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but powdered sugar donuts ARE good for me

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For anybody interested in 'enlightenment' at all, **highly** recommend checking out Aella. Fascinating life story, which included 10-months of regular and high dosage LSD, which gave them an experience of enlightenment. They have since interviewed dozens of people who claim to have experienced entlightment and clustered their experiences.

-Interview of them on ClearerThinking podcast. https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=017

-Their website. https://knowingless.com. Here is post summarising their clutering of enlightenment experiences: https://knowingless.com/2020/07/15/the-enlightenment-interviews/

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I have read so much about the Buddhist conception that the self is an illusion, and the idea is very appealing to me, but I have never been able to understand it even on a superficial level. I don't know why.

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Overall, i loved the synthesis and an attempt to bring clarity to topics that often feel confusing and contradictory.

I think i've reached a similar synthesis as you:

- on the idea of meditation going well with metta / loving compassion training, since having values is important for being functional in the world

- the notion of feelings as giving 'weight' to thoughts and causing them to surface

- instead 'of 'destroying' the self, dissolving boundaries between self and other.

- desire being different from pain; i.e. when something hurts, it's easy to add to it the unpleasant desire for the pain to go away; that desire is an additionally unpleasant feeling that's somehow worse than the raw pain

Here are a few points where we differ:

> I hope that by now you agree that we shouldn’t give up our feelings. But perhaps we should rebel against evolution and rebuild ourselves to approximate a perfect moral agent more closely

What you are calling 'rebellion against evolution', i would call something more like 'calibration.' We evolved in one environment that is so different from where we are now, it would be a real wonder if the drives and desires we have at present tended to make us calm and happy. Sugary donut, loot crates, internet porn, and algorithmic social networks didn't exist for our ancestors.

This notion of calibration then seems to link together the idea of global workspace of consciousness, and mental chatter. If our brains consist of many different conflicting control systems, then these control systems fighting against each other gives rise to unmet desires, aka feelings, and this give rise to thoughts and mental chatter. There's an old buddhist story comparing the untrained mind to a bunch of animals all chained together - each animal wants to go to its preferred environment. Here's a writeup:

https://www.sgi.org/ru/sgi-president/writings-by-sgi-president-ikeda/six-animals-and-one-pillar.html

If you adopt the hypothesis that these control systems all evolved with certain defaults, and that the defaults worked in the ancestral environment, but are mismatched with the present environment, you get a conclusion that says something like: "we generally feel shitty and have lots of internal chatter because the various control systems in our brains are all pulling us in different directions. The control systems that don't feel good then generate negative feelings, which give rise to thoughts, in an attempt to moderate between the various control systems. We can re-write the intensity with which we try to manage the control systems, by consciously relaxing the weight we put on any one control system; we can learn to feel pain without adding on to the pain the desire for the pain to go away. Doing this mindful acceptance allows the control systems to 'settle down' which reduces both the arising of unpleasant feelings, and the mental chatter that rides along with them."

> he world is a causally interconnected system, with no sharp divide between the inside and outside of an organism, or between actions which are done by the organism and to it. (This is one of the things people sometimes mean by “emptiness.”) If that's true, then the Perfectly Wise Perfect Utilitarian wouldn't have a sense of self-as-site-of-action either. (She could still act in whatever way we normally act, but she wouldn't see an in-principle difference between "directly" wiggling her toe and causing you to wiggle yours e.g. by asking you to do it

I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that distance does matter in terms of predictive accuracy. There may not be sharp divides between the insides and outside of organisms, but divides to exist. An example here might be simpler if you replace a perfectly enlightened human being with a perfectly enlightened AGI that runs on a computer in a garage in new jersey. The computer in the garage in new jersey knows that it's running on hardware located in a garage, and although it might _care_ globally, it knows that its capacity to _act_ is constrained locally, and the quality fo the information it recives about distant locations is likely to degrade with distance.

This is a place where i disagree with a lot of people in the EA community. I agree with the basic premise (we should try to do as much good as possible with the limited donation budget) but i think the idea that we can just ignore spacetime when making decisions is absurd. Our ability to accurately predict the consequences of our actions is heavily constrained by proximity; it's much harder to tell what my choices will do when i am trying to affect a situation far away in space or time.

Overall, though, i loved this writeup. Thank you for taking the time to share it.

