I'm not particularly buying any of this. The central metaphor just doesn't seem true (scratching an itch can be way more pleasurable than not having one, imE, and ditto with many other instances of receding unpleasantness) and I don't think "[t]herefore what we usually take as pleasure is just scratching the sore of underlying suffering" follows from any of the stuff before (lots of types of pleasure for which this doesn't seem true).
1Thank you for this comment! It's an excellent response that gets to the heart of the matter. You're absolutely right to focus on the metaphor, as its validity determines the model's usefulness.
Let me clarify the intended meaning, because I think we use 'pleasure' in two different senses, which is exactly what the metaphor is trying to reveal.
- Distinguishing 'pleasure' from 'well-being'. The claim isn't that the sensation of scratching is less intense than the sensation of neutrality. The claim is about the overall state of the system.
In a 'scratching state' the system has a problem (a sore/itch). The scratch provides a high-contrast relief from the negative state. This relief is intensely felt and is certainly 'pleasurable' in a hedonic sense. But the system's baseline is compromised. - In a 'no sore state' the system has no problem. There is no negative state to relieve, so there's no high-contrast 'pleasure event'. Instead, there is a steady unobstructed peaceful functionality. This is what Nāgārjuna calls "more pleasurable still", not in terms of peak sensory intensity, but in terms of well-being and the absence of background suffering.
The metaphor argues that what we often chase as 'pleasure' is the first kind: the intense signal of a problem being temporarily solved. The second kind - the peace of a problem-free system - is quieter but constitutes a higher quality of existence.
A way to test this: would you choose to have a mild chronic itch in order to enjoy scratching it? Probably not. The pleasure of scratching 100% depends on unpleasantness of the itch. The pleasure is fundamentally parasitic on the problem. If you could magically have no-itch state, you would certainly choose that! This reveals that at a meta-level we value the problem-free state more, even if scratch provides a momentary peak experience of pleasure.
Translating this to worldly desires: the model suggests our worldly cravings often work the same way. The pleasure of satisfying a craving (for food, distraction, status, etc.) is often most intense when it relieves a background state of lack, anxiety, or boredom (the 'sore'). The point is not to never scratch an itch - that's impractical, the insight is:
- To recognize the itch. In other words: is this craving arising from a genuine neutral need or from a background 'sore' I'm trying to pacify?
- To aim to problem-free state. Prioritizing movement to 'no sore state' (by insight, resolution of conflicts, etc.) over optimizing for the most efficient 'scratching' routines.
So you point is valid, if we equate 'pleasure' with raw hedonic intensity. The model invites us to consider a wider perspective of well-being, where freedom from the need to scratch is superior (if less intensive) outcome.
Where in this view do pleasures fit that are not the removal of suffering? Or does it deny any such thing?
For example, listening to great music, contemplating great art, studying a field of mathematics, or creating any of these things?
Sorry to bother you again, but I was wrong about joy (pīti and sukha) all this time! They are mental factors in Buddhism, so they have three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering and no substantive nature. When I was writing I was thinking about the term ananda from Advaita tradition. Which is usually translated as bliss and concomitant with liberation. I thought they were synonymous. And they are not!
Buddhists don't use a positive term to describe that state, they only point to the unconditioned nature that results out of extinguishment of the fires of delusion, greed and hatred. Profound peace and freedom that results out of that extinguishment may be described as happiness. The happiness of release from craving. In one place they describe it as "the highest bliss" (parama sukha).
The stillness of the mind that I was referring to comes from Advaita tradition and called there sahaja sthiti (natural state or innate state) and may be partially experienced during the meditative absorption (samādhi). When the mind abides in the meditative absorption thoughts and craving cease and what is experienced is deep peace beyond description. I wrongly called it "joy". But it is called bliss in Advaita tradition and Buddhist tradition in general describes it in negative terms, i.e. the absence of craving, etc.
Therefore, what I meant by "joy" was the extinguishment of craving and the resulting "highest bliss" (parama sukha). And what I meant by "stillness of the mind" was the pointer to that natural unobscured abiding - called sahaja sthiti in Advaita, which finds its ultimate consummation in the realization of Nibbana in Buddhism.
To sum up. Stillness of the mind is bliss. Craving is turbulence in the mind. As long as there is craving there is seeking for pleasure (or avoiding unpleasantness) to still the mind. Satisfying pleasure is not bliss, only a spasmodic glimpse of it, a temporary relief. The highest bliss is possible if we reach effortless stillness of the mind by getting rid of craving. Whatever we do in that state of stillness is unblemished by craving and excessive thinking. Until then we are subject to craving of one kind or another.
So to answer your initial question in terms of the Buddhist doctrine: all pleasures are concomitant with suffering (for the unliberated and for the liberated the mechanism of craving is absent).
To put it simply: everything we do with a still mind is pure joy (based on the doctrinal assumption and some personal experience). Craving is turbulence in the mind. We crave to be free from suffering or satisfy a desire. As long as there is craving there is seeking for pleasure (or avoiding unpleasantness) to still the mind (at least temporarily, to have a glimpse of joy the still mind entails). Pleasure is not permanent joy (happiness) only spasmodic glimpse (if at all). So craving and pleasure are interrelated. The Buddhist doctrine states that permanent joy is possible if we get rid of craving or still the mind.
What concerns great music, art, science and so on - they mostly come from deep absorption and one-pointed concentration to the point of detachment from everything else where craving subsides and the mind becomes still (at least for some time). Stillness of the mind or the absence of craving are the same.
This is a crucial question, thank you for asking it! It challenges the model's boundaries and forces us to be precise about what we mean by 'suffering' (dukkha) and 'craving' (tanha).
Short Answer: The model does not necessarily deny the existence of such pleasures (they would be in a different category though, more on this later). It invites us to inspect them more closely. Are they truly free from the mechanism of 'scratching a sore', or do they contain subtle elements of it? The framework suggests a spectrum rather than a binary.
- Distinguishing dukkha (the 'sore') from acute pain. First, it's important to clarify that dukkha in the first noble truth is not just gross pain or misery. It encompasses a subtle, pervasive background of unsatisfactoriness, instability, or 'dis-ease.' This can include:
- boredom: seeking stimulation (music, study)
- existential restlessness or meaning-seeking: pursuing beauty (art) or truth (mathematics)
- a sense of incompleteness or lack of accomplishment: the drive to create
If the activity primarily functions to relieve that kind of background tension, then it fits the 'scratch' dynamics, even if the activity itself is sublime. The pleasure is, in part, the relief of that subtle lack. - The concept of 'non-craving joy' (pīti, sukha). Buddhist sources themselves acknowledge states of joy that are not born of sensual craving. In deep meditation (jhāna and samadhi), one experiences rapture and happiness that arise from stillness, concentration, and letting go, not from fulfilling a lack. This is closer to the 'no-sore' state manifesting as positive affect. This is what Nāgārjuna means by "more pleasurable still", abiding in this state is pure joy.
Could listening to Bach or contemplating an elegant proof trigger a similar non-acquisitive non-lacking joy? Possibly, if it is experienced with a mind free from craving - free from the 'itch' to possess it, to use it for status, to escape something else, or even to prolong the experience itself. The pleasure then is not a relief from a negative, but an appreciation of a positive that arises in a still mind. Then it should be called joy, really. - The model itself might serve as a litmus test. To distinguish between pleasure and non-contrived joy one might ask:
- is it addictive? Does its absence create a craving or a sense of loss? (Suggests a 'scratch' dynamic.)
- what is its emotional aftertaste? Does it lead to contentment and release, or to a craving for more? (The former suggests satiation; the latter suggests the 'sore' remains.)
- could I enjoy this equally if no one ever knew I experienced it? (Helps isolate it from the 'sore' of social validation).
Creating great art or mathematics often involves immense struggle (a 'sore'), but the moment of breakthrough can feel like a transcendent release from that very struggle. Yet, the appreciation of the final product by a still mind might be different - a pure non-contrived joy.
Therefore, the model doesn't automatically categorize all pleasure on the same level (there is a non-contrived joy which is beyond the scope of pleasure). What it does: it asks us to discern the underlying mental state. A huge portion of what we chase is relief-driven ('scratching'), and that a state of peace ('no sore') is superior and can itself be profoundly positive. So the pleasures you list could sit anywhere on this spectrum between pleasure and non-contrived joy. The final litmus test is whether there is craving or not.
The worried voice in my head says:
"Doesn't this all just add up to negative-utilitarianism and extinctionism? If all action is rooted in desire, if 'everything is suffering', then eliminating 'desire and suffering' means eliminating the motives for action, which ultimately means eliminating life."
To which a reassuring voice responds:
"Think about eating habits. There is such a thing as healthy eating. But a lot of people's eating habits are dominated by craving and gluttony; or self-loathing and bingeing; or other cycles of self-reinforcing suffering. Healthy eating doesn't look like eliminating the action of eating, that is, starving yourself! (But it certainly doesn't look like pigging out and hating yourself, or getting envious over whether your gourmet meal is less cool than the other guy's, or eating whatever maximizes the profits of the food industry.) Attempting to starve yourself would be part of one of these cycles of suffering. Healthy eating entails eliminating those cycles. The same thing applies to other sorts of suffering."
Worried voice again:
"Okay, sure, eliminating specific intense knots of 'desire and suffering' makes sense to me. But what about the limit case? If the theory says 'everything in life is suffering', then after you eliminate those knots, the theory is still going to aim at eliminating everything else in life. That's extinctionism right there. Hey wait a minute, doesn't nirvana mean extinction to begin with?"
Reassuring voice:
"Hey, hold on, I like that 'knots of desire and suffering' idea. You're thinking of painful knots in a muscle, where it's tense and it's keeping itself tense, and causes you pain. But there's a big difference between relieving a knot in a muscle, and never putting any tension on that muscle at all. Healthy muscle motion isn't a knot, but it also isn't disuse and atrophy. Unknotting the knots is part of getting to healthy motion. It doesn't mean the end goal is to go totally limp and relaxed all the time. But if the reason you can't relax at all is because of painful knots, then worrying about disuse and atrophy is the wrong cognitive behavior."
W:
"Yeah, I was also thinking of Knots by Laing, and the idea of self-reinforcing interpersonal suffering. But seriously, what about the limit case?"
R:
"We are so far from the limit case that it doesn't make sense to worry about it! If we set out eliminating knots of suffering, the heat-death of the universe would come long before we actually got to the limit case where it makes sense to worry about extinctionism. Extinction is going to happen anyway eventually, but it's so very far in the future. And by reducing suffering, we would have had a happier future."
W:
"So, you agree that present-day extinctionists are just wrong? That eliminating human life isn't the correct way to eliminate human suffering?"
R:
"Yeah, definitely. They're bonkers bozos and always lose. Entropy happens but there's no point in worshiping it!"
W:
"Okay, fine, I'm a little bit more on board with this Buddhism stuff."
This is a fascinating dialogue, thank you for sharing it! I want to jump on board of the Reassuring Voice and add some comments.
First, nirvana is not extinction of a person, life or experience. What is extinguished is suffering (dukkha) and its cause - craving (tanha). It's the extinction of the fire of ignorance, clinging and aversion - not of consciousness or life. The result is described as the highest bliss, supreme security and freedom. All are positive terms. It is the end of problematic mode of being and not of being itself.
Second, the first noble truth doesn't say "everything is suffering". It says that life as conditioned by clinging (upadana) is pervaded by suffering (dukkha). It's a statement about a process (clinging to the five aggregates), not a condemnation of pure sensory experience itself.
Eliminating the 'knots' (craving/clinging) is not like trimming a tree branch by branch until nothing is left. It's like untying a knot in a hose. Once the knot (the obstruction) is gone, the water (life, energy, consciousness) can flow freely, without distortion or blockage. The goal isn't to stop the flow; it's to remove the distortions that cause the "painful pressure" and "blocked functionality".
Third, the Buddhist path is about cultivating positive qualities, not just negating negatives (even more so!) The four noble truth, the noble eightfold path is a training in skillful action, not inaction. It cultivates: wisdom (prajñā), ethical conduct (śīla) and meditative absorption (samādhi). These states represent a re-orientation from "scratching itches" (craving-driven action) to skillful, compassionate and clear engagement with the world.
Last, on present day Extinctionists R is right to dismiss them. Extinctionism mistakes the problem (suffering born of craving and ignorance) for the vehicle of experience (life itself) and seeks to destroy the vehicle to solve the problem. The Buddhist solution is to repair the flawed navigation system of the driver (the mind), not to crash the car.
Your dialogue beautifully resolves the issue. The 'knots' metaphor is perfect. We aim to untie the painful, self-reinforcing knots of craving and aversion so that the muscle of our being can be strong, flexible, and capable of healthy, responsive tension - not perpetually knotted up in suffering, nor limp and atrophied in a pseudo-nirvana of inaction (stupor really).
The goal isn't the extinction of life but the transcendence of a specific flawed operating system (the 'itch-and-scratch' or 'knot-forming' system) and its replacement with one of wisdom and compassion. That is the opposite of extinctionism, it's about making life actually work.
Buddhists do not use words in the same way as modern psychology. "Clinging objects" is the subjective feeling of mentally tracking and rejecting something in a way which results in a mental tension. We waste cognitive energy keeping up this resistance, and it feels as if letting of this resistance will cause harm. E.g. "Worrying about my friends keeps them safe. This mental strain is a shield which protect them, and if I stop caring if they're hurt, the shield disappears". What the Buddhists figured out is that this is not the case - letting go is free. The benefit of the tension is an illusion, we're not in control. It merely feels as if we're holding up the world through our cognitive strain, but it's possible to just let go of everything and discover that it was holding itself up all along.
Buddhists have a problem with most pleasant sensations, because they only exist as contrast. To feel relieved you must first feel worried. Food taste the best when you're hungry, water feels the best when you're thirsty. Pleasant sensations are fleeting, and usually paid for by their own opposite.
Buddhism seems to prefer a flat landscape to ups and downs. It also assumes that avoiding one unit of suffering is better than gaining one unit of pleasure. I disagree with the former because contrast tends to be psychologically healthy (it's better to exercise and then relax than it is to exercise without resting or resting without exercising). I disagree with the latter because suffering only bothers people when it lacks meaning.
The human body only moves because it can think of a possible future state which it deems better than the current state, and because it seems to reduce this gap between what is and what isn't. If you deem this to be an illusion, and remove the mechanism, I think your motivational system would collapse. You'd be free of suffering, thought!
The state of enlightenment is just the destruction of many things, but I don't know what remains in the end (whether everything is destroyed or not). The state without craving/suffering might not be completely neutral, it may even feel slightly good all the time. But I highly doubt that the peak pleasures of enlightened people beat the peak pleasures of the unenlightnened.
The priorities of Buddhism are unhealthy, but its teachings aren't false. It answers "Is it better to love and lose than to never have loved?" with a no, and I think that having such an attitude towards life is a bigger issue than the fact that life can be painful.
It is true, that we are not in control. But the illusion that we are keeps us tense, i.e. clinging to it results in suffering. So, yes, letting go is freeing. That's why Buddhists express truth in apophatic terms. Always as a negation to what is experienced.
What concerns that Buddhists have a problem with pleasant sensations, it is not entirely correct, they have a problem with clinging to them. They acknowledge that some pleasant sensations (like joy in meditative absorption) are superior in the sense that they are enabling insights into impermanence, suffering and absence of intrinsic nature. So their approach is utilitarian in that sense. They even say that cultivation of joy through meditative absorption is a healthy way to reduce suffering.
