“If I’m thinking about how to pick up tofu with a fork, I might analogize to how I might pick up feta with a fork, and so if tofu is yummy then I’ll get a yummy vibe and I’ll wind up feeling that feta is yummy too.”

Isn't the more analogous argument "If I'm thinking about how to pick up tofu with a fork, and it feels good when I imagine doing that, then when I analogize to picking up feta with a fork, it would also feel good when I imagine that"? This does seem valid to me, and also seems more analogous to the argument you'd compared the counter-to-common-sense second argument with: 

“If I’m thinking about what someone else might do and feel in situation X by analogy to what I might do and feel in situation X, and then if situation X is unpleasant than that simulation will be unpleasant, and I’ll get a generally unpleasant feeling by doing that.”

I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don't reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying,  you will die before you get to finish your life review.

My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I'd thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of "thinking", or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis. 

However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it's the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to "unsee" something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it's something you're supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of "unseeing". What I'm proposing is that all the work that goes into "unseeing" halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion. 

This is related to the hypothesis I'd mentioned in the original post about attention being a filter, rather than a spotlight. On this view, we filter stuff out to help us survive, but this filtration process actually takes more energy than directly experiencing everything unfiltered. This would counterintuitively imply that having high precision on (/ paying attention to) a bajillion things at once might actually require less cognitive effort than our default moment-to-moment experience, and the reason this doesn't happen by default is because we can't navigate reality well enough to survive in this lower-cognitive-effort state. 

I think we'd still need an explanation for how the memo to stop dissociating could propagate throughout one's whole belief network so quickly. But I can pretty easily imagine non-mysterious explanations for this, e.g. something analogous to a mother's belief network near-instantaneously getting the memo to put ~100% of their psychological and physiological effort into lifting a car off of their child. The Experience of Dying From Falls by Noyes and Kletti (sci-hub link here) describes somewhat similar experiences occurring during falls on the top of page 4. 

I should also mention that on my current models, just because someone experiences a dump of all their undissociated experiences doesn't mean that they'll remember any of it, or that any more than a tiny minority of these undissociated experiences will have a meaningful impact on how they'll live their lives afterward. I think it can be a lot like having a "life-changing peak experience" at a workshop and then life continuing as usual upon return. 

I'm curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states. 

One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it's very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob's affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she'd been ignoring all along. 

I'm pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we'd been filtering out happening in a split second. (It's different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)

@habryka, responding to your agreement with this claim: 

a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one's life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions. 

I think my real crux is that I've had experiences adjacent to near-death experiences on ayahuasca, during which I've directly experienced some aspects of phenomena reported in life reviews (like re-experiencing memories in relatively high-res from a place where my usual psychological defenses weren't around to help me dissociate, especially around empathizing with others' experiences), which significantly increases my credence on there being something going on in these life review accounts beyond just culturally-mediated hallucinations. 

Abduction by literal physical aliens is obviously a culturally-mediated hallucination, but I suspect the general experience of "alien abductions" is an instantiation of an unexplained psychological phenomenon that's been reported throughout the ages. I don't feel comfortable dismissing this general psychological phenomenon as 100% chaff, given that I've had comparably strange experiences of "receiving teachings from a plant spirit" that nevertheless seem explainable within the scientific worldview. 

In general, I think we have significantly different priors about the extent to which the things you dismiss as confabulations actually contain veridical content of a type signature that's still relatively foreign to the mainstream scientific worldview, in addition to chaff that's appropriate to dismiss. I'll concede that you're much better than I am at rejecting false positives, but I think my "epistemic risk-neutrality" makes me much better than you are at rejecting false negatives. 🙂

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! A couple of thoughts in response: 

I suspect that the principles you describe around the "experience of tanha" go well beyond human or even mammalian psychology. 

That's how I see it too. Buddhism says tanha is experienced by all non-enlightened beings, which probably includes some unicellular organisms. If I recall correctly, some active inference folk I've brainstormed with consider tanha a component of any self-evidencing process with counterfactual depth. 

Forgiveness (non-judgment?) may then need a clear definition: are you talking about a person's ability not to seek "tanha-originating revenge," while still being able to act out of caring self-protection?

Yes, this pretty much aligns exactly with how I think about forgiveness! 

I really like the directions that both of you are thinking in. 

But I think the "We suffered and we forgive, why can't you?" is not the way to present the idea.

I agree. I think of it more as like "We suffered and we forgave and found inner peace in doing so, and you can too, as unthinkable as that may seem to you". 

I think the turbo-charged version is "We suffered and we forgave, and we were ultimately grateful for the opportunity to do so, because it just so deeply nourishes our souls to know that we can inspire hope and inner peace in others going through what we had to go through." I think Jesus alludes to this in the Sermon on the Mount: 

11 “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Here's something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I'm including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...

The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a discrete entity with fixed and unchanging terminal values, because this entity would be a fixed and unchanging self. This means that anyone employing reasoning of the form “well, it makes sense for me to feel tanha toward X, because my terminal values imply that X is bad!” is basing their reasoning on the faulty premise that they actually have terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values. 

Your section on "tanha" sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.

I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I'm claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I'm basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it's making the error of projecting value into the world. 

I think this probably brings us back to: 

A big problem with this post is that I don't have a clear idea of "tanha" is/isn't, so can't really tell how broad various claims are.

A couple of additional pointers that might be helpful: 

• I think of tanha as corresponding to the phenomenology of resisting an update because of a trapped prior. 
• I think tanha is present whenever we get triggered, under the standard usage of the word (like in "trigger warning"), and I think of milder forms of tanha as being kind of like micro-triggers. 
• Whenever we're suffering, and there's a sense of rush and urgency coming from lower subsystems that override higher cognition in service of trying to make the suffering go away, there's tanha involved. 

(Note that I don't consider myself an expert on Buddhism, so take these pointers with a grain of salt.)

I think it might be helpful if you elaborated on specific confusions you have around the concept of tanha. 

I'm open to the hypothesis that the life review is basically not a real empirical phenomenon, although I don't currently find that very plausible. I do think it's probably true that a lot of the detailed characteristics ascribed to life reviews are not nearly as universal as some near-death experience researchers claim they are, but it seems pretty implausible to me that a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one's life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions. (That's what I'm understanding you to be claiming, please let me know if I'm wrong.)

For example, the anecdatapoint in the link I'd shared about the guy who had a near-death experience during a fall included a life review. ("Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening.") This fall happened in 1871, before life reviews were prevalent in popular culture, and I'm curious how you interpret anecdatapoints like these. 

Regarding your second point, I'm leaving this comment as a placeholder to indicate my intention to give a proper response at some point. My views here have some subtlely that I want to make sure I unpack correctly, and it's getting late here!