Really interesting ideas here and mostly rings true. There is one part I'm stuck on...isn't the fact that we have evolved these hardwired drives to act (avoiding risk, pursuing rewards, etc.) pretty strong evidence that the territory is NOT contoured to meet our needs? The very presence of these drives seems to be evidence that they are needed for survival (though, not for happiness/contentment/enlightenment so maybe there is some kind of tradeoff there where you marginally reduce your gene survival likelihood in exchange for greater peace of mind?)
EDIT: hoping you can point out a flaw in this idea, because otherwise I really like the concept outlined in your post.
This is clearly something I have to articular better. By 'the territory is contoured to our needs' I mean "you can use a greedy algorithm to navigate the territory effectively."
In other words, what you _don't_ need to do is spend a bunch of time thinking about how the next five years will play out, anxiously trying to predict and plan future consequences. You can, instead, do something like 'aim for a point at t=infinity where all the best outcomes and more have happened' and then try to do the best you can _today_.
Yes, we still have to act in the world in order to survive. Unless you are a monk living in a monestary where routine meets all your needs, this also includes the need to do things like plan, prepare etc.
But what you _don't_ need to do is simulate a large number of future hypotheticals while in a state of mild fear, and then run some code that's like "but what if some OTHER bad thing happens" and then have this code trigger a 'present danger' flag.
IF the territory had a certain shape - say, if there were only a very narrow path that you had to follow for your family to survive, and this path required purchasing a weird set of spices which had no value and tested terrible, and then keeping them in a jar that you sung a weird orcish incantation to every third thursday - well, that world would be a much scarier one.
What i'm claiming is that there's a deep structure to the world that's orthogonal to the "it's all made of atoms" structure. Not that the atomic structure is _false_, but more that it's an implementation detail that, for the most part, is only relevant when you make it so. There's _another_ deep structure that's intuitive and simpler to follow - you just have to _both_ trust reality, and then also humbly obey a narrow path that says something like, 'keep aiming for that point at infinity, rather than prioritizing pleasure and comfort now'. If you follow _that_ path, what happens is, opportunities and good things just sort of fall into place for you. Things get better for you at an exponential pace, and relationships deepen. This doesn't have to be magic if you understand it as something like, "every brain already contains multiple personalities, and 'the kingdom of heaven' spreads virally, as long as you keep feeding it from the source."
I agree with a lot of what you've said here, but I think you focus too much on the "experience" of not having a self. I think that an experience of not-self is almost entirely unrelated to not-self as the Buddha taught it — that's why short-lived experiences of not-self that one may have while on psychedelics don't tend to lead to actual enlightenment as most people would understand it. Those experiences can be useful, healing, and helpful, but they are (usually) something different. Those are what I would consider trance experiences, as they function by keeping the mind entranced on a specific experience, and then once the experience changes, the trance ends.
Not-self could be better described as tacit knowledge in relation to experience, which I think is similar to what you're saying, but you seem to frame it as an experience itself. I guess depending on what exactly you mean by experience, you could say that it is an experience of some sort, but the point I'm trying to get at is that you can have the experience of thinking "I have a self, I am me, and this body is mine" while simultaneously still understanding that as not-self. It seems more along the lines of shifting the "transcendental basis" that orders experience itself, so a layer/level below experience. That's why the Buddha speaks in apparent opposites, like saying that an arahant is one who does not suffer amongst suffering or does not grieve amongst grief.
Again, I don't know how you actually mean the terms you've said here, but generally, this is why one of the first directives is to understand suffering, not to take our default conception of suffering as what suffering actually is. So becoming ok with suffering leading to less suffering, as you described it, would in some sense be stopping short of the actual goal, which is the complete elimination of the possibility of any suffering by understanding what dukka actually is. Being in a trance state sounds like operating on the level of experience, which is fundamentally opposite to what the Buddha taught (as I understand it, at least).
One other thing I found interesting is your usage of the word womb, as yoniso manasikara is sometimes translated as "womb attention" (at least by Hillside Hermitage).
Serendipitously apropos and a really fun read. I'm curious if you've expanded elsewhere on this thought:
> Why do we feel an “I”? I think it’s because computation has a cost. The “weighing valence of different paths” process is metabolically intensive. An “i” symbol which carries out the task and experiences the consequences can be the energy pump that resolves the paradox of escher’s staircase. ...
I am wondering if the correct interpretation of this passage might be that qualia accompany metabolic action and coalesce into an "I" through temporal patterns so that the "I" is energized through recognition of repetition; or that the "I" symbol serves to reduce the energy needed to organize action and therefore creates a metastable equilibrium.
Thanks for the kind words. I think i mean... maybe... both?
The first part - that there's some qualia for metabolic action, yeah, I definitely think that. Intentional effort's probably related but maybe not the same - something something mid anterior cingulate cortex over there.
But I would think that some notion of an 'i' - i.e. a 'body controller' would _also_ be useful for organizing all kind of actions; you'd remember repetitive actions in terms of 'what i did' in a way that's independent of context. That might also suggest that an industrialized world where we do lots of repetitive actions might end up increasing the sense of a 'separate self' which is not part of the world - the more often you repeat similar physical routes, maybe you end up 'learning' that pattern.
