The west has shifted into believing subjective experience is useless compared to objective knowledge.
This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists.
We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value.
Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.
Yes. All my therapists have referred me to meditation and explained to me that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy takes some influence from it.
There are tons of articles published in journals on it.
As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
I once told a CBT therapist that it sounded very similar to religious ideas an quoted something from the Bible that matched it. He agreed. Really the follow up to that is another Biblical quote: "there is nothing new under the sun".
> As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
If it works it should be testable. A lot of traditional medicine does work, but then it can be incorporated in to medicine. If alternative medicine (traditional or otherwise) works we call it "medicine". If it shines in subjective experience but is not testable, it just sounds like it provides a temporary feel good experience.
>it just sounds like it provides a temporary feel good experience.
I think you're missing the point of optimizing for subjective experience over objective knowledge. The feel good experience is the point. Subjectively, life is like playing a video game; you do what _works_ to have good mental health.
Sure it's fun to wonder what the video game's code looks like, but that's not the point of playing the game.
You will never experience the BackEnd of your brain. We can affect it of course, with medication and surgery etc. I take medication for anxiety myself, but I also meditate, and it's the union of FrontEnd behaviors and BackEnd modification that gives you wellbeing.
Also, subjective experience is testable, it's just not testable by anyone but YOU. You try things out and you see how your subjective experience changes.
There are tests we've done (MRIs on meditators) that show the neural correlates of meditation etc, but again that's not the point: You are going to die and all your knowledge will be annihilated, so play the game to have the best life by optimizing your subjective experience of every moment of life.
I don't know, it seems everyone has different idea of what meditation is and if it doesn't work for me I will be told I am doing it wrong in some way. At least CBT seems to have a clear enough definition and instructions.
Yeah, it's these "different ideas" of contemplative studies that gives it a bad name. There are especially a lot of grifters in the west selling snakeoil "eastern medicine."
Ultimately, you have to try things out and see what affects your subjective experience. You will know by direct experience what is transforming your experience.
If something doesn't work, throw it out.
There are a lot of different ways of meditating, because the brain is complex enough that every person has different predispositions. But ultimately meditation begins by watching your mind so that you can know how it behaves and then testing different things to see how the behavior changes.
But I do like CBT and agree is has the strength you're talking about; it has the rigorousness of scientific research behind it, so its solutions tend to be applicable for larger categories of people.
Science usually throws out anomalies where something only works or doesn't work for a few individuals.
Yeah, meditation as a practice seems kind of this "holier than thou" thing that I seem to not get. I get annoyed, impatient, frustrated trying to follow the guidelines. I have tried different things such as Mindspace, guided meditation, random YouTube videos and other things. They all just feel so boring and frustrating. Is it a flaw with me that I find them so boring? That I can't handle it?
However what I think has helped me is actually observing my negative thoughts or someone questioning those thoughts - in the "so what?" sense. I am worried or having negative thoughts - and there's this idea of "so what?" and reframing it.
I'm scared of failing at something or saying the wrong thing. So what if I fail? This will continue in to further ideas of how the failure might impact my life and "so what's" after that until I can't complain anymore. At certain point I am forced to find my negative thoughts ridiculous.
Hey man. Graal was an intimate part of my life growing up. I had thousands of hours logged on Valikorlia and a few hundred on other playerworlds. It was a good idea. It's where I first started programming; graalscript was my first language.
It's sad to see it go. I really wish we could have a game experience that had the community graal did. There's not much with that level of involvement for players anymore; it's all now downstream of ivory towers and extremely restricted.
Likewise! I played a ton of Graal Online during my adolescence and owe my programming career to its level editor (NPC scripting). I was able to learn how to program without reading much documentation outside of reading its command sidebar and inferring from others' NPC scripts. Thinking about it now, they did an outstanding job making it very straightforward to learn and use.
I played Graal for 10+ years, mostly on Valikorlia, but I tossed around Era and Maloria too; I started some time between 2002 and 2005.
But I didn't realize its main website had been taken down, as I was literally on it a few months ago. Did it die completely? I am no longer able to login with the client.
That's too bad. It really was ahead of its time technologically; it's where my programming life got started and I was intimately familiar with graalscript and GS2.
This was my experience too :) Was a bit more promiscuous with where I helped out, including UN, Graal Kingdoms and Zone, but also spent a lot of time building my own playerworlds.
> thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughts being weighed and slowed down
This has been my experience as I've learned to stop thinking in words. I realized at one point that words are learned; which means that there was a point where you were thinking without them, before you learned language.
I've done a lot of work on myself with therapy and meditation and learned to think without words. And what I've noticed is that when I think with words, they occur AFTER what I'd call sensational thinking; thinking without words is a full-body sensational experience for me and not something that only occurs in a slice of the mind like a vapid calculation.
>mind chatter
A few times I've experienced acting without any chatter. A pure quietness. It's wonderful.
I've been working on myself to make this a permanent thing.
I can do both. Getting rid of the inner voice took a lot of therapy and meditation and I still struggle; I had it for most of my life.
The "inner voice" is absolutely a real voice, as real as my own; and it's not necessarily the only voice. The voices are not auditory hallucinations—they are very distinctly discernible from sounds I'd hear with my ears.
I have learned how to think without this voice and I prefer doing so immensely, as the voice is akin to vapid calculation, while thinking without it is a sensational experience with feelings and is a much more enjoyable experience, extending beyond the location of where I hear the inner voice and goes as far experiencing sensation throughout my entire body; this sensation can be as vivid as physical touch.
In fact the voice is slower than sensational thinking. It occurs after the sensational thinking and the sensational thinking rarely can occur at the same time as the voice; they very easily become mutually exclusive and the inner voice tends to be the one that dominates.
I hope to reverse this relationship with continued work. Thinking without an inner voice is a much more enjoyable life for me.
Would a machine solving the trolly problem on whether to hit the wall vs some cyclists ever choose to hit the wall in a way that damages the driver, bounces into the people and damages some of the people, but kills no one?
I have seen accidents where a truck driver drives partially off the road to slow down his truck and minimize damage, but does not go entirely off it because that would kill him.
>The best defense is to not absorb the data to begin with.
The despair that can result from this is almost unimaginable though. When you separate yourself from the propaganda infrastructure then try to have conversations with people and at the slightest prompting they start vomiting talking points and a viewpoint that's purely based on propaganda... oh god, it's unbearable. And you can't call them stupid because they're not stupid they're just... outmatched by a professional force.
It's too true and so depressing. People can't stand up to the immense volumes of resources and hundreds (thousands?) of years of research these organizations are founded on.
All my education has lead me to not participating being the best solution.
Despair is a good word. I couldn't think of a better one to describe the dropping of emotion that I feel when I hear people repeat verbatim.
Indeed. The talking points really stand out. Especially from the reactionary side, they often have no other basis than 'this is what is being repeated'.
This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists.
We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value.
Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.