This is fantastic and absolutely the conversation I want to be having. Resonates quite a lot with my experience, especially as a description of what it is exactly that I got out of circling.
In your language circling naturally stirs up sankharas because relational shit is happening (e.g. people are paying attention to you or ignoring you, liking or disliking what you say, etc) and then hopefully, if the circle is being well-facilitated, you sometimes get coached into a state where you can notice and work with your "causal links in the perceptual system between physical sensations, feelings, and mental reactions," e.g. by the facilitator remaining very calm and holding space, then gently pointing out their observations about your causal links, that kind of thing. Unfortunately with less skilled facilitation this doesn't happen and shit just gets stirred up and not resolved; worst case people get retraumatized.
Very excited to talk to you more about this.
I think a lot of explanations ground on somatic components of thought because (a) they're so neglected and (b) they're comparatively hard to mess up or take metaphorically.
Unfortunately many good manuals for how to do somatic mindfulness don't know how to connect it to anything else, so verbal centers never really get online. I think Qigong has this problem, & the Vipassana I've seen too.
Feldenkrais seems to have a model for how to link somatics and stories, but no idea how to teach it, so I had to reinvent it myself to get full value out of his exercises, and I suspect he mostly didn't do it dynamically. Tracking breath/posture *while* going through other stuff is really, really helpful.
It would be great to start a post like this with a epistemic status note, that specifies your relationship to Buddhism.
I read your post as operating on the assumption that the historic path of the Buddha is about teaching farmers to meditate.
To the extend I understand the history of Buddhism that isn't what Buddhism was about for thousands of years.
In religions there's always a desire to argue that what's taught today is taught because it's ancient knowledge but I see no reason to have that kind of discourse on LessWrong.
If you want to argue that you have something useful to say about meditation, there's no necessity to argue that what you are saying is a translation of the Buddha. I don't think that it leads to good epistemic hygiene.
People like to have a claim on "what the Buddha really taught", e.g. in this post "Though the Buddha taught one specific concentration technique..."
But we don't really know what the Buddha taught. We have scriptures from an oral tradition, compiled by many people centuries after the death of this figure, a figure for which we have very little historical evidence for, that probably did exist, but we don't really know when. He is a ghost.
Therefore, it seems a safer option not to state what "The Buddha" taught or what "Buddhism" (singular) is really about at its core.
I like the way that Stephen Batchelor put it:
In the parable of the raft, the Buddha describes “a man in the course of a journey” who arrives at a body of water that he has to cross. Since there are no boats or bridges available, his only option is to assemble a raft out of the “grass, twigs, branches, leaves” and whatever other materials are to hand. Having bound them together, and “making an effort with his hands and feet” he manages to get across to the opposite shore. Despite its evident usefulness, he realises that there is no point in carrying the raft any further once it has accomplished its purpose. So he leaves it by the shore and continues on his way. Likewise, the Buddha concludes, “I have shown you how the dharma is similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping” [M. 22]. This story shows how the dharma is an expedient, a means to achieve an urgent task at hand, not an end in itself that is to be preserved at all cost. It emphasises how one needs to draw upon whatever resources are available at a given time in order to accomplish what you have to do. It does not matter whether these resources are “what the Buddha truly taught
Trying to be post-metaphysical is often about not thinking much about metaphysis and thus in this case staying with the metaphysics of concentration, equanimity, tranquility, mindfulness and suffering without thinking about whether those are the best concepts to use.
Huh? The article's very much saying that we should think about whether the traditional concepts are useful, and then it has an extended case study where it dismantles and reconstructs the four noble truths into a form that's rather different from the common one but which it argues to support practice better. Whether its proposed new version is actually better is a question I don't have a strong opinion on, but it's certainly at least trying; the "mindlessness trainer" criticism seems off.
The post is predicated on reading 4 different translations of Pali Canon discourse, checked against my own experience, discussion with teachers, and works of historical Buddhist scholarship charting the development of differing interpretations.
edit: I also agree with ashen above, the frame of 'what the buddha taught' is a simplified one that dissolves under close examination (the historical record on how the discourses got compiled is if anything even more sketchy than the one we have for the bible)
a) Imagine a different post on LessWrong:
“Guys, let me share something with you I am really excited about. I have been studying the bible pretty hard, including reading several translations of the original Hebrew in my quest to master the Core Teachings of Jesus, and putting these teachings into practice (and I have reached Nebula Level 4.2, so know what I am talking about). Based on my experiences, and extensive discussions with a variety of my priests, I have figured out the core practice that Lord Jesus taught, and I am going to break it down for you in a way that is easy to understand for a modern audience, in order that Jesus’s teachings can be spread onto the globe and help as many people as possible.
How might this be received differently on Less Wrong? Is Buddhism just hip right now?
b) I do find this post useful though. "Insight" in some Buddhism practices is hard to explain, so this attempt is very welcome.
I am not a fan of the “random miswiring” metaphor. What is random about adaptive responses to stressors based on your genotype and lifetime experiences? Idiosyncratic, yes, but not random. But talking about efficiency makes more sense to me e.g. "‘this type of circuit onl
Is Buddhism just hip right now?
I think it's just that rationalists are not skeptics; we don't automatically dismiss things because they sound "woo". If Lord Jesus came up with a helpful mental technique, I'm all ears.
I expect this to be harder but still doable - Christianity is more of a central case of a "religion" than Judaism or Buddhism, so I expect the translation work to be more difficult. The essay someone else linked to on the idea of a Buddhism 2.0 oriented towards praxis instead of doctrine seems like it would be harder to do with Christianity, especially Protestant faith-oriented variants.
For a post that claims to be a "translation" of Buddhism, this seems to contain:
On the other hand, it does contain quite a bit of unjustified speculation. "Literal electrical resistance in the CNS", really? "Rewiring your CNS"? Why should I believe any of this?
Why are people upvoting this?
I don’t view this post as telling you anything you’re supposed to believe on Romeo’s word.
On what other basis, then, are we to believe any of this stuff about rewiring neurons, “electrical resistance = emotional resistance”, etc. etc.? We’ve been told that there’s no evidence whatsoever for any of it and that Romeo got the idea for the latter claim, in particular, from literally nowhere at all. So we can’t believe any of this on the basis of evidence, because we’ve been given none, and told that none is forthcoming. And you say we’re not to believe it on Romeo’s word. What’s left?
Or perhaps you’re saying that the post makes no claims at all? But I can’t see how that reading is possible, and in any case that is contradicted by Romeo’s comments in response to me. Claims are being made, and relatively clear claims, at that.
Thus nshepperd’s question seems to me to be quite apt!
On what other basis, then, are we to believe any of this stuff about rewiring neurons, “electrical resistance = emotional resistance”, etc. etc.? We’ve been told that there’s no evidence whatsoever for any of it and that Romeo got the idea for the latter claim, in particular, from literally nowhere at all. So we can’t believe any of this on the basis of evidence, because we’ve been given none, and told that none is forthcoming. And you say we’re not to believe it on Romeo’s word. What’s left?
You both latched onto the least interesting part of the post. The part that is literally just Romeo throwing out some wild speculations. The post would probably have been a bit cleaner to not mention the few wild speculations he mentions, but getting caught up on the tiny details seems to miss the forest from the trees.
The more interesting part is the general framework where he matches up the some of the processes mentioned in Buddhism with some insights from behavioral psychology, psychotherapy, and pop psychology. It gives a framework to start understanding why anecdotally people claim such big effects from extended meditation practice, and gives an insight about how one might begin to ...
The tacit claim is that LW should be about confirmatory research and that exploratory research doesn't belong here. But confirmatory, cited research has never been the majority of content going back to LW 1.0.
Firstly, because the Sequences were written almost entirely on Overcoming Bias, not on Less Wrong. That alone would suffice. (Less Wrong simply did not exist when Eliezer wrote most of the Sequences.)
Secondly, because we already know that Eliezer can (or could, at least) write interesting and useful things, and have interesting and useful ideas. The question is whether anyone else—specifically, anyone from the Less Wrong commentariat—has that ability; and how we should encourage it, and nurture it; and what epistemic standards, and what community norms, encourage good and interesting and useful and correct ideas. We are, after all, talking about what kind of posts are appropriate for Less Wrong today. So asking whether the site’s founder and originally primary contributor wrote anything of value (especially before the community was even founded) is not relevant.
