GrahamH wrote:

Teuton wrote:The intuition is the justification. The concept of an experiencerless experience, an experience which is experienced by nothing/nobody just doesn't make any rational sense.

Intuition is not reason. Of all things, given how the mind is not open to it's own nature, there is no strong reason to suppose that intuitions about mind are reliable. I think there are rational alternatives well worth consideration, but we do have to lay aside our intuition to entertain them.

You don't have to agree with Dennett in general to see his point here:

Dennett wrote:A closing observation: I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don’t respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. “But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!” No kidding. That’s the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. That’s the trouble with “pure” philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive (like the Copernican theory--at least at first), this means that “pure” philosophy must just concede impotence and retreat into conservative conceptual anthropology until the advance of science puts it out of its misery. Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of these folk concepts are illusion-generators. The way to take that prospect seriously is to consider theories that propose revisions to those concepts.

Teuton wrote:

GrahamH wrote:Mind you, if all you mean by that is that experience requires an animal it isn't really saying much.

To say that experiences are subject-dependent is not to say that subjects of experience are animals or material things at all. For instance, Berkeley agrees with me that experiences (what he calls "ideas") depend on experiencers which are not experiences themselves, but he believes that experiencers are immaterial things rather than material ones.

You don't claim experiencers are immaterial things, do you? Are you claiming experiencers are human animals? If you are only saying the humans experience you aren't saying much.

Teuton wrote:

GrahamH wrote:But perhaps all Harris is saying, and what you are responding to , is merely that he can lose a sense of being somewhere and lose a sense of being a thinker.

There may be phenomenological cases of nonpathological meditation or pathological delusion in which the subject loses its sense of ownership, i.e. the sense of being the owner, haver, and bearer of its experiences and thoughts, getting into a state of decentered "self-forgetfulness", in which it is deeply immersed in and absorbed by "pure experience". But the possibility of phenomenally "selfless" experience doesn't entail the possibility of ontically "selfless", i.e. subjectless, experience

GrahamH wrote:

Harris wrote:If you turn consciousness upon itself in this moment, you will discover that your mind tends to wander into thought. If you look closely at thoughts themselves, you will notice that they continually arise and pass away. If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have — “What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!”— is just another thought, arising in consciousness.

Perhaps you don't have those senses anyway, and have a all-in-one sense of just being a 'human animal', drawing no distinction between thought and action. It seems unlikely. I suspect that most people have a very strong sense of being a thinker, and thought driving action. That sense is open to challenge. I have that sense that I am thinking. It doesn't seem to me that there are thoughts. But rationally I think that makes more sense, that there is not a subject thinker thinking thoughts. The subject is probably just another 'thought' that a human animal creates that really doesn't need a subject to also have/experience the thought.

My being a thinker is independent of my thinking that I am a thinker. I certainly don't find the thinker I am among my thoughts, because thinkers aren't thoughts—only thoughts about thinkers are. Thinkers are represented in thought by "thinker-thoughts", but the represented thinkers are thought-transcendent entities.

We only think there is a thinker because of the thought that there is a thinker.

The thing about the thinker is that is is not inherently conscious of producing thought. What we call thinking is a stream of concepts, linkages and sense of authorship, but we are incapable of digging down to a full account of how thoughts are formed. Thoughts contain meaning and have structure, but the creation of the meaning and structure is not done consciously. There is no subjective guarantee that a subject thinker made any thought, even if we suppose that a subject experienced the content of the thought and the sense of authorship.

That is indeed counter intuitive, but how can you tell if any thought is a creation of your subjective mind (or human animal if you prefer)?

An idea or perhaps a tune might come to mind and we will experience ownership of it unless we are explicitly aware of some other source for the content. It is a common occurrence to have something come to mind only to later realise that the content was most likely from some other source.