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The Buddha didn't preach not-self as a metaphysical doctrine but as a tool of inquiry, just like he broke with yogic traditions teaching jhana as a means of ultimate liberation but still used jhana as a tool. Non-self/non-dual schools already existed at the time of the Buddha. There is a sutta I am having trouble locating at the moment where someone comes to ask him this explicit question as a point of difference between schools: does the Buddha teach a doctrine of self or a doctrine of no-self and the Buddha says that the question has a confused foundation rendering an answer 'not even wrong' or in Buddhist terminology 'neither true-nor-untrue, nor both-true-and-untrue.' I try to explain some of this in the section on anatta here:

http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2020/01/mistranslating-buddha.html

there's also this resource

https://puredhamma.net/key-dhamma-concepts/anicca-dukkha-anatta-2/anatta-systematic-analysis/

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I don't want to sound snarky here, but I think it's worth pointing that Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus have been doing a long-running Blogging Heads series which, the couple times I had the misfortune of stumbling on, I found to be virtually unwatchable due to the two of them sniping at and try to talk over each other constantly. He seems to still have a decent sized reservoir of ill will, at least for his co-host, despite the meditation.

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This is interesting but doesn't feel that much like a book review. Is there a position on whether votes should be based on "how much do I like this as an article in a vacuum" vs "how much does it succeed at the task of being a book review"?

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founding

This review is what people have in mind when they dismiss the ACX community a place for precocious 13 year old know-it-alls. I read the review because Robert Wright's work is outstanding and deserves discussion in this forum. But it doesn't deserve this onanistic, willful misunderstanding and self-indulgent speculation about topics the review author seems to only be familiar with from reading the first half of some of the sentences in the book.

The actual book is well cited and builds its arguments carefully and reasonably. Obviously the reviewer wasn't able to connect with them and has their own ideas the nature of reality. I don't see what that has to do with the book itself, at all.

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I didn't hate this by any means, but I would counsel anyone that snark, though relentlessly attempted on the internet, is far harder to pull off than you might think. It's really easy to instill an unintended childish quality in a piece even while that piece says intelligent and true things. Go carefully in that direction. Just one reader's opinion.

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I thought this was really good. I confess that I don’t understand the idea that an idea of self ceasing to matter should or would lead toward utilitarianism. All those other selves are no more important than mine on this perspective and there’s no better reason to care about the others than to care about my own. Seems the lesson would be to stop caring about any sort of consequentialist system rather than supporting a move toward utility maximizing.

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http://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/

n.b. you have to read it to the end; it's a wild ride, but well worth the time (IMO).

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We have an immune system because our bodies actually do distinguish between ourselves and the rest of the world.

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"How much can you trust someone high on the fumes of their own breathing?" 😂

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Why should we believe for a second that meditation can make us a "Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe"? The review calls this "not implausible" and founds much of the reasoning in the review on that possibility (since it's apparently the end goal for meditation). This seems obviously provably false. Is there a single scrap of not-easily-faked evidence that meditators can feel other people's pain through some extrasensory mechanism? I don't think so. Given that this a central point of the review, I found this whole thing impossible to take seriously.

(Am I being too harsh here? Too literal? I've reread that section three times and each time it seems like the reviewer very much believes in the super-utilitarian as literally possible.)

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Please don't underestimate this sentence by the reviewer: "I’ll be intentionally strawmanning Wright."

YMMV, I thought it was a great book.

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>> Suppose you’re that Perfect Utilitarian who literally feels all the pain and pleasure of the universe. In that case, I think it's fair to say that you don't have a self.

No man is an island entire of itself.

>> (Or, if you prefer, your self is the whole universe.)

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

>> After all, what makes my toe mine, rather than yours?

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;

>> Arguably, the fact that when I stub it, I'm the one who feels pain, and not you.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

>> If I literally felt you stub your toe, I might start calling it "my toe."

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

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I propose an additional contest: best (worst) pun in the text of a review. This one should be in the running: "When reading Why Buddhism is True, I had Greg's tumor, er, in the back of my mind"

There are more pun entries in the book review contest so far than there are books; multiple jokes per review if the pattern holds. Some would say that those jokes are what should be edited out first, but it seems to be part of a subcultural communication style here, maybe, "write like Scott when possible."

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Whoever wrote this, to them I say:

Dude, you're clearly temperamentally not a Buddhist, but a Shaiva!