What do you mean by this, if not that you’re trying to figure out whether other people share some personal specialness Eliezer has?
It’s not “some personal specialness”; it’s the ability, inclination, wherewithal, knowledge, expertise, habit, etc., etc., to write posts and comments that are useful, interesting, and otherwise desirable to have insofar as they serve the goals of Less Wrong.
These qualities can be encouraged where present, they can be developed where absent, they can be selected for from among a population, and their application can be incentivized.
But it is clearly not the case that said qualities are simply present in anyone who gets it into their head to write a Less Wrong post.
How common are these salutary qualities? We don’t know (but not very common). How common are they among the current Less Wrong commentariat, in particular? We don’t know (hopefully more common than in the general population, but clearly not as common as we’d like). What community norms, what rules, contribute to increasing and maintaining their prevalence among the membership of the site? We don’t know.
If you’re not thinking of the past as an uncaused golden age and Eliezer as a legend of
I now think I may have misread you quite badly - see this comment - if so, thanks for your patience.
The latter is closer to what I meant, certainly.
As you took the time to reread my comments, it seems only fair that I should take the time to attempt another explanation, as perhaps a rewording will help to dispel any remaining confusion. I hope you’ll excuse my using your earlier comment as a jumping-off point, though I know you no longer endorse this interpretation of my view:
Articles that explore new ideas are harder to write productively than articles that don’t.
This is true. However, as I wrote in this comment, I believe “exploratory research” to be a (perhaps not unique, but certainly unusual) strength of Less Wrong. That such articles are harder to write only means that it is more important—given how few places on the internet have any capability to produce such writing—that we do these things well.
Eliezer, uniquely on LessWrong, wrote productive articles exploring new ideas.
First, again, I do not think that it is sensible to view the Sequences as having been written on Less Wrong—not least because they, in fact, weren’t! (You will note, by the way, that I specified Eliezer’s writings from the Sequences period for exclusion—not all his writings!)
That aside, I do not
The author does a good job articulating his views on why Buddhist concentration and insight practices can lead to psychological benefits. As somebody who has spent years practicing these practices and engaging with various types of (Western) discourse about them, the author's psychological claims seem plausible to a point. He does not offer a compelling mechanism for why introspective awareness of sankharas should lead to diminishing them. He also offers no account for why if insight does dissolve psychological patterns, it would preferentially dissolve negative patterns while leaving positive patterns unchanged. In my own opinion this has a lot more to do with the set and setting of the meditations practice, i.e., the expectation that practice will have salutary effects.
I am not convinced that this is a faithful "translation" of the Buddha's teachings. He leaves out any talk of achieving liberation from rebirth which is the overarching goal of Buddhist practice in the original texts. He does not discuss the phenomenon of cessation/nirvana and whether it is necessary (according to the Buddha it is necessary). He also does not address the fact that the Buddha was not ai...
I found this useful, at least at first glance (though it's the sort of post I'd want eventually to be subjected to rigor, both from a scientific and probably traditional buddhist perspective).
Also appreciated the meta level point about confusing concepts needing better translation.
While I think this post paints a somewhat simplistic image - I'm not sure that Buddhism is a unified enough entity for talk of a single "core loop" to make sense - I did nonetheless find it a useful articulation of one particular core loop in a specific style of practice, and later built on it in my own post about the mechanisms of meditation.
For my own benefit I stumbled back here to add, "what do I mean by translation?".
Some comments seem to be confused by this not being a language-language translation in the conventional sense. It's worth pointing out that the word translation is being used to translate across cultural contexts or across jargon barriers and not language barriers. In this sense - still a translation but not an ancient text translation as a cultural bridge.
Funny aside, emotional ‘resistance’ might be well named, it might be literal electrical resistance in the CNSs wiring as a result of this spaghetti logic.
This sounds interesting—do you have any references for this?
Thus are theories like the four humours, the five elements, yin/yang, signatures, and astrology created. I could mischievously add System 1/2, neuromarketing, and most schools of psychotherapy to that list.
