result.
I'm not advocating trying for kenshō. You can't try for it in any useful way. That's not how it works. I honestly don't care whether I persuade anyone of its value, because it does not matter whether you try for it. Or rather, if it does matter, it does so by making you obsessed in a way that can actually block the seeing. So, there isn't really any good benefit to fighting with your analysis to try to persuade you of its value. That's all on you!
And I imagine that's frustrating. And I do apologize; I'm really not trying to be frustrating or vague here. It's just… well, see the entire opening post!
But to steelman your… hmm, mix of a request and a challenge: I receive you as wanting either for me to give you concrete things learning how to Look has done for me, or to admit I can't and retract the value of what I...
I'm not advocating trying for kenshō.
I don't have any particularly good ideas for what an alternative goal of this post could be, and would be interested in more elaboration on that. It definitely seems to me that the goal of the post is to teach something, and as is usually required for teaching, to motivate why the thing you are teaching is important. If this post is only for people who are already motivated to learn about the things you describe, then that's fine, but I did not get that sense from the way it was written.
Upon reflection, I think maybe I can spell out the logic of what I was trying to focus on a little more clearly.
There’s this thing, ``flibble’’, that is super hard to understand. Some people come to understand it and can then talk to each other about it. But they can’t explain flibble to pre-understanding folk. There’s some kind of process that’s basically unrelated to the attempts to explain flibble that lets people suddenly get flibble.
It really doesn’t matter what flibble is. The curious thing from an epistemic point of view (to me) is that there seems to be a skill to getting flibble. It looks like it’s a very general “get my ontology to update when I have no damn clue beforehand what the update is” skill. That seems damn useful.
The problem is, that skill is just as subject to non-understandability as flibble is. Which means you need the skill to some extent in order to bootstrap.
I do not care what flibble is. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the value of flibble. I’m trying to point at this puzzle and note that it suggests a really huge goddamn hole in epistemology as we normally talk about it.
It just so happens that flibble, when properly understood, is exactly...
I want to address this response, because it fits a pattern I’ve seen a few times, which I think is an important aspect of this discussion. Here’s the pattern:
“I’ve invented a fascinating new baking technique! With it, I have baked an amazing new cake!”
“An amazing new cake?! Sounds delicious! Could we have a taste?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the cake, I want to talk about the baking technique.”
“I’ve invented an amazing new programming technique! With it, I have developed an awesome new app!”
“An awesome new app?! Sounds cool! Where can we download it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the app, I want to talk about the programming technique.”
“I’ve come up with a whole new way to write fiction! With it, I have written an incredible novel!”
“An incredible novel?! Sounds wonderful! Could we read it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the novel, I want to talk about the new writing method.”
But the only reason we might possibly care about your new baking technique is if it lets us bake amazing cakes. The only reason we might possibly want to hear about your amazing new programming technique is if let us make cool apps. And the only reason we might have to ...
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn't already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I'll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can't be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you'll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can't be directly explained in words and aren't obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficul...
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action.
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn: whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn: whistles aga...
I like this comment because it's a relatively clear articulation of the central thing you seem to be frustrated about here, which is that you think that Val could show you the cake but is refusing to for some perverse reason that you can't fathom.
I think the cake analogy is a very poor fit for what's happening here. Everyone knows what a cake is. I don't have to teach you anything to show you a cake; I just show it to you and you've instantly understood that what you're looking at is a cake. This is very different from trying to show someone what "enlightenment" looks like, whatever that means. At a minimum "enlightenment" involves something screwy happening with ontologies, so there's no guarantee that you'll be able to "see" an example of "enlightenment" just by staying in your particular ontology.
Back to the cell phone world: Alex texts me demanding that I show him an example of what looking up looks like. What can I do? I can text him a picture of a person looking up from a phone. What's his referent for that? Other pictures he's seen, on his screen, of people looking up from their phones. Nothing he hasn't seen a million times, on his screen. Alex thinks the thing he is asking me to do is easy, and if he's right it's not in the sense that he thinks.
To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’.
How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, several such things.)
Having done this, you will thereby have demonstrated ‘enlightenment’, and can then proceed up to the meta-meta-level of “the technique you used to achieve enlightenment”.
Analogously, suppose what I claimed to discover was not a new baking technique, but a new process of culinary experimentation which might be used to discover new baking techniques.
So first you’d exhibit a cake, and we’d all have a bite and agree that it’s delicious. Then you’d show us a pie, and we’d all have a forkful and agree that it, too, is delicious. You would then bring out a tray of cookies, and we’d all have one and judge them to be delicious.
Then you’d tell us about the novel baking techniques you used in the process of baking the cake, the pie, and the cookies, respectively. We’d all be impressed (and would, at this point, have no doubt that the techniques work, as the taste of your delicious baked goods still lingered in our m...
Valentine did list things in the above comment that are fancy.
As I say in another comment, Valentine has certainly told us all about how great the cake is. What he hasn’t done is provide us with any. All of his listed examples are benefits that are (a) self-reported, unverified, and possibly unverifiable[1], and (b) very, very vague.
[1] Though even third-party testimony, if sufficiently diverse and credible, would be a good start.
According to that conception enlightment isn’t about doing or more trying to do more but about doing less.
What does “doing less” mean, in this context? (And why might I want to “do less”?)
I must say I am perplexed by comments such as this. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m not singling you out in any way; this is only the latest in a pattern.)
In what world does any of what you wrote, there, constitute anything like: (a) concrete actionable knowledge or understanding; or (b) actual, real-world benefits?
It feels strange to do this, given how vague all of this is, but let’s try to tackle at least your first bullet point:
there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality
To what line of thought to do you refer? Are you making reference to the concept of the “map-territory distinction”? Or something else?
Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word
What is this discrepancy? Tell us about it!
It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on
And? What is actually going on?
what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is
So what are they?
and see how that conversation went off the rails.
Yes? And how did it?
...It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grou
People tend to get exactly the quoted part out of the sequences somehow, not the rejection of it. I didn't explain it there because it takes a lot of writing to do so, but I will do it here.
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Then, note that there are many parts of this pathway that can be interrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in there, and there is a fundamental disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain in there. Since there is always a chance for somthing interfering with that connection, nothing can be probability 1. From this you conclude that any thing that you experience is just some image your brain conjures up from sensory stimulus. Those things that you experience are not real, and are only maps of the actual real things out there in ineffable reality.
Looking allows you to see that the entire thing I just described is just a model - an image. In going through that whole thing, Look at how you are shri...
The image we are given in the sequences… [snipped]
It would be a drastic understatement to say that what you wrote in that paragraph is a ludicrous misunderstanding of what Eliezer wrote. I could call it a ‘distortion’, but it’s more like literally the opposite of what the Sequences say. (The part about probability in particular makes me question whether we read the same posts or, indeed, live in the same reality; suffice it to say that you certainly did not understand what was said in the Sequences about probability theory.)