Your path is clearly flavoured by the destruction of the artificial boundaries of the of the self as opposed to the destruction of the self itself, you do not Fucking Hate™ the world or have revulsion for it and want to escape it to go into a monastery which is far away from all its horrible filth, you don't Fucking Hate™ all feelings and actions and engagement with the world like a Good Sutrayana Boy™, and your thesis has as one of its foci a topic which was also something the Shaivas made major contributions to and were quite into (aesthetics).

Join us!

We have (and strongly value) aesthetics, both academic and appreciatory, in a seamless whole! (This is not hyperbole - the current paradigm in classical/traditional Indian aesthetics was *founded* by a Shaiva yogi (meditator, you'd call him today), and has remained pre-eminent since. In fact, I think that even today, only a fraction of its potential has been unlocked - sad twist of history, and something I'm interested in moving forward.) (If you want more information about it, LMK and I'll answer with what resources I know of. It's probably interesting to you academically as well, given it's an aesthetic theory.)

And our meditation methods actually allow you to *appreciate* not just nice things, but all things and experiences *as themselves*. So if you find yourself accidentally smelling something disgusting, your reaction may be of disgust, but it's also of an appreciation of the disgusting smell as well as the disgust, as in "Man, this smell is so disgusting right now! So cool!" (Let me hasten to add we begin with nicer things than this, this is just an effect of cultivating the ability to nonjudgementally experience and savour all experience.) Normally, people can only have this experience vicariously, through media - few truly appreciate the 3D-6sense-full-immersion-VR experience that is their own life. One fruit of practice in this tradition is the aesthetisation of all of life.

And they also enhance greatly aesthetic enjoyment itself - many of the arts of India have historically found a great outburst of creative expression following the influence of our tradition! And no wonder - we don't Fucking Hate™ the world, in fact we (in a sense) Fucking Love™ all of it...

And huge amounts of creative juice, too! The ideal archetype in our system is not the monk with deadened eyes/feelings, it's the ecstatic yet unattached connoisseur of life itself, with all its ups and downs and joys and sorrows.

And strong, effective, healthy egos that are capable of acting in the world without self-centredness as step one (and 1.5) of our path! Because it's a path that is grown and built and developed from the ground up for householders (people in the world doing stuff), not monastics (though there are monastic variants, for those who are temperamentally like that - there are a few). Many of the major figures of the tradition were men (and women) of eminence.

And we don't Fucking Hate™ the mind and intellect either, nor reason; though we're suspicious of attractors of delusion and suffering it has a bad habit of falling into...

And feasts! And the very, very occasional powdered sugar donut, too (though we don't make a habit of it, for obvious reasons).

And cookies!

But more seriously - it seems clear that you're temperamentally more aligned with the Shaivas (your words and work and analysis betray your true affinity - you even articulated the Shaiva analogue of the no-self doctrine as something that appeals to you more, apparently as an independent preference, in the book review!), or the Vajrayana Buddhists (if you want to stay within the broader Buddhist fold).

I will add here that historically, we were bigger/richer/more popular/more influential/more creative than the Buddhists; it is thanks to an accident of history that Buddhism is more prominent and has greater name recognition and brand power today. Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism), for example, is what you get when you apply to Mahayana Buddhism the Tantrik mode of practice which was developed among the Shaivas. (Both traditions got fucked in India by the Muslims and their destruction of institutions, monasteries, and mathas, but Buddhism had established institutional bases outside, so it lived (though it died in India); we survived in India in a tremendously reduced form, sometimes worse than not surviving, and are beginning to recover only now, with the recovery of the various streams of the classical material.)

LMK if you (or anyone else) would like to know more, and I can post sources and links.

(Luckily, there is now available a (free) introductory practice course which provides instruction in a broad array of meditation practices from the tradition (suitable and safe for beginners), along with a solid introduction to the most useful/fundamental conceptual tools and categories, and general guidelines and so on; I'll post it only if someone wants it/asks for it, since it'd be spam otherwise.)

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Overall I'm unsure of how I feel about this review. I'm an occasional meditator and this is useful for motivating me to get back into what is, for me, an objectively good habit. OTOH I feel like it didn't really delve that deeply into what's interesting or unique about this book. Overall I think it's a fine review but maybe not at the level of many of the other entries.

New ranking:

1st Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)

3rd Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

4th Order Without Law

5th Why Buddhism is True

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Only being able to vote for one is a bad voting system. Why not take the one with the most hearts? Or have a form where we can vote for as many as we choose.