It is not that they prefer a flat landscape, they are set on relief from clinging and suffering. In that scheme they even acknowledge that joy from meditative absorption is preferable to other pleasures. But eventually even that has to be transcended. As it is impermanent and lacks substance. It is not like they say, "Pleasure is evil", they are saying, "Use it skillfully to get insight and transcend clinging".
Nibbana is usually described in apophatic terms to avoid building concepts about it, so it is always in the negative, e.g. freedom from clinging, freedom from desire, etc. But. The texts don't say what it is. In one place it is called "the highest bliss". So it is preferable to mind laden with clinging, even if this clinging is of very subtle form (e.g. for joy of meditative absorption). It is also supreme freedom and relief from what we consider to be 'normal tension'. But it is not flat. Experiences are still registered, pleasures are there, they just don't lead to clinging and craving anymore. The inner tension is not there.
So although it's described in negative terms, it is not flat but "the highest bliss" that results from freedom from craving and compulsive thinking.
And what concerns the second point, it is simple: freedom from suffering is better than suffering. It doesn't mean pleasures will be absent, they will loose the oomph (clinging and craving) beyond them. In our usual state we cannot imagine how deep the roots of suffering are, only when we experience even temporarily relief from it (e.g. by experiencing the state of stillness in meditative absorption and absence of problematic thoughts), we start to notice how unhealthy our default state in comparison to it. Only then we start wishing to change the default state, when we've experienced the other mode of being, of stillness beyond thinking.
What you describe about the human body where the present and future states are compared, it is indeed how we operate by default. We now know it is the function of the DMN which builds an image of "self in time" and performs comparison. But the loss of motivation is not what happens after liberation. We won't become a zombie. We can judge about it by experience of liberated people. What happens is that the image-building mechanism collapses and actions flow spontaneously in stillness. The body still feeds itself when it has to. Planning and problem solving happens when they have to. What's different - there is no commentator on top of that, that appropriates the experiences to itself. No inner dialogue, 'I should do this' / 'I shouldn't do that'.
The model that is helpful to understand it: we can divide the brain operation into an elephant and a rider, where the elephant is highly complex sub-conscious mechanism that performs all computation and solves all problems, and the rider is the conscious part of it, that appropriates the results to itself and claims that it decided to solve a problem and has solved the problem. After awakening the rider is wiped out, but the elephant still functions very much (as it always has done). In the end, it's all about letting go and letting the elephant do what it does. As you yourself mentioned in the beginning, the control is only imagined and beautifully stated:
It merely feels as if we're holding up the world through our cognitive strain, but it's possible to just let go of everything and discover that it was holding itself up all along.
That also applies to ourselves! We are not in control of our thoughts or we do not choose what to desire ("You can do what you will, but not will what you will", Schopenhauer). All that happens is out of our hands, we only imagine we have control.
What concerns the enlightenment - it's anyone's guess until one reached it. But some experiences with meditative absorptions tell me that:
- The experience is not neutral, it is blissful beyond compare! It is like everything is permeated by peace and thoughts stop (self-referential ones, which are about 95% of them). It's like you are high just on your own being! Nothing else is required (which doesn't mean the body won't feed itself when hunger is felt, but even not feeding the body feels alright, if it happens).
- Peak pleasures are experienced more deeply and feel more pleasurable than ever. But. There is one but. Pain is likewise experienced more deeply. It's like there is no dissipation to other thoughts and current experiences are being amplified and you cannot hide from them. I think that transfers to liberated state as I've heard many liberated people describe it in the same way.
What concerns the answer to 'Is it better to love and lose than to never have loved?' as 'No.' It is not what they say. They just express the law that if one has great clinging, one will suffer a lot. They don't prescribe 'not to love' (in fact the opposite is true, as loving-kindness and compassion are virtues to be cultivated). They say: love, but love wisely, without clinging and craving. And use such love (as that's superior to pleasure) to come to insight concerning the insubstantiality of self. Love is a potent portal to understand ourselves.
To sum up, Buddhists are not prescriptive (what concerns laymen), they are descriptive. They say "do as you wish, but that's how it works". And for those who are already keen on removing the suffering they give directions on the best way to do it (that they knew of). But in the end, you yourself described everything beautifully in the first paragraph! To the extent to which we let go of illusory control (clinging), to that extent we are free.
I do agree that it's about clinging to them. But they do not treat positive and negative sensations equally. They remain indifferent to positive sensations, but treat negative sansations as something important enough to dedicate their entire lives to eradicate. It's very asymmetric. Healthy people tend to judge the positives as being of higher worth, e.g. "Pain says refrain, yet joy wants eternity".
Superior in the sense that they are enabling insights
It does enable such insights, but using the word "superior" here makes it appear as if the goal was understanding the nature of suffering and the human mind. But the real goal is the reduction of suffering. This is dishonest as Buddhists pretend to be above the illusions of the self. Just like the brain tells us to cling to moments of happiness, it also tells us to avoid suffering. These are both axiomatic in the brain, but while the Buddhists recognize the former axiom as an illusion, why do they not recognize the second as such? They too treat it as an axiom, trapping themselves.
As it is impermanent and lacks substance
That's not true, this is the belief "That which is not forever is a waste of time", and it's a similar belief to "That which is only locally true is an illusion". If you regard the former as true, then you're a nihilist, as nothing will have value. If you regard the latter as true, then nothing is true, everything is illusion. Both conclusions are only made in mentally unhealthy minds (anxiety leading to a desire for cognitive clusure), the second stems from a lack of understanding about the limits of axiomatic systems (universal truth doesn't exist, and cannot exist. It's not a reasonable demand to make, but few people knew this before Gödel discovered the incompleteness theorems)
One only clings to things when they regard them as important to survival. Simply having alternatives reduces the clinging a lot. This is why dating books recommend dating 3 women at once rather than one. Being clingy (that word is no coincidence!) with a woman will scare her away, and by having alternatives, one feels less threatened by the possibility of a single failure.
Reducing clinging will reduce all associated negative emotions. However, when you regard something as less important, and therefore suffer by it less, you also find less meaning in its pursuit, and feel less happy when you achieve it. The reason this is terrible is that the only way to endure suffering with a smile on your face is by finding meaning in said suffering. Also, people who have lots of casual sex value these relationships less because they're common.
Nibbana is limited in how blissful it can be. Not only does Buddhism cultivate nihilism, depersonalization, and meta-thinking, all of which reduce the vividness of life through mental distancing, it also removes the contrast required for pleasure. Food taste better when you're really hungry, and this is because "Lack" increases the value of the thing which is lacked. If you destroy the lack, and prevent an amount X of suffering, X is subtracted from the reward of X as well.
Buddhists try to have their cake and eat it too. Liberation is freedom, but freedom is empty. Their entire life will "loose the oomph". If you're immersed in a book then you care about the characters and sympathize with them, but when you recognize that it's "just a book" and that the characters aren't real, you destroy not just the pain you feel through your immersion, you destoy the entire story and your own experience as well. I could flip it around and ask you "Does a video game become more enjoyable when you use cheats? Does being liberated from the need to grind for resources save you?" and the answer is quite trivial.
What is very important, which Buddhists sort of fail at explaining, is that you can ruin your entire experience by having high expectations, and enjoy most things by having low expectations. Having low expectations means lowering the baseline used for comparison. If 80% of experiences are better than what you expected, your life will be more joy than suffering. This is the only cognitive hack I'm aware of which is not zero-sum like Buddhism is. The only mechanism where you can "cheat" your brain into eternal abundance.
What Buddhists teach is not how to move this baseline of comparion. What they teach is reducing the amplitude of what is compared against. It's a small difference with huge implications. They get really close, since "not clinging" approaches "live in reality rather than in your expectations", and in that "wanting more" lowers the value of that which is.
We cannot imagine how deep the roots of suffering are
What you're describing here is immersion into an unhealthy state. But if you learn how to permanently escape immersion, how will you later immerse yourself into a healthy state? The meta-perspective allow you to retreat and watch from a distance, but many who struggle with derealization/depersonalization wish they could enjoy the moment rather than merely observe it from a distance.
How is this for a comparison? Those who work 50 hours a week really wish for a holiday, but those on disability income, who never work, will tell you that such a life is tedius and boring, that life just passes them by.
It is blissful beyond compare
I found that to be the case for the first Jhana, but this is because unbroken concentration leads to feedback loops. When you get goosebumps listening to music, it's the same kind of feedback loop. I think people with ADHD generally enjoy things less because of their fragmented concentration.
Anyway, it's also because I only take up meditation when I'm absolutely wrecked. If you only meditate when you're completely overwhelmed and exhausted, and thus love meditation, it would be like if you only had ice cream on hot summer days and came to think of ice cream as the best snack in the world.
Current experiences are being amplified
Sounds a lot like a feedback loop. You don't need Buddhism or enlightenment for this, just strong, continuous concentration on a stimuli. It's a very useful insight, and it made me realize just how harmful the habit of 'multi-tasking' is.
They don't prescribe
I'm not sure about this. They would likely describe me as "fool" for choosing the stage play and falling into the illusion that it's real (by the way, it would be real, since it's occuring in reality). Many Buddhists also try to push their teachings on other people, even when they're harmful. HealthyGamerGG on Youtube showed a rare moment of self-awareness when he named a video "Your Success Was Unprocessed Trauma". When people are "traumatized in the right way" it can push them to live extremely successful lives, and curing them from this trauma can therefore be harmful. I've done a lot of self-improvement, so I know the trade-offs of most cognitive framings very well, and I've even had to undo some of my improvements as the trade wasn't worth it. Most of my comments on LW are about me taking something further than other users, gaining insights on the trade-offs, and warning against them. And like when Nietzsche warned against morality and conformity, and Kaczynski warned against technology, it's not received well initially. That's the price of being ahead.
Buddhists use theory to deny reality as illusion (everything becomes false when you think about it enough). What I recommend they do afterwards is using reality to deny theory as illusion (the problem was the map (thinking) all along, not the territory (reality)). Nihilism is only good as a transitory state
First of all, I am not at all an authority on Buddhism and not apologetic for it. These are just my limited understanding and thoughts. As I view some of their models helpful on my path.
They do not remain indifferent to positive sensations. They are all about developing virtues. What they say, is to choose those positive sensations wisely with discernment. The whole of the eightfold noble path is about developing proper positive sensations irrespective of circumstances.
But the real goal is the reduction of suffering.
The real goal is complete transcendence of suffering through experiential insight. And Buddhists (as many others) are not above illusions of the self and the self itself, only awakened individuals among Buddhists are. They were those who wrote the texts. Describing the way to this state the best they could. And the awakened individuals exactly state that seeing through the mechanism of suffering experientially makes it illusory (not just theoretically accepting it). So they recognize the second axiom as such, but that's only true for the awakened. One has to transcend suffering to see it as illusory. And no amount of theorizing will help.
With regards to nihilism, it's not entirely correct that they are nihilistic, it's deeper than that. They respond with the Middle Way, a way between nihilism and eternalism. Which basically states that all interdependent phenomena lack intrinsic nature (or essence). That is, to begin with. Nihilism assumes the absence of intrinsic nature but implicitly presupposes existence of such intrinsic nature. What Buddhism says, there is no intrinsic nature to begin with, that can be intrinsically absent or negated / 'nihilized'. The thing is they recover the relative meaning exactly in terms of such non-existence of intrinsic nature and make claim that meaning can only exist if there is no intrinsic nature (I wrote a post about it in details). If there could be intrinsic nature change would not be possible (as essence doesn't change) and meaning would not make sense as it would be either absolute or non-existent. Other absolutist errors would follow.
So they are not saying that what is not permanent is not worth the effort. They are exactly saying use one's locally true environment to transcend it. And yes, they will claim that it will seem as an illusion in the result (again, not as a theory, but as experienced reality). But illusion in a sense that it appears in one way, and exists in another. One will still operate in terms of cause and effect. But one will see the illusory structure of absolutes in one's thinking. Things neither have intrinsic nature, nor they lack such intrinsic nature (exactly because no intrinsic nature exists to begin with). Because of that the self, clinging and suffering are transcended if one gets insight into emptiness.
When one finds meaning in suffering that is only a palliative to cope with, not the final solution, that is the transcendence of suffering. And in its place it has its value, I don't see they are denying that. They just direct in the way of complete transcendence by insight into emptiness of suffering.
Food taste better when you're really hungry.
They do say to neutralize the paroxysms of joy and sorrow, but in order to have tranquility and one-pointedness to enable insight. All is tampered to this end only - to get the insight.
I do not agree that freedom is empty, it is empty of the absolutes of intrinsic meaning, but full of tranquility and peace. Something that has a positive meaning and value. That they don't say about it much is their pedagogical choice. Life will not loose oomph, it will flow unruffled not depending on circumstances anymore. Pleasures will still be pleasures. Joy will still be joy.
Concerning the expectations (I may not get what you mean here), they approach them through the moral instructions, which kind of gamifies the whole experience, and train themselves to be happy with what comes one's way naturally. That's lowering the bar to the minimum. However, they also set up the scene for the epic win - the enlightenment. Also according to the doctrine one cannot "live in reality" pre-awakening, one will get lost in one's cognitive models of it. That's why they are lowering the bar for the "necessities". Ideally you will feel joyful just by renouncing the concept of 'how life is supposed to be'. Self-perpetuating joy (and yes a feedback loop) is implied.
What concerns immersion. When one is not immersed in suffering (or joy), one tends to immersion in being itself. And that's not something 'empty' but indescribably full. It's like you get the flow state just from being! The baseline of where you get your joy from changes. Instead of externally-driven it becomes autotelic, coming from the inside.
I don't compare it with the first Jhana as it lacks paroxysm inevitable for all joyful states. In words I can describe it as all-permeating peace for no apparent reason. When it happens, you want to repeat it and are ready to do whatever is necessary to get there (sadly it's quite unpredictable and rare in my case).
Concerning that what one needs strong concentration and doesn't need Buddhism I cannot argue with that. Who said anyone at all needs Buddhism. If one gets strong concentration out of any activity, hopefully autotelic, that's helpful for the brain to switch from the DMN to the TPN network, - that's the way to diminish suffering. But that's what Buddhism also says in different words… But eventually, whatever works!
They may tell me I'm a fool, I'm not bothered by that, but what they generally say, e.g. 'craving leads to suffering', they don't prescribe one to get rid of suffering. That's left up to oneself to decide what to do with it.
Concerning the denial of reality as an illusion based on theory. It is not entirely correct. They stress out experiential insight into the nature of reality. To see things as they are, and not as we perceive them in the default state. And based on that experiential understanding use the map wisely. They are not nihilistic, they stress out the need for the Middle Way between the opposites of 'is' and 'isn't', they are quite utilitarian in that sense. Their task is to dissipate the views, not to establish new ones.
I'm not too confident about my knowledge of Buddhism either, but I've independently made similar discoveries to Buddhists and I think I can explain them in more modern words.
I think you're telling the truth as far as you're concerned, but I think Buddhists misinterpret themselves since they use morality as a metaphysics (to me, it's just another dynamic). They seem more focused on reducing the bad than cultivating the good, and they probably don't see much of a difference.
Transcendence of suffering
Is that not reduction? An alternative is to simply accept suffering, and to let it wash over you as any other sensation, and to pay it no more mind. But Buddhists take the concept of suffering way too seriously for me to believe that's what they're doing. They must think of the fight against suffering and sin as a grand and important battle in order to dedicate their life on it, but once such a battle is won, it would no longer seem grand and important. Everything becomes simple once it's understood, knowledge results in disillusionment. In their defense, a lot of insights are worded simply: "The secret is that there is no secret" or "The moment is all there is".