I'm not suggesting here that thoughts are beamed into our minds from outside. I'm pointing to the possibility that our intuitions could be deeply wrong about how thoughts arise and it cannot be certain that the subjective mind is the thinker of the thoughts it appears to experience.

Suppose for a moment that every thought a subjective mind experiences is 'beamed in'. What are the implications of that for the certain intuition that the subject mind knows it's own reality?

Anyway, this could go on a long way. Just please question your strongest intuitions about mind.

There ya go.

And what contradictions do you suggest are in there?

GrahamH wrote:

I have no particular reasons to doubt numerous reports, anecdotal and scientific, that meditative practices can reduce symptom of stress and make people feel good. My personal experience, limited as it is, does not dominate that view. But these are small claims. Relaxing is relaxing. Relaxing is not stressful. Reducing distraction allows room for awareness of other things.

Therefore what conclusion would you draw in relation to the line of argument you have been more or less pursuing?

GrahamH wrote:
Specifically I mean anything that takes brain function well outside normal operation. Meditative practices that flat-line EEG clearly count. Psychotropics clearly count.

I have said a few times I am talking about meditation and not the use of drugs, so you need to improve the function of your senses and stop adding this distortion to your argument. Since you are struggling to understand how it is possible for something like meditation to provide a clearer view of reality, why do you imagine extreme states of meditation that can produce flatline EEG are the same as drugs (ie. delusional) and not a better view of reality than ‘normal’ states of mind which are mostly quite befuddled for most people.

GrahamH wrote:
Clearly I don't think that. I'm question the fitness of extreme alteration of brain function to reveal deep truth about reality.

Since you agree later in your same post that meditation as a means to allow our senses to operate better with less clutter in the mind, why are questioning the efficacy of the state of mind in advanced forms of meditation. Do you have reason to believe that the effects on the mind suddenly changes from sharper senses in lower levels, then somehow flips back to delusion for those people who go deeper into meditation.

GrahamH wrote:
I have taken neither to the extreme I'm referring to, so personal experience does not inform me on that.

So what did you experiences of meditation and exercise show you? That your mind became clearer, you seemed to have more time, your senses were sharper? In fact at base levels or in combination (meditation while exercising) some benefits will be similar? I am not suggesting that someone who exercises 30 mins x 5 times per week will probably not get 10 times the benefit if he exercise for 300 minutes 5 days per week. Are you suggesting that if someone one spends most of their waking life in meditation and flatlines EEG that they will flip into extreme delusions?

TMB wrote:[ Then perhaps you should read and deconstruct my responses with better attention, something that meditation also provides. The logic is simple, meditation is a process that allows us to quiet constant chatter of thoughts in our heads. There are various types of meditation that do this by focussing on something, like the bodily senses for example. The net effect of training ourselves to not be as distracted by our thoughts, and more in tune with our bodies. In so doing, you will find that we are more in touch with reality, because our thoughts usually take us into the past or future and to different places from where our bodies are. Our physical reality is here and now and in order to be able to engage with and fully see it, our sense need to be operating. Once again it is not rocket science. I imagine you could ask someone if they could describe what they saw while driving into the office today. The chances are they would have been day dreaming for much of the time, meaning that they did not see much of the world they were driving through because indeed their senses were absent. Contrast that with someone who is totally engaged, but relaxed and alert, and whose mind does not take him off with the fairies, but instead is aware of all the sights and sounds, smells and sensations.

GrahamH wrote:
I have no issue with that.

If you have no issue with this then why have you taken the approach in the first part of your response?

TMB wrote:This means the mindful person has a far better grasp of reality than someone who is off with his thoughts somewhere else. This is not even ‘mind bending’, just simple logic. Constant repetition of meditation allows our senses to operate as they are designed to, and our thoughts, though always present, stay in background where they belong until you bring them forward to examine and make necessary decisions from them.

GrahamH wrote:
No problem there either, taking 'reality' in the worldly sense.

Here you go again, does this logic fail once meditation is taken to extremes, and if so why should this be, and at what point does it happen?

