Episode 9: Insight
Last time we were talking more about mindfulness and trying to get an account of how mindfulness can bring about an insight. Not just a single insight into a single problem, but a modal insight, a systemic insight that is fully transformative of the agent-arena relationship and brings about the alleviation of existential distress and the affordance of enhanced meaning. We took a look at that by getting into the machinery of attention and seeing that attention involves two kinds of attentional scaling: attention involves an ability to engage in a transparency-opacity shift and also breaking up gestalt into features / scaling down / the kind of thing we can enhance in meditation, but it also involves an ability to scale up / to move from features to gestalt / and to go from looking at something to looking more deeply into reality.
In mindfulness and meditation we're practicing the scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to train making better framing. If we can optimize by learning how to fluently flow between the two, bringing in an aspect of fluency and flow that we've already talked about, then we could optimize our capacity for much more comprehensive insight. If we could take it to the depths of our self, like we do in the pure consciousness event, and the depths of reality and the resonant at-one-ment, and we could integrate those, optimize between them, we could bring about Prajna, a kind of non-duality that would be potentially transformative of the whole agent-arena relationship, dissipate modal confusion, enhance meaning in life by bringing about one of the most powerful kinds of mystical experience, give people a sense of enhanced realness that will challenge, encourage, and empower them to transform all of their existence and bring about a tremendous increase in meaning in life.
We talked about some recent cognitive science, including some of my own theoretical and experimental work that seems to be supporting the claim that these higher states of consciousness can bring about these quantum changes, these radical kinds of transformative experience.
Incidentally, when he first introduces 'quantum change' he says "This is known as quantum change. Bad name, bad name. Good theory."
John Vervaeke has a lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I thought it was great, so I'm arranging a lecture club to discuss it here on Less Wrong. The format is simple: each weekday I post a comment that's a link to the next lecture and the summary (which I plan on stealing from the recap at the beginning of the next lecture), and then sometimes comment beneath it with my own thoughts. If you're coming late (even years late!) feel free to join in, and go at whatever pace works for you.
(Who is John Vervaeke? He's a lecturer in cognitive science at the University of Toronto. I hadn't heard of him before the series, which came highly recommended to me.)
I split the lecture series into three parts: the philosophical, religious, and cultural history of humankind (25 episodes) related to meaning, the cognitive science of wisdom and meaning (20 episodes), and more recent philosophy related to the meaning crisis specifically (5 episodes). Each episode is about an hour at regular speed (but I think they're understandable at 2x speed). I am not yet aware of a good text version of the lectures; I also have some suspicion that some important content is not in the text itself, and so even if I transcribed them (or paid someone to) it'd still be worth watching or listening to it.
I think the subject matter is 1) very convergent with the sort of rationality people are interested in on LW, and 2) relevant to AI alignment, especially thinking about embedded agency.
Discussion: