roche
1hr ago
I don’t buy that meditation can reliably lead to “any emotion or experience”. I don’t think the evidence is weighty enough to support that idea. Certainly you can’t trust the old writings of an institution of monks who are interested in getting monks to meditate as much as possible.
Yeah, fair. This is more or less a supposition that meditation has the same mechanism as a psychedelic experience, but even if that's true, you can do virtually anything on something like LSD whereas meditation is limiting your experiences as much as humanly possible, so by the time you get to a profound state there's a small handful of consistent attainments we can get, and these become the jhana states, deep samadhi, etc.
This is a more realistic aim. Non-effortful meditation is probably beneficial for the Domain Mode Network, resulting in greater rest and general awareness. But if anything, I’d bet the benefits of meditation are precisely insofar as they don’t cause a preferable emotional state. If meditation is boring, unpleasant, but restful, then your “real life” will be more interesting, pleasant, and energetic. It’s like a nap.
You're making the opposite error of me, which is lowballing it while I'm aiming too high. We're not sure what these practices amount to at most, but they absolutely give us more than restful sleep and greater focus.
roche
1hr ago
Good stuff. Will also add keeping your muscles relaxed before bed is quite important.
Good stuff, thanks for the links.
that you can re-program yourself, that you can live in constant bliss or reach a higher level of consciousness?
Hereabouts. The more perception-related stuff like reality shifting and kasina meditation is like playing with fire. I do recall hearing that the Tibetans practice some kind of "emotional alchemy", where one emotion is changed into another, and that this is one of the most dangerous meditations on earth as if it backfires you can go insane or become a psychopathic murderer and the likes, but maybe that's hearsay. There is though a staple of Vajrayana, where you "become" the pure embodiment of some emotion or idea for a time, like a "demon of hatred", but this is just embracing a current emotion and letting it all out, which is what we all do during therapy. Pretty simple.
Living in constant bliss (which should be possible given that these mechanisms don't rely on dopamine or other neurotransmitters, but occur in the processing of sensations) probably just requires a strong concentration, then to focus on a pleasant experience in your body, and keep the focus such that a feedback-loop occurs.
This is basically the process behind all serious meditative/psychedelic states, no? Some kind of feedback loop. The dhyanas are triggered by noticing some pleasant tingles in the hands, and with your brain in a very plastic and vulnerable state, the observation of these tingles magnifies the sensation, and on repeat observations the feeling builds, up until you reach immense pleasure. And this is qualitatively different from a high state of samadhi, which is typically based on a cool feeling of the breath, and so manifests more as a profound relaxation.
But a feedback loop like that simply doesn't happen while sober, and it is evidently not something you can condition through meditation (with our current knowledge). But there is a whole bunch of crap related to kundalini awakening that seems potentially promising, but feels like digging through your weird old relative's house where everything's dirty and smells weird. Mainly I just don't have any good leads. Perhaps you do though.
roche
11hr ago
Euphoria is the experience of an unusual amount of pleasure, and an experience which provides euphoria will eventually provide “mere pleasantness” when repeated. And if repeated long enough it will provide “mere baseline”.
Back in the day, senior monks used to spend all day in the dhyana states to the point of neglecting to instruct the younger monks. AFAIK the pleasure of the jhanas does not dimish.
Let’s suppose you could self-administer euphoria on command. This would be similar to heroin addiction. What would be your incentive to fulfill the hours of necessary daily tasks to maintain health, if you could summon euphoria at will? Once you exit that state of euphoria you would feel abysmal because now your body has to utilize so much energy and effort to, like, get groceries while in a state of displeasure.
Obviously if we were just seeking to replicate heroin or MDMA the whole idea would be stupid. The point here is that drugs like heroin and MDMA operate within a certain paradigm, they work by throwing a giant monkey wrench in the face of your sobriety, and so the way to healthy unique experiences is not by fucking with your sobriety through a medley of strange chemicals, but by changing the nature of your sobriety through meditation and other practices, which is already done in a number of ways by monks and tantrikas.
I don’t think you are treating these eastern spiritual claims with enough skepticism. The idea that a human can experience an eternally preferable state (a bliss) without the experience of a negative emotional state to refer back to is illogical.