Really interesting ideas here and mostly rings true. There is one part I'm stuck on...isn't the fact that we have evolved these hardwired drives to act (avoiding risk, pursuing rewards, etc.) pretty strong evidence that the territory is NOT contoured to meet our needs? The very presence of these drives seems to be evidence that they are needed for survival (though, not for happiness/contentment/enlightenment so maybe there is some kind of tradeoff there where you marginally reduce your gene survival likelihood in exchange for greater peace of mind?)
EDIT: hoping you can point out a flaw in this idea, because otherwise I really like the concept outlined in your post.
This is clearly something I have to articular better. By 'the territory is contoured to our needs' I mean "you can use a greedy algorithm to navigate the territory effectively."
In other words, what you _don't_ need to do is spend a bunch of time thinking about how the next five years will play out, anxiously trying to predict and plan future consequences. You can, instead, do something like 'aim for a point at t=infinity where all the best outcomes and more have happened' and then try to do the best you can _today_.
Yes, we still have to act in the world in order to survive. Unless you are a monk living in a monestary where routine meets all your needs, this also includes the need to do things like plan, prepare etc.
But what you _don't_ need to do is simulate a large number of future hypotheticals while in a state of mild fear, and then run some code that's like "but what if some OTHER bad thing happens" and then have this code trigger a 'present danger' flag.
IF the territory had a certain shape - say, if there were only a very narrow path that you had to follow for your family to survive, and this path required purchasing a weird set of spices which had no value and tested terrible, and then keeping them in a jar that you sung a weird orcish incantation to every third thursday - well, that world would be a much scarier one.
What i'm claiming is that there's a deep structure to the world that's orthogonal to the "it's all made of atoms" structure. Not that the atomic structure is _false_, but more that it's an implementation detail that, for the most part, is only relevant when you make it so. There's _another_ deep structure that's intuitive and simpler to follow - you just have to _both_ trust reality, and then also humbly obey a narrow path that says something like, 'keep aiming for that point at infinity, rather than prioritizing pleasure and comfort now'. If you follow _that_ path, what happens is, opportunities and good things just sort of fall into place for you. Things get better for you at an exponential pace, and relationships deepen. This doesn't have to be magic if you understand it as something like, "every brain already contains multiple personalities, and 'the kingdom of heaven' spreads virally, as long as you keep feeding it from the source."
I agree with a lot of what you've said here, but I think you focus too much on the "experience" of not having a self. I think that an experience of not-self is almost entirely unrelated to not-self as the Buddha taught it — that's why short-lived experiences of not-self that one may have while on psychedelics don't tend to lead to actual enlightenment as most people would understand it. Those experiences can be useful, healing, and helpful, but they are (usually) something different. Those are what I would consider trance experiences, as they function by keeping the mind entranced on a specific experience, and then once the experience changes, the trance ends.
Not-self could be better described as tacit knowledge in relation to experience, which I think is similar to what you're saying, but you seem to frame it as an experience itself. I guess depending on what exactly you mean by experience, you could say that it is an experience of some sort, but the point I'm trying to get at is that you can have the experience of thinking "I have a self, I am me, and this body is mine" while simultaneously still understanding that as not-self. It seems more along the lines of shifting the "transcendental basis" that orders experience itself, so a layer/level below experience. That's why the Buddha speaks in apparent opposites, like saying that an arahant is one who does not suffer amongst suffering or does not grieve amongst grief.
Again, I don't know how you actually mean the terms you've said here, but generally, this is why one of the first directives is to understand suffering, not to take our default conception of suffering as what suffering actually is. So becoming ok with suffering leading to less suffering, as you described it, would in some sense be stopping short of the actual goal, which is the complete elimination of the possibility of any suffering by understanding what dukka actually is. Being in a trance state sounds like operating on the level of experience, which is fundamentally opposite to what the Buddha taught (as I understand it, at least).
One other thing I found interesting is your usage of the word womb, as yoniso manasikara is sometimes translated as "womb attention" (at least by Hillside Hermitage).
Serendipitously apropos and a really fun read. I'm curious if you've expanded elsewhere on this thought:
> Why do we feel an “I”? I think it’s because computation has a cost. The “weighing valence of different paths” process is metabolically intensive. An “i” symbol which carries out the task and experiences the consequences can be the energy pump that resolves the paradox of escher’s staircase. ...
I am wondering if the correct interpretation of this passage might be that qualia accompany metabolic action and coalesce into an "I" through temporal patterns so that the "I" is energized through recognition of repetition; or that the "I" symbol serves to reduce the energy needed to organize action and therefore creates a metastable equilibrium.
Thanks for the kind words. I think i mean... maybe... both?
The first part - that there's some qualia for metabolic action, yeah, I definitely think that. Intentional effort's probably related but maybe not the same - something something mid anterior cingulate cortex over there.
But I would think that some notion of an 'i' - i.e. a 'body controller' would _also_ be useful for organizing all kind of actions; you'd remember repetitive actions in terms of 'what i did' in a way that's independent of context. That might also suggest that an industrialized world where we do lots of repetitive actions might end up increasing the sense of a 'separate self' which is not part of the world - the more often you repeat similar physical routes, maybe you end up 'learning' that pattern.