The entirety of that section of your comment consists of setting up and then knocking down this frankly shocking strawman of Eliezer’s ideas; this is then mixed with a rather amateurish recapitulation of selected bits of Enlightenment-era and 20th-century philosophy (which have been beaten to death by generations of analytic philosophers—who, even in those cases where they haven’t solved these issues, have said some much more significant and useful things about them then you have). Most of it, frankly, is not even wrong.
In the second section, you take some facts about how non-verbal signals work in human social interaction—facts which are, no doubt, interes...
(comment continued from parent, due to character limit)
The final section is yet more of the mind projection fallacy. Phenomenology is interesting, and your contributions to it are… not novel, of course, but written in a clear enough way to be of interest to investigators. Yet you have again chosen not only to construct a bizarre ontology out of a combination of fairly straightforward phenomenological facts and what are apparently some highly-idiosyncratic-at-best elements of your mental experience; you’ve also gone on to make the again outlandish claim that none of it is discernible without your capital-letter skill.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I mean that in all sincerity and wholly sans sarcasm; I appreciate it, as I know that responding to skeptical internet strangers is a mostly-thankless task. Few people would attempt to respond in so concrete a fashion (and indeed almost no one else has), so know that I very much value the effort that you took to respond, and the product of that effort.
That you have responded with enough specificity and detail for me to be able to draw satisfyingly (though not nearly totally) definite conclusions, is icing on the (sadly, only proverbial) cake. So, again: thank you.
P.S. I upvoted dsatan’s comment, as I very much endorse encouraging detailed, specific responses to critical inquiries, here on LW.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
FWIW, this aptly describes my own adverse reaction to the OP. "I have this great insight, but I not only can't explain it to you, but I'm going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn't understand it if I tried to explain it" sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, "If only you weren't blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord".
That the object level benefits offered seem to be idiographic self-exhaltations augur still poorer (i.e. I cut through confusion so much more easily now (no examples provided); I have much greater reserves to do stuff; I can form much deeper pacts with others who, like I, can See the Truth.) I recall the 'case' for Ander's Connection Theory was of a similar type. But at least connection theory at least sketched something like a theory to consider on its merits.
There needs to be either some object-level description (i.e. "This is what Looking is"), or - if that really isn't possible - demonstration of good results (i.e. "Here's a great post on a CFAR-adjecent topic, and this was thanks to Looking.") Otherwise, the recondite and the obscurantist look very much alike.
I appreciate you writing the list of examples, but also don't find them currently particularly compelling, mostly because they are hard to verify from my current perspective (which is fine and the real value might just be hard to communicate).
Yes, I don't think it is possible to convey the value that "understanding proof" provides to everyone. But even for someone who cannot easily understand, asking to be shown the value is a very reasonable response, and if they cannot be shown the value, it makes sense for them to not spend their time learning mathematical proof. Trying to teach them proof, without them seeing any value in it, seems doomed to failure.
I can imagine being in a world where it is similarly hard for me to understand the value of kensho. But in that world the necessary first step for me learning, is to be motivated to learn. As I said, it seems fine if the target audience for this post is not me. And it seems plausible, though obviously sad to me, that my mind is shaped so that I can not understand the value without spending dozens of hours on good faith on following your argument along. And if you continue writing this post-series, I will try to seriously engage with the things you are describing, even without seeing the value directly, because I do think you have some interesting perspectives and this whole area might have some value in it.
What I am trying to say is that for the goal of ...
I think that a) Val has obtained a real and valuable skill, b) Oli is engaging in good faith and making a reasonable request, and c) that there is a type of post that Val could conceivably write which Oli would find satisfactory.
I hope to eventually prove this by achieving enough skill in this area myself (making the assumption I'm correct in understand what Val's skill is), obtaining the value, and then conveying this in a convincing manner such that anyone reasoning as Oli does is motivated by my case.
Appreciation for you, Ruby. :-)
I’m honestly flummoxed about how to create the type of post you’re suggesting. Given the clarity of everything else you’ve written here about this, I’m inclined to believe you. And I’d much like to write that post, or see it written. Any pointers?
Thanks! Okay, some pointers :) You asked for them!
Your writing style is characteristcally evocative - the kind of writing I'd use to point at the majesty of stars, the tragedy of death, and the grandeur of all that could be. It's emotional, and that is perhaps both its strength and its weakness.
You have the right style to conjure strong feelings around things one already believes and endorses (perfect for Solstice), but perhaps less so to convince people of things they're skeptical of. A pastor's rousing sermon about Jesus's love for all mankind, while moving to his congregation, does little to convince me about the matter.
Unfortunately, it seems that people who don’t know how to intentionally Look literally cannot conceptually understand what Looking is for . . .
I emphatically reject this. You've observed that you don't feel understood when you explain your experie...
One more pointer - clarity on the purpose of a post is paramount. From your comments, it seems like a few different purposes got mixed in:
a) Kensho/Looking are very powerful, I want to motivate you to try them.
b) There is a puzzle around communicating things which you can only conceptually understand once you've experienced them. (I'd focus mostly on the puzzle and make it clear Kensho is but an example in this post.)
There's a dictum: "1) Tell them what you're going to tell them, 2) Tell them, 3) Tell them what you've told them." Going by your CFAR classes too, I feel like you don't like telling people what you're going to tell them (you even want them to be confused). I think this unsurprisingly results in confusion.
Thanks, this is clear and appreciated.
I do feel some exasperation. You’re right in picking up on that.
My experience is that even when I’m not exasperated, this doesn’t convey to people who haven’t done any Looking. I don’t mean that as a judgment against anyone; it’s just a really strong phenomenon, and I think it’s getting conflated with my frustration.
But I’ll take your push-back seriously and reflect on this.
Thanks. :-)
I may have a better answer for the concrete thing that it allows you to do: it's fully generalizing the move of un-goodharting. Buddhism seems to be about doing this for happiness/inverse-suffering, though in principle you could pick a different navigational target (maybe).
Concretely, this should show up as being able to decondition induced reward loops and thus not be caught up in any negative compulsive behaviors.
Thanks for the offer Ruby. I've done a little bit of meditation (0.5-2 hours, 5-10 times) and think it may have given me a better phenomenological sense of my own focus and awareness, and slightly more control over it.
However, the improvement seems very low cost-effectiveness compared to the similar improvements in focus and awareness of my cognition I get from doing long stretches of math - noticing which strands of my mind think different things are useful to think about and focus on. I also find that most of the low-hanging fruit in improving my attention came from a CFAR class I had (that Val taught :-) ) about how removing drains on your working memory has increasing marginal value, and how to design your life environment accordingly (analagous to how rationality training on humans is very weak relative to being able to set up economic incentives to do well). This has helped me a fair bit, I think.
Regarding the practice of meditation, I'm currently at a level of skepticism where (I think) the only thing that will persuade me to do a bunch more will be someone doing something I personally regard as remarkable, and then telling me they believe it was causally due to their having done lots of meditation. It honestly just doesn't seem worth the time.