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Given that it is not immediately obvious why anyone should be interested in pursuing the happiness of all humanity, a connection with everything in existence, or philosophies that largely mirror Utilitarianism (especially considering the basic evolutionary predisposition toward self-interest and survival instincts that can and have superseded a number of similar 'ties to humanity,' such as blood relations), it behooves anyone making this claim to offer a moral argument as to why I or anyone else should have any interest in others at all.

That is, I'll not tolerate sneaky Utilitarians making out that their philosophical outlook is somehow the default one. The question is far from settled.

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> The nihilism problem legitimately [sic!] raised by Buddhist philosophy

Why the [sic!]? "Legitimately" is being used correctly here no? No typos either. Some kind of joke about legitimacy and nihilism?

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Why is there a [sic] after a correctly-spelled word? Is this a clever joke I'm missing?

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I initially thought the author was Ben who was thanked at the end of the article and went to ask him this question

Then I corrected myself and thought to post this question here instead

## Question

“Distinguishes craving and aversion from pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are intrinsic to feelings. Craving and aversion are how we react “

So this part seems to suggest (and I agree) our day to day we conflate pleasure with craving, and pain with aversion

What about desire and craving?

Most spritual writing talks about removing desire but maybe I’m too much of an engineer brain by thinking isn’t that self defeating because you would have to desire to stop all desires no?

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I found this review's comments about morality fairly annoying.

It's not exactly a great revelation "why moral people are sometimes described as 'selfless'" if the standard of morality that you are putting forward is altruism, i.e. never privileging your own interests over those of others. Actually I find it odd that someone could not get this.

And it talks about things like "It's all in the service of realizing that other people's perspectives are as real as your own, and their happiness as important as yours." But it doesn't at all defend the idea of altruism that this is supposed to be evidence for. Yes, other people's perspectives are real. But why is their happiness supposed to be as important *to you* as your own is *to you*, as opposed to its being as important *to them* as your own is *to you*? That is just as symmetrical and indeed I would say the more obvious interpretation. This is not defended.

The Buddhist/Humean "bundle theory" of the self, which the review doesn't clearly reject or endorse, purports to give a *reason* why the egoistic perspective is nonsensical: that there is no self whose interests it is possible to prioritize. Since there is no actual distinction between "you yourself" being tortured and anyone else being tortured, you should seek to minimize all torture equally. The problem is that this is a completely absurd view.

Moreover, defenders' interpretations in my experience bounce back and forth between two versions of it. The more mystical version says somehow your locus of experience could jump unpredictably into someone else's body, and therefore "you" (a term they reject but which is actually indispensable) could experience someone else's future pain in exactly the same way you experience your own current pain. The more nihilistic and skeptical version says there simply is no continuity whatsoever; it's all a matter of convention. In which case it is very difficult to see why any fleeting present-instant person should care about *anyone's* future pain.

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Wow, talk about a coincidence ! Just a few days ago :

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-flight-from-thinking/

and the accompanying Harper's article, for those who end up with a subscribe wall :

https://web.archive.org/web/20210317005421/https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/

Probably somewhat inaccurate and harsh TL;DR :

- Mindfulness meditation is being pushed in the West as a way to learn to stop thinking and love Moloch.

- Spiritual practice can be dangerous, especially the kind of spiritual practice where the goal is for you to end up as a monk separate from society hoping to achieve enlightenment.

- It's being taught by amateurs who have barely any experience in Buddhism, much less an actual monk training, who routinely conduct their practice in single week sessions where disciples overdose on meditation, and so their disciples end up with a much larger share of mental health issues.

- There are plenty of Western options for spiritual practice where there's an abundant literature, experienced teachers, and the kind of meditation that trains your cognitive tools instead of sabotaging them. [Disclaimer : the author, now retired, was one of them.]

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The "nihilistic vegetable" thing is interesting. I've read Scott's earlier posts on meditation and noticed that some features of enlightenment struck me as oddly relatable... as someone with a history of depression. I'm still not sure what to make of that.

Oh, and I think "~~give you puppies and unicorns and the ability to cure cancer~~" is meant to be struckthrough text. That's how Discord parses it, anyway, and reading it that way makes sense.

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If we want the reviews to be anonymous, there shouldn't be links to the authors personal philpapers profile in the review. This is not the first author to link their own work, so maybe we should just give up the anonymity aspect of the contest since it's clearly not feasible.

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Very interesting review, thank you!