My comment about the way our senses are better tuned through mediation, our thought brought under control and inevitably we become more aware of the physical reality uses those better tuned senses. How does it work that the senses that interpret reality (and assuming a normally functioning person) would get a better view of reality, yet with more use and finer tuning of these senses and better control of think, starts to have illusions that you see as analogous to mind bending drugs.

I think the main source of confusion here is that you seem to be taking 'reality' to sense perception of the physical world and I used the term in scare quotes as a claim to see 'beyond the veil' of the physical world, as might be implied by a topic with 'mysterian' in the title. I think I made enough references to 'mystical reality' in various forms to convey that sense of the word.

GrahamH wrote:I think the main source of confusion here is that you seem to be taking 'reality' to sense perception of the physical world and I used the term in scare quotes as a claim to see 'beyond the veil' of the physical world, as might be implied by a topic with 'mysterian' in the title. I think I made enough references to 'mystical reality' in various forms to convey that sense of the word.

How is it hat you know this 'mystical reality' that some refer to is the caricature you make of it?

GrahamH wrote:I think the main source of confusion here is that you seem to be taking 'reality' to sense perception of the physical world and I used the term in scare quotes as a claim to see 'beyond the veil' of the physical world, as might be implied by a topic with 'mysterian' in the title. I think I made enough references to 'mystical reality' in various forms to convey that sense of the word.

In that case how do you support your assumption that a process that by its very nature will give practitioners a better chance of knowing the material reality, and in doing so not also provide more profound insights? These more profound insights might seem mysterian to the uninitiated, and if you can support an opposing position either with logic or evidence, I do not see how you can be sceptical on the basis of your own ignorance. Your starting position was made without any insight on the basics of meditation and your own practice of meditation did not prompt any feedback that you were willing to share, so why disclose this fact at all. On what basis do you have any position whatever on where advanced meditation might lead a practitioner when you were unaware of the basics? Comparing drug use to meditation as if you had insight to these is irresponsible, I have not read Harris book so cannot comment on how he positions drugs in relation to meditation, but simple logic and experience tells me that if you see them as analogous you had need to have strong support, something I have not see thus far from your posts.

TMB wrote:In that case how do you support your assumption that a process that by its very nature will give practitioners a better chance of knowing the material reality, and in doing so not also provide more profound insights? These more profound insights might seem mysterian to the uninitiated, and if you can support an opposing position either with logic or evidence, I do not see how you can be sceptical on the basis of your own ignorance.

What sort of 'profound insights' do you have in mind?, as distinct from 'material reality', do you have in mind?

TMB wrote:Comparing drug use to meditation as if you had insight to these is irresponsible, I have not read Harris book so cannot comment on how he positions drugs in relation to meditation, but simple logic and experience tells me that if you see them as analogous you had need to have strong support, something I have not see thus far from your posts.

The only analogue is at the more extreme end of effect on brain function, as I set out.

This is a digression from the topic of the views of Sam Harris.

Sam Harris on mindfulness:

I'm am really liking this guy.

GrahamH wrote:What sort of 'profound insights' do you have in mind?, as distinct from 'material reality', do you have in mind?

You avoid answering my points directly and if you were more mindful of what I have been saying and asking you, you might understand why this question is not useful.

Dialectic can be useful when done in the context of direct and necessarily subjective experience, otherwise it like trying to teach someone to swim using a book and not getting into the water. Only with experience of swimming will the instructions be properly known and applicable, meditation is the same.

To separate mundane from profound is not exact and on a continuum. Its not hard to see that if you can focus your attention on the senses and body, fully observing and engaging with the material world, that you will know and get better results from the material world than someone whose mind is a chattering monkey preventing the senses from accurately observing reality. The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane, but also richly experienced by a practised meditator. Food tastes and smells are more intense and accurate, visuals more vivid, sounds clearer, and there is a sense that behind sounds is a matrix of silence. All this arises because our thoughts do not dominate, are in the background and the senses operate better.