As I said, I'm very happy to read examples of people having accomplished impressive things, and then crediting it to the practice of meditation. Such examples will gradually move my credences up.
I think that the only coherent way to convince us that Enlightment is real is to provide a model from a 3rd party perspective. To use your phone parable, you can send the other person a diagram of a person holding a phone, explain to them how eir current perceptions arise (e.g. the phone is a computer attached to an LCD display, the display generates light according to commands from the computer, light enters eye retina; brain controls eye muscles, neck muscles and leg muscles etc.) and then explain how the new perceptions can arise (if eye + neck muscles rotate your line of sight s.t. it doesn't intersect phone display...) Scientific epistomology can be in principle explained in a similar way, through models such as Solomonoff induction (although in this case it took a lot of time from the invention of scientific epistemology to the invention of a sufficiently precise model.)
The model doesn't have to be fully mathematically rigorous: as always, it can be a little fuzzy and informal. However, it must be precise enough in order to (i) correctly capture the essentials and (ii) be interpretable more or less unambigously by the sufficiently educated reader.
Now, having such a model does...
What if - these are probably the wrong words, but even so - thinking in terms of models and 3rd-party perspectives is part of what needs to be bypassed in order to understand the thing?
Try sinking deeper into the cell-phone world. You send someone a diagram of a person holding a phone. What does that diagram refer to, in the cell-phone world? It refers to other pictures, on the cell phone, of people holding phones. The Archimedes Chronophone game isn't so easy to win as this.
What if - these are probably the wrong words, but even so - thinking in terms of models and 3rd-party perspectives is part of what needs to be bypassed in order to understand the thing?
This would be much more surprising than the situation with the cellphones (which, as Vanessa correctly points out, seems pretty easy for a rationalist). I would love to see a metaphor that explained how something like this could happen, even if that metaphor had to be much more of a stretch.
It looks like a normal scientific view should at least be able to talk about the experience of enlightenment in the same way that it can easily talk about the experience of "red" to a blind person, since ultimately it's just a thing happening with a brain.
it's actually very difficult to say anything to a cell-phone-worlder about what looking entails, because all of the referents that a cell-phone-worlder has for the relevant words refer to images on their cell phone
The cell-phone-worlder has seen images on their phone, which comprise a model for the things outside of their phone. That model includes themselves, and all their actions and perceptions. You can tell them facts about that model, including facts about the consequences of actions they could take (though they may not have words for those actions). Yes, the cell-phone-worlder has not perceived reality (and neither have we). That's not how models work, they aren't supposed to be identical with the thing they are modeling, they are supposed to be used to draw inferences about the thing that they are modeling.
From my perspective your statement seems about as convincing as saying: "it's actually very difficult to say anything to a human about what a banana is like, because all of the referents the human has for the relevant words refer to photons impinging on their retina." That does not mean that our beliefs about the world are restricted to belief...
I have, in fact, given the model.
Where exactly? Are you talking about this essay or some previous one?
The problem is, your type signature for “model” is too low-dimensional.
Can you give me a model of the correct type signature of models? Or is it Kensho all the way down?
I want an explantion on my own terms. It doesn't have to a perfect explanation, maybe there are things which are ineffable or unknowable or whatever (although one can ask what does it mean to say that they "are"), but it has to be something like the best approximation possible in my language.
Is Kensho amenable to mathematical description? If not, how is it possible, given that your brain understands Kensho and your brain is governed by mathematical laws? Or, do you claim to have discovered new physics? I understand that the map is not the territory and understanding a mathematical model is not the same thing as experiencing something first hand, but all I'm asking for is the 3rd party perspective.
I think drawing may be a similar skill. I can't actually draw well, but my model of how one does this is by not interpreting your visual field by the laws of perspective and instead making lines that correspond to your actual sensations. This is why sometimes one sees it recommended, as a learning technique, to put a photo upside down and then try drawing that. It forces you to pay attention to the lines instead of performing the visual parsing step one ordinarily does. (The other half of drawing is causing the lines to show up on the page in the place where you want them to; this is not part of the analogy.)
One could consider this Looking at one's raw visual phenomena. The skill described in the OP would be Looking at one's own mental phenomena, a layer or two further up the stack from the raw visual phenomena. It's possibly important not to think one has the generalized skill of looking if one just knows how to draw (it may block you from actually learning how to Look). However, if this analogy holds as strongly as I think it does, then one ought to be able to learn both skills with similar techniques?
For drawing that implies perhaps spending time studying you...
I think I get what Looking is now. This draws together most of the things I thought Looking might be, and explains how they're the same skill applied to different things. The skill of drawing is transformative for some people. There's a phenomenon I've heard repeated a few times (most prominantly in the book IMPRO) where a person "lives in their head" so much that they become distant from their sense-data, things literally losing color and taste, or noticing that you aren't feeling touch very sensitively, and drawing can help you break out of that.
Learning to draw in itself might not help with Looking or might even hurt (if you get in the habit of thinking that all internal experiences reduce to atomic sensory observations), but it maybe if you learned to draw in conjunction with learning Gendlin's Focusing, and meditation, and another introspective/phenomenological skill, you might get the general thing!
So, my model is that Looking is the ability to see your experiences for what they are. Whereas learning to draw, or learning to pay attention to what your body is feeling allow you to Look at sense-data only, the general skill has to do with perce...
I like this analogy!
Of course, it suggests ever more strongly that—if ‘Looking’ is a real thing (i.e., a skill or ability that it’s possible to have, and that perhaps some people do have, but which most people don’t have)—then it should allow one to produce unmistakeably impressive artifacts or feats.
After all, what can one do with this ‘visual Looking’ skill you describe? Why—draw pictures! (Specifically, one can draw pictures that look much more realistic than those drawn by people without the skill, such that the beholder says—“My god! That actually looks like the real thing!”.)
There can be absolutely no mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. Crucially, their impressiveness is perceivable…
(That’s not the only clearly real and tangible skill or ability gained by someone who has this capacity to perceive their raw visual field; there are others. Drawing realistic pictures, however, is one of the most unmistakeably impressive ones, and one of the easiest to demonstrate.)
What is the analogous product of general ‘Looking’—one which is impressive to someone who does not themselves have the skill, nor even know that such a skill exists?
This is an interesting perspective. I could respond by asking “then what good is it?”—but let’s dig deeper:
What examples can we think of, of other domains which have no obvious output, but which, clearly, are real and valuable?
No doubt there are some. Comparing them to ‘Looking’ may yield useful insights, yes?
G’Kar: You must understand, Ta’Lon. I have had a revelation!
Ta’Lon: What kind of revelation?
G'Kar: A most profound and substantial one, Ta’Lon. The kind of revelation that transforms your mind, your soul, your heart—even your flesh—so that you are a new creature, reborn in the instant of understanding.
Ta’Lon: That was a stirring reply, Citizen G’Kar. Unfortunately, while all answers are replies, not all replies are answers. You did not answer the question that I asked. What do you understand now that you did not understand before?