It's an incredible claim, and for now I don't believe it either. However, there are two facts which make me hesitate here:
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Meditative states can produce virtually any emotion or experience, with enough effort and time. Imagine it, and it will happen.
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Effects from meditative states can and often do carry into sober existence.
Now, the logical link between these two facts and "You can achieve a lasting state of bliss in sobriety" does not exist. But the logical link of "Meditation (and psychedelic experiences in general) leave lasting impacts on your sobriety, and we don't know how" does. The anecdotes are endless. So I'm not pursuing something ridiculous like a state of meditative bliss out the gate, but rather inquiring where the line is drawn, to see on paper the maximum benefit we can derive from these practices, and hopefully to find the origin of their negative aspects like psychosis and the Long Dark Night of the Soul. This is important because current meditation traditions have no interest in that. They're dogmatists as I've mentioned, and their approach is to wait until a disaster happens and only then clean up the mess. Personally, I'm not confident a lasting bliss-like state may be achieved, because the nature of lasting meditative effects tend to be more perceptive like floaters, fuzzy borders, and high-visual clarity as opposed to concrete feelings. And yet, those absolutely do happen -- particularly from 'metta'.
There’s some higher order part of ourself that finds this repulsive and actually demands the necessity of pain in order to adapt to biological, external, and social reality.
Do you think about all that stuff in the 5~ seconds after you orgasm? Personally, I bask in the waves of bliss. I think you ought to read up on some of the meditative stuff ITT to see just how far out these states can get.
roche
12hr ago
A special kind of relativism, yeah. But...
If you think about anything long enough, you will find that there's no one true answer, no matter if the subject is morality, meaning, philosophy, or mathematics (incompleteness theorems).
Careful here. This train of logic contradicts relativism, because you're saying if anyone thinks long enough they'll arrive at the relativist position, whereas a true relativist knows this only applies to himself and the others "destined" for relativism, and it's wholly natural for Muslims and Christians to collide with the same ideas as you and bounce off into becoming even more fervent Muslims and Christians. For them there is no "choosing" in the process. It's simply the truth.
roche
12hr ago
Hey guys, what's your experience with chronic sleep deprivation?
Like a huge fraction of the population, I don't get that healthy 8 hours of sleep on a consistent schedule every night, and consuming caffeine before bed certainly doesn't help. So a few weeks ago, I woke up after a 2 hour sleep with some incredible brain fog which was scary, but it soon went away. According to Matthew Walker, some effects are permanent. However, I happened across this Japanese gentleman the other day who had a stroke on a livestream. I'll quote part of his post below:
Due to trauma I still can't watch this video, but nowadays I'm on meds and doing well. After that stream, I went to the hospital and got a CT scan, and they said everything's fine, but afterwards I kept getting stuck on my words in weird ways (Like to be specific, I couldn't say "As always, thank you for your assistance" at work). So I went in for a second opinion at another hospital and got an MRI. Their diagnosis was a stroke. According to the doctor, the blood in my brain stopped moving by accident, yet began to move again immediately afterward, so there were ultimately no after-effects, and just by taking some meds I could return to my normal life.
Ultimately we spent 2 years doing tests, but could never determine the exact cause. However, I spent 10 years sleeping an average of 3 hours per night, so I can't help but imagine this is the cause.
And he still streams, too! Very energetic, quick-minded... not at all what you'd expect. Now, I write this because a man named Matt Walker comes up on the topic of sleep debt, and his stance is that long-term sleep debt cannot be recovered from. And I cannot help but feel this may be a form of health scaremongering. Obviously, don't treat your body and mind like shit, health is the #1 priority, you know the deal. But I'm increasingly skeptical of these health gurus online who seem to make a career from either promising you the world or scaring you into relying on their advice.
roche
1d ago
Until recently it was also natural that infant mortality rates were 30% to 50% during childbirth, and that a single cut from a rock may prove fatal. Natural too, then, is the fact that this mystical path really ends in no profound change, and this is owed not to the weakness of our methods, but the poor karma of most practitioners. So the Buddha is said to have stored countless lifetimes of accumulated good will, and that for any man to become awakened it is like digging through a mountain with a spoon. In the end it's all promises, and I've seen it too many times. Dig through the layer of promises and you hit the bottom.
I find profound benefits in this and was recommended to meditate even by my therapist in my psychiatrist's office.
