Enjoyed reading this and might comment in more detail later, but a couple of points of historical clarification: Varela was primarily Humberto Maturana’s student (and later co-author). Maturana, in turn, was more associated with McCulloch (most famously as a co-author with Jerry Lettvin, also Pitts, on ‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain’). There might be a formal Wiesel connection, but from what I remember, it was so that Varela could leave Chile for Cambridge and come work with his fellow Chilean, Maturana. Not sure about the Rosch-Trungpa connection either. Could be, but I know of a closer Berkeley connection that Rosch had/has with Steven Tainer, originally trained in the Nyingma tradition with Tarthang Tulku (Steven was the actual author of the famous ‘Time, Space and Knowledge’ book) and then went on to become a Chan teacher. I believe Steven was, at one point, renting one floor in George Lakoff’s house and that’s the origin of the connection with Eleanor Rosch.
If non-dual view and practice produces non-dual experiences and dualistic view and practice produces dualistic experiences, are they equivalent in some sense? Why pick non-dualism over dualism?
Ah, once again I ask a question without looking deeply enough into where it’s coming from and make a fool of myself.
I believe my question sprang from a confusion about the relationship between ‘direct experience’ and the corresponding ‘account of the world’.
How do we know that reality as such is non-dual? The Buddhist answer (at least as I understand it) is: well, you can sit meditation for while and if you’re diligent enough you’ll see for yourself that it is non-dual. And this does work. However, it seems to me that when it comes to direct experience of this kind, almost anything goes. E.g. if you sit with a monist view you will have a monist realization. If you sit with the view that reality is all a play of Shiva/Shakti, you start seeing everything as aspects of the mother goddess (shakti)! Many of these experiences can even be ‘stabilized’. What makes one experience true (or fundamental) and other experiences false in this sense?
Or, it could be that there is nothing fundamentally true about non-dualism. It is just that for one reason or another some of us find it dissatisfying and hence take up the non-dual view instead, thus avoiding the thoughts, feelings and actions *we* think have “bad” results. Others may not consider these results as bad at all and thus have no need for non-dualism whatsoever. (I guess I’m describing a post-modern relativist position here?)
A point you make, that a meditator's conceptual view influences their experience, is one that Charlie made in the recording, and that Evan Thompson made in the blog comment thread that prompted it:
> you bring the conceptual framework to the experience and that forms the experience
So we should not take claims from experience as strong evidence about objective reality.
I usually avoid the term "non-dual," because it's highly ambiguous. One should ask: "what is not dual with what? what *is* their relationship if it is not dualistic?" In Buddhism, there are many pairs that are said to be non-dual, such as self and other, relative and absolute truths, form and emptiness, samsara and nirvana, and so on.
Different specific pairs need different explanations for why you should believe them, if you want to go into detail.
In this discussion, though, it's a more general point, that all categories are nebulous. There is no definite truth about whether the water in the cells of an eggplant in the refrigerator "counts" (the opening example in my meta-rationality book). Coyotes and wolves interbreed; there is no definite truth about whether a hybrid counts as one or the other or both or neither, and so on. This is a boring, mundane sort of non-duality: the categories are not sharply separated. This is non-controversial.
Somehow, the types of meditation Charlie and I are familiar with seem to make one comfortable with this sort of boring non-duality, as well as giving insight into fancier ones, like self and other, or form and emptiness.
There are rational, science-compatible explanations for why those fancier ones are non-dual as well. Those won't fit into this comment, but see: https://metarationality.com/objective-objects
I speculated that meditation methods that come with a dualistic view would tend to make one less accepting of mundane non-duality, and specifically that vipassana as taught in contemporary Theravada-derived systems might be like that. I don't know, though.
Unlike traditional Buddhism, your work has offered discursive, technical accounts of why dualism is false… I believe that this is an important contribution, especially for STEM practitioners. Humanities people have been harping on about “ambiguity” or reality being “messy” (their version of nebulosity) for decades (mostly since post-modernism). But I never encountered anything equivalent in the STEM fields where people seemed to adamantly insist that reality was patterned all the way through… This was a gap I experienced going back and forth between science and humanities courses. The humanities people were all like “reality is nebulous!” without any account of why pattern worked at all. While the science people were very fixated on pattern without even acknowledging that they work within a nebulous world.
I'm not sure I agree that the tradition you're coming from that you bring to meditation shapes the experience as much as you say. It probably has some effect, but the benefits of sitting and specifically the non-dual view of the world that results, I would expect to be common. Of course, a different aspect of it is that there's a big difference between someone who has been sitting for 3 years and someone who is just starting.