— “Point of No Return” (Babylon 5, season 3, episode 9)
Ta’Lon’s reply is, basically, my reaction to this post.
So you’re enlightened. Ok. Now what? What do you understand now that you did not understand before? What do you know now that you did not know before? What can you do now that you could not do before? What have you gained? (And why should anyone want this thing? Or should they?)
Or, to put it another way: suppose that, just prior to reading this post, my view of enlightenment was “I suspect this ‘enlightenment’ business is mostly nonsense, though there’s a chance it’s not nonsense”. Would you predict that reading this post would shift my view? If so, in which direction would you predict that my view would shift?
Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced.
Can you say how? (Was it drugs?)
Perhaps. If so, I certainly look forward to reading that future post.
However, I will say that before one begins to lay out an elaborate explanation of why something is hard to explain, one might perhaps begin by offering at least a taste of just why, exactly, anyone might be interested in having that thing explained at all.
An analogy: suppose I have invented a widget. Well, so I claim, anyway, having shown up in your office (you’re an investor, to whom I propose to license my invention). Upon entering, I immediately launch into a long, elaborate explanation of the fact that my widget is very difficult to manufacture—almost impossible, really. It’s quite a herculean effort, just making the thing! Yes, producing even one of these widgets is an ordeal worthy of song and story, because the process of its creation is long and arduous and complex…
Are you not liable to interrupt my tale, by saying “Yes, yes, but what is it? Do you have one? What the heck are we even talking about, here? Show it to me!”?
Coming back from the analogy, what I’d very much like to have seen first (and would still like to see) is a post along the lines of: “Observe, as I demonstrate unusual and impressive feats of thinking / writing / action! Are you not impressed? Yes, of course you are… and how did I accomplish these things? Enlightenment! And what is this ‘enlightenment’? Ah, now that’s a tricky one… settle in, because this’ll take a while…”
… or something. You know?
I do feel the post is not really trying to explain why you should care to achieve enlightenment. It highlights that it is difficult to talk about enlightenment, and that it is difficult to point at the benefits elightenment might provide, but it doesn't feel like it's actually trying to give me evidence about the benefits of enlightenment, and that's the part I am actually most skeptical about.
I believe we have many deep epistemic blindspots, and deep ontological frameworks we cannot easily break out off. I expect there are methods to expand your ontology in various ways, and this seems like one of them, but it is competing with hundreds of other ways I could expand my horizon (for example by studying math, or coming to deeply understand poetry, or going through intense social experiences like circling, or participating in intense religious experiences). Mindspace is deep and wide, and while I believe that you've had many internal experiences I haven't, just highlighting that you had them and I have not does not make me want to spend dozens of hours trying to achieve yours. It's not completely unconvincing, but a pretty weak sell overall.
My disagreem...
That PNSE paper makes disturbing reading. The four locations the author identifies on a spectrum of deepness of PNSE display progressively increasing sense of well-being and equanimity. However, he also observed that this subjective sense was not evident in the subjects' actual behaviour. Three examples from the paper:
"Over the course of a week, his father died followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: ...
I've read so many reports from people claiming enlightenment that it's become something of a genre. The common thread is that they all claim better emotional skills, but the writing doesn't reflect any such skills. It's like a house with broken windows that says "elite real estate". All this time I thought it was just me, but in retrospect any incommunicable superpowers should've seemed fishy from the beginning. Your comment confirms that someone else got the same impression and they fact-checked it. Thank you!
Sasha Chapin has written a followup to his earlier meditation experiences, "How my day is going: report", which struck me as being eerily like the PNSE paper's pathologies, particularly his descriptions of derealization and being temporally adrift (and reading between the lines, other people not noticing Chapin's new status and him overrating his improvements so he has to explain it to them).
I brought the similarity up and he replied:
The PNSE paper has some issues IMO, but it's perhaps the closest thing I've found to a perfect description of the experiences I've had.
Whenever someone wants to convince me of the value or promise of some meditationy thing by making strong sweeping claims about mental benefits, I simply ask them "Can you name someone who's done some practice like this, and then subsequently done something that I'd recognize as both good and impressive, and then somewhat attributed the latter to the former?". I'm sure there must be some good answers to this question, on baserates if nothing else, but no one has ever (N=10ish?) named an example.
One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably "they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward" wouldn't be something that you'd recognize as both good and impressive.
I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings. He has a website for writing about these things, two organisations for researching them, and a string of books on the subject on Amazon.
The same four stages appear in the preface to one of these books, "The God Formula" ("A simple scientifically proven blueprint that has transformed millions of lives"). They are described in glowing terms. Producing those experiences is the very purpose of the book. And yet the book was published in 2013, and references his research on PNSEs, which was carried out over many years previous to that. I can't see enough of the book for free to see how he reconciles these drastically different views.
Apart from a two-volume work on Reiki (of which he is a "world renowned master"), his other books are a science-fictionalised account of what he calls the "Fourth Awakening". I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case. From the blurbs: "For the past 500 or so years, t...
I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings.
From viewing a couple of his interviews on YouTube, I gathered that there are two possible explanations for this. One is the he was initially motivated to study PNSE because he wasn't feeling happy despite achieving conventional success and saw PNSE as a possible way to achieve sustained happiness and well-being, so that could explain why he's not too bothered by PNSE being more like wireheading than making a person more effective at achieving real-world objectives. Two is that he didn't personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case.
I wouldn't read too much into those books, because according to the interviews they were almost entirely written by a co-author, for the purpose of trying to reach people with PNSE and gathering them as subjects for his research project.
Harper's has a new article on meditation which delves into some of these issues. It doesn't mention PNSE or Martin by name, but some of the mentioned results parallel them, at least:
......Compared with an eight-person control group, the subjects who meditated for more than thirty minutes per day experienced shallower sleep and woke up more often during the night. The more participants reported meditating, the worse their sleep became... A 2014 study from Carnegie Mellon University subjected two groups of participants to an interview with openly hostile evaluators. One group had been coached in meditation for three days beforehand and the other group had not. Participants who had meditated reported feeling less stress immediately after the interview, but their levels of cortisol—the fight-or-flight hormone—were significantly higher than those of the control group. They had become more sensitive, not less, to stressful stimuli, but believing and expecting that meditation reduced stress, they gave self-reports that contradicted the data.
Britton and her team began visiting retreats, talking to the people who ran them, and asking about the difficulties they’d seen. “Every meditation cent
I wonder if Jill Bolte Taylor was temporarily enlightened? (Incidentally, The God Formula is now on Libgen.)
The question of whether enlightenment is wireheading is really interesting (and perhaps important) to me. Would love to hear Val's explicit take on that.
(Context: I am more-or-less convinced that there is a repeatable phenomenon called enlightenment, and also that both meditation and CFAR-style introspection have the potential to trigger it. I also meditate moderately regularly and find it very beneficial and insight-provoking. I currently suspect englightenment might be wireheading.)