I started out as a self-identified rationalist, got fascinated by mysticism and 'went native.' Ever since, I have been watching the rationality from the sidelines to see if anyone else will 'cross over' as well.
I predict that if Romeo continues to work on methods for teaching meditation, that eventually he will also 'go mystical' and publicly rescind his claim that all perceived metaphysical insights can be explained as pathological disconnects with reality caused by neural rewiring. Conditional on his continuing to teach, I...
Why no probability on "there exists a truth that is very difficult to express in conventional language, such that as contexts change, fixed written accounts of it tend to decay into uselessness, it's so difficult that even most people who get it lack the verbal skill to express it clearly in their words in their time, this is compounded by most people needing higher-context instruction than words alone to get to the point where the words can mean anything to them, and because of this the vast majority of people trying to talk about this round it off to it being literally impossible"?
That's basically Plato's model, and it seems to me like the obvious hypothesis here given the extent to which people actually do try to say the thing in words, or parts of it, including people widely reputed to have "got it" such as the Buddha.
Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:
It turns out there is painless pain: lobotomized people experience that, and “reactive dissociation” is the phrase used to describe the effects sometimes of analgesics like morphine when administered after pain has begun, and the patient reports, to quote Dennett 1978 [PDF] (emphasis in original), that “After receiving the analgesic subjects commonly report not that the pain has disappeared or diminished (as with aspirin) but that the pain is as intense as ever though they no longer mind it…if it is administered before the onset of pain…the subjects claim to not feel any pain subsequently (though they are not numb or anesthetized—they have sensation in the relevant parts of their bodies); while if the morphine is administered after the pain has commenced, the subjects report that the pain continues (and continues to be pain), though they no longer mind it……Lobotomized subjects similarly report feeling intense pain but not minding it, and in other ways the manifestations of lobotomy and morphine are similar enough to lead some researchers to describe
Do you have any citations for the claims about “miswiring” or “random wiring” of the central nervous system?
Although, that may be premature; I’m actually curious what, precisely, you mean when you talk about “miswiring” or “rewiring”. Do you mean that the physical pattern of connections between neurons changes as a result of Buddhist practice? If so—which neurons, in which part(s) of the brain, and how does it change (and how is this change detectable—with fMRIs, perhaps?)?
Likewise, you mention “efficiency” of wiring. What is the measure of efficiency being used here, and how is it measured?
There aren’t good answers for any of those questions.
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand this answer. I’m asking what you mean when you say the things you said in the post—what specific things you’re referring to. It’s not clear what it would mean for there to be “no good answers” to such a question; surely you know what you meant when you wrote this post?
It occurs to me this experiential-translation problem is pretty broad. This post brought to mind the relatively recent ways to recognize a heart attack if you are a woman. We know what heart attacks consist of, physically. We knew how to recognize them based on data from men. But it was only about 20 years ago that we started really noticing that women often present different symptoms, and so they were frequently missed.
There are two things that I really like about this post; being somewhat self-aware about the type of work that it's trying to do, and also this specific attempt.
That is, contra nsheppard, I do see this as trying to do the hard work of translation, not in the sense of demonstrating that the original author meant what is rendered here in English (as, say, lsusr's translation of 'Sunzi's <<Methods of War>>' tries to do), but in the sense of attempting to regenerate the same underlying concept in a new environment. What dependencies can be used, an...
This is fantastic and absolutely the conversation I want to be having.
Ditto on everything Qiaochu_Yuan said. Huge thanks for writing this, Romeo.
Two typo fixes that would have saved me a headache:
Paragraph 11:
normative way. Like you should wire
I think you meant “normative way, like you should wire”
Second-to-last paragraph:
Though the Buddha taught one specific concentration technique and a series of simple insight techniques, but there are probably a dozen
I think you meant to omit either “Though” or “but”
What a pleasant read, I hope we can read more of this from you! Do you happen to have some ressources with a similar demystified tone about the How-To of the actual practices? By the increased popularity the amount of metaphysical claims also increased a lot and this always scares me away from getting too close to the topic of mindfulness.