Theorizing works if one understands the insight (as supposed to memorizing it). It has to connect on a deeper level to be felt. It's similar to how knowing everything is fine and relaxing is different to knowing everything is fine but still being anxious. The knowledge has to be embodied.
I think "the middle way" means a balance between extremes. Not working too much or too little, not eating too much or too little, not trying too hard or too little. I don't think it applies to Buddhism itself. I've heard of many Buddhist papers about the concept of nothingness.
There is no intrinsic nature to begin with
This is true, the concept itself is flawed. Same goes for "truth", "free will", and "meaning". The way we think of truth requires that something is inherently true, i.e. true outside of any systems. But truth is a property of systems. The way we think of meaning requires that it exists outside of ourselves, but "meaning" is a property of the human brain. The way we think about "free will" requires that it's different from "unfree will", but we cannot tell if free will exists because the universe would look the exact same if it didn't (in other words, the definition is nonsense). If you encounter questions that you cannot answer, it's likely because the question is wrong.
But truth exists, locally. Meaning exists locally, and free will exists in that it's experienced.
Most people think of life as having a foreground and a background, and some think that the background is the real world and that the foreground is fake (e.g. shadows on a wall in a cave). I can confidently tell you that it's the other way around. Only the foreground is real!
Nietzsche understood these things, they're explained in his "Will to power", but he still refers to Buddhism as being nihilistic, so I'm using the word in the same way. He likely uses it to refer to a state of mind, rather than to a description of the universe.
I agree that there's no life without change. There's no "being", only a continuous "becoming". But I can't tell you what this implies about the intrinsic nature of things, as that would require solving the ship of theseus problem. Am I a new person every moment? It depends what definitions we use.
To transcend it
They use this word a lot. But you cannot transcend something in the sense of going beyond it. Have you ever tried to transcend your own humanity? If not, I will tell you the result: One does not become a super human, but rather less human. It's a reduction, not an increase. The same problem occurs with liberation/freedom, it's actually just separation. It's not the ability to engage with things as you wish, but rather a lack of engagement.
As you go from the specific to the general, you increase emptiness. Everything which is more general than uniqueness can not and does not exist. That which has the potential to be anything has not yet become anything. Him who has compete freedom is not engaged with anything. As you increase width you decrease depth, and as you increase depth you decrease width. That higher branches of mathematics are more abstract, and therefore more empty, is because they apply more widely. As width approaches infinity, depth approaches zero. As depth approaches infinity, width approaches zero.
Not the final solution
Is it not? It transforms the negative into something positive, is this not superior to destroying it? Giving birth is one of the strongest pains a human being can experience naturally, but it's an event so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Some women go through this, and then decide to do it again. Is that not the ultimate affirmation of life? The choice of being over non-being *despite* suffering?
All is tampered to this end only - to get the insight
One cannot optimize for multiple things at once. "Virtue", "Insight" and "Life" point in three different directions. If they optimize for virtue they do not optimize for insight and vice versa. This is how optimization works, and it's why an AI will convert all of us to paperclips if it truly optimizes for it.
I do not agree that freedom is empty
If one has no ambition, then they will be content with a quiet life. Enlightened people with no drives will not become bored, that is true. But the more you shield yourself from life, the less alive you will be. For the same reason that, if you never open yourself up to other people, all your relationships will be superficial. Here I'm not describing subjective experience, but a mechanism. A relation (A,B) is a connection between A and B. If A and B are truly independent then there is no connection. For a node in a graph to experience true freedom, it must be connected to no other nodes. When things are connected, the must necessarily influence eachother. As you know from quantum mechanics, you can only observe that which you interact with, and all interactions between things influence both things proportionally to their size.
One will get lost in one's cognitive models of it
Getting lost in an experience is "immersion" (animals do this), but getting lost in beliefs, mental models and thinking is indeed not living in reality. But at least it's living.
Nietzsche too found the innocence of all existence to be a freeing thought. The idea that nobody was to blame for anything. But it's the concept of morality which makes this liberation impossible (Nietzsche freed himself by being amoral), and Buddhists strike me as believing in morality.
I may not get what you mean here
It's the most important part of my message. A person who is used to poverty will savour a plain piece of bread. A person who is used to fancy resturants will experience fast food as being trash.
If life gives you more than you try to take from it, you will be pleasantly surprised. If life gives you less than you try to take, you will experience it as a loss even though you're getting something. Rationalists sometimes decribe depression as trapped baysian priors. Why not trap low priors instead? We can define this constant as "taking for granted". Lower this constant, and every event in your life will feel more pleasant. I don't mean "don't hope", but hope in such a way that the outcome you hope for does not become the baseline for comparison. The goal is to keep the comparison mechanism rather than destroying it, while preventing the brain from updating the baseline and getting used to the improvements we make.
All-permeating peace
I've tried this, but only doing really good times, in which I must have had high levels of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Ideal states should be sustainable over longer periods of time, rather than once-in-a-lifetime experiences (though these are nice)
They stress out experiential insight into the nature of reality
They do so using a base set of assumptions about morality, truth, illusion, virtue, being, etc. They consider these axioms, but they do not realize that axioms are created rather than discovered. All of mathematics is a set of axioms and everything which follows. We consider 2 plus 2 to be 4 "in reality", but it's only true within an arbitrary system in which we define numbers and the plus operator. Math is created, not discovered. It's the same when we think about "time" and "space", as if they were fundamental. Nothing is fundamental, it's all our own sloppy constructs. Even this word, "is", is a linguistic construct. Coffee isn't actually hot, since that would imply that hot is coffee, which is nonsense. We can't think about reality, because language influences how we do so and gets in the way. Some people realize this, others experience words as reality. But even concepts should not be experienced as reality if you want true cognitive flexibility. But most people who lose faith in the map also lose faith in the territory, which is no good. All problems are with the map, the territory is perfect.
All problems are with the map, the territory is perfect.
If you experience it in this way you are already liberated! That's what Buddhism points to as well.
Is that not reduction?
Oh, no! Reduction is a process in thinking, and transcendence is holistic experiential insight into the nature of suffering's emptiness (in Buddhist sense). It's like writing down a formula for coffee and drinking it. One has to transcend suffering first to get what it is all about.
I think "the middle way" means a balance between extremes.
Superficially it is so. But the roots go much deeper. In short, it is the middle way in our tendency to live in absolutes in "something exists" and "nothing exists", in "everything matters" and "nothing matters". It is basically mental relativity stressing out interconnectedness of all "things" and their having no sense outside of relations. If you are interested what the middle way is, read my post on emptiness, I tried to express it there as best I could.
But truth exists, locally. Meaning exists locally, and free will exists in that it's experienced.
For me "free will" never made any sense, and I've been observing my thinking since my teens. All I see is the blind intention that is arising out of the blue and then the body acts, and sometimes it acts first and then the intention arises! You no doubt have heard about Libet's experiments. Ivan Sechenov, a physiologist, also factored out "free will" out of equation.
Concerning the truth. What if the truth of the default state is different from the one of transcendence? Who is the judge of what is true? What I mean, if I'm blind and someone tells me of colors, it will sound gibberish, but if I'm capable to fix my vision, I will get what he was saying all this time. The state of transcendence according to the liberated is similar.
Only the foreground is real!
How do you know that?
There's no "being", only a continuous "becoming".
I would not agree with that as there are states where the concept of "becoming" looses meaning. But in the end run that's what works for you and how you call that is secondary (although better maps help to navigate the territory in healthier ways).
But you cannot transcend something in the sense of going beyond it. Have you ever tried to transcend your own humanity?
That's exactly what it means: going beyond it. As for myself: not only I'm trying constantly, but I'm already sure that "the other shore" exists, it's not a figment of imagination, liberation is a real deal. And what you imply by super- or less- human is still on the human level. The goal is to go beyond these concepts altogether. It's exactly to be one with the flow of life. To the point that there is no one, just the flow of life remains.
Him who has compete freedom is not engaged with anything.
On the contrary, it's to be one with life as it goes. Your concept of freedom is somewhat different from mine. You imply that freedom is independence. But that's not freedom, it's a fiction (as no one can be truly independent). From my perspective freedom is the freedom from the self, i.e. from the associations that are built with regards to the body as the self, i.e. self-talk, desire, anger, hatred, delusion, etc. That which prevents me complete immersion with life as it is, instead of how I perceive it and regard everything through the prism of my body.
It transforms the negative into something positive.
I agreed that it has its place. But still sure it's not the final solution. It's like in the metaphor: itching helps with the sore temporarily, but to be without sores is more pleasurable. We prefer the state of being without sores than chronic condition of itching and scratching them, don't we? The same applies here.
One cannot optimize for multiple things at once.
The thing is that they are not essentially multiple. But represent different aspects of the same dynamics: the freedom reflex. Only superficially it seems they are about different things. Virtue is the foundation that helps one to ask deeper questions. And life cannot be integrated until such questions are pondered and resolved. All about the same dynamics.
But the more you shield yourself from life, the less alive you will be.
Again, we have a different understanding of freedom. In my perspective freedom means openness to what is. I believe that's what Buddhists also pursue. One cannot be outside of relations, but one can get beyond the travails of them. Which basically means to stop self-talk. Not by separating oneself, but by immersing in what is. The constant flow state.
The idea that nobody was to blame for anything. But it's the concept of morality which makes this liberation impossible…
Buddhists exactly say that eventually there is no one to blame for anything, only the set of causes and conditions. But it doesn't mean one cannot change conditions to more favorable for awakening, and one of the ways is the morality, as it frees the energies which are otherwise dispersed. E.g. to be cunning requires more energy, than to be truthful, etc.
The goal is to keep the comparison mechanism rather than destroying it
The trouble with it is that comparison operates in thought. Thought is limited by definition and operates by division. When you discover something that is beyond thought, free from thought completely, how will comparison match it? Freedom from thought is possible, it is not a state of zombie but full immersion in what is. Then the baseline will change accordingly (what would one need, if one gets happiness just from being, that lowers the baseline to the ground).
Ideal states should be sustainable over longer periods of time
It is possible to reach those states but very-very hard (that's why so few succeed). You can check the post Myths about Nonduality and Science that explores this question in depth.
Nothing is fundamental, it's all our own sloppy constructs. Even this word, "is", is a linguistic construct.
You are close to the middle way here...
That's what Buddhism points to as well.
Is it? I consider even the existence of suffering to be alright.
We're meant to fight against it, but we're not meant to win, that's a misunderstanding. For instance, when you get hungry, you're meant to eat, right? That's the purpose of hunger. If you were to create medicine which could "cure hunger", destroying it entirely, that would be to misunderstand the purpose of suffering. A lot of human wireheading is like this, including the way Buddhists succeeded in hacking the human perception.
Into the nature of suffering's emptiness
I think I accidently did this recently. The qualia of suffering has at least two components. They're the raw feeling of suffering, and its meaning. Ever noticed how sounds also have at least two components? There's the raw sound, but also a location in 3D space. Your brain assigns a location to each sound.
Anyway, I somehow separated the raw feeling of suffering from the meaning component. That reduced its intensity by about 85%. The most painful part is what the suffering signifies, e.g. a bad future.
It is the middle way in our tendency to live in absolutes
I'll take your word for it, but Buddhism strikes me as taking its own teachings all the way. It does not for instance suggest only grasping enlightenment halfway.
"Free will" never made any sense
The way most people think about it is silly. They basically make the definition of free will "the ability to break cause and effect", because that's sufficient for them to feel as if actions are pre-determined. That quickly turns into the question "does randomness exist?" which is a conversation about a property of the universe, and not about agency. It quickly gets silly, and both "free will" and "no free will" are wrong. The very concept is a mistake.
What if the truth of the default state is different from the one of transcendence?
Transcendence is not a property of a thing. If you transcend suffering, it's you which changes and not the suffering. Your relationship to it changes though.
Who is the judge of what is true?
For you, your brain is the judge. You're the axiomatic system of your own reality. Your reality is gibberish from the outside, just like foreign languages are gibberish to you. I speak English, your computer speaks CPU instructions, your body speaks DNA. These all have alphabets and rules about their composition. Inside such systems, falsehood is contradiction and truth is tautology. Asking what's true outside of these systems is like asking what matter exists outside of the universe. I was kind of bummed out when I figured this out, myself.
How do you know that?
I reversed an error. I also drew inspiration from one of the smartest people in the world, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Super intelligent people usually go all in on objectivity, but not Goethe, and I think it's because they put the foreground first. If you go in the other direction, you end up with a kind of Infinite regress... And emptiness. "Consciousness is just electricity, electricity is just forces, forces is just information, information is just.."
See the problem? If you take anything far enough, it eventually contradicts itself. If you keep zooming in on anything, it eventually doesn't exist. Question something enough, and it eventually stops making sense. All these errors are solved if you learn to love the surface instead.
The old EST training program also argues that only experience is real, so you can look into their arguments too.
It's exactly to be one with the flow of life
Would this not require immersion in the moment to the point of self-forgetfulness? Buddhism strikes me as going in the complete opposite direction, becoming so aware that nothing remains besides the thing observing the self which resides in the body which experiences. Buddhism feels like it's taking a distance from life, rather than going further into it.
What you're saying doesn't feel wrong, but one way to lessen anxiety is through grounding, and another is by focusing so much on other things that you forget yourself and thus the anxiety you're feeling.
You're right that the freedom I was talking about is a fiction, that's why I warn against it. Your definition sounds a bit more like freedom from imaginary problems. The end of self-sabotage. The breaking of artificial limits, rules and borders. All these things getting in your way are likely constructed by your mind in order to protect you, or by your ego in order to protect itself.
We prefer the state of being without sores than chronic condition of itching and scratching them, don't we?
I'm not sure. Do you prefer never playing video games, over repeately starting them and winning them? Never reading books over starting them and finishing them? Do you think death is better than being born and eventually dying?
Personally, I don't want to win. I want the game to keep going forever. I like the game, and while it's my job as a player to try to win, winning would end the game. Without itching, there is no scratching. Without death there is no life.
Life cannot be integrated until such questions are pondered and resolved
The anxious brain tells the self "I just need more information, then everything can be resolved". How do you know this is truer than when a famous person thinks they just need more fame, or a businessman thinks they just need more money? The brain collects information to reduce uncertaincy, because it copes with it poorly. No matter how noble goals we have in life, I think we remain the playthings of our instincts. Trying to go outside of oneself is like trying to bite ones own teeth.
In my perspective freedom means openness to what is
True openness would be Amor Fati - to wish nothing different. To consider everything perfect as it is, even imperfection. But this would mean not prefering enlightenment over ignorance, and to not prefer virtue over injustice. Or if you were to accept yourself as an axiomatic system, it would mean to accept that you're simply a being who prefers virtue over injustice, and prefers enlightenment over ignorance.
What you seem to prefer has a lot in common with what I've already found, but I found many of these things by rejecting or reversing Buddhism. Oh well, we're quite aligned, and I'm happy to announce that these states are indeed possible.
Thought is limited by definition and operates by division
Yes, but you need conflict in order to have force at all. The flow state for instance is the right amount of difficulty contrasted with the right amount of skill. If you destroy either difficulty or skill, the flow state disappears. You can only feel your own strength when you're using it. You can only be a hero when you have an enemy. If you get rid of contrasts, some states will become unreachable for you. How will you feel embarrassment after achieving perfect self-acceptance, for instance?