Edit: This theory only makes sense if "the enlightenment experience" is a distinct thing from "the clarity of sight that accompanies a lot of meditation". I definitely think the latter is a good thing and is clearly not wireheading. But I am confused/turned off by stuff like the "everything is ok" paragraph, and that seems to be an important part of most enlightenment experiences.
The awakened community definitely needs more rationality and the rationality community could probably benefit from some Insight, so thank you for starting this conversation. Hopefully it's just the first step. For anyone interested r/streamentry is a mostly woo-free, friendly community for discussing this sort of thing.
A particularly useful and traditional guideline is to wait a year and a day before claiming an attainment and completely making up your mind. This is slippery stuff sometimes, and many states and stages can easily fool someone into thinking that they are something they are not.
Do you have a teacher? I ask for two reasons. Firstly a reputable teacher will be able to provide confirmation of your attainment. Secondly what you’re describing doesn’t sound like stream entry, it sounds like A&P. There’s typically a difficult period after this which can be brutal if you’re not expecting it and it’s extremely useful to have the support of a teacher who knows the territory to guide you through it. Whatever it turns out to be it sounds like it's reduced suffering considerably, so congratulations.
You linked to Rinzai Zen, is that the tradition in which you’ve been...
Meta: it looks like a few people (including me) are getting confused about comments disappearing on this thread. The page by default only displays 100 comments, presumably chosen by magical algorithm, and you need to request at the top to get it to display more comments.
To me this effect is jarring because when I see that a comment I wrote has disappeared I don't know whether it was 1) eaten by a bug, 2) put on another thread by a bug, 3) deleted by a moderator, or 4) hidden in this way, which is not a hypothesis I had before looking more carefully because I already had 3 other excellent hypotheses. I don't have concrete suggestions for what to do about this.
Yep, this is horrible and I apologize. We only had two threads with over 100 comments since he start of LW2, and so this is not something that I ended up optimizing super much for. But I will try to fix it soon.
I think you're talking about doing your own perceptual chunking, instead of projecting socially received models (or your own prior models) on top of something. This is absolutely critical for being able to do anything new, and almost definitionally difficult to verify based on legible standards. I don't actually think the problem is that people don't know how to do it - it's usually that they perceive an incentive not to do it, and to cover up this fact. And sometimes they're right!
Related: Do One-Eyed Rule Blind?, The order of the soul
[Edit: this comment starts off on a critical tone. After reading more comments which are very critical, I wanted to edit my comment to first at least indicate that I think you are communicating about it as best you can and am somewhat annoyed with those suggesting otherwise. Nonetheless, my comment focuses on a single paragraph in which you make a decision about how to communicate which I disagree with. This is neither a criticism of the central point of the essay, nor a criticism of the overall way in which you try to make your point here.]
[Edit 2: I think I get what Looking is now; see my reply to Moral Of Story's comment.]
Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to interpret them: if you think something like “Oh, that’s the map/territory distinction”, then all I can say is you are still looking at your phone.
There's something very frustrating about this. Explaining in-parable: if you're trying to tell me to look up, and I send a di...
My sense is that "enlightenment" is a perceptual-emotional shift rather than any change of belief or judgment, and this makes the communication difficult, same as communicating any other qualia to a person who hasn't had it. It's not unlike trying to communicate what a hypothetical novel color looks like to someone who hasn't seen it.
Of course, if I can see ultraviolet colors (due to some novel Crispr treatment or something), I can offer a good description of the mechanics which are producing my unique experience , i.e. "I can see a wavelength you can't." In the case of enlightenment, however, we don't have commonly accepted and understood models like wavelength of light. If we did for qualia too, I think Val could communicate in an understandable what was going on his mind, even if the mechanical description cannot convey the actual experience. (I'm reminded of the Mary's Room thought experiment.)
In the case of Val's Kensho, I don't think I've ever occupied that mental state, but I've experienced enough variations in relevant dimensions of perception, emotion, and relation to reality that I get that he...
I haven't achieved any state profound enough that I'd consider it enlightenment, but I'll answer based on my understanding and what I've experienced so far.
I don't think there is a trivially-verifable power conferred by enlightenment, but I would wager that people who have experienced enlightened will perform systematically better at certain tasks, including:
It's a useful state to achieve if you plan to wake up each day, confront the sheer magnituted of the suffering that exists in the world, or carry the burden of trying to ensure the far future is as good as it could be, while hoping to be a psychologically well-adjusted and effective human. All the more so if the tasks you carry out push you to your limits[1].
It'd take resource-intensive experiments to measure these effects, but I'd still wager on their existence. Much of my confidence is because each time I feel myself move along theses dimensions, I reap marginal benefits.
[1] I think many EA's suffer because they take on these tasks without the mental infrastructure required to bear them and still flourish.
Interesting! This is starting to sound quite a bit like something resembling verifiable claims (not quite, but much closer than most other stuff in this vein!).
Could you say a bit more about what sorts of experiments you envision, that could verify the effects you allude to? (Or, to put it another way: you said you’d wager on the existence of these effects—do you mind sketching out in more detail how we might construct the conditions of such a bet, with sufficient rigor to make it definitely resolvable?)
In any case, I very much appreciate this sort of response, thanks.
I'm trying to decide whether or not I understand what "looking" is, and I think it's possible I do, so I want to try and describe it, and hopefully get corrected if it turns out I'm very wrong.
Basically, there's sort of a divide between "feeling" and "Feeling" and it's really not obvious that there should be, since we often make category errors in referring to these things. On the one hand, you might have the subjective feeling of pain, like putting your hand on something extremely hot. Part of that feeling of pain is the very strong sensation on your hand. Another part of the pain is the sense that you should not do that. This Feeling is the part that sucks. This is the part that you don't want.
It turns out that those two types of subjective experience aren't one in the same and aren't inseparable. For the vast majority of situations where you notice that one occurs you also notice the other. However, (and it's a big however), there are some times where the first type appears without the second type. It just so happens that our brain is wired so that you never notice that specific situation. But it occurs...
Fantastic. It's seemed to me for awhile now that the stuff that people are actually talking about in-person (e.g. at CFAR workshops) has far outstripped the pace of what's publicly available in blog post format and I'm really happy to see progress on that front.
For what such claims are worth, I don't think this has happened to me yet, but I think I've gotten near enough to it that I believe it exists.
FYI, I have an impression that 150 comments in some kind of progress in understanding was actually made by at least some people, and I'd be interested in someone who learned anything significant writing a (much condensed) summary of the output of this thread.
Not to put too fine a point on it: through the tone and content of the post, I can still see the old attachments and subconscious messed-up strategies shining through.
I am, of course, not free of blame here because the same could be said about my comment.
However, I reach out over both of these and touch you, Val.
In the dialogue between "YOU" and ALEX, not only does ALEX not have a place in their mind for "look up" to land, YOU does not seem to have a place in their mind for that fact to land. YOU just keeps on repeating "look up" and "you are not looking up yet", without noticing even after six repetitions that he is offering nothing that ALEX can use. Scott's green bat does the same thing in saying "get out of the car". Illusion of transparency, in spades.