The Buddha taught one specific concentration technique and a simple series of insight techniques
Any pointers on where I can find information about the specific techniques as originally taught by the Buddha?
This is an excellent post - my only question is how accurately this translates the Buddhism which is not something I'm qualified to have a strong opinion on. Nonethless, it matches my limited understanding of meditation.
what I see as the core causal loop that causes progress on the Buddha's path
The "core loop" that causes progress is sitting the fuck down and meditating. Instructions: get comfy, put your attention on your breath as it goes through your nose, put it back on the breath when it wanders. Repeat for like 100 hours, at least 1h/day.
There are a *fuckton* of writings on meditation, and the benefit you get from reading them is less than sitting down and practicing.
telling people to just sit the fuck down is basically zen. Zen hasn't conquered the world and made freedom from suffering available in every classroom, so we still have some work to do.
The issue, as it seems to me, is that almost every text you read on Buddhism does not attempt to do the actual work of translation. The first transmission of Buddhism to the west reified a bunch of translations of terms, such as concentration, equanimity, tranquility, mindfulness, suffering, etc. and works since then have mostly stuck to rearranging these words in different combinations and referencing the same metaphors that have been in use since the time of the Buddha. If these authors had true discernment they would realize that the umpteenth text on 'establishing the noble bases of tranquility secluded from sensuous ignorance' or what-have-you aren't helping anyone who didn't already get the message.
At this point I want to say that I think this approach is 'working' for the fraction of the population it is going to work for. If we want to make the practical fruits of Buddhist practice dramatically more accessible to a broader range of humanity we need people to do the hard work of translation to put the Buddha's teachings in forms that will be accessible to various groups of people.
The hard work of translation is to attempt to use language to point your mind at the same distinctions that the original author was trying to point to. Attempts to do this will inevitably fail in lots of ways, but can hopefully communicate enough of the core message that people can piece together the essential causal relations after which, having had direct experience as a result of skillful practice, they can help to improve the translations further.
So, putting my money where my mouth is, I want to try to produce a translation of what I see as the core causal loop that causes progress on the Buddha's path. I'm attempting this because I believe the core causal loop is actually quite small. The Buddha had a tougher task because he had to explain causation, locus of control, and other critical concepts to farmers from scratch.
To begin with, you may think that the purpose of meditation is to eliminate thoughts. But read the Pali Canon and you find a text rife with concepts, schemas, diagnostic methods for various classifications of mental activity, meditation taxonomies, sensory taxonomies, feedback loops etc. Pretending you're already enlightened and that there isn't hard work to do is something the new agers have borrowed from some crappy spiritual schools of various flavors. I refer to people preaching such messages as mindlessness teachers.
To be clear, a decrease in discursive thought, and especially unpleasant mental contents that don't seem to serve any purpose, are one of many pleasant effects of proper practice, but don't really need to be focused on. It is a benefit that arrives in stages on its own.
So, what is the core loop?
It's basically cognitive behavioral therapy, supercharged with a mental state more intense than most pharmaceuticals.
There are two categories of practice, one for cultivating the useful mental state, the other uses that mental state to investigate the causal linkages between various parts of your perception (physical sensations, emotional tones, and mental reactions) which leads to clearing out of old linkages that weren't constructed well.
You have physical sensations in the course of life. Your nervous system reacts to these sensations with high or low valence (positive, negative, neutral) and arousal (sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation), your mind reacts to these now-emotion-laden sensations with activity (mental image, mental talk) out of which you then build stories to make sense of your situation.
The key insight that drives everything is the knowledge (and later, direct experience) that this system isn't wired up efficiently. Importantly: I don't mean this in a normative way. Like you should wire it the way I say just because, but in the 'this type of circuit only needs 20 nand gates, why are there 60 and why is it shunting excess voltage into the anger circuits over there that have nothing to do with this computation?' way. Regardless of possible arguments over an ultimately 'correct' way to wire everything, there are very low hanging fruit in terms of improvements that will help you effectively pursue *any* other goal you set your mind to.
Funny aside, emotional 'resistance' might be well named, it might be literal electrical resistance in the CNSs wiring as a result of this spaghetti logic.