The layer below thought is an animal like state of sensations and sensory impressions. It feels kind of trance-like to me. Flow is still possible here, as the contrast between a stimuli and your concentration. For instance, listening to music can be nice when the contrast between the music and your conscious processing of it are at a balance. Perhaps this occurs at 110BPM for you. Anything below 30 or above 400 beats per minute is probably unpleasant.
The reason I can't consistently reach or stay in these states, at least some of them, is because real life gets in the way. Other people and their problems, social norms, daily duties, and being bombarded with perspectives which are incompatible with the enlightened state. And sometimes, sleeping. Your mind repairs craziness doing sleep, and sadly this can include pleasant states like manic moods.
I'm not sure if methods for reaching enlightened states can be communicated. If you were to teach somebody how to balance while standing on a ball, using words alone, it would be impossible, right? Even when I do get an epiphany, and write it down, I can't always come back to it even when I read my own notes. I can tell you about some of my experiments, but I don't know if it would be useful for you.
By the way, I like your articles, but I'm less interested in Buddhism itself than in learning new insights that I can use to reprogram myself with
I consider even the existence of suffering to be alright.
I think you mash up two things into one - pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable and a useful indicator for maintenance of the body. But suffering is an added layer to it which can be reduced or got rid of completely. You accept the intention to be free from suffering. It means that you tend to some homeostatic state and find it preferable (otherwise, you would not have the intention to "play the game"). You state that without such dynamics of pleasure/suffering one would atrophy into oblivion. But I think it is not so. Pain is there as an indicator to keep the body going and it will be there after awakening. What you get rid of is self-ruminating mode of the brain to be obsessed with the body's integrity. That's what researches call self-referential internal narrative (SRIN). That's what goes away. But inputs from pleasures and pains are still coming.
I somehow separated the raw feeling of suffering from the meaning component.
That sounds like an insight. But you were happy to reduce it, see? We tend in the direction of reduction of suffering.
On the topic of "free will", I see where you are coming from. But I tend in the direction of superdeterminism (latest discoveries by Zeilinger et al, didn't rule it out). How does it affect my macro level axiomatic system? I tend to relax — it's all out of my hands and release the malady of thinking that I have to somehow change the world or even my (often dead-end) circumstances. So meta-level thinking often helps on a local macro scale.
Transcendence is not a property of a thing.
Oh, I don't care about the thing before I've figured out how to transcend myself (unless it helps me to do so). It would be contradictory in my perspective. The truth as you highlighted is a property of subjective experience. Even if it applies universally, one has to discover it first in oneself. How do we know if we are not Boltzmann's brains at all? Objective "reality" is one of the most harmful fictions.
For you, your brain is the judge.
I don't trust my brain that much. Only locally and superficially. What I meant is the standard against which we evaluate our experience. If that standard is an average normal, it's almost certainly unhealthy. I have high trust in people who transcended their self. And orient in the same direction. That creates the necessary friction or challenge (but I avoid the word conflict) for development. I think that such questions and examples give the right meta-level perspective so they are healthy for thinking. There most certainly is truth that I'm not aware of, but like the blind who wants to fix his vision, I tend to fix my perspective constantly and not on the level of thinking (so not theoretically).
I reversed an error.
And I've personally experienced the state where the world and the self were totally dissolved into the space of "dark electricity" which felt like the only thing that there is. It might be called Consciousness. So I know there is background, but I so far haven't figured it out nor can I return "there". But here I contradict Buddhists who deny any such background and more in line with Advaita practitioners who claim that that field (they call it Brahman) is all there is. So for me the question "what was first the chicken or the egg" has an answer - the chicken, i.e. Consciousness. But I cannot express it in better terms.
Would this not require immersion in the moment to the point of self-forgetfulness?
The point of dhyana/meditation is to train immersion to one's breathing or being, that nothing can remove you from it, not even pain. Then paradoxically you are more engaged with life as your old algorithms of self-subversion and self-rumination break apart and you are more open to what's really happening. Neurophysiologically it's deactivating the DMN by some autotelic process without crutches.
All these things getting in your way are likely constructed by your mind in order to protect you, or by your ego in order to protect itself.
They are exactly built by the ego, but they are not healthy nor useful, just "vestigial tails" of past ancestors. They must be factored out somehow, or I don't stand a chance with life.
What concerns sores. Playing a video game is fine but I'm sure you would not choose that your happiness depend on it, right? Imagine how many things have to be right to play a video game: safe environment, healthy brain, free time, physiological needs satisfied, relative security and so on. Imagine if that house of cards falls apart and if your happiness depends on it, it's on a shaky ground. So I want to win over my self and get rid of it (read here to get rid of SRIN).
The anxious brain tells the self "I just need more information, then everything can be resolved".
You think that the questions can be answered only in thinking. But they can be like zen koans that set up thinking with unsolvable riddle, which can only be transcended holistically and experientially. That's what I meant. Right questions can be like hot coals, that tend to shut down the excessive thinking and collect the attention to a riddle or contradiction.
…to accept that you're simply a being who prefers virtue over injustice, and prefers enlightenment over ignorance
That's exactly the case. I happen to prefer that. And it's not my virtue nor my fault. Pre-set configuration of this brain.
Yes, but you need conflict in order to have force at all.
Not conflict. A challenge. Conflict is dissipation, it's heat and no free energy, just increase in entropy. A challenge is a structured contradiction usually feasible to solve. When you have an enemy, it only divides you inside and dissipates energy. But a sparring partner is different. See, where I'm going with this? From all expected outcomes the information has to be structured and complex enough to provide surprise to extract the useful relations from it. Otherwise, it's garbage. The same applies for physical interactions with others. Conflict is just heat and dissipation.
The layer below thought is an animal like state of sensations and sensory impressions.
It's exactly the opposite — the state of tranquility and peace, where obsessive thinking subsides and the brain is in the state of alertness and readiness. It is very active! But in silence. Some refactoring is going on there at that time, some rewiring. Animals as a rule don't do that, they are always "on", they constantly live in simulacra.
One more note, when I asked you "How do you know that there is no background?" it was a trick, as to know there is no background requires you to be outside of foreground at least for a moment, see? It's a meta-knowledge. How would you get that knowledge if you were constantly immersed in the foreground? You would not know anything but foreground. But you obviously reflect over this matter, which shows you do it from a different space.
I'm not sure if methods for reaching enlightened states can be communicated.
Yes, it's a well-known conundrum. Eventually, nothing works… Sages accept that. I tend to think it in the way of an analogy with the Feynman's path integral. I believe there is an equivalent process in thinking. Our thinking goes all possible ways before the optimal solution is reached. And if your brain is complex enough and you feed it the right puzzles (contradictions, koans, whatever), it will come up with the experiential solution at the right time. And it will be the optimal path for it. The trick is to find (or guess) the triggers.
Let me try to experiment with one trigger (that works for me). Forgetting all the concepts. How would you answer the following question: how do you know that you are?
I'm less interested in Buddhism itself than in learning new insights that I can use to reprogram myself with
Actually same here. I only resonate with some of their thinkers who made me think and ponder over questions/triggers that work for me (Nāgārjuna is one such example). If you wish you can share your experiments, I'm always curious about interesting stuff that comes my way unsolicited...
I hear that a lot. But I think suffering is just a broader category of pain, which includes more complex feelings and discomfort stemming from thought rather than physical sensations. I still think that promoting this concept to metaphysics is wrong, suffering is not a part of life, it's just a function of the body. Human cognition has a built in fallacy which intentionally externalizes internal issues. E.g. when you're angry, the whole world might seem annoying. When you're sad, the whole world seems unfair. The projection is a quirk of the mind, but it tricks even intelligent people into writing books "about life" which are really just about themselves. Like Nietzsche concluded:
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”
However, it's valid to model pain as sensation, and suffering as the interpretation of the sensation, and then to acknowledge that the latter can be controlled by the individual.
Pain is there as an indicator to keep the body going and it will be there after awakening
It's only there as long as the brain deems it useful. The brain can learn that nobody cares if you cry, and then become unable to cry entirely. It can learn that shame is illogical, and become unable to feel shame. It can learn that backpain is normal, and make your backpain fade into the background so that you don't notice it anymore.
One cna experience a dimensional collapse, either in the brains signaling or in ones ability to listen to it. Some people are blind to faces, others like empathy, others lack theory of mind, others are asexual. I can't tell if this is a result of "getting used" to something, or the brain just discarding a frequency entirely because it doesn't have a use, but one should be careful not to accidentally trigger these changes.
I also think that disabling the internal narrative might be bad for your subjective experience of life, since the story being written might stop feeling like a story. You need to immerse yourself into a story in order to feel the meaning of it and in order to sympathize with the characters. If a character is introduced and dies 30 seconds later there's little emotional impact, precisely because it takes time for the viewer to get attached to the story and its characters. A common way to feel less suffering is to reduce the mechanism which causes over-investment into a story, but this method has hidden costs.
But you were happy to reduce it, see?
I thought it was interesting more than anything. I'm not afraid of suffering, but it's reason. When my body is hurt, I'm afraid that it might be permanently damaged, the pain signal is secondary, and if I were to reduce the dimensionality of signal, my life would also lose depth.
And again, the concept itself is flawed. If I love chocolate, and this determine that I choose it over vanilla, how does does that invalidate the choice as being my own?
I don't think objective reality is a harmful fiction, but the belief correlates negatively with intelligence, so less intelligent groups will claim to fight for "the truth" as they actually fight to spread their own personal values while combating conflicting values. Like with egoism, the desire to be right leads to hostility towards those who disagree. But in cultures, this self-defense is often necessary since it protects against subversion by other cultures looking to propagate themselves.
One has to discover it first in oneself
And I'm not sure I agree with this. Why do you think understanding beats ignorance? Reality doesn't change by you understanding it, and philosophers don't strike me as happier nor as more competent than average people. Is the foreground is the most valuable, then isn't every experience worth more than its explanation?
I consider things like questioning the realness of reality to be a serious mistake. And given how intelligent people do this more than dumb people, intelligence is a mistake. General intelligence conflicts with narrow intelligence, but we're narrow beings in narrow circumstances. It does us no good to think outside of the scope in which we exist, especially not if it leads us to question the only scope in which we *can* exist.
I don't trust my brain that much
Since the foreground is the only thing which is real, every experience you have is real. Your brain too is more real than any theory. If you tell me that you're sad because a demon is after you, then the sadness will be real, even if the reason is false. And to you, the experience would be real.
"Necessary friction for development", you say. I don't personally value development except as a hobby. If the world changes twice as fast, I think we'd just destroy ourselves twice as fast. But I do find it strange that you want to get rid of suffering, since it exists precisely to create a friction which results in development. And you think development will continue without suffering, so why wouldn't a country drift even with strict policing of social norms?
Consciousness
I think consciousness and the moment itself is "foreground". Things which are background would be anything processing what is experienced. Further in the background is models built from what's processed. Further still is meta-thinking.
Not even pain
But in novels, characters bite their own tongues in order to sober, because pain grounds them in the moment (grounding techniques too, focus on the sensations of the body). So this seems more like a method to get away from unreality (e.g. doomscrolling).
They are not healthy nor useful
Why do you believe so? Except in this one way, in which I'll agree: Because we've created a modern society which is somewhat incompatible with our biological selves. If you ask me, the error is not our failure to conform to society, but the ridiculus action of building a world which we're incompatible. It happened in such a stupid way, too. We constructed it out of ideals! Ideals are ideal because they symbolize something which is not the case, we value them because we want them to be true, which is the opposite of them being true.
I could make my happiness not depend on anything, at all. But if I was happy even as my life fell apart, wouldn't that prevent me from taking action to fix it? The brain seems to think so, which is why it's so hard to turn off this dependency.
Conquering yourself and conquring reality is two different tasks.
Zen koans
These exist not the find the solution to a problem, but to make us realize that we can deny the problem itself. Koans aim to break the map, so that one may experience the territory. For instance, I deny that suffering is a problem, and because of that, I don't feel the need to solve it.
Pre-set configuration of this brain.
This is what I meant by "Your brain is your axiomatic system"
Conflict is dissipation
It's two contrasting forces. Three outcomes are possible:
1: force A is stronger than force B and consumes it. 2: Force B is stronger than force A, forcing A to yield to B. And 3: The contrast itself is denied. Force A and force B no longer interact.
That which does not kill you (force you to yield) makes you stronger (increases your energy), but you may choose to deny the conflict entirely (Amor Fati, turning the other cheek, radical acceptance, denying the problem, etc.)
Depression and low self-esteem is excessive failure (yielding). Mania and grandiose delusions is excessive victory/overcoming.
You can hack this value, but doing so often puts you out of alignment with other people, and it may result in reckless and dangerous behaviour since your self-model may predict victory where you'd lose.
It's heat and no free energy
Heat is a result of having too many ongoing battles. You should either win them or lose them. Being undecided on a lot of things is what makes you feel trapped and aimless at the same time.
You need information if you wish to update your own model of yourself in a way which is accurate. But it's a 'challenge' of power, not of truth. Politicians keep lying, for that's what makes them win. If you're playing the truth game and they're playing the power game, I'm afraid that's why you're not doing well in life.
It was a trick
The entire quest for knowledge seems to end with the conclusion that the quest for knowledge was a mistake, and that only action will suffice. When you take something far enough, you end up with the opposite. The greatest act of living will kill you. Morality taken to its extreme is immoral. Rationality taken to the extreme is irrational.
I worded myself badly, the background does exists, it's just not physically real. It's simulacra. The map (background) is simulacra of the territory (foreground). I'm committing an error (thinking) in order to show you that it's an error. It's like saying "those who don't understand, speak. Those who understand, remain silent". Zen Koans exist because here's a class of errors which can only be taught through that same error.
how do you know that you are?
Something thinks, therefore something is. But the issue here is not the lack of proof, it's wanting a proof in the first place. The proof exists in the map, and I've already argued that the map is of secondary importance. Do you not wish to be free of existential problems? If you deem reality more real than thought experiments, then thought experiments (e.g. boltzmann brains) won't threaten your belief in reality.
I won't write my experiments this time as the comment is already too long for my taste. But I can tell you that if you have a belief which relies on nothing, then no attack exists which can harm said belief. You could write a proof that I didn't exist, and I'd just laugh at the concept of a map of the territory claiming that the territory its mean to approximate is wrong. It's like taking a picture of the sky and claiming that the sky is wrong because the picture looks different. Anyway, can you provide more information about the problem you want to solve? Right now I'm just sharing random insights, and I don't know which may be of use to you
Anyway, can you provide more information about the problem you want to solve?
Oh, I wasn't trying to solve a problem (except for subconscious few). I think philosophizing has its own value, an end in itself and "random insights" are what makes it interesting. It's rare when someone takes it seriously enough for it to be interesting. And it was interesting for me so far. Your brain is more sophisticated than mine but I will still try to entertain you, especially considering that I see many things differently.
a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography
I think he exaggerated a bit. As many philosophers reflect due to this very reason - to reflect oneself out of the system. To see oneself from the side as an object, as a stone. In order to get an insight and transcend it. And yes, for the attentive such thinking is the most intimate reflection of a person one can think of. For example, here is the first clause of Alexander Piatigorsky's testament:
He must ceaselessly remain in fear that he will die having failed or not having had enough time to realize his thought of himself as an external object alien to this thought and realize this very thought as alien to all his past and present objects, primarily to himself. This is Noble Fear.
I also think that disabling the internal narrative might be bad for your subjective experience of life, since the story being written might stop feeling like a story.