Enjoyed reading this and might comment in more detail later, but a couple of points of historical clarification: Varela was primarily Humberto Maturana’s student (and later co-author). Maturana, in turn, was more associated with McCulloch (most famously as a co-author with Jerry Lettvin, also Pitts, on ‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain’). There might be a formal Wiesel connection, but from what I remember, it was so that Varela could leave Chile for Cambridge and come work with his fellow Chilean, Maturana. Not sure about the Rosch-Trungpa connection either. Could be, but I know of a closer Berkeley connection that Rosch had/has with Steven Tainer, originally trained in the Nyingma tradition with Tarthang Tulku (Steven was the actual author of the famous ‘Time, Space and Knowledge’ book) and then went on to become a Chan teacher. I believe Steven was, at one point, renting one floor in George Lakoff’s house and that’s the origin of the connection with Eleanor Rosch.
Thank you very much! This is history I did not know!
If non-dual view and practice produces non-dual experiences and dualistic view and practice produces dualistic experiences, are they equivalent in some sense? Why pick non-dualism over dualism?
Um, well, because dualism is false and leads to thoughts, feelings, and actions with bad results. https://meaningness.com/monism-dualism-schematic-overview
Ah, once again I ask a question without looking deeply enough into where it’s coming from and make a fool of myself.
I believe my question sprang from a confusion about the relationship between ‘direct experience’ and the corresponding ‘account of the world’.
How do we know that reality as such is non-dual? The Buddhist answer (at least as I understand it) is: well, you can sit meditation for while and if you’re diligent enough you’ll see for yourself that it is non-dual. And this does work. However, it seems to me that when it comes to direct experience of this kind, almost anything goes. E.g. if you sit with a monist view you will have a monist realization. If you sit with the view that reality is all a play of Shiva/Shakti, you start seeing everything as aspects of the mother goddess (shakti)! Many of these experiences can even be ‘stabilized’. What makes one experience true (or fundamental) and other experiences false in this sense?
Or, it could be that there is nothing fundamentally true about non-dualism. It is just that for one reason or another some of us find it dissatisfying and hence take up the non-dual view instead, thus avoiding the thoughts, feelings and actions *we* think have “bad” results. Others may not consider these results as bad at all and thus have no need for non-dualism whatsoever. (I guess I’m describing a post-modern relativist position here?)
Ah, much here (and none of it was foolish)!
A point you make, that a meditator's conceptual view influences their experience, is one that Charlie made in the recording, and that Evan Thompson made in the blog comment thread that prompted it:
> you bring the conceptual framework to the experience and that forms the experience
So we should not take claims from experience as strong evidence about objective reality.
I usually avoid the term "non-dual," because it's highly ambiguous. One should ask: "what is not dual with what? what *is* their relationship if it is not dualistic?" In Buddhism, there are many pairs that are said to be non-dual, such as self and other, relative and absolute truths, form and emptiness, samsara and nirvana, and so on.
Different specific pairs need different explanations for why you should believe them, if you want to go into detail.
In this discussion, though, it's a more general point, that all categories are nebulous. There is no definite truth about whether the water in the cells of an eggplant in the refrigerator "counts" (the opening example in my meta-rationality book). Coyotes and wolves interbreed; there is no definite truth about whether a hybrid counts as one or the other or both or neither, and so on. This is a boring, mundane sort of non-duality: the categories are not sharply separated. This is non-controversial.
Somehow, the types of meditation Charlie and I are familiar with seem to make one comfortable with this sort of boring non-duality, as well as giving insight into fancier ones, like self and other, or form and emptiness.
There are rational, science-compatible explanations for why those fancier ones are non-dual as well. Those won't fit into this comment, but see: https://metarationality.com/objective-objects
I speculated that meditation methods that come with a dualistic view would tend to make one less accepting of mundane non-duality, and specifically that vipassana as taught in contemporary Theravada-derived systems might be like that. I don't know, though.
Unlike traditional Buddhism, your work has offered discursive, technical accounts of why dualism is false… I believe that this is an important contribution, especially for STEM practitioners. Humanities people have been harping on about “ambiguity” or reality being “messy” (their version of nebulosity) for decades (mostly since post-modernism). But I never encountered anything equivalent in the STEM fields where people seemed to adamantly insist that reality was patterned all the way through… This was a gap I experienced going back and forth between science and humanities courses. The humanities people were all like “reality is nebulous!” without any account of why pattern worked at all. While the science people were very fixated on pattern without even acknowledging that they work within a nebulous world.
I'm not sure I agree that the tradition you're coming from that you bring to meditation shapes the experience as much as you say. It probably has some effect, but the benefits of sitting and specifically the non-dual view of the world that results, I would expect to be common. Of course, a different aspect of it is that there's a big difference between someone who has been sitting for 3 years and someone who is just starting.
One notable thing (for me at any rate) about The Embodied Mind, it actually had a decently good engagement with Minsky's Society of Mind theory.
Did you know Varela taught a course on Buddhist Cognitive Science at Naropa? Sometime around 1982 I think.
I had to stop after 10 minutes, as it just felt like name dropping and lineage enumeration. I still had no idea what this is actually about.