Sure. Freedom from ADHD. Freedom from anxiety. These are all wonderful things. But it's not what was advertised.
roche
1d ago
This strain of analysis is limited, because one pillar of the Indian perspective we struggle to understand is the jewel analogy, the kaleidoscopic view of the capital-t Truth where it changes depending on where we stand, hence Kathenotheism, hence Syadvada. Hence Samsara as being an arrow that soars out of oblivion and lands in your rib. It doesn't matter where the arrow came from; it's a problem and it needs to go. Unfortunately, I don't see much in your quote. To me it seems like a rehashed and watered-down Schopenhauer's Will.
roche
1d ago
Sure, there are benefits to meditation both in the moment and long-term. But there's a massive discrepancy between what is being promised, and what is actually happening for long-term practitioners. People go in expecting something like Krishnamurti's natural state, where the qualitative nature of moment-to-moment experience and behavior is permanently changed, but all you really get is a mild feeling of equanimity and non-dualism -- though you can reach immensely powerful states during meditation and shortly after. There is an obvious mismatch between what manifests and the type of thing promised in the suttas. And yet, our meditation is entirely a reconstruction from the ancient texts; one that emphasizes vipassana while the ancients emphasized samadhi.
It is tragic that meditation is so closely tied to a religion, because this means effectively one side of the population will not take it seriously, while the other half embraces it like pure magic. And this extends to our scientists. Someone who's done his reading knows the almost cartoonish way our scientists flip on a dime when shown a few good proofs of eastern medicine. When the Greeks found their high arts among the Egyptian priests, they saw to separating the mystical from the material. It is a third position that is exceedingly hard to come by now.
roche
4d ago
Best to abandon all hopes of reading something interesting online in 2024. Put the onus on yourself to dig through old publications and research instead.
roche
6d ago
Sure, I agree. If you want ancient go to China.
But in defense of Japan, they view time differently. This is damn hard to explain if you're not really familiar with Asian cultures, but imagine a piece of taffy stretched out to infinity, and then suppose this taffy is infinitely divisible, and that you live on a random notch somewhere on this taffy, and that's how Japanese view time. There is a natural sense of eternity there, as if you're just a little ink blot on the letter of some word of a grand page in a grand book you know nothing about, and can never read or decipher. But you don't care, because things are safe and cozy and beautiful, and if there's anything you like it'll be around a long time. Driving to work, warm coffee, pleasant tunes. All of it will last.
AFAIK, caring about quantitative time is a Westerner thing. Even the ancient Greeks had a very different conception of it, where the past is like infinitely far away even for events that occurred 10 years ago, and you have dudes getting labeled demigods while their grandkids still walk around town.
roche
10d ago
Holding a thinking face expression for much of the day also creates wrinkles around the face. The greats have eye-areas marked out like world war trench formations
roche
12d ago
Keep in mind that religion is a social mechanism -- one of multiple nigh-invisible but indispensable mechanisms to keep us from clawing out one another's throats. In Japan's case what happened is not religion, but something functionally equivalent to one, which is that the entire country sort of melded into one enormous clan, and the operative faith here is that if one performs his duty in the clan to the nth degree he's going to get all the spoils of society, which is why Japanese elders make no bones about picking up trash or being a crossing guard, and why they're so reticent and polite. Japan is also by no means homogeneous, and that word is a phantasm unless you're talking about very old villages or uncontacted tribes.
and then they formed warm relations the formerly enemy distant genome.
Politeness is a social mechanism too
roche
13d ago
And what are tribal reasons? Differences in behavior. A symbiotic relation is made possibly only by very advanced social mechanisms, and when you consider the advancement of tribal peoples, you should take it to heart that failure to innovate in these systems more than anything concrete is the culprit for their failure. Someone very well read in Chinese history would probably get me, since this process is much harder to see in Western society, as low population density is the historical norm and we had generous time to figure these things out.
roche
13d ago
Had a random thought that really kinda depressed me. It was thinking about my father and extended family as a whole, and how I can naturally relate to them a lot, while in the world at large I butt heads against people all the time from the sheer fact we're just so different. I remember Westerners laughing at those little tribes in Africa or Brazil with 99%+ genetic similarity that murder fractions of their populations, and do it again yearly, and the punchline is supposed to be Hey look at these idiots killing each other when they're so similar!, and yet they never stopped to think hey perhaps those tribes lived separately because their ancestors hated one another and split off from the same tribe generations ago, like the valley vs. highland people, and this happens constantly in hunter-gatherer societies when there's conflict, and our society is a spectacular achievement in taming groups that should by all accounts loathe one another, by hiding who we are through politeness and living in Dunbar's number-adjacent circles of moderate genetic similarity.
