Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

He offers Neo two pills, a red one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

Starts off with a bold assertion: that choosing Buddhism is like…

Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here’s one way I had described it in my book: It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.

Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.

“the hedonic treadmill”—

Maybe many of the Buddha’s teachings were saying essentially the same thing modern psychological science says.

Yes, true of politically motivated thinking as well. "Keep your identity small" = become less attached to things (and ideas).

I don’t have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It’s individual humans I have trouble with.

More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people. I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time. I think it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.

I—that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control—don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental life: what I’m thinking about.

“According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”

With respect to the phrase “motivated reasoning”, what is creating the motivation is the ‘self’'in the sense of emotional attachment to one's emotionally anchored identity. Or, more succinctly, self equals identity.

the five “aggregates”

Hmm, conveniently, there is one monk per “aggregate”.

You—the “you” that experiences feelings and perceptions and entertains thoughts—isn’t really in complete control of these things.

Jonathan Haidt uses a similar elephant and rider metaphor to explain the conscious/subconscious dichotomy.

“What do you think of this, O monks? Are mental formations permanent or impermanent?”

I suspect 'permanent', because it's a byproduct of a suite of interacting cognitive habits that resolve in a consistent way. It won't be perfectly steady, but will trend in a consistent direction.

“Are mental formations permanent or impermanent?”

I think this is backwards: the permanence of my preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream means i do NOT have executive control over that aspect of my mind.

Psychologists have found that if you show men pictures of women they find attractive, their intertemporal utility function, the rate at which they discount the future, changes.

Oh, okay: that my preference for vanilla can be manipulated via my subconscious is *also* a sign of lack of executive control.

“self-protection” module

But there's also empirical evidence that conservatives have a consistent bias towards self-protection.

These computer scientists would have trouble pointing to a part of the robot’s programming and saying, “This part is the robot itself.”

This is related to my argument against the creation of sentient AI. The way the human mind works is too chaotic and scary to want to replicate. Except: is this a genetic learning algorithm?

Well, the activation of modules is closely associated with feelings.

We evolved to feel, not to think, because feelings are evolution's shortcut that binds us to our social network.

In this light, it becomes a bit clearer why losing attachment to feelings could help you reach a point where there seems to be no self.

And why some highly capable meditators acquire psychopathic tendencies: their dismissal of feelings leaves them unbeholden to society and its norms.

You can still reflect on the fact of your mate’s infidelity and decide whether it means you should end your relationship.

In Kahneman's terms, you're learning how to process stimuli with the conscious System 2 instead of the subconscious System 1.

Men placed in the presence of women, it turned out, were more inclined to rate the accumulation of wealth as an important goal.

Hmm, what does this imply about student choices in a co-ed high school College Counseling class?

Kenrick and Griskevicius sometimes sound pretty enamored. They divide the mind neatly into seven “subselves” with the following missions: self-protection, mate attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends), kin care, social status, and disease avoidance. This taxonomy has its virtues; these seven areas of mental functioning no doubt got a lot of emphasis from natural selection as it designed the mind.

Interesting. Can this be connected to Haidt's Moral Foundations theory? Or might an over-eager context switching be related to ADHD?

Politicians activate this same mental tendency to get us to “overread” threats in ways that lead to war or ethnic antagonism.

Gosh! Who would do that?!?

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

If during meditation you see things that are consistent with credible scientific models of how the mind works, that gives you a bit more reason to believe that, indeed, meditation is helping you see the dynamics of your mind clearly.

notice what kinds of thoughts are making you fail.

My default mode bears no resemblance to the list below.

Third, most of these thoughts involve other people.

“imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.”

“Let me see if I have this right. During meditation, you can begin to see that . . . whereas you might have thought all your life that you’re thinking thoughts—the thing you think of as ‘you’ is thinking thoughts—it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you.’ ” “Right.”

the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.

System 1 vs 2: how to evade cognitive biases, such as the framing effect?

they often seem to have feelings attached to them.

— the hypothetical problem with some cognitive biases is that they don't emerge as feelings. I don't "feel" that the proper price for a bottle of wine is higher because it had been framed that way.

And I don’t mean just focus on whatever thought is distracting you—I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the thought that is distracting you.

John Ruskin put it in the nineteenth century, “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing.”

Samuel Johnson, writing in the eighteenth century, put a different spin on it: “The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.”

Interesting. I was just reading about research into curiosity, and these same variations were used.

Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at a given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness.

The evolutionary purpose of emotions needs to be investigated. Also: the activation potential of thoughts: maybe here the neural connection to the "emotion center", which does the reconciliation?

As these people were shown each product, and then its price, their brains were being scanned. It turned out researchers could do a good job of predicting whether someone would purchase something by watching which parts of the brain got more active and which got less active. And none of these were parts of the brain mainly associated with rational deliberation; rather, they were parts associated with feelings. Like, for example, the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in doling out pleasure and gets more active when people anticipate rewards or see things they like. The more active the nucleus accumbens while subjects were looking at a product, the more likely they were to buy it. On the other hand, there’s the insula, which gets especially active when people anticipate pain and other unpleasant things. The more active the insula got when people were shown the price, the less likely they were to buy the product.

Brain-scan studies have shown that the same parts of the brain that mediate physical pain also mediate the pain of social rejection.

Reason has its effect not by directly pushing back against a feeling but by fortifying the feeling that does do the pushing back.

Citation?

Joshua Greene,

Name check!

Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment.

Related to Social identity theory, ultimately.

I say that the dampening of feelings leads to the clarity of vision. Indeed, I’d almost go so far as to say the dampening of feelings is the clarity of vision, so finely is affect intertwined with perception—in particular, with the perception of essence.†

But haven't you also said that he (and others) are accomplished at this, while you're still intellectualizing it (possibly to the detriment of your own mastery?).

So essence matters! One minute you see a certain essence in something and you want to kill it, and the next minute the essence has vanished and you don’t want to kill it.

Just like people from the other tribe.

“the fundamental attribution error.”

Woo-hoo!

Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.”

Isn't the key here «they place themselves»?

We go through each day attaching positive and negative tags to things we see. Being affiliated with a tribe—a football team, a nation, an ethnic group—is a particular instance of that tendency, and sometimes a particularly intense instance of it: our tribe can be very good, and its enemies very bad.

More usage of tribe/tribal in this chapter.

So seeing evildoers suffer can give us the gratifying sense that justice has been done.

Ridiculing the other tribe along with friends on social media is also gratifying.

“Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment.”

When I get irritated at someone for littering or wasting water, how is that about my self? (Answer: efficient usage of resources is a goal I identify with.)

if you transcend the perspective of the self, any self, and view things from nowhere in particular—essence disappears, along with the feelings that created it in the first place.

Would I / should I still become irritated?

impromptu armadillo liaison.

Okay, this example was very strange.