To me the idea of no-self is strongly connected to physical determinism. There was a point in meditation where I, with absolute clarity, saw that all humans are just physical objects with weird behavior. They can't be anything else, because all behavior follows from fundamental subatomic laws.

In physical determinism there is no place for self or consciousness.

At the same time, in jarring juxtaposition, Humans aren't *really* physical creatures. If every human body was replaced by a magical robot body, we would not really be different people. I would still like my friends, be concerned about my social circle and all that stuff.

If you think about this, then most of the stuff you care about is not definable in a physical reality.

So, to me

No-Self = viewing the world purely through a physical lense

Opposite = viewing the world purely as abstract communication between humans, which sadly has to go through base reality

I believe that, in some part, meditation teaches to switch between the views. If you are in pain, well it's only synapses firing, what do you care? If you want to be kind? Well, every body contains an almost infinite amount of possibility, how could you not care about them?

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I liked this review! Of course, it's impossible to judge a review in terms of how well it represents the book if one hasn't read the book, and I haven't.

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I haven't been able to meditate myself (too boring and/or sleepy, though admittedly I haven't tried too hard), but from what I've seen, the Rationalist approach to meditation is a giant motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Meditation proponents talk a good game about using meditation to see awesome visions, "become better people", "abandon the self", become one with the Universe, gain increased intelligence and perception, acquire extrasensory and/or psionic powers, and generally become an enlightened energy being. But as soon as you ask them, "that sounds cool, can you prove it ?", they fade back into the shadows, and the only claims that withstand scrutiny are the ones about the awesome hallucinations -- and I'm not even convinced all of those are real.

My personal hypothesis (and I admit that I don't have any evidence, it's just a guess) is the cause and effect are reversed in this case. Perhaps some people are just really good at auto-hypnosis, due to some mutation or epigenetic trait or whatever. With a little training, they can learn to hallucinate at will, be it through Buddhist meditation, Pentecostal chanting, Shamanic rituals (the drug-free ones, if any such exist), etc. Such people go on to become spiritual leaders in whatever religions they'd chosen, preaching the merits of their personal meditation method -- which is still mostly pointless for the other 99% of the population.

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Brief review-of-the-review:

I was happy to see the topic and themes of the review since they get at one of my main reservations about the "rationalist" project: it's trying (correctly, in my view) to map out the limitations of evolved cognitive heuristics for decision-making while also embracing a worldview that can't really provide any other consistent basis for decision-making. So reading the review was helpful in that it provided some intuition as to why rationalists tend to be interested in Buddhist-style meditation, which also seems to be the reviewer's main point. I personally was disappointed when part II adopted, with not much argument, the standard utilitarian position, but it wouldn't be fair of me to hold that against the reviewer. More objectively disappointing were that a) I don't feel like I actually learned what the book's argument was, and b) part III felt like a non sequitur. The post as a whole feels more like a personal engagement with the book's themes than like a review as such. For what it is, though, it's a very good one!

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I've never had any propper meditation training but it seems that for the most of my life I've been... let say more enlightened than the rest of the people around. I've been friendly to everyone, I knew, and totally disregarded any attempts from other people to be hostile towards me. At first I didn't notice, but later on reflection I figured out that people are playing some weird status games which seems ridiculous and cruel. So I decided I won't participate. Again on reflection it seems that I was somewhat of an outcast for a long time but I didn't mind it at all. When people talked about the "enlightenned behaviour" of some saints or Jesus I was nodding along and actually taking it as an advice in ethics applicable to me and was confused why others seem to not do it. It was nearly impossible to offend or enrage me and I've always been fast to forgive. I've always had a very good control over my desires and fears. In general I've felt that I'm not supposed to have desires, but not due to some abusive parenting, on the contrary my parents have always been super supportive, but due to the fact that in the grand scheme of things, for the universe itself there is no "objective reason" to want anything. And yeah, I had a lot of religious experiences and insights directly from the God Himself, as I felt at the moment.

I wouldn't say that it was generally unhelpfull. I value a lot of my cognitive adaptations. But my dating life was terrible, at first. I felt the universal love and beauty centered in one person but had no idea what to do with it. And also I knew that in theory I can feel it towards anyone. Well maybe in full power only towards women - I'm still having problems with accepting my limiting heterosexuality. Than why this person? Why can't all the world be in love with everyone else? That still feels somewhat tormenting. Also at some point of my life I've found myself just going with the flow. I was doing bullshit job, and didn't have much motivation to change anything.