I think it's really uncharitable to read that dialogue as a description of anything like an optimal attempt to get Alex to look up; it starts "in your excitement" for a reason. Read it as a description of a person's internal experience of being able to look up and then being frustrated at how difficult it is to communicate that to Alex. Instead of asking "how could I attack this person's reasoning as much as possible?" you could be asking something more like "what kind of experience would cause a person to be so excited, in this particular way, that they would try repeatedly to explain that experience, in this particular way, without remembering to pause to come up with a good way to explain it first?"
And you sigh, stop typing, and gently speak right into their ear, “no. LOOK AT ME.”
They twitch uncomfortably and type, “I don’t know what you did, but that was deeply uncomfortable. Please don’t do that again.”
What is this part an analogy for, in the ‘enlightenment’ case? What can you (or Valentine) do, that would make the un-enlightened twitch uncomfortably and say “I don’t know what you did”?
(Similarly, in the ‘parable’ part of the OP, Valentine alludes to the possibility of reaching over and raising the person’s head, forcing them to look up. He then gives what I consider to be some quite unsatisfying reasons for not doing this—but what actually would that constitute? Can you demonstrate, or could Valentine? Surely we can find a willing subject…)
twitch I really REALLY want to explain why this is a bad idea, but explaining why it is a bad idea is currently a bad idea. Some local sociopolitcal stuff will need to calm down first, and then I can explain.
EDIT: No, wait. I think I can gesture at it, even if I can't explain fully yet.
There is something about ... concepts that I'm going to call "sovereignty" and "agency", which seem deeply connected with Looking.
Something I've learned to do, occasionally, is sit down with someone and say "Hey. You've been taught that you're not allowed to use your sovereignty and agency to Look. I really think you should Look." And then they flail a bit, like someone who doesn't know how to wiggle their ears trying to learn, and I sigh and say "hey. If I deliberately fuck with your agency, in a way that causes you to feel your sovereignty being attacked, you'll actually notice what your sovereignty feels like, and then you can learn to play around in that space. May I do that? It feels kind of scary and violating, so I don't want to do it without your permission."
And then they say "umm no?", and I go away.
But...
Please avoid vagueness. It doesn’t help at all.
Unfortunately, the vagueness is to protect him, not to help you.
#1 would be a good start, and seems like it should be very easy to provide.
Why does it seem like it should be very easy to provide? I imagine if you set a 5-minute timer and really tried to come up with a list of reasons a person might be some combination of unable or unwilling to provide a concrete description of something, you would come up with more than one possible reason.
I appreciate you trying to explain. Please take my responses/questions as eager attempts to understand.
I appreciate this. Thank you.
Cool! This is exactly the sort of answer I wanted: one where you literally tell us what actually took place.
Now, could you give exactly that sort of answer—one that involves a literal account of events—but about the thing we were talking about in the first place?
I've been talking to some friends in philosophy for some time in what they describe as in the realm of post-rationality. Based on my reading of what post-rationality among ex-rationalists/rationalist-adjacents doesn't match what my friends have been talking about, so I guess they mean it in the sense that what they're pursuing seems thematically typical of what techniques rationalists tend to pursue after they feel they're not getting new value out of applying or re-applying mindsets typical of the rationality community. One feature tha...
How accurate would it be if I characterized Looking as "the skill of being able to notice concept-shaped holes"? (with the difference that the "hole" in question may be an entirely different ontology that's necessary for making sense of something)
Brief footnote:
The post I mention at the end was already planned before September. It's (to me) the natural follow-up after Fake Frameworks. Having it work so quickly to result in kenshō just came as a surprise and had me delay the sequence I'm writing.
Not critical for y'all to know. I just thought it was amusing.
Earlier I quoted this from the PNSE paper:
"Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference."
I am wondering, has anyone, after achieving some great insight, or doing some sort of personal development work, received, from people unaware of it, unsolicited favourable comments on how they have changed?
Thank you for your very interesting post Valentine.
I am coming to this topic from a quite different viewpoint than most of the comments I read (did not read them all). That is because I believe I know exactly what you are talking about due to having this experience myself. Nevertheless, I think you are mistaken to call it enlightenment.
The base of what you are describing as 'Looking' is that there is a different way of perceiving the world. Something like a separate perceptual channel or mode. This concept and its various distortions can be indee...
Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced. I think I understand the mechanisms behind how, and I believe I can convey them in a usable way. I plan to do so in an upcoming post.
If you learn how to Look, you can see things that you can learn to interpret as novel patterns. This gives you a lot more room to do some pretty epic stuff.
…but explaining that more concretely is really best left for the upcoming post.
...The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several
I am curious too but it looks like Valentine is never going to write the promised post, as it's been almost 6 years and looking at his profile, none of the 4 immediately subsequent posts (1, 2, 3, 4) really deal with the topic of meditation & enlightenment, as only #2 even briefly links here (and then he stopping posting entirely for almost 4 years, and his resumed posts are on rather different topics - unless "Creating a truly formidable Art" is that?).
(If I may generalize about Internet writers, if someone has some big piece in mind about their current interests and their interest drift and they haven't written it up after a few years, then you can safely assume that it is never going to happen and be pleasantly surprised by the rare exceptions; this is why it is critical to 'strike while the iron is hot' and not let perfectionism stop you because for most people, what will happen is that nothing will happen, rather than write an exquisite perfect essay (or video, or fanfic, or novel etc). Once it exists, cleaning it up is less demanding, and if you don't, at least it exists, and can do whatever good it can do.)
This might be related to his statement in a followup discussion t...
But honestly, I’m tired of arguing with logic machines about this. No, I cannot prove to you that it’s not your daughter’s arm. No, that fact does not cause me to question my certainty that it’s not your daughter’s arm. Yes, I understand you think I’m crazy or deluded. I am sorry I don’t know how to help you; it is beyond my skill, and my human heart hurts for being so misunderstood so much here.
Isn’t this an ironic choice of metaphor? The situation rather more resembles you insisting that it’s your daughter’s arm, being certain of this despite many other people thinking that you’re not quite in touch with reality, being impervious to demonstrations or proofs that it’s your arm, etc.
(Of course, I don’t think that the metaphor is quite apt either way. I don’t think that what you’ve said is obviously wrong in the same way that the stroke patient’s arm-ownership claim is obviously wrong; rather, it’s mostly unclear to me what you’re claiming in the first place, and to the extent that it is clear, the claims seem vague, etc. Indeed, it would be a much easier discussion if you were merely saying [apparently-]straightforwardly-wrong things… And, conversely, I don’t think that I’ve sai...