No need to be afraid here. All-permeating tranquility takes its place and its very life-affirming and accepting, it's like saying "yes" to everything. I can say so because I've experienced those moments when the narrative stops and they are freeing. It's like you get a complete wonder out of things you previously deemed mundane. But the total shut down of the narrative is my goal and, yes, it's possible (the post I mentioned above about nonduality discusses this in detail). You say "you need" to "feel meaning". Who told you about the need? And the meaning-making changes when the brain turns to different modes of being. It's not obliterated. Kegan invented five stages of development of the self and the meaning-making mechanism where each stage crushes before new begins. It's a helpful map, when your mind is in a transitional stage.
I consider things like questioning the realness of reality to be a serious mistake.
That might mean two things. Either you deem the very question flawed because the concept of reality is like our belief in ghosts. Or you have to define what you mean by reality, or at least describe it the way you see it.
And to you, the experience would be real.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don't exist or direct me to seek a professional help. Not that anyone says someone has to be compassionate. It just would be such an act.
it exists precisely to create a friction which results in development
First, I call development everything that helps me to get rid of the self, to transcend it completely. Second, I disagree with that because suffering doesn't lead to development in the usual sense as well, it only increases entropy of the situation. Some strong individuals may learn from it, but most won't. It's just an explosion, no free energy involved as it doesn't have a structure.
I think consciousness and the moment itself is "foreground".
That's why in ancient Advaita texts they mention two types of consciousness: objectifying consciousness (or empiric) and Pure Consciousness, that which lights up the screen of the theatre (or the cave). From the standpoint of objectifying consciousness, Pure Consciousness is either a fiction or a concept. But from the standpoint of Pure Consciousness, objectifying consciousness is an illusion. Think of the moon that reflects in many waters in pots. Every reflection thinks it has light of its own independent of other pots and of the moon. Until the pot is broken and water drains. Only the moon remains.
because pain grounds them in the moment
But you are already 100% grounded at that point. Meaning when not even pain can distract you from pure being.
Why do you believe so?
I assess my coping strategies as subpar and the internal narrative as overly anxious. I rarely think in terms of society as such complexity is beyond my brains, but I tell you this: do you think it could have been otherwise? It's a rhetorical question. On that note, I also don't think we create things or that they are sloppy concepts or ours, we indeed discover them, nobody chose to be born with 10 fingers (which leads to decimal arithmetics) or bilateral vision (which basically gives you trigonometry), Theory of General Relativity or the Universal Turing Machine is practically inevitable for observers like us. "... we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper" / Einstein.
I could make my happiness not depend on anything, at all. But…
First, one has to come to that place. Everything that needs fixing will be fixed. When you are happy you still tend to homeostasis, not only when you are in pain.
Conquering yourself and conquring reality is two different tasks.
Conquering oneself is tantamount to finding out the reality.
I don't feel the need to solve it.
But you've said yourself, that the point is in playing the game not winning it, so the intention to avoid suffering is there, you accept it, it's only that you don't believe it can be done (or is healthy), so you play this game. That is which surprises me. As one thing can be generalized to living beings (and I'm very cautious with generalizations usually) and that's tendency to be happy. But in your model you refuse to seek an antidote for the sore. I don't say I don't believe you, but find it surprising.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger
I don't agree with Nietzsche here. I've already described the way I see it. It's increase in entropy and the absence of free energy. The energy is there, it's just cannot be used constructively (i.e. to lessen the entropy increase). So it leads to dissipation of heat (both metaphorically and not).
I'm afraid that's why you're not doing well in life
And what's wrong with that? Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one's makeup? You see you say you don't want to win the game but tend to think in terms of conflict and power, as if you do.
It's like saying "those who don't understand, speak. Those who understand, remain silent".
And I think understanding is not a guaranteed outcome even if one is intelligent (and more so if not), but that doesn't mean you must necessarily remain silent, some will see it from another angle, some won't. Every way to solve a Zen koan is an error, yet it is helpful in order to lead beyond the mind.
Something thinks, therefore something is.
A cartesian answer. But what about the deep dreamless sleep? You could not think there, but you know that you are somehow. You don't doubt your being in your deep sleep, do you? If there were no thinking there, how so?..
You must have a reason for seeking enlightenment in the first place, some reason that suffering doesn't work well. I think there's good excitement (thrill) and bad excitement (anxiety). And that there's good insanity (slight mania, vividness, charisma, stong engagement) and bad insanity (mental illness and the mind collapsing under its own generated strain). I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
To reflect oneself out of the system
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible. When a person says "Life is suffering", what they mean is "My life is suffering". It's about them. Everything in life only exist in relation to other things. "Nothing exists but the whole". How a picture looks depends as much on the thing being photographed as it depends on the camera. In this case, a camera is trying to say "the picture looks like this in itself. I, the camera, am unbiased".
In order to remove all the bias, you must remove the entire person, including the thinking process. You will not be able to remove "error" any faster than "virtue".
There are insights that you naturally come across if you suffer enough. Buddha came across them, as I did I. They're not necessarily true, but most of them are the experience of a previous idea breaking apart, and the mind freeing itself from something which used to trouble it.
Is it really life-affirming if it doesn't invest into the moment? i.e. if it's without "skin in the game". Saying yes to everything means that one seemingly lacks preference. Well, the brain can give a positive value to everything all at once, it's has slightly different rules from mathematical systems. And it is indeed possible to destroy the narration. But I think that is strongly tied to the meaning-making circuit of the brain? I experience meaning as "weight" and "relevance". Weight is strongly tied to "caring" as well. Here's some examples:
In Dragon ball, the power levels scale exponentially every season, making the old numbers feel meaningless.
In videogames, cheating ruins the value of resources because the value was given by scarcity. Also, leaving a game and coming back later makes it less meaningful because the relevance has decreased.
A way to momentarily get rid of anxiety is to tell yourself "we're just monkeys on a big rock hurling through space" or to otherwise zoom out to a bigger perspective. This is an outside-in perspective rather than an inside-out perspective, making the brain filter away the self which is suffering. The ratio of space that you occupy in the perspective is also about a billion times smaller when you reduce the earth to a rock in space. I think this is WHY the method works.
Finally, the "rat race" makes one fixate on productivity, which makes the brain assign less values to things which do not further the goal of productivity, so the value which things are assigned depends on ones current plans, which explains why people who don't know what to do next also feel a sense of meaninglessness.
These examples are not exhaustive of how perception and meaning is tied together, but I find it difficult to come up with methods which lessen suffering without decreasing weight, caring and subjective relevance, and therefore meaning. And meditation seems to work by modifying perception directly. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong or that my model is incomplete, but the model applies to myself.
Or you have to define what you mean by reality
Reality is that which exists physically. These words merely "point" at reality. Reality is not "ghosts", I think you're fixing the wrong side of the equation. The perspective from which reality appears unreal is a ghost.
It's still ambiguous what I'm actually claiming, so I will be more direct: In order to live in reality, one must have no mental model of reality. When you see a car, you must see the car itself, as if you had never seen a car before. Your brain wants to pull up the concept of car that it's already familiar with, and this is what would prevent you from experiencing the car as it is. I think one is the closest to reality when they have no preconceived notions, not even the knowledge of logic, nor of concepts.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don't exist
To the person experiencing demons, it would feel like that. But perhaps the person who has lost the ability to believe in anything except material reality would be jealous of such an experience. And find it cute in the same sense that it's cute when a child believes in santa or the tooth fairy.
And fair. I used "development" to mean "adaptation to circumstances of life".
Suffering leads to development when and only when one overcomes a problem. If one loses to the problem, it becomes a setback, and if the tension remains unresolved, then it's just a passive energy sink.
Can you learn math without studying math? I think you need math problems to overcome in order to get better at math. The problem helps you find the solution, as the two are one. If you have math homework you just keep trying to ignore, then ignoring it will tire you out (energy sink). If the math is way above your level you become discouraged (lose momentum/energy). If you can do the math, successfully it feels good to the extent that it challenged you. If you were to design a video game and calculate the amount of experience points something would give, it would be a perfect fit to my analogy. And despite this all being subjective and mental, it seems to describe how physical growth in power works, too.
Are you sure challenges can't improve a system? To grow stronger through conflict is almost the definition of life. The greatest growth results from the greatest suffering. Almost everything I write here I discovered on my own, because I refused the alternative, which was dying.
My entropy also increases when I read a new book, but then I chew on the information and integrate it into my worldview, again lowering the entropy. It's similar to actual eating and digesting. And physical trainin and healing. If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don't learn anymore. Conflicting information reduce the coherence of your mind, increasing entropy until the conflicts (inconsistencies) are resolved. Even chatting with me leads to conflict (inconsistencies) which result in growth (stronger models). The feeling of mental clarity, and confidence, is likely just the minds certaincy about its own worldview. From self-esteem issues to confidence the only things which change are the certaincy of belief and the value assessment of oneself.
It's a rhetorical question
If you think of things as "created" rather than "discovered", then you won't be bothered when you realize how arbitrary many things are. It also won't bother you that different people have different worldviews. It also won't bother you that some things are emergent, and that you can't prove anything exists prior to the universe. It also allows you to create your own values and to believe in their legitimacy. About 80% of all existential issues disappear on the spot for anyone who adopts this view.
Tantamount to finding out the reality
I think integration is needed, not just self-tyranny. And I think one learns to know oneself, rather than reality. But the reality which is not tied to oneself is, in my opinion, irrelevant.
The reason I wrote that, by the way, is that one can focus so much on spiritual growth that everyday life is neglected. In that way, the type of victory does not transfer over.
The intention to avoid suffering is there
I avoid outcomes which are against my taste. Suffering can be beautiful, just likes movies which make us cry can be excellent movies. But why is this anymore surprising than people loving video games? Some even choose hard mode or hardcore mode, intentionally making the game difficult and frustrating.
Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one's makeup?
Self-modification is doable. Meditation is self-modification too. And I need to know the mathematics of experience in order to create a richer experience. Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness, and instead of breaking the fourth wall and invalidating the book, he chooses to remain a character and make the book even more thrilling to read.
Koans help one to get out of the car
Deep sleep
I only need to show that I sometimes exist in order to show that existence is real. I don't really care about the reality which I'm not around to experience, and if I was only alive 17 hours a day, that wouldn't really bother me either.
I'm not sure what experiments will align the most with your quest for enlightenment. I can remain happy even when the ratio of suffering to pleasure is 85/15. I guess I can teach you one way of escaping yourself, but don't say I didn't warn you. The brain can filter out background noise, right? You can treat your own suffering and thoughts like such noise. This would be a bit cruel to yourself, though, since you'd be ignoring their (your) suffering.
Most anxiety comes from not having things in order, and the best way to deal with it is to take life by the horns. Don't ask for permission, and don't merely hope. Cause what you want to happen, you have the ability. If you ask me "How will X go?" my first answer will be "I don't know, I lack information", but this is just an impulse, a lie. I know what my future will be, how my relationships will go, which of my goals will fail and succeed at this rate. I just have to look, and looking is scary, but if I open my eyes and also steer things in a good direction, then there's no anxiety and worries about failure. I will know I won't fail. I can even decide when to go to sleep and when to wake up (and I won't need an alarm). I could lie and say "It's unpredictable", but I can feel my brain negotiating with itself, deciding before it falls asleep if it wants to wake up or sleep until it's rested. I've just sometimes pretended I didn't know. This is probably what is meant by "There is no try".
Let me quote "EST, playing the game the new way", for I just remembered where I've seen this idea before: "You have a remarkable ability which you never acknowledged before. It is, to look at a situation and know whether you can do it. And I mean really know the answer for you. And all I'm saying is that if you can see that you can do it, go on and do it". This requires some level of alertness above that of self-deception and autopilot, but that's not a very high level. It also requires you and your subconscious being somewhat on the same page (you will know!).
Regarding favorable states, they get easier as you have more control over yourself. Can you relax on command? What about hearing a spoiler and then intentionally choosing not to commit it to memory? Can you placebo yourself without a sugar pill? These things are all quite fun.
I only need to show that I sometimes exist
You exist continuously, otherwise you would loose the previous thread of experience and it would be incoherent. The thing is that being is pre-conceptual, not established based on thinking. How is it established? That's a greatest koan for me. It's like asking "Who am I, really?" If one is honest, one will acknowledge that all the mental chatter that the mind comes up with is not "I". "I'm a human" is a thought. Which didn't occur to one in the deep sleep. Yet, one didn't cease being.
Reality is that which exists physically.
I find physicality is a weak description of reality as you omit the fact how do you know of such physicality. You first know it in your thinking which is a process in consciousness. I tend to think that reality has to possess a character of immutability and must be self-revealing without a break to be considered real. Something akin to Leibniz' idea of a monad. But since nothing we observe has such property, everything is in perpetual flux of change, the question looms, is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
To sum up, you cannot establish physicality unless you first aware of it. And the nature of such observer is also at best questionable. Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity. We establish a local pattern and induce that it has the universal character. That's how we build "the reality". But something that is dependent on such process is highly vulnerable in terms of calling it "the reality". It is at best a consensus we reach through the experience of many observers and the principle of relativity. But can it be called "real"? I'm not so sure.
I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
So you are essentially saying, "I have a frightful dream, but I don't want to wake up, I just want to make it a beautiful dream." That's an option. I just personally consider it unacceptable.
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible.
And I believe (that's the word) that it is possible. Very-very hard but possible. The basic insight in awakening is exactly that person doesn't exist. It's simply a conglomeration of thoughts. It's not removing all of thinking, but just self-referential part of it, the self-talk. Problem solving remains.
I experience meaning as "weight" and "relevance". Weight is strongly tied to "caring" as well.
Weight and consequently meaning from the narrative is indeed removed, but that's like removing the meaning from the dreaming apparatus, you stop believing in the dream. What takes its place is satisfaction from just being. No matter the circumstances. So meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it. The circuits of meaning-making are indeed changed. But I have to admit, I cannot understand that state before it's reached. It's like the blind who tries to imagine the colors. One has to first fix one's vision. It's not theoretical.
Are you sure challenges can't improve a system?
Challenges can improve the system. Conflict cannot. Learning math is a challenge. Sparring partner is a challenge. Enemy is a conflict.
If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don't learn anymore.
That's a structured challenge, which I can digest and which as a result helps me to lessen entropy. Not learning is not an option as the mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly. And if one doesn't learn, the seeking mechanism will just lead one to anxiety. So the dynamics is this: either learn or become restless. I have to admit, that's the default behavior and it is changed after awakening, where one can remain peaceful without a structured challenge. But for now, learning is inevitable.
It also allows you to create your own values.
And how did you learn of those values? You don't exist in a vacuum independently of relations. They are causes and conditions that lead you to accept those values. You as an agent, are not in control over it.
Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness
You want a better dream. But you operate under the assumption that you have control over life. I don't have such an assumption.
I know what my future will be
And I don't have a clue. All predictions in my case are worrisome and not constructive. But the most importantly, you again assume a capacity of control. Who is the controller? Is it that a conglomeration of thoughts that is built from the past experiences "decides" what to do next? But then it's not control, it's fatalism. If that's something else, one has first to find out what is meant by the word "I". What is this "I" who decides and controls its own destiny? How is it built? Do you even have control over your thoughts? It's like a parable, "take a medicine not thinking of a red monkey", and it cannot be done. I'm skeptical of all prescriptions like you've mentioned from EST. As the controller is the controlled. I cannot spot for the sake of me any agent that is apart from life, that can change its course and trust me I've tried to spot it. It seems it all works on its own, without the "Mighty Controller". It is all out of my hands.