Anyway, at some point in my life I've learned that one can deeply care about "eartly matters", despite the universe being irrelivant because `There is light in the world, and it is us!` And so I've started practising "disenlightenment". I've started figuring out my desires and radically changed my life. Currently I'm learning to be angry with people to better stand up for my interests. That's hard because my initial reaction is to become uninvolved. But now I at least have the ability to consciously decide to be angry, though it still makes me feel somewhat dirty.

From my experience I can tell that our society isn't really optimized for enlightment-ish people. Not that it's a surprising conclusion, all things considered.

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> The same sensation Wright normally "defines as unpleasant" is there, without actually feeling unpleasant. (This is super weird, but...

This is very much in line with my personal experience on MDMA in regards to talking about difficult emotional topics. The feeling in there but most negative emotion is removed. Weird but definitely real.

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I want to watch a movie about the police hunting a serial-killer nicknamed the "Zen Predator of the Upper East Side”. He uses his Siddhis to "make oneself invisible" to attack his victims. "Sitting crosslegged he flies through the air like a winged bird", he leaves crime scenes. "He appears. He vanishes."

"He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, & mountains as if through space." He masteted "Telekinesis (Supernormal Locomotion)", "the power of Transformation", "The ability to replicate one's body" and

"Penetration of others' minds (Thought Reading)". The only hope is bringing back from retirement an old, enbittered meditator.

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Just an FYI for readers you can find Robert Wright on substack here: https://nonzero.substack.com/p/the-week-in-blob-cbb

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Not directly related to the review, but maybe I'll share my experience with meditation: started doing it more or less daily around late 2017, following the instructions of the 'Mind Illuminated'. I remember enjoying and being excited with the practice during the first months, where I was seeing myself progressing along the lines of the book. I wasn't practising *everyday, but most of the days, at least 30min. I have had nice experiences of more or less deep concentration, and interesting insights (at least at the time). Around 1.5 years more or less after I started I started slacking a bit on the practice due to a feeling of being stuck and not progressing (for those familiar with the book, around stage 6/7). Since then I have relaxed on the practice, and have had long periods without meditating at all. Not sure if directly related to meditation, but I have noticed some seemingly permanent changes on myself (all not that great): the mental chatter seems to be gone, and I seem to live is a state of awareness of myself and surroundings (sensations, feelings). Not sure this is usual, when meditating I notice visual memories, feelings, sensations, but thoughts, not really. I'm much less reactive emotionally - my usual experience has a neutral emotional quality to it (emotions do arise, but in a more detached way). Creativity and drive to do/learn things is also much lower compared to before (this sucks). Note that this hasn't affected work, personal relationships or social life, I'm a bit of an extrovert and I enjoy socialising, but I seem to be on auto-pilot most of the time. Concluding, if I'm correct on the assessment of these changes and they are due to meditation, not sure they have made me a better person (whatever that means) or improved my life. Maybe paradoxically, I continue meditating often and I enjoy the much-pleasant states I usually obtain. Not sure if this resonates with the experiences of some of you, feedback is welcome.

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Psych explanation: mindfulness meditation gives people a dose-dependent degree of depersonalization, derealization, dissociation. This tends to be helpful in small doses and harmful in large doses (rather like most psychoactive drugs; the common outcomes are either vegetable or psychosis). Recent post by David Chapman: https://vividness.live/meditation-risks

Self-other boundary: I think people tend to classify everything the world either as "self" (100% controlled) or "other" (0% controlled), and they temporarily project the boundary around things (the clothes they wear, the bike they ride) without being aware of doing it. I think this explains a lot of phenomena: because they lack intermediates to these buckets, saying that they are not as good drivers as they think they are would push driving all the way from 100% to 0% controlled, so they become angry and fight back at the claim. If they encounter clear evidence that they don't have 100% control of something they thought of as self, they either flip it over to 0% (we call this result learned helplessness) or they vigorously explain why the evidence doesn't matter. When other people bring up the incident (implying that it does matter according to others), they furiously double down on "no it doesn't matter and stop talking about it", which is I believe the other common trauma-response.

My favored explanation on how to break this is to imagine going to martial arts training, specifically to imagine grappling. Contested, partial control of both bodies is the whole point. Hopefully this is anvilicious enough to create a continuous spectrum of control between 100% and 0%. (The parallels to Cromwell's law in epistemology should be obvious.)