Knowing the reason we fight is pretty much just genetics is a downer.
roche
15d ago
Party. It's a gross phenomenon when parties tailor their every little motion to match the flow of the crowd (or really a clumsy, out-of-touch notion of the people), and even uneducated Americans can probably sense they have no other real motive. Like parents who spoil their children and bend their will to match the kid, the whole process feels backwards. Presidents are leaders, but these apparatuses don't select for actual leaders because a tough guy maverick will refuse to play by the rules. I get the ick looking at parties; How's a bunch of followers going to produce a leader? It's backwards.
roche
16d ago
Right, but if the main road to political domination is military genius, the selection pressure falls on tactical brilliance.
roche
16d ago
Charisma is undeniable, but it's a holistic product of concrete things. Trump's charisma is not his background or his manner of speech or suit, but they all play a part in forming his charisma. So what's the nature of that charisma? Why does it work when Trump does the funny hand motions and says "I've got a deal with China, it's the greatest deal, you're gonna love it", when if any other candidate did this it would be suicide? Answer: It appeals to that old old American mentality I mentioned. That sort of enterprising, ungarnished, take-no shit ambition which historically defines this nation's existence. It's because Trump actually embodies these values that it works for him, and for that reason republicans can't produce a replica, because these are not their values. Which is really a failure of democracy: Like every system of morality known to man, when you optimize for trait X as seen from outside, you don't end up with a society full of trait Xers, you get a dog-and-pony show great at convincing swathes of the population someone has trait X even if they don't, and only that; Not actually getting trait X. But for this reason, red tribe could totally produce new Trumps if they recalibrate. The big obstacle is they're so divorced from the common man, they too can't quite fathom his appeal.
Calling it charisma is circular reasoning. People like him because he's charismatic. He's charismatic because of... his voice? His hair? His smile? What about him can't be replicated, exactly? Undeniably what he's giving us is rare, but it revealed to us something undeniable, this type of mass appeal we haven't seen before. He's like a businessman without the bullshit, like an old old American, so old that a huge subset of Americans can't even really fathom his appeal or why it works. And I think that in all honestly is the origin of TDS -- it's because they don't get his main appeal that they assume he's popular because of x/y/z -ism. Not even reds understand it, but crack the code and we'll be seeing more Trumps some day. Not soon, but it's coming. This isn't a stars-aligned moment, but rather a 'we've accidentally stumbled into something huge, and almost a decade later we're still working out what it means' type thing. This is clearly not a fluke.
roche
16d ago
Hi all! I'm cooking up a new history of science blog with a side of book reviews, a pinch of games, deep dives into obscurities, and cultural observations. I've put a healthy amount of time into branding, and then let the first batch of ideas simmer until they're fairly strong. As I have (close to) zero audience coming in, I'm optimizing for quality on this first run (1-2 months), shilling it in some relevant spaces, and then basically praying. If you have any tips or suggestions, I'd appreciate it!
roche
16d ago
Why do you disagree that they selected for it? The link is undeniable. Especially because consular appointments are annual, and it's very hard to judge the wider decisions or impact of a consul on that time scale, and conquest is one of the lone things that's obviously an immense positive, just like rhetoric, except proconsular appointments shatter that dynamic and form an even greater imbalance of power. If we're not selecting for great orators or great generals, then what are we selecting for?
I get you, but IMO this is a "High intelligence + High openness" result. There are some profoundly intelligent people like Schopenhauer who never second-guessed their axioms or sought out a higher authority or basis for them, and when questioned on what authority they're derived from, he and others always defer to Plato's forms or the "laws of nature" or whatever. And rather than infinite regress, they arrive at some bedrock idea like entelechy and say "Yep, this explains everything" and there is nothing before it. And to their defense is the Eleatic argument that something cannot come from nothing, and this is the most widely loved idea by philosophers because it spits in the face of infinite regress.
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