I suppose that's true. But aren't questions and answers false? If I ask you how heavy a rock is, and you answer that it's 7 kilo, isn't our conversation happening entirely outside of the rock? Neither the question nor the answer really relates to the rock itself. So when you ask what something "really is", neither the question or the answer is any more real than your experience of the thing, they're both inferior. And a memory is, at best, a low quality imitation of an experience, it does the vividness of the experience no justice. The same goes for the re-telling of a story, one had to be there in order to experience the real thing.
For the same reason, I don't think thoughts, models, theories, explanations and descriptions can get to the bottom of things. They're all derivatives.
How do you know of such physicality
Through my senses. If you're asking how I can prove that physical reality exists, that idea is really not something which bothers me. If you mean that it might be illusion or whatever, you're right, but it's even less likely that beings exist which have a shared illusion of something they call physical reality, and a whole lot of coherent information which just so happens to not break said illusion. It would be as if somebody faked an autograph by simulating an entire person neuron by neuron and then having them interact with somebody asking for an autograph and then compying it over from the simulation onto the paper. Intuitively, you only have more things to explain if the simple assumption is wrong.
Is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
A changing thing can be constant. A stable orbit is something which is constant but also changes over time. And gravity is constant acceleration. The soluton to an equation can also be, for instance, a line. By "unchanging", you're actually asking for everything to be zero-dimensional (a single dot). I think we make a lot of unreasonable demands of reality. That reason itself makes wrong assumptions about things.
Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity
No, relativity is correct because absoluteness cannot exist! I meant this literally. Nothing is absolute, for there is no fixed neutral reference point. You might as well try looking for the middle of the surface of a sphere. It's easy to think that ones own culture is reality until one meets other cultures. A person with a single watch always knows what time it is, but give him two different watches and he will have a problem on his hands. The problem can only be fixed by pointing to a new unique authority, like the clock on the church. But then you discover another church, and now the problem is back! Then you look in a bigger scope for the next unique thing. Similar problem to infinite regress and Infinite ascent.
Now, most people think that "universal truths" are "absolute truths", but it's really just that they made "the universe" the new authority. If you point our that, perhaps other universes exist, then they will say "well, math is objective! Laws of physics are objective". But you can create different mathematics, they're just axiomatic systems. And it's possible that other universes have other laws of physics. Even if you arrived at a true upper layer, it would be finite and definite, and thus limited in a way, and thus exist as something specific and thus not universal.
No local patterns can have universal character. Things literally only exist in one place. Existence is uniqueness. If something is multiplicity (like the future), then it does not yet exist. And as soon as it comes into existence, it's definite, precisely because every other possiblity is excluded at that moment in time. Every single atom is different. From this we arrive at the semi-famous quote: "All generalizations, except maybe this one, are false".
I have a frightful dream
I experience both positive and negation emotions. Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions? It's not wrong, but the opposite is just as valid. For the same reason that these two statements are equivalent:
1: Every time I get up, I get knocked down again.
2: Every time I get knocked down, I get up again.
Both are a loop transitioning between two states forever, but one sounds negative and the other sounds positive. But it's the one and same loop, mirrored.
Person doesn't exist
I think this means "The (personality/ego/constructed sense of self) doesn't exist". Bu the generalization is true even for objects, and I meant the physical person. When I look at things, what I see is a function of my eyes. I cannot seperate what I see from eyes. What I taste depends on my taste buds, if taste buds do not exist then neither does taste. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder. Thus, if a picture of a flower is ugly, it's human to assume that there's something wrong with the flower, but what if the problem is actually with the camera? When a person says "life is bad", why do we assume that there's something wrong with life, rather than the person who speaks such words?
Meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it
I don't think mere being results in meaning. But I think that a person can endure a lack of meaning if he has a sense of beauty. In either case, I feel like enlightenment undermines itself. It cannot be a meaningful persuit if the persuit destroys its own meaning.
Challenges can improve the system
I just model it as two interacting forces with some incompatibility. Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict? What about the desire to be productive and the desire to relax? What about a guilty pleasure? I try to model things in such a way that I can trace a single principle from the laws of physics all the way to subjective things. This doesn't always succeed, but it's because the brain has different elemental operations than physics does. In real life, hot + cold is lukewarm. Your brain however, can experience the qualia of frost and burning at the same time, they don't cancel out.
The mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly
Yeah, but that's like how an insecure person fishing for compliments. It's an "error" stemming from a self-protective mechanism, and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it's safe to do so. You could argue that one has to learn why, but I'm tempted to say "the answer is already within you, you can already do it, you just need to realize it".
You don't exist in a vacuum
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
You operate under the assumption that you have control over life
At least, I have control over myself. And I'm a part of life, so I have a little bit of power. And like you, I could make some good arguments that this power is an illusion. But if you look around the world, you will see individuals who singlehandedly seem to have a lot of influence on the world. It's like those who are crazy enough to believe that they can make a difference are those who can.
Who is the controller?
I'm not sure it's a "who". It feels like some mutual understanding between the elephant and the rider, which is experienced as a mixture of agency and certainty. It's not merely following a schematic created by memory, because if it were, one wouldn't be able to turn their life around from one day to the next, and yet some people have managed this. The mechanism doesn't question, it answers. It doesn't ask "What is it?" It says "Thus it shall be", it doesn't follow, it leads.
One has first to find out what is meant by the word "I"
This feels like a limiting belief. It's a bit like "In order to drive a car, you must first know how it works, and somebody will have to prove to you that it's actually a car", but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes.
And it cannot be done
You could say "Take a medicine, and think of yellow flowers", and then no red monkeys would bother you. The reason that it doesn't work, is that when you write "not X", you're also writing X. The reason it works in logic is because "not false" is evaluated to "true". It changes into something which works. The brain does not seem to do this step, at least not in the same way.
That is apart from life
I don't think anything which exists is apart from life. And since we exist, we're part of life. I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don't trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Can you not remember any cases where you "woke up" and allowed yourself agency? This always happens to me when people I care about are in danger. If you ask me if I can get to the graveyard one night, I will tell you no, I don't know where it is, and it's basically impossible to navigate in the dark, and it's cold and I'm too tired. But if you told me that my grandma had fallen at the graveyard and was lying on the ground waiting for me, I'd be there within about 15 minutes. And there are no if's, it's an assertion. It feels unconditional. Can you try similar thought experiments and capture this feeling of certainty? That's probably the elephant you can feel. You allow yourself to use your own strength because circumstances legitimize it.
Now, these experiments might fail. You might feel like a victim instead, and wanting to call for help. That's alright, it just means that your elephant considers it a better strategy to get the attention of other people who can help you. You might also just panic on the spot - in this case it would be because the elephant first panics, and then protects itself from the feeling of panic through a mental retreat, because it incorrectly believes that it's the emotion, rather than the source of emotion, which is the danger.
If it works, I'd say focus on negotiating with yourself, and on creating mental framings which legitimize your agency. Fuse what you want to do, and what you know you ought to do, into one. Watch which objections occur, those are the limiting beliefs. E.g. "I want to believe the explanation I'm reading right now, but I want more proof first, as it may be wrong". In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them. There's an ocean of possible limiting beliefs, including "I don't think I deserve success", and "successful people tend to be bad people, and I'm a good person, therefore I must not be successful". All self-defense, which is also self-sabotage.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn't actually require understanding the solution. Neither is it the case that it will work if, and only if, I can prove that it will. Reality cares just as little about logical arguments as ideologues and religious fanatics do.
I tend to agree with everything that you wrote about the reality considering its content. And applying Occam's razor to exclude the simulation hypothesis. The only thing which I don't do, I don't internally consider it real (except in the empirical sense and in everyday usage). One might say, I consider it quasi-real. Why is that? I tend to agree with Gaudapada, who said, "Something that isn't real in the beginning and in the end, isn't real even in the interval between the two." For example, the dream comes out of nowhere and ends in the same place, therefore it's not even real in-between. The body is born someday and will die some other day, therefore it cannot be considered real in-between. And so on.
The only thing that I have doubts about is pure consciousness itself. I'm not so sure it has a beginning and an end. For all I know, it may be a universal characteristic of existence. That is, not a quality of beings with a particular complexity of brains, but that which permeates all of existence. It seems like a religious belief, but I had this experience which proved to me that some "field" exists beyond the conceptual layer of thinking. And I could not say if it had a beginning or an end. It's rather my thoughts about it that have a beginning and an end. My thoughts are not reliable indicator or reality as they are themselves come and go (as in deep sleep).
A changing thing can be constant.
It's the observer who deems it constant. It's constant with regard to the observer. But even the orbits wobble. As Heraclitus said, "A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not same man." It's the second part that is constantly missed: space-time changes but so is the observer of it. Orbits and gravity formed over time with the distribution of matter somehow. We still have no answer which goes beyond the mechanism of gravity. But we have no reason to assume that it's constant all over. "Unchanging" thing would lead to a plethora of unresolvable contradictions (yes, I know that postulating pure consciousness is also such a thing, I have no answer to it yet, only a limited experience of it).
Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions?
I meant it as an example. You seem to want a better dream (whatever "better" means to you). And I want to wake up from the dream altogether.
I don't think mere being results in meaning.
When you experience it even once even in a glimpse you will know for certain, that that's a preferable state. Theorizing doesn't do it justice. And I'm not the right person to fully describe this experience as I don't have it on a regular basis. I only know that it exists. In that state the search for meaning itself stops, but it doesn't land you in void and despair, on the contrary, everything seems alright and as "it should be".
Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict?
I tend to think that it only applies to complex macro systems. Conflict is something that leads to rapid increase of entropy and no free energy (i.e. no possibility to learn from it, to use the obtained knowledge later, no structure, etc.). Challenge is something constructive that has a structure, from which one may learn and apply knowledge later to reduce entropic growth. When challenge is too complex it turns into conflict.
and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it's safe to do so
What I really meant there was that the mind is always "on", always seeking for something to do and act, and if one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness. So one is almost certain to engage in some acquisition of knowledge or some other task that makes one less anxious. One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it (until awakening). So the suggestion "not to learn" is not feasible.
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the "I" (which is just a post hoc construct for experience). And you allocate to it much trust if you confide the most important decisions to it. Are you sure it's not a substitution to "I don't know where my decisions and values are coming from", to the unknown which you cannot accept?
At least, I have control over myself.
And the more I look the less I see that I have control over my mind. It's all the elephant's doing, over which I have no control. That's the current model. But I have been observing my mind for a long time. And frankly I was always doubting the control that I have. I did few experiments that proved to me, that the control is a fiction. You cannot will what you will.
but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes
The only question is where it will go in such case? I consider this question the most important for the rider to figure out. As until it's crystal clear, it's not certain where are you going, with what speed and whose objective you perform.
I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don't trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Plausible assumption. But I have been observing my mind very carefully for a long time to come to this understanding. I cannot find any particular "doer" with certainty, that would have at least quasi-real character. Whenever I look, I only see intentions, thoughts that are coming out of nowhere really. I understand that all of them are of reflex nature, but I cannot spot the first member of such reflex.
That's probably the elephant you can feel.
Yes, that's the elephant. And the rider cannot trick it really into believing it's a life and death situation. It's much more intelligent than the rider. Why even this? The rider is a post hoc construct of the elephant for some secretarial tasks.
In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them.
I believe that it's the rider who is afraid and has limiting beliefs. Self-referential internal narrative (SRIN) is an aspect of the rider. Self-negotiation and self-observation are always limited to the rider's capacities and they only prolong its life. My goal is to get rid of the SRIN, i.e. to refactor the rider into a more friendly function or get rid of it completely (i.e. awakening). And to let the elephant do its thing.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn't actually require understanding the solution.
Yeah, I've already got what you mean. You are still enthusiastic with regard to self-improvement. In my case I want more radical change than the change of the rider's "mood" (function, etc.). Changing the rider's "mood" may have its value, I don't argue with that. It's just I'm sick and tired of SRIN enormously and want to get rid of it. I know it's possible so I tend in that direction.
I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it's content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with "I think, therefore I am" is that it supposes an "I", and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
I don't think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It's like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on "came out of nowhere". The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that's the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can't think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it's arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they're embedded inside is wrong or fake. There's orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.
I'm not so sure it has a beginning and an end
You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren't real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don't think it's a problem.
Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You're only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.
It's constant with regard to the observer.
If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law "An object in motion stays in motion", it says "Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside", and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.
Heraclitus is right, but it's because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That's the only possibilities which does not violate "Always changes but has no beginning nor end". This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.
So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren't necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I've also shown that this doesn't make the local truth less real.
You seem to want a better dream
Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I'd keep dreaming even if it didn't improve, for I'd still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.
I've experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn't even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I'd consider that good.
When you're in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you're depressed, and drunk people rarely think they've had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I'm doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there's no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.
I don't think it's the dream which is painful, even. It's the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn't even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.
No possibility to learn from it
I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We're soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn't drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.
But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they're usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.
If one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness
I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don't think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)
One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can't be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it's in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the "I"
Yeah, thought I wouldn't call the "I" a facade. It's real, it's just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I'm in alignment with myself. But this 'myself' goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn't matter that it's not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I'm lying to myself or acting on impulse.
You cannot will what you will.
I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as "Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine". Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you're in a room and everyone likes you - your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don't accidentally focus on the fact that you don't believe in what you see. The brain doesn't really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.
The only question is where it will go in such case?
Look at the destination, and that's where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don't want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:
"Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed."
Whenever I look, I only see intentions
If you tell yourself "Everything is fine" your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you "argue against yourself", you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like "Here's a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn't. Here's a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here's the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here's a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here's the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn't look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable".
You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you're tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there's no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it "I hear your worries, I know it's hard, but I sincerely belive it's best for both of us if we do X"
The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don't like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: "both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets... when he gets it."
The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
Yes! We establish thinking based on being, not vice versa. Being is pre-conceptual. Everything else we might doubt, but that doubting happens in being. It's like in a VR-world, we may question its content but not the fact of our being. All images may be unreal (I know you consider it real as long as immersion lasts, but I don't), but the feeling of existence is fundamental to all that.
In Advaita tradition they call the reality Sat-Cit-Ananda. Sat is being. Cit is consciousness (awareness of being). Ananda is bliss (we are generally happy that we are, even in the depressed state or while assessing suicide, we value that we are, we might not like the pictures that are shown to us, be we like that fundamental substratum of being). Gaudapada actually said, "What is not Sat in the beginning and in the end, cannot be Sat in the middle". So it means both reality and existence.
The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing.
You see, I take here a phenomenological stance. I don't know anything about the brain in a dream (except if it's a part of the dream). Nor do I know anything about memory and neurotransmitters until I start thinking. That knowledge is not intrinsic to me as the knowledge of my being is. It may be called superimposed knowledge. In the deep sleep my thinking doesn't function and I don't know anything about the apparatus presumed to do such thinking, but I still am.
I take that knowledge of being as fundamental and primary to other knowledge that my senses tell me. If you will, that's the only real thing that I have no doubt about. I may mistrust my senses or my thoughts and the world that they build, but not my being. To me it's still mindblowing to think that all I know about the world and "myself" is mediated through the senses and thoughts! Therefore I tend to mistrust that "reality" as my senses and my thoughts are often lying to me, but I don't mistrust the reality of being itself. So to me being and consciousness are fundamental to all other knowledge and information. Buddhists, btw, don't agree with that. They consider consciousness as the product of nescience or primal ignorance. So they take it as a part of the spectacle. They say that the final state is neither consciousness nor its absence. Which is impossible to grasp intellectually. But they remain silent with regard to being.
that thoughts therefore aren't real
Aren't real in the sense mentioned. Thoughts are physical, but for me physicality is itself is not established as all processes are in interminable flux, each entity has a beginning and an end and therefore cannot be Sat. If you say that they are the continuation of interactions of the wider system which we assume in thinking, that is true, but the universe is itself under scrutiny as it's subject to change, most likely have a beginning and an end, therefore not Sat.
