5 ms·
> They are not eating, exercising, listening to music, socializing, talking more than necessary, and not allowing themselves to be photographed if there’s a fla
by otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> They are not eating, exercising, listening to music, socializing, talking more than necessary, and not allowing themselves to be photographed if there’s a flash
This is the standard asceticism routine that every human religion in history followed. (And follows.)
I'll trust the weight of centuries of experience over some random internet source.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Barrin92 5y agoreligions have also practiced the punishment of homosexuals and atheists for thousands of years, and doctors have practiced bloodletting for ages. A lot of the standard stuff we've been doing for thousands of years turns out to be pretty terrible the random internet source in this case happens to be harvard medical laying out basic facts about how dopamine works in the human brain and why you can't actually 'fast' it.
- imwillofficial 5y agoBloodletting has been shown to be effective treatment for some disorders (phlebotomy), even leeches are still used in modern times.
- wincy 5y agoHarvard Medical also extols the virtues of a low fat diet, and managing your cholesterol with statins, both of which aren’t particularly helpful at reducing your mortality.
- Barrin92 5y agoyes, sometimes established medicine gets things wrong. But we do agree that if you experience chest pain tomorrow you consult the harvard trained cardiologist and not a witch doctor, priest or traditional chinese medicine, correct? General point being, if you weigh "weights of centuries" higher than modern expertise, you would still believe that night air is dangerous and your four humors are out of balance instead of believing in germs. The chance that anyone who posts on HN actually treats their illnesses with ancient religious practice is, I'd wager, very low. And that tells you all there is to it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NikolaNovak 5y ago>>"I'll trust the weight of centuries of experience" Why? Shouldn't any such practice / experience be based on results, ideally well controlled, rather than just something people did or do? There's any number of things people in my old neck of the woods did for hundreds of years that I'm very happy to have escaped the heck away from :-)
- imwillofficial 5y agoMust something be reproducible to be true?
- imachine1980_ 5y agoyes, at least if you want to say in the scientific way(is big chunk of the method), religion and philosophy isn't science.
- imwillofficial 5y agoA thing can be irreproducible and still true, in scientific terms. Everyone here knows how the scientific method works.
- Y_Y 5y agoScientifically yes. Logically no. Relativistically it depends. That is to say that there are meaningful answers to that question that go either way. Not to mention Tarski's undefinability theorem.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
- robbedpeter 5y agoIt's neat that so many of these traditions align with neuroscience. My naive expectation would be skepticism of anything that's mysticism adjacent. Many spiritual practices are being laid bare by science, and found to be effective in modulating neurochemistry, or directly manipulating parasympathetic immune responses, or a myriad other effects that can improve a person's well-being. There are human superpowers, like increasing or decreasing your core temperature, consciously resisting infections, deliberately triggering the placebo effect, feats of memory, endurance, or cognition. Science is making inroads to the mechanics of many of these feats. Asceticism seems like a clear cut system for improving cognition by letting the baselines of dopaminergic activity settle down. I can see the potential for negative effects of overstimulation, but where there's atrope, there's usually a kernel of truth to be found. Intellectuals and scholars are known to retreat from the world to silence and study for extended periods. Removing external stimulation is about as obvious as it gets when you want to focus on something. However, sensory deprivation- the extreme end of the axis - is known to have extremely negative effects, sometimes within a couple days. There's clearly a minimum threshold of stimulation needed to retain your sanity. Running studies on cognitive performance through the use of deprivation tanks, silent retreats, minimal stimulation lifestyles, and other methodologies would be interesting. If a once weekly tank session provides as much benefit as daily silent retreats, or a month of living in isolation, or something like that, it would give people reasons to improve their well-being. My own suspicion is that infrequent tank use is probably as beneficial as more rigorous asceticism, but that's just opinion. With the doors open to psychedelics research, I'd love to see the comparative results from ascetic practice with and without psychedelics over 6 month periods.
- pawelmurias 5y agoDid in result in anything of particular worth?
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoYes, human civilization. :) (Ok, granted, "worth" of civilization might be debatable.)
- mattkrause 5y agoAre there a lot of religions with bans on flash photography? This, to my mind, is a perfect example of people getting carried away. It is definitely the case that dopamine signalling occurs in the retina, but the connection between that and any sort of higher-level “affective” phenomenon seems pretty tenuous.