I'm a very occasional meditator but I think I mostly get what you mean by Looking. But it's 4am and I'm commenting more to report that something weird happened as result of this post. I read this earlier today, then later via Scott's review read this page about A&P events: http://integrateddaniel.info/the-arising-and-passing-away/
Then tonight in bed I started having some strange sensations. I started seeing some of those vibrations, maybe. This part was only visual and could have been imaginary. Then I started getting a strong sense...
This post really captured my attention. So much so I read it and most of the comments thrice.
Two of Valentine's claims:
A) Certan types of things are meta-cognitive blindspots (cfar jargon). For example, alcohol impairs your driving ability, it also impairs the ability to tell whether or not you're okay to drive. Given you've had N drinks, the feeling of "I'm okay to drive" is not to be trusted. Another example is recognising good outfits, If you're lacking in fashion sense you can't tell whether or not the clothes y...
I remember that I had enlightenment for about two days, back in fourth grade.
But of course, it wasn't real enlightenment, because I can explain what I mean.
When you consider whether to do something (e.g. my fourth-grade homework), you do many things. You think about what other people will think. You execute habits, both good and bad. You might let yourself get distracted, which is itself a sort of habit. And there is also some small part of you that can predict the costs and benefits of doing the thing.
In my state of enlightenment, I felt the costs an...
So glad you wrote this, and looking forward to where you take this thread of posts. There is a whole bunch of stuff here that doesn't get touched upon enough for what we're all trying to do, and I think writing about it needs to happen more.
Good post! I'm excited for your milestone. I'm not sure if I can discern between my having enough experience with mindfulness and acceptance to get what you're pointing at, or if I'm simply using my closest conceptual bucket, but I believe your experience is real (if not always your interpretation of it).
Note: as the original post is 4 years ago, this is more of a note to self, the remains of an introspection process that was first meant to be private. I post it to challenge the part of myself that wants to stay comfortable in my beliefs, like a signal to myself that i need to write and be less afraid of sharing the results, to let my thoughts be criticised. So here goes:
i think I've experienced the same thing, at a particularly hard moment of my life. looking back, it didn't occur to me to spiritualize it, or pretend it cannot be rationally understood and...
I finally feel I understand this post. I also feel I understand why it was hard for me to understand originally.
The car analogy is being used to explain both looking and why looking is difficult to explain. This encourages trying to understand both at the same time, when it'd be simpler to focus on the later first.
Beyond that, as a story, it is hard to completely understand without a more realistic example to clarify. Unfortuantely, the only real example is the skill of Looking is anything but clear. So to understand Looking you have to understand why explaining Looking is Hard which is explained with the Car Example which is only completely clear once you understand Looking.
From Buddhist Phenomenology by Henk Barendrekt
1.7 Explaining apparent contradictions
Now we will explain how contradictions, which happen to occur in some buddhist texts, are possible. Suppose some part of reality U is described using some language L. Some of the regularities observed in L are in fact physical laws, but may be confused with logical laws. If we extend the reality U to U+, but keep as the describing language L, then statements may result that contradict statements made about U. Although the contradictions are only app...
I feel like this is correctly pointing at a thing. I would also like to try to put it into my words to see what Val thinks about them:
The map/territory analogy illustrates a way to eventually be able to engineer the territory. Engineering the territory is not a goal in itself though so we need to continuously Look to remind us of there being an actually desirable end state. That end state is there, always, we can access it even now. It's just that our current reality will not enable us to access it nonstop and accessing it too much will either kill us...
Seems worth linking to Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, given that it contains a parallel to your phone analogy in the form of a "get out of the car" analogy.
Is this enlightenment anything like described in https://aellagirl.com/2017/07/07/the-abyss-of-want/ ?
Also possibly related : http://nonsymbolic.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/PNSE-Article.pdf (can you point on that map where you think you found yourself)
This sound suspiciously like Plato telling people to stop looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave, turn around, and see the transcendental Forms.
Curious if you're almost done with the followup post. This sounds extremely interesting, and I'm curious to see what you have to say on how to reach kensho.
The thing is, I don’t mean “it’s okay” as something to think. I mean it more like an instruction, like “look up” in the cell phone parable. Trying to understand the meaning is analogous to Alex posting a photo of their phone and then scrolling above it in the text chat.
Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to in...
I have read this post multiple times and allowed myself being confused about it.
With this recent reading my associative bridges matched more on Nolan's movies which also seem to have some kind of funky communication going on.
In Memonto in the runtime finale, which is chronologically in the middle, there is a kind of philosphical or psyhcological dilemma which seems connected to this "jam up your phone" thing. The protagonist has just experienced a lot of stress and has committed murder by lying to himself despite having a principle and life foundation by s...
IS there a community out there for people who have been able to do this? I find it very difficult to find people who can stay present, yet it improves every single aspect of my life. I try to explain it and you can see it in their eyes they are understanding, but then you can see doubt enter their minds and they lose it as soon as I stop talking. You explain it perfectly which is how I know you figured it out. I learned just by listening to podcasts and audio recordings and one day it clicked. Now I re-listen to everything and more stuff is being said. But...
Howdy Valentine! Will you be posting anymore content related to Looking and Kenshō? I would really like to try and flip my perspective and Look for myself, but feel a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights... What I’m sensing is that ‘Looking’ is an apprehension of things before the ‘claiming’ mind jumps in ...which is harder to say than do. Do you have any practical advice for an aspirant? Many thanks, Oliver
Another metaphor that emerged from what i recognized as a kenshō experience.
We were in the ER for one of my late husband's health crises, I don't remember which. (As a survivor of a Soviet prison camp and a midwinter escape with gangrene in his legs, he had a few.) I was already in an extreme state. An apparently incorrigible alcoholic derelict, ravaged, scabbed, ragged, was also in the ER. Listening to him rave to the intake people I had all the usual feelings of deploring addiction and the damage it does to people's lives and our parlous, ...
I'm just commenting to give you another data point (and to reinforce to myself what I'm saying): your quote about everything being okay, and the way you describe the general reactions, resonates strongly.
Some days, I think "everything is okay" and it just is. Other days I fall off one side into nihilism, and yet other days I fall off the other side into boundless optimism. Rarely do I settle into the knowledge that it just is, and even more rarely does the resulting acceptance or (cliche) tranquility linger.
I haven't had words to ...
I feel that this is an area where engaging in some ameteur phenomenology may help clarify what you mean, or at least provide insight into what you don't mean.
So, as a very rough and off-the-cuff attempt to clarify the kinds of mental operations, we have the following:
I'll be looking forward to your next post, but meanwhile, is this something different from consciousness of abstraction?
Follow-up to: Gears in Understanding, Fake Frameworks
This last September, I experienced enlightenment.
I mean to share this as a simple fact to set context. I don’t claim I am enlightened, as though I have some amazing property that makes me better than people who don’t have it. I mean simply that there’s something vaguely like a state that our culture calls “enlightenment” that I’ve been in and have returned to a few times over the last four months. In Rinzai Zen one would say that I had a kenshō: a moment of understanding that makes the path clear but is not yet full attainment.