The thoughts are also better observed and more clarity is given to things that are mentioned by Harris like the sense of self. Life itself and the associated existential anxiety are also better seen, these are all more profound than the physical world. In a mind cluttered with uncontrolled thoughts, existential anxieties and the need for meaning in life are still present but they get pushed into the background where they can do great harm to individuals if not confronted correctly. We know that death is a material reality that happens to us at some point and we have evolved to have a deep and abiding desire not to be dead. This bald fact is not well addressed in western society and I would say we do not have profound insight into this, nor in conjunction with what it means to be alive, to have a sense of self.

Profound insights are only accessible to very experienced or tuned meditators and since I am neither, I am intellectualising this and do not speak from personal experience. However I do have enough experience and done enough research to believe that if I practice meditation sufficiently I might know these. I also have no concern that I am embarking on a path quite unlike a drug induced one, or something else that I know to be harmful. Since there are many things that are harmful to life, including inevitable death, I need a way to come to terms with existential anxiety and I have reason to believe meditation in conjunction with yoga and qi gong is the best means to do this.

GrahamH wrote:The only analogue is at the more extreme end of effect on brain function, as I set out.
This is a digression from the topic of the views of Sam Harris.

And it was a digression of your making by continuing to drop drugs into the discussion despite me noting this more than once.

The problem is that we only have access to mental models of things. What else do we have? The answer to the rock 'n' roll question, "who put the Ding in the Ding an sich?" is "nobody, so far."

I don't have much problem saying that the sense of self is an illusion, though the wording might be sloppy. The sense, of course, appears to be as real as anything. The mental construct that it is about is probably an illusion. Or, at minimum, there isn't really a solid reason to consider to assume that it isn't an illusion, which is about the best that can be said.

Nietzsche pointed out that we see the word mythologically. As I might say instead, we see the world in terms of models. The mind, if you want to call it that, or the brain, has what amount to folk models, not only about the stuff outside brains but the stuff inside brains.

The standard rational folk model of the brain of the brain, which owes a lot to Descartes, is broken in many ways, to the point that one can declare it outright wrong. But so is the folk model of reality, classical thought. We can show this by how difficult it is to wrap one's head around quantum behavior, and the elaborate interpretation mechanism that people go through, essentially to feel comfortable with the discomfiting.

Harris pisses some atheists off, probably for a lot of reason. One is that the rational folk model, which is wrong, seems to be quite popular amongst them. That's probably unfair to Harris.

However, there's another objection or at least caution that is legitimate. I suppose it's possible that mindfulness or meditation or whatever you want to call it can help some people to recognize that the standard model is broken. That's a good insight. However, that does not mean that any "insights" garnered through that process are any better. They may be, and I think probably are, just as folksy.

In general, I think that having more perspectives tend to be better. But the allure of the new, different perspective, is dangerous. It snares and ruins many a young college mind. Just because, to quote the Firesign Theatre, everything you know is wrong doesn't mean that what you get next is any better.

That's why I like science. It has an acknowledgment that we are only dealing with models, and there's at least an attempt to describe models precisely and clearly enough that multiple people can look at them and meaningfully discuss their quality.

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

SpeedOfSound wrote:

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

Wishful thinking?

TMB wrote:Profound insights are only accessible to very experienced or tuned meditators and since I am neither, I am intellectualising this and do not speak from personal experience. However I do have enough experience and done enough research to believe that if I practice meditation sufficiently I might know these.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

The dictionary definition has less of a shadow than the stigma some might attach to this adjective

1. of or pertaining to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly:
mundane affairs.
2. common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative.
3. of or pertaining to the world, universe, or earth.

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

Wishful thinking?

TMB wrote:Profound insights are only accessible to very experienced or tuned meditators and since I am neither, I am intellectualising this and do not speak from personal experience. However I do have enough experience and done enough research to believe that if I practice meditation sufficiently I might know these.