Phenomenologically speaking, the only sure thing is being-consciousness (Sat-Cit), everything else is postulated with regard to available computational capacities of thinking, but which is inherently limited. The thing that we cannot process all the information that is going through us leads to ideas like space and time. It's basically a lag in the computational process. To tell you the truth, I don't care that much if the universe turns out to be real or not, all I care about is a projection of my mind and the way to fix it.
I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self
The trouble is that intellectually I am almost sure I don't have any agency, but I still operate as if I do. I believe that's the problem as I'm not aligned with how things really are. My mind believes in a phantom which is not really there, i.e. the agency.
repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure.
I agree with that. You described it with intellectual rigor, it was a pleasure to read.
I'd still consider it better than no dream
Here I disagree. As waking up from the dream doesn't mean you will end up in a void or blankness. It only means that two subnetworks of your brain that are building images of "self in time" and "self and other" are shut down. That means end to SRIN. But according to awakened individuals that's where you experience things as they really are, i.e. without prejudice, anger, confusion, lust, etc. That is you abandon self-talk and self-subversive modes in thinking. But you will enjoy life in its fullest. It's exactly "self-torture" that you awake from.
I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity.
And I feel that I cannot properly process all the information that is thrown at me (meaning actions too). It's the process of self-torture that leads to problems and doesn't let me enjoy life. But on the other hand, it's the same very process that pushes me in the direction of awakening. So I cannot complain because of that. It has its raison d'être.
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you.
Mine is keeping fighting all the way. I do 1-hour meditation sessions (self-inquiry or koan practice to be precise, as that's the most helpful tool for me to come to rest) and it's a fight all the way! Only occasionally it looses its grip and I turn out in the space of no-thoughts, which is a bliss beyond description. But you are right in the regard that that's the best tool we have to fight restlessness. I meant all the other time, when one is not meditating (and meditation can and should be pursued during everyday actions, so really no problem here as turns out).
Yeah, thought I wouldn't call the "I" a facade.
There are the states where it's seen through. Those are the states without SRIN and are blissful. That's why I call it a facade.
Close your eyes and imagine that you're in a room
But you have to be willing to do so. And I agree with the rest. The exercises like that helped me in the past, but most helpful was just meditation. So I kept with meditation.
I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while
Thank you, it's a beautiful reminder to keep going no matter the setbacks. I enjoy one parable which basically says the same thing, but it's a tad too long to mention it here.
For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist! Thank you for writing this, your process itself reminds me of meditation. To let go of worries I do something else called the Sedona Method, which is basically four steps:
- Load some worry into RAM, feel the texture.
- Ask "Could I let go of it?", answer with: "yes/no/I don't know".
- Ask "Would I let go of it?", answer with: "yes/no/I don't know".
- Ask "When can I let go of it?", answer with something, even if it is "never".
The funny thing is that even if you answer "no/no/never" brain learns that that's something one can let go of and starts restructuring! That's one of the most helpful techniques I've encountered on the path.
Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more.
Yes, one of the most important things. I only disagree that the rider can see further. It only feigns that it can, that's where all the worries are coming from. But when you let go and surrender to what is, something else starts happening and the elephant restructures the rider in accordance with its needs. But thank you for your kind words, your rider is irredeemable optimist and I think that is indeed helpful on the path, even if you are not looking for awakening directly. Just don't think it's blankness or void and that you will lose all oomph from life, the reverse is true, as one awakened man said you will realise that it's "whole and complete" on the gut level, not just intellectually.
I don't know anything about the brain in a dream
But there must still exist a physical location with bits of informaton which corresponds to your dream, and that is your physical brain. The contents of the dream is using prior knowledge (even if said knowledge isn't true), you can't see people in a dream unless the brain contains the pattern of information which resembles people. Human creativity can turn a shadow into a demon, but it cannot turn nothingness into a shadow (unless it already knows something from which the idea of shadow can be generated).
What's important is not what neurotransmitters are, or if they're real. Maybe what I'm saying is that "being" and "thinking" seem to be the same. This is why the boltzmann brain may exist as long as particles can appear. You can't have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter. This physical matter is also self-contained (that is, equal to itself). It exists, and its existence is the whole structure and nothing but the structure. Nothing exists universally, since existence is uniqueness, and nothing which is universal exists, for "existence" means physical matter at one and only one location, and all matter is self-contained so it cannot reach outside of itself. Thus, human beings can only ever learn information about ourselves, since learning occurs in the matter which we are made out of, and since information is made out of matter.
Here, I'm assuming that the universe follows something similar to rules of logic, and that quantum computers don't actually allow "existence" and "multiplicity" to occur at the same time. Things get a bit more complicated if I'm wrong about this.
Now, it could be that we're all a single consciousness, and that the self is an illusion (a sort of compartmentalization/tunnel vision), a false belief of being separated. Nothing I've said so far conflicts with that idea.
I'm basically saying "The map is within the territory, but the map models the territory as being within the map. The brain is wrong in assuming that the territory in the map is the same as the territory outside of the map". Most people make this error when they think. They confuse the model inside their head for the thing outside their head. I'm claiming that it's literally impossible to break such 'containment', and that there's also no need to do so.
When you meditate, you can gain insight into yourself, but you can only get insight into "the nature of things" if this nature is contained within yourself. To the extent that you're similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe. But if something outside is different, we will be forever unable to grasp it.
Senses and thoughts "lie" in that models of things are constructed from limiting information. The models are used to predict the consequences of actions, and at times, these predictions are wrong, and then the brain modifies the model such that the new information is taken into account. Over time, the brain confuses the model with reality and with the self. When the model is attacked, it feels like the self is attacked. If one lets go of the model, it feels like one lets go of the entire world. The model isn't wrong about the environment it was created in (at least, it's usually a good approximation), but as a being moves to a new environment (or the environment changes), the old model will be more of a hindrance than a help. This is how the ego traps the person, right? So perhaps it's better to experience life without any models whatsoever, so that one remains as flexible as water. Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them (more on this later).
What I don't agree with, is the gloomy attitude that many people take towards life: "If I can't predict the future then my knowledge isn't real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn't real. I want a model which is perfect in every environment, and I want the environment to bend to my model! I want an easy life but to feel heroic, and I want to play forever but also to win. I want everyone to have freedom but also for them to be unable to hurt me, and I want to give into every impulse but also for others to respect me".
I'm ranting a bit, but I think most people are unable to accept that one cannot have the good without the bad. That's silly! Such a thing is only possible in our minds, which is why I'm a psychologist and not a rationalist. And being silly is fine, as long as one enjoys being silly, but a lot of people do not.
All processes are in interminable flux
If life is "becoming" then "being" is every moment of time in that becoming. Life requires change, which requires time. And the universe requires a series of states, and if a loop exists, it must contain every single state, for once it enters the loop it won't be able to break out, as the markov property prevents it from having a high enough class in the chomsky hierarchy to have the "memory" required for this. But perhaps I didn't counter this idea of yours well enough before, so I will try again below.
They are the continuation of interactions of the wider system
Yes, I believe so. And the universe cannot have a beginning and an end without breaking the laws of logic, and if the laws of logic aren't true, then we can't conclude anything, since "true" and "false" are nothing but logical symbols.
Actually, I will have to disagree with the quote you mentioned earlier. It would assume that exposions aren't real (as they have beginnings and ends), which is silly. The idea that something has a start and an end also seems wrong. Everything since the big bang (at the very minimum) has been an effect, so there has been no causes since then. When we say "X resulted in Y" we're just looking at a subset of this chain in isolation, and asserting X as a cause of Y when it's just the previous state.
The universe follows many conservation laws but these are just symmetries and equivelences over some dimensions rather than others. A cube is equal under rotation, but is a rotating cube something constant or something which is in flux? A vector (1,2) has no location, so it's equal to every other vector under relocation (translation), but not under rotation. If you scale the entire universe, laws of physics included, does the universe change or remain static? I'd tell you the answers to these questions, but as I think more deeply, all I get is more difficult questions, rather than answers. Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense. And already now, one needs a spatial IQ equal to that of Emmy Noether to be able to understand my explanation intuitively. By the time we arrive at the final truth, I fear neither of us will be able to understand any of it.
The only sure thing is being-consciousness
Lets assume you're right. Being unsure still freaks out the elephant, because certaincy = feeling of power = confidence = perceived realness. Faith is confidence is belief is peace of mind. Without uncertaincy, I don't think anxiety could exist (this seems to be supported by Lazarus' research). So why doubt? Why value truth at all?
Perhaps this essay is about people similar to us? "There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty"
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you're discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you're trying to solve a psychological issue. Certain insights can shut down aspects in the brain, but rather than learning about the brain and the mechanisms for shutting down parts of it, you're learning about life and the nature of being, is that not a lot harder? You seem to think you have no control over either reality nor yourself, but I think we at least have control over ourselves (after all, meditation works, and you've chosen it yourself, even if you didn't choose that choice)
There are the states where it's seen through
Everything can be seen through, at least everything which can be put into symbols or words. But if "being able to see through" assumes "false" then everything is false, and I can see through even this falsehood - therefore, "being able to see though" does not assume "false". That's my conclusion, anyway.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist!
Doing a few years of depression, I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them, only for them all to break apart (usually leaving behind positive conclusions or at least neutral ones). But after breaking everything apart, I had to build something anew, since I didn't like the feeling of any interpretation being as valid as any other. I didn't feel like a participant, and I didn't have any opinions to share. Perhaps I broke the wrong part of my mind. I didn't reach that state with classic meditation, after all - and my mind is flexible enough to break itself, seemingly lacking safe-guards which keep other people functioning.
You can't have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter.
But here you are assuming that we know what that physical matter is. And when you use the words like location, you've already assumed space and time. What I am hinting at is that the field in which it all arises may itself be conscious. Not our psychological understanding of consciousness but something like proto-consciousness. Perturbation of which leads to arising of matter, not a long stretch from the QFT. It's back to turtles all the way down. Or what was first a particle or a field. I'm basically saying that the field is fundamental and a particle a temporary excitation of that field.
How does it relate to Gaudapada's quote? It is basically saying that the particle is essentially a local derivative (not in a literal sense) of the field (which is fundamental), in order to detect it on the macro level some background information from the macro level has to be assumed like space and time. But unless it is observed it cannot said to be fully manifest in the field. It's only during the interaction that the measurement process takes place (it's most likely highly non-linear otherwise we would already have the explanation for the collapse of the WF). It's basically Wheeler's participatory universe interpretation.
That's what I mean when I say the reality cannot be said to be real from the perspective of the underlying field. And I make an unsubstantiated claim that the field is self-revealing or self-luminous, i.e. conscious.
Apart from that it's a psychological coping mechanism for me to think that everything that has a beginning and an end cannot be considered substantial in the end run. It helps me to let go of the psychological grip that otherwise tyrannizes me with its bars of "reality". When in a nightmare I know I'm dreaming it makes the experience somewhat lighter, I know it's not for real and sooner or later it will end. I regard this life in the same vein. I cannot say like you, that it's better to be born and suffer than never to be born, because there are times when I wish I was not born. During such times the only relief I have is that I remember that it will end at some point. That's why Gaudapada's quote hits close to home for me.
But most importantly, when you start philosophizing about matter, you do it in thinking. And what I tried to express is that I don't deny the processes that stand beyond thinking but I view thinking phenomenologically, i.e. when awake the world and the seer of it appears, when in the deep sleep they both disappear, phenomenologically, not scientifically. Very simply like for a kid. Something that appears at one time and disappears at another, I do not call real. If the world and the seer were real they would appear without disappearing. But they do disappear in the deep sleep. Why select the deep sleep? Because it's the third state among waking, dreaming and sleeping. Waking shows me that dream is not real. Deep sleep shows me that waking is not real. Very simply, almost primitively. Phenomenologically thoughts do appear out of nowhere, and subside there, therefore they cannot torment me constantly. Take it as description of empirical experience, not as a theory and it becomes clear. You attempt to analyze everything, and what I attempted to express is primitively simple, almost childish.
I'm claiming that it's literally impossible to break such 'containment'
Yeah, I agree about that. When they say, "You will see things as they are after the awakening", it means a slightly different thing. It doesn't mean you will literally see what is. It means that self-rumination is turned off. A self-subversive commentary that we all run. And mountains will be just mountains. As sickness, or despair, or death. Without the on-going commentary, "What it all means?"
To the extent that you're similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe.
Yes, I believe that some principle of equivalence takes place when we shut down the noise in the mind. But I cannot say anything about the nature of it as, first, I only experience it rarely to study it fully, and, second, I lack a proper capacities and preparation to dissect it and express in terms of good models. I think there are many brilliant people who have also experienced awakening are up for the task. My goal is to get an experience, and not to understand it in the scheme of things.
Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them
Yes! But it's easier said than done. Also I believe some models are (if not universal) then generalize to many environments. You probably know math better than I'd ever wish for. But the principles of relativity, symmetries, conservation laws and invariants hold the ground firmly even when we change the perspective.
If I can't predict the future then my knowledge isn't real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn't real.
In my case it's slightly more complicated. The knowledge one uses in this reality is as real as the said reality and I don't dismiss it as unhelpful. On the contrary, I believe it gives me free energy in overcoming many entropic pits, which I would otherwise fall into and would have a worse time. And the second part, I can predict the future with about 70-80% accuracy just because I don't consider myself as an agent. It's just I don't like the predictions that much. But life so far had many surprises that I could not predict and that were coming my way unsolicited. When I thought I was in the very depth of depression and didn't want anything (literally), I had experienced most profound experience of peace and tranquility in meditation. Since than I know that it is possible and try to repeat it. The new door opened where I didn't expect it to open (namely, inside).
Life requires change, which requires time.
Here, I am not competent enough to answer you scientifically. But experientially psychologically when you experience that state of no-thoughts (and other mystical states, i.e. when the perception of the world shuts down) it feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out. Do these insights transfer to stochastic processes or similar models I cannot tell. I think they do and I think there are people who are working on it.
Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense.
I think there are no useless knowledge, it will close the gaps and make the bridges in different fields. But it's not a game for everyone as you've mentioned.
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you're discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you're trying to solve a psychological issue.
You see, I don't divide knowledge in categories, I indeed tend to learn what seems helpful to me on the path. But oftentimes (and earlier in life) I am just plain curious, and I cannot help it. I think most knowledge can be helpful and is transformative in a good way. Even if it is to show me how little do I know. But you are right in one regard, I have to be more practical and concentrate more on practice. I tend to philosophize when not engaged in practice and it may be detrimental in the long run. But some people like watching TVs, or read fiction books, I happen not to enjoy these things, but I enjoy (soft) philosophizing and it was a great conversation to be sure! And one more note, it's not just a psychological issue, it's a holistic existential issue, it relates to the very being, to "Who am I, really?" And that question is not answerable in logic or in thinking, but only existentially, holistically.
