Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And, therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating. Because, the future is a concept; it doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes.” There is…
I know that high level meditation is supposed to have no practical purpose, but that is exactly what is bothering me. What would be the utility of that, from an evolutionary point of view, or from a reinforcement learning point of view (where we divide the world into agents and environment, with goals and rewards). The spiritual utility, as it is presented in tradition, is related to attaining some sort of freedom an…
Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
131–140 of 147 posts
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#132Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#133> Major commercial players in the meditation space The sheer insanity of this phrase astounds me. There's an industry devoted to meditation. For such a thing to exist, you have to start by convincing people that they're not meditating right. Which means some people are better at it than others and you should worry about not being as good. What's next, competitive meditation?
Fun comment, but you know, people are paying to run in rooms so ..
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#134People should be aware that this does not mean you shouldn't meditate. At least give it a shot. The risk/reward ratio is so heavily skewed toward reward (what are the risks, really?) that you'd be foolish not to try it.
So like Pascal's Wager for meditation?
Exactly.
And to paraphrase some other comment read in this thread:
"It's 1000s years that people practice religion, so it must imply that it is good for them".
Mindfulness or meditation is just the usual wave of religion or spiritualism or whatever you want to call it mimetized as something more exotic and powerful.
The peculiar thing is that for the most part the self-professed atheist are the most fervent proponents of this.
So maybe it is true that spirituality is an innate need of the human race...
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
So like Pascal's Wager for meditation?
Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.
Tell this to someone that committed suicide because of mindfulness..
Oh wait.. they look exactly the same to me in this case.
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.
Tell this to someone that committed suicide because of mindfulness.. Oh wait.. they look exactly the same to me in this case.
[deleted]
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.
Tell this to someone that committed suicide because of mindfulness.. Oh wait.. they look exactly the same to me in this case.
This is you right now: https://xkcd.com/1901/
EDIT: Ok, fine, I'll bite: exactly the same how exactly?
Anti-depressants can cause suicide too: some people are too depressed to even commit suicide, and the anti-depressants give them enough mental energy to commit to that.
That doesn't mean anti-depressants are pseudo-science or a bad idea, it just means their usage must be determined on a case-by-case basis
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#138There's plenty of support behind cognitive behavioral therapy--mindfulness is the same thing, but facing westward. Where is the discrepancy?
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And, therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating. Because, the future is a concept; it doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes.” There is…
I know that high level meditation is supposed to have no practical purpose, but that is exactly what is bothering me. What would be the utility of that, from an evolutionary point of view, or from a reinforcement learning point of view (where we divide the world into agents and environment, with goals and rewards). The spiritual utility, as it is presented in tradition, is related to attaining some sort of freedom an…
The emptiness you're referring to, if I understand you correctly, is that of sunyata[1], wherein we realize precisely what you have stated: that there is no thing besides patterns and activations, and that assuming these things construct a whole person that has some sort of "centerpoint" is fallacious. Your devil's advocate point arrives at the truth precisely.
The freedom arises when one accepts this fact wholeheartedly. This realization isn't "supposed" to help you, or bring you anywhere, since that would be assuming that the actions that are taken have some internal guidance mechanism that bring it to fruition and bestow benefit on the actor. But no such thing exists. It just happens, is, and you are ok with it (or not). The utility doesn't need to exist because it can't exist: if all there is, is now, utility has absolutely no goals or targets, and thus the only thing supporting its "existence" is an assumption about what may yet does not exist.
Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm quite excited about CBT, but I think it's kind of a half-way-there step towards meditation/mindfulness, and in my personal case it actually was counter-productive in a way that meditation hasn't been. The core difference, I'd say, is that with CBT there is still too much emphasis on your thoughts. You're taught to use your own thinking to counter those thoughts, which is a bit like pulling yourself up by your own…
> But I'm even more excited about some of the 'newer' approaches under the CBT umbrella Can you give examples?
It's a while back that I did my research, but I think it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy that struck me as a kind of progression toward even more of the mindfulness/observational approach, and away from using your thinking to solve your thinking.
I also find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther... an interesting approach.
Either way I wouldn't argue that those approaches are better in all cases, but rather that they appear to draw even more from (Zen?) Buddhism than CBT does, and that for an atypical, anxious mind like mine they seem to work in a way that CBT doesn't. In fact, I've found that my anxiety was often worse when I actively applied CBT when I was in therapy.