So back to these stories and story building blocks that are the outputs of this system. You generated a bunch of the primitive building blocks when you were very young and throwing everything together on an as needed basis with no instructions. You both have a back log of such stories and story building-blocks and are generating new ones all the time. Practice improves each of these situations. It improves the backlog by going through and reprocessing stories that aren't actually reality aligned when examined. Again, not pointing to edge cases here but things in the 'your partner humming the spongebob theme shouldn't make you furious because of something that happened when you were 12' class. You can clean up all the obvious stuff and then let your future self (who now has more resources) think about how to wisely deal with the fuzzy edge cases. It improves the new stories coming in (partially by learning as it processes the back log) by building far fewer incoherent stories out of pieces that don't fit together, and building less of the crappier building blocks in the first place.
I'll go ahead and name these things now to connect them up for people who have some knowledge of existing translations.
Concentration meditation gives rise to a mental state where the mind is very calm and inclined to neutrality. Of the same sort you'd want in a good judge.
Insight meditation makes one aware of the causal links in the perceptual system between physical sensations, feelings, and mental reactions.
Sankharas are the stories and story pieces that get reexamined and refactored as a result.
So what is the core loop of meditation practice?
Concentration puts you in the ideal state for insight.
Insight stirs up Sankaras.
Examining Sankharas riles up the mind, eventually leading to a desire to do some more concentration in order to calm down and keep making progress.
Clearing Sankharas cause concentration to go much better. And onward.
Why is concentration ideal to prepare you for insight practice?
Insight requires a high degree of temporal and spatial resolution in order to see the finer linkages between mental activities that normally flow past you without you noticing. Concentration meditation improves that resolution.
Second, to examine the Sankharas is to, to some extent, reactivate the sensations, feelings, and mental reactions associated with them. Since the ones we are most concerned with are the ones that are causing the biggest negative reactions in our lives, we need the mind to be calm and tranquil in order to do this work. Concentration greatly improves this tranquility as well.
How do insights stir up Sankharas?
This would require more speculation about somatic theories that don't yet have a good evidence base. Subjectively, it feels like building up insights into particular kinds of linkages between physical sensations, feelings, and mental reactions causes areas of your backlog that are particularly heavy in those linkages to get some activation and thus be available to consciousness.
You've experienced this if you've ever had a conceptual insight and then spent the next week noticing ways it was applicable, seemingly spontaneously. The only difference here is that insight can also be non-conceptual (ie, insight into how two particular physical sensations interact might generate no verbal content/mental talk but some sense of something happening.)
How does clearing Sankharas improve concentration?
The mental talk, emotional avoidance, and physical discomforts that interrupt concentration practice are built from unendorsed linkages.
So, the Buddha taught a method of concentration, a system for developing insight that we know as mindfulness, and to use these to both stop building new stories and to clear out our backlog of stories. That's actually it. The rest is details for how this plays out in practice. Failure modes can get a bit weird, and even if you do it right some mind blowing states and experiences can pop up. So there's lots of whataboutism for all that.
The miswired central nervous system story gives us simple answers to things like trauma (extreme levels of miswiring of things into fear and freeze responses), why stuff like yoga and exercise help (general CNS health, probably capacitance/fuse breaker improvements), why psychotherapy sometimes but not always activates childhood memories and the significance of that, and why practitioners claim they have a much better life but can't always explain why (they perform the same actions but with much less internal resistance).
So then why all the rest of this crap?
Well, besides my post on why practitioners make so many metaphysical claims, it's also just that there's a lot of idiosyncrasy in first unwiring a randomly wired CNS and then rewiring it in arbitrary order. Especially when you don't really know that that's what you're doing as you're doing it and your mindlessness teacher is a bit clueless as well (though may still have good pragmatic advice despite bad epistemics.)
In addition, each of the practices is actually a practice category. The Buddha taught one specific concentration technique and a simple series of insight techniques, but there are probably a dozen alternatives in each category that seem to work for some people and which entire traditions have subsequently built themselves around and gotten into fights with rival schools about.
Note: I am fairly confident this is how things work up until 2nd path. Since approximately zero percent of people make it beyond that point I'm not too worried about this.