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For whatever it's worth I wrote a review of this book also a couple years ago. I have a somewhat different take, so you might find it interesting for comparison.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FGZk5PgoaNoLQrzAR/book-review-why-buddhism-is-true

I think there's some things the review and Wright are getting wrong, but it's sort of hard to explain. There's this thing about the way we typically point at what meditation and enlightenment are supposed to look like are easily misunderstood because we lack the verbal categories and experiences to directly point to the thing until after we've done it, so all the words used sort of point in the wrong direction if you take them too literally, and I feel like that's what happening here and being amplified by the fact that most Western Buddhists are practicing some kind of confused practices that result from taking the practices too literally and out of context (they can't help it, their teachers seem similarly confused as best I can tell).

I don't intend for this to be a general my-practice-is-better-than-yours kind of claim, but a more direct claim that lots of Westerners seem to be doing things that are just not effective practices for Westerners to be doing and getting weird outcomes because they're doing things that are maladaptive for their context. A great example is that strong renunciation practices seem poorly adapted to Westerners who don't lead lives full of obvious moment to moment suffering because we have central heating and air conditioners and modern medicine and plentiful food. Instead we Westerners are already pretty comfortable, and applying monastery grade meditation can carry us to places that don't really fit with wanting to live in a world full of cool things that are fun to interact with.

There's alternatives of course, but Wright doesn't really touch on them because he doesn't seem to be familiar with them.

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Interesting essay, need some time to digest it, although in general I agree with the general scepticism around attempts to align Buddhism with "modern" psychology.

I practise Vajrayana, idgaf about that tbh, seems like a modernist Theravadin/Zen thing mainly? I feel like the model of liberation and "enlightened activity" also differs a lot between Mahayana (incl. Vajrayana) and Theravada -- traditional texts like the Bodhisattva-bhumi have lots of advice on how the bodhisattva acts in the world (start a big business, don't aim for a little shop)

I have a little quibble about the Bhikkhu Bodhi quote. It seems like he was actually joking: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/science-of-meditation/essentialism-and-emptiness-KBT5Z

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My usual discomfort with Buddhism is the sentiment that Your mind is chaotic and cluttered and you must clean it! Order it! Make it meager and quiet like a temple. I feel like, why? I like the chaos, the many desires and interests and ideas bouncing around. It’s really fun! And helps accomplish a lot of my goals.

But this review is a new perspective to me. It starts with a single large scale instrumental goal that I identify with, How can I be a better utilitarian? And makes a compelling case that meditation can help. I can’t tell how Buddhist this is versus stealing their neat tools to go build your own thing, but I appreciate it and for the first time kind of want to meditate.

It still has tough competition though: what makes this better than Shut up and calculate? Do I really need to feel my friend stubbing his toe to buy bed nets in Africa? Couldn’t it be distracting, even making me over focus on pain I can observe rather than pain I can infer? Even if I identify with all of humanity and cease to feel self, how does that help with the problem of triage? Maybe a moderate amount of feeling the world spirit is enough and after that it’s just hard nose-to-the-grindstone work?

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I didn't like this review. It's hard to tell how much is even a review of the book vs. the reviewer's own interpretations of the subject matter; devoting a significant percentage of the review to strawmanning the book's contents did not seem like a defensible choice; in some ways, I feel less informed about the book than before I read the review, when I knew nothing about it; etc.

The review's big section on pain also seemed needlessly confused on what I thought weren't particularly complicated ideas. In particular, despite only some cursory meditation practice (i.e. <15 min per day for a few months, many years ago), the insight that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional seemed a) central to meditation, b) obvious once I'd been meditating for a while and c) while I couldn't make great use of this insight in my day-to-day life, it did serve me moderately well in improving my subjective experience of specific short events I knew I'd dislike, like visiting the dentist.

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The title of the book puts me off. "Why Buddhism Works For Me" I could accept. But Buddhism is just as dogmatic and anti-science as any other religion, and yes, it is a religion. Its basis is karma, which is metaphysical and unprovable.

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Excellent review. Impressive and perceptive engagement with the text. I've often found that the best authors, as well as the best reviewers, create a "map of decision" in which they position you well to agree or disagree with the study's core position. Weirdly, though, I've often found that author interviews or book reviews express more clearly and compellingly the positions and arguments there-fore. Does anyone know of books or articles written on 'how to write a steel book review?" Regardless, and again, excellent review.

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Meditation + Steve Jobs + "creative" ... no?

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