Sour grapes?

TMB wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

Wishful thinking?

TMB wrote:Profound insights are only accessible to very experienced or tuned meditators and since I am neither, I am intellectualising this and do not speak from personal experience. However I do have enough experience and done enough research to believe that if I practice meditation sufficiently I might know these.

Sour grapes?

You made a hopeful statement of faith that you 'might know these'.

Who does know these, and just what do they know?

My suspicion is that these are experiences of profundity rather than acquisition of actual profound knowledge about anything substantive. Deep meditation, and other practices, seem apt for producing experiences of profundity. I have doubts that they are apt for accessing actual knowledge about 'profound reality'.

I'm open to your reading your considered reasoning.

Huge architecture can inspire experience of awe. That doesn't mean people sense the presence of god in a cathedral. It means that we can be impressed by extravagant scale or detail of precise symmetry.

TMB wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

TMB wrote:...The observed material reality in which we operate is mundane,...

Why would you say such a thing?

The dictionary definition has less of a shadow than the stigma some might attach to this adjective

1. of or pertaining to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly:
mundane affairs.
2. common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative.
3. of or pertaining to the world, universe, or earth.

Stigma? If someone finds the material mundane then I think it indicates that they lack imagination, not material.

This is one of the things I learned from meditation of the type you are talking about. Counter to your efforts to get Graham out of the drug zone I must be honest and admit that certain drugs in my past also changed my relationship with the material.

The mundane world of the Protestants is not reality. It's bad tv script inside their own head.

GrahamH wrote:

TMB wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Why would you say such a thing?

Wishful thinking?

TMB wrote:Profound insights are only accessible to very experienced or tuned meditators and since I am neither, I am intellectualising this and do not speak from personal experience. However I do have enough experience and done enough research to believe that if I practice meditation sufficiently I might know these.

Sour grapes?

You made a hopeful statement of faith that you 'might know these'.

Who does know these, and just what do they know?

My suspicion is that these are experiences of profundity rather than acquisition of actual profound knowledge about anything substantive. Deep meditation, and other practices, seem apt for producing experiences of profundity. I have doubts that they are apt for accessing actual knowledge about 'profound reality'.

I'm open to your reading your considered reasoning.

Huge architecture can inspire experience of awe. That doesn't mean people sense the presence of god in a cathedral. It means that we can be impressed by extravagant scale or detail of precise symmetry.

Experience of profundity? I suppose that when a highly stressed miserable person suddenly finds a few moments of peace and simple pleasures due to being a living ting that they would feel something profound has happened. Spiritual experience phenomena are thick with this feeling I guess but let's not let seizures be conflated with normal skill acquired by practice.

In your whole dialog with TMB you have guarding this little beetle in head. This idea of the charlatan master in his robes being all profound with his followers. A caricature of what TMB is talking about.

SpeedOfSound wrote:Experience of profundity?

You think you cannot not experience profundity? Do you deny that things can seem profound?
What exactly are you chuckling at?

SpeedOfSound wrote:I suppose that when a highly stressed miserable person suddenly finds a few moments of peace and simple pleasures due to being a living ting that they would feel something profound has happened. Spiritual experience phenomena are thick with this feeling I guess but let's not let seizures be conflated with normal skill acquired by practice.

Good, tell me about how you tell the difference between Spiritual experience phenomena are thick with this feeling and the real thing itself.

SpeedOfSound wrote:In your whole dialog with TMB you have guarding this little beetle in head. This idea of the charlatan master in his robes being all profound with his followers. A caricature of what TMB is talking about.

I'm not suggesting charlatans, I'm asking how anyone is equipped to know true profound knowledge, and what such knowledge is. I don't doubt that people have these experience and believe in them.

You are the only one talking about 'true profound knowledge' here. It's your fucking beetle.