I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them
You see what you did! You reflected the old "you" from the system! That's philosophizing's power. That's exactly what Piatigorsky's quote is all about. That's also insight. It's cool that it's worked for you like that. I still catch many enthusiastic tones from your text, which I believe is on the level of BIOS of the mind of an individual. Perhaps it's an echo of youth, as when one is young one is generally believes that things are more capable of change than they really are (I shamelessly generalize here). And as Lazarus suggested, "patients who engaged in denial about the seriousness of their situation did better than those who were more "realistic"" So maybe you are right in believing that you can reach for the stars.
I don't need to know what it is, I only need to know what properties it has or has to have.
Do you know Conway's game of life? It's turing complete, and the structure, life, calculations, and the information - are all the same thing. So you cannot remove information without removing life. You cannot do a calcuation with no squares. There is no distinction between a foreground and the background, or between a structure and its substance.
I think that human beings with thoughts are similar. Maybe not to the same extent. But you can't really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person. I can remove the noise from my computer, but it requires removing the fan, and most people don't model these costs mentally. They think "optimization" means "improvement", as if they could do an unequal trade. When people try to improve humanity, or society, they think they can remove just one aspect of something without removing others, and gain only benefits. SSRIs might help against depression, but is that really all?
This bias is so strong that Nietzsche argued that making society more evil would be less harmful than attempting to remove evil elements. The condept of Chesterton's fence is only a first step towards realizing the consequences of naive attempts at improvement.
The field in which it all arises may itself be conscious
If consciousness is emergent, it's very possible that it is. However, while we can describe something with math, which makes it feel as if things are made out of math, and as if math is some underlying reality, I think this feeling is misleading. I think it's the brain confusing the map for reality. I think it's more likely that there's no distinction between foreground and background.
And since the human perception is literally made out of human, and occurs in human, we can't be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
It helps me to let go of the psychological grip
Isn't it enough to feel that it's real and independent of yourself? You can let go and grasp again as you please, come and go whenever you want.
When my reality turns into a nightmare, I perceive it as real, but not as absolute. Being in a nightmare is a bit like a headache, it's real but you know it's temporary. It can also be considered a 'bad place', and one can move to a better place physically or psychologically. Bad places are real, but they're local, so one is not trapped. In either case, the self is the creator of this nightmare, it can always be destroyed. It also helps knowing that, as long as your mind doesn't break, it can't actually hurt you. It's also very unlikely that the mind gets stuck in a really bad state for extended periods of time. My worldview allows for "A reality" which is not "THE reality".
Something that appears at one time and disappears at another
Makes sense. I still consider it real, just arbitrary rather than fundamental. It's like.. The name of a folder on a computer. A folder needs a name, but it can be any name. No name is false, and yet, if you don't like the name then you just give it another. Through this way of thinking, I can create the world that I myself experience, and consider it real, but also allow myself to switch out parts that I do not like. Each little piece is something that I can accept or reject, and with some effort I can change pieces or create new ones.
It means that self-rumination is turned off
I see! Enlightenment helps with that, but reducing anxiety to zero should be enough. And funnily enough, I no longer ask "what it all means". Such a question does not point to a more real, underlying reality, but rather to a less real, derivative model of reality. In my hierarchy, experience comes first and theory comes second.
But it's easier said than done
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you're also really attached to it. I love the dream, but I think I might be less attached than you are, it's pretty interesting. I'm not actually all that good at math, I just have a good spatial intuition and borrow concepts from it. And yeah, it does feel as if the world is made out of principles, but I think these principles are aspects of the human mind, after all, "duality" is one of said principles. Yin/yang, light and shadow, hot and cold. But when we meditate, we can collapse some of the usual dualities.
In my case it's slightly more complicated
Yeah, most didn't apply to you, I was ranting about how human beings tend to trip over their own legs. A lot of human behaviour ends up being the person hurting themselves. So we're our own worst enemy, even when we blame other people and other things (like society, or reality). I suppose everyone does this, myself included, but that people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves.
Profound experience of peace and tranquility
To really relax, one has to let go of everything that usually consumes energy, like judging if any sounds in the environment are usual or unusual, checking if one is being looked at, making sure one does not look silly from the outside, keeping track of time, etc. And these are usually difficult to turn off because they protect against danger. By wanting a break so much that one no longer cares to defend themselves, profound relaxation becomes possible.
But I'm more interested in perception changes. It would feel terrible if a male stranger, without permission, came over and started touching your inner thigh. But if that was a young woman, I assume it could feel nice (it doesn't generalize to all people, but roll with the thought experiment for now). The physical touch is practically the same in both situations, but the perceived value and cleanliness of that which interacts with us, and the possible futures which may occur as a result of these, changes the experience entirely.
When I drink coca cola, it can feel refreshing, but only as long as I don't remind myself that it's actually synthetic, sugar water acid. Actually, my mind likes to remind itself, because it thinks that disliking what I'm drinking makes it less harmful, as if rejecting it mentally kept it from touching my physical body as well. Not only does realizing this allow you to 'grasp' less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
It feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out.
I agree, but in a frozen simulation, nothing can be felt. Even feeling a sense of calmness requires small changes to occur in the brain over time.
I tend to philosophize
I'm guilty of it as well. Too much thought, too little action. I think it's "need for cognition". I don't differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues, since both occur in the mind. And the mind overwrite reality. A mentally ill person who thinks they're the main character in the universe will get the benefits of that belief even if it's false. As I write these messages, I also try to be truthful, correct and logical, but there's technically no need for either constraint.
We just need to find a sequence of steps which get you from your current state to an enlightened state. An illogical path may be shorter than a logical one. I think "Who am I?" is a wrong question, since it assumes an underlying reality which is more real than the reality we're experiencing. But you could also look within, and just see what resonates with you, and be true to that. That usually feels good. Throw away stuff which isn't 'you', stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc. But which always felt foreign in a sense. Perhaps the real you will appear once you let go of everything which isn't you.
Perhaps it's an echo of youth
It likely is, but I have more of it than I had 10 years ago. Even if you're losing this yourself, there should be older models of yourself somewhere which have these qualities. Then you just reconnect with these aspects and reinforce their pathways. There are no real limits. I read a lot of self-help books, I might have internalized some of the positive attitudes over time. A sort of indoctrination of optimism.
There's also methods out there for manipulating ones own core beliefs. This manipulation is dangerous, so I recommend at least having a notepad where you write down the "version history" of your own configuration. Maybe write ten sentences which make you feel in various ways, and track how these feelings change as you change yourself.
The brain has BIOS level access to itself. This is mainly testable through hypnosis and placebo, but technically you don't need either. Sometimes, I can just "decide" that I'm not tired, and then feel more alert. And my brain knows how to cause changes that I wouldn't be able to do myself, e.g. adjusting my level of empathy. You can also fight within the dream, you mentioned that you didn't like your predictions of the future? If you take life by the horns, and improve yourself, that will make you feel much better too. If you have an issue that another person doesn't suffer from, find out what they did and do the same. Almost all limitations are self-imposed
Do you know Conway's game of life?
Yeah, I enjoy the concept of cellular automata and work that Wolfram is doing with his physics project is similar. I especially like what Jonathan Gorard does there and his thought experiments. Math there is beyond my head, I cannot read the papers straight (I tried), but intuitively I can follow his thought experiments which concerns the observer and its model of space and time as being the lag in computation. E.g. a great speculative video, Discussion About Alien Intelligence, a tad too long but very interesting.
But you can't really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person.
And I'm willing to risk it. Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are, they are more compassionate not less in the result of loosing biases. It shows that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing of importance is lost. But what concerns society improvements I agree with you. Generally, sages didn't directly attempt to change society, and said something like, "First change yourself, then see if society needs changing."
If consciousness is emergent, it's very possible that it is.
I'm saying something more radical there. Consciousness is not emergent from the field. The field itself is consciousness. What I meant by proto-consciousness is pure consciousness without content. Which has a potential to appear many. In that model we are not the bodies we identify ourselves with, we are indeed that field. The empirical consciousness of the mind is a reflection of that pure consciousness.
It's back to analogy of the moon that reflects in many waters in the pots. Water in the pot that reflects the moon is the individual mind. The reflected image of the moon is empirical consciousness. The moon is pure consciousness. When we are entangled with the body we identify ourselves with it. But when we disentangle ourselves from the body as in deep sleep, meditation or awakening, we realise ourselves as being pure consciousness. After awakening we can perform actions in the empirical world while not loosing the insight of ourselves being that pure consciousness. It's the identification with the body that we awake from.
...we can't be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
That's beautifully put dilemma, which as they say resolves itself on awakening. You exactly realise the non-separation from the universe as pure consciousness itself. But intellectually it is futile to understand it. I have some premonition which stems from my meditation experiences but it's too weak to say more and not to distort it.
there's no distinction between foreground and background
That's the major insight if you experience it directly, not just intellectually. In Advaita they give an analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold. When you look at ornaments, you forget about gold. When you look at gold, you forget about ornaments. But in truth it's all one and the same.
My worldview allows for "A reality" which is not "THE reality".
We look at it similarly, your working hypothesis is that it is "locally real" and my working hypothesis - "unreal in the ultimate sense". In the same sense that ornaments made of gold are "unreal", while gold, their substratum, is "real". Calling it locally real is fine by me also.
The name of a folder on a computer.
It's exactly what Advaita also says. The full description of reality is Sat-Cit-Ananda-nama-rupa, which means Being-Consciousness-Bliss-name-form. It considers Being-Consciousness-Bliss as substratum (gold), and nama-rupa as superimposition on it (ornaments). Name and form is something that is subject to change, exactly as you've described with the folders. I also view it in a similar way.
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you're also really attached to it.
Yeah, I cannot snap out of it. You might indeed be less attached than I am. But I think it's not so special to be attached to the dream, it's unfortunately rather a default state. Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it. And yes, duality is an aspect of the mind, it is indeed can be transcended in meditation. That's the aim.
people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves
I agree that we are our own worst enemy. But this generalization of yours is way too generous. I would rather say it's the people who think deeply about these matters understand it. It's just for some thinking about it happens in older age. But some understand it even young.
Not only does realizing this allow you to 'grasp' less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
You are constantly making the move that Nāgārjuna also did - analyse something down to its very constituents and see it as ephemeral in the result (I know you would not frame it like that). But that doesn't generalize well as one has to possess a certain complexity of the brain to perform such analysis. I do it myself at times, what concerns "big" things. But I don't have enough bandwidth to do it with Coca-Cola or smoking, so I just drink Coca-Cola and smoke.
I don't differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues
Psychological relates to thinking, existential relates to being itself. Not both occur in the mind. Existential is on the holistic level, which concerns all of the organism (mind included). It's rather felt that thought. It's closer to the marrow of things.
I think "Who am I?" is a wrong question
It does engage me paradoxically as a koan should. I would say it's not exactly presupposes the existence of underlying reality, it's rather questions whether there is any "I" at all. Hands are moving, sounds are heard, thoughts are happening, who is the master of it all? I cannot spot for the sake of me any entity! I came up with this question myself before I encountered other people who were talking about it, and it led me to some mystical non-dual experiences. I tried many things myself, but the best is that simple question. Which my mind cannot grasp or give an intellectual answer for. It bugs me in a good way.
Throw away stuff which isn't 'you', stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc.
That's another important aspect of the practice - letting go. I do that and it's helpful and that's exactly how the question works for me! It negates everything as not-"I". Am I my problems? No. Am I my body? No. Am I my feelings? No. Am I my thoughts? No. What is left there? … [Silence] And that silence sometimes becomes more profound and envelops all else and peace is felt. When in that state, the brain goes through some restructuring, it likes it and as a rule I can take life easier after that.
Self-inquiry is the best tool that I've discovered among many-many other things (psychological, hacks, self-improvement techniques, and so on). So I know where I am going and the means to get there. The only thing which remains is doing the practice and perseverance. I already know on the gut level that's the shortest path there. So here I have no doubts. I only doubt that it's possible in my case, with my mind (it's not neurotypical, which means that the DMN is overly active in my case, it's more difficult to shut down self-rumination).
Almost all limitations are self-imposed
With that I wholeheartedly agree. Reverse-engineering of other people behavior helps to some extent and self-help books are also valuable help but in the end it all comes down to the question, "Who is it that tries to improve?", "Who is is that suffers?" I just have to be more consistent with practice. I already do it in long sessions and introduced 2 minutes breaks to do it throughout the day. So I'm on the way. The rest is that quote of yours about setbacks and that success may be just around the corner so don't stop halfway there.
To sum up the reply in simple terms to all raised questions concerning pleasure in the Buddhist model: for the unliberated all pleasures are concomitant with suffering.
That includes "positive pleasures" such as pleasure derived from the beautiful art or profound scientific thinking. It happens due to the fact that for the unliberated all pleasures imply craving (tanhā) of some sort and corresponding mental states bear the three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha) and the absence of substantive nature (anatta). Even pleasure derived from well-being as a result of craving (bhava-tanhā) is not free from the three marks. As it is a subject to change (impermanence).
That said, some pleasures are higher in the scheme of things as they might lead to insight into the nature of the self (or rather non-self, anatta) or directly to the non-dual state (Nibbana). Those pleasures include joy states (pīti and sukha) experienced during deep meditative absorption (samādhi). Deep absorption states might arise during the periods of contemplation on a scientific problem or profound art form as well. Stillness of the mind which is the result of deep meditative absorption is propitious for insight into the nature of reality. In that sense it's a preferable state. Albeit still not free from subtle craving therefore subtle suffering.
And for the liberated the mechanism of craving is absent. So pleasures (and sorrows) don't lead to clinging (upādāna) and are experienced with equanimity and peace independent of the outcome. Whatever the pleasures may be. It doesn't mean that the sensations are not registered or action is avoided. The key words here are equanimity and peace. Action flows naturally in accordance with the circumstances.
Rationality involves understanding the hidden structures of our own cognition and motivation. A common failure mode is conflating symptom-relief with genuine problem-solving. Buddhist sources offer a stark, 2,500-year-old model of this, which I'll explore here using Nāgārjuna's potent analogy to reveal how pleasure relates to suffering.
The first noble truth declares:
— Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth[1]
The usual remark to this noble truth, "Not everything in life is suffering: we experience so many pleasant things in this life that it is preposterous to call everything suffering." But I would like to question that remark with the following words by Nāgārjuna:
— Nāgārjuna, The Precious Garland, 169[2]
It unveils a deep-rooted truth concerning pleasure we get from the worldly desires. He compares pleasure with scratching a sore. The sore in that case is deep rooted suffering. If it weren't for underlying suffering we might not get the worldly desires at all!
It is also true when stated backwards as in the second noble truth:
— Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth[1]
What that means is that craving or worldly desires and suffering are interrelated. One cannot arise without another. We attempt to avoid suffering by scratching the sore, i.e. by craving for pleasure. If it weren't for suffering the desire to scratch might not even arise! The opposite is also true: if there were no desire to scratch, it would mean there is no sore of suffering. Therefore, what we usually call pleasure is just scratching the sore of suffering.
But to be without sores would be more blissful than scratching them. And that is revealed in the third noble truth:
— Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth[1]
Therefore what we usually take as pleasure is just scratching the sore of underlying suffering. And to get rid of that sore and be free from it requires insight into the nature of the appropriator of craving or the self. That would lead one beyond that loop of itch-and-scratch, craving-and-gratification.
Why I enjoy that verse of Nāgārjuna that much? It is a terse and lucid expression of the three noble truths which reveals the mechanism of pleasure and provides a proper metaphor to understand it.
Tripitaka, Samyutta Nikaya 56.11, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth.
Nāgārjuna, The Precious Garland.