Over the last several months I’ve tried to share what I now see so clearly. And this has mostly just failed. People who’ve had a kenshō follow what I’m saying just fine, but most people just get really confused. It feels a bit like being one of the only people around who understand scientific thinking: most people can see that the behavior of a gyroscope is weird when you show them, but most can’t really see its behavior through the lens of scientific epistemology. They just keep translating what you’re saying into e.g. isolated facts.
This is particularly vexing in the case of kenshō because enlightenment isn’t an insight. I claim it’s not a matter of inferential distance. It’s more like bothering to notice what you already know. When the moment of seeing struck me, I fell over laughing and basically didn’t stop laughing for two days, because it was so incredibly stunningly obvious. There isn’t something to learn: it’s already always here.
And what is “it”, you might ask? Well, I would honestly love to be able to tell you. But apparently my saying it doesn’t convey it hardly at all, unless you’ve already seen it for yourself.
(And yes, there’s most definitely an “it”. This isn’t just brains getting flooded with feeling-of-profundity without an object. And it totally makes sense that some people think that. Just… from this vantage point, those objections come across a bit like people arguing that science is just another religion. Or more to the point, it’s like trying to convince me that I have no subjective experience: no matter how cunning and logical and well-researched the argument, I’m still here listening to you.)
With all that said, I think I can share something one meta-level up. I think the reason it’s hard to convey enlightenment in words can itself be conveyed with words. And I think doing so illustrates something important about epistemology. And with some luck, this might give me a way of pointing at what enlightenment is, in a way that can land.
So, that’s what I’ll aim to do here.
First, a parable.
Imagine you’re in a world where people have literally forgotten how to look up from their cell phones. They use maps and camera functions to navigate, and they use chat programs to communicate with one another. They’re so focused on their phones that they don’t notice most stimuli coming in by other means.
Somehow, by a miracle we’ll just inject mysteriously into this thought experiment, you look up, and suddenly you remember that you can actually just see the world directly. You realize you had forgotten you were holding a cell phone.
In your excitement, you try texting your friend Alex:
You now realize you have a perplexing challenge made of two apparent facts.
First, Alex doesn’t have a place in their mind where the idea of “look up” can land in the way you intend. They are going to keep misunderstanding you.
Second, your only familiar way of interacting with Alex is through text, which seems to require somehow explaining what you mean.
But it’s so obvious! How can it be this hard to convey? And clearly some part of Alex already knows it and they just forgot like you had; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to walk around and use their phone. Maybe you can find some way of describing it to Alex that will help them notice that they already know…?
Or… maybe if you rendezvous with them, you can somehow figure out how to reach forward and just pull their head up? But you’re not sure you can do that; you’ve never used your hands that way before. And you might hurt them. And it seems kind of violating to try.
So, now what?
Here’s one way I used to try to convey part of the “it” from my kenshō:
After several attempts at this, I gathered that many (but not all) folk were translating what I was saying into one of two categories:
And… nope. Not even close.
But it makes sense that so many people had those interpretations. I mean, what else are they going to think when I say “it’s okay”?
The thing is, I don’t mean “it’s okay” as something to think. I mean it more like an instruction, like “look up” in the cell phone parable. Trying to understand the meaning is analogous to Alex posting a photo of their phone and then scrolling above it in the text chat.
Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to interpret them: if you think something like “Oh, that’s the map/territory distinction”, then all I can say is you are still looking at your phone.
It seems that most people do not have the type of conceptual Gears needed to intellectually understand what enlightenment is about. But instead of hitting a “this falls outside the current system” alarm, their minds grab the most fitting conceptual bucket they have to what they heard and plop it in there. This creates an impression of understanding that actually blocks the ability to understand.
This is why zen sometimes uses koans. A koan is meant to give the student’s mind something to chew on that it cannot understand intellectually. The hope is that at some point the conceiving mind will jam, the student will see “it”, and then they’ll have the raw data they need for their mind to start building the new type of Gear. That’s kenshō.
…which makes it kind of frustrating when rationalists are so pleased with themselves for dissolving koans. Yes, very good, you figured out how to download a few apps that prevent me or others from easily sending you messages that jam your cell phone. And that’s good and worthwhile. But you are still looking at your phone. And now you’ve removed one way you can be directly shown this fact.
At this point I’ll try to say the meta-level thing plainly:
There is a skill, analogous to “looking up”, which one will almost certainly misunderstand if we use normal words or concepts for it. I need a handle for it, though, so I’m going to call it “Looking” with a capital “L”.
(And yes, it’s conceptually related to Seeing With Fresh Eyes. But if you think it is Seeing With Fresh Eyes, you will miss the point, because you’ll be attaching what I’m saying to ideas you’re familiar with instead of Looking. And if you object based on the claim that that’s what Seeing With Fresh Eyes is about… then please reread the previous sentence.)
As far as I can tell, you need this skill in order to bypass a particular kind of epistemic trap, where your methods of gathering information preclude the ability to get an entire dimension of data type. It’s an ontological version of confirmation bias.
Once you have any meaningful grasp of how to Look, you can use it to see things that prompt novel Gears in your understanding of the world. A lot of things that previously sounded kind of mystical or incoherent will suddenly change meaning and be made of obviousness to you. And some of them really, really, really, really matter.
Seeing these things will probably transform you, although it usually seems to feel more like realizing who you have always been and what has always mattered most to you. Your reflective priorities rearrange, you start caring in a different and deeper way, and most of the things you had previously been so stressed or concerned about stop mattering. You actually start to get what’s at stake and what’s worth doing.
And then you, too, can experience the hilarious frustration of trying to get others to Look.
So, how does one learn how to Look?
Well, that’s a damn good question. And people with varying degrees of enlightenment have been trying to answer it for literally thousands of years.
So, rather than pretending I have some great novel algorithm for this, I’ll add three notes that I hope will be helpful here.
First, for rationalists in particular, I think skill with switching freely between frameworks is really useful. That is not at all the same thing as Looking, but it sort of stretches a thing I usually find is rigid in rationalists in a way that blocks their ability to Look. If you’re always interpreting everything through Bayesian updating or decision theory or epistemic hygiene or whatever, you’re always interpreting, regardless of the validity of which tools you’re using. I claim that being able to put those tools down for a second is actually really helpful — and, I claim, it can help contextualize where those tools are actually useful.
Second, one clear thing I noticed when I first intentionally Looked is that everyone has bodhicitta. There’s an important way in which everyone is already enlightened, and “enlightenment” is simply a moment of someone remembering this fact about themselves. This is why people know to build beautiful monuments to honor lost loved ones, and to be respectful while in them, across vast cultural and religious belief differences. We already know. This is the “already know” of that small quiet part of us that nudges us to notice that we’re wrong while in a fight with a loved one. The skill of Looking is closely related to the skill of pausing our usual habit patterns and actually paying attention to our quiet, clear sense of knowing.
Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced. I think I understand the mechanisms behind how, and I believe I can convey them in a usable way. I plan to do so in an upcoming post.