6 ms·

Sounds as conveniently unfalsifibale as any more patent pseudoscience.

Karunamon 4y ago
Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results. That does not make those results any less real.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  "Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile. Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    As real as the rest of your feelings in that they color, if not drive, your subjective experience of the world. Which applies to pretty much every person on the planet.
  - Frummy 4y ago
    So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this: Your brain is sick, yes you are hallucinating me, but that doesn't make me less real.
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).
      - Frummy 4y ago
        Thank you for your reply. In most ways I agree, in all ways actually. But my point is that the term "real" doesn't mean strictly material. The picture I'm painting is to bring away "reality" from strictly material and external. I do this to argue with the point above your original reply, saying that the scientific method is incompatible with these things. We're in philosophical territory and I won't pretend to be an expert but I think we will have plenty of tools to bring the scientific method even to our most personal experiences.
        fluoridation 4y ago
        Which is why I originally asked what was meant by "real". From a consensus-realistic perspective, things that are purely subjective and non-material things are definitely less real or at least less-obviously real. From a solipsistic perspective the only real thing is one's subjective experience, and everything else is in doubt. But most people are not capable of consistently maintaining a solipsistic perspective, so I didn't assume that's what was meant.
        Frummy 4y ago
        Thank you for the conversation. Your style reminds me of "Theaetus" by Plato. Maybe you'd like it.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Accidental Wittgenstein :)
  - enugu 4y ago
    As someone noticed, you are trying to say something similar the private language argument of Wittgenstein. But notice that this isn’t really private to a person. How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands. Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago. Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time. For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice). A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience. But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      However, I question whether there's actually a shared context when it comes to meditation. Unlike for external phenomena like gravity and QM, there's a lot of ambiguity related to communicating internal processes. For example, basic emotions like happiness and fear are easily communicated because they show up on the face. Two people can agree that the emotion that causes them to make the same face is the same one, and so can agree to call the emotion by a word. But are we sure the same is true for things that don't work like this? If someone says "do this and you'll feel like that" and I do and I don't feel that, what am I to understand? Is it that I did it wrong, that I did it right and my brain just works differently, or that the speaker and I are failing to understand each other? Did the speaker misuse a word? Did I mistakenly think a word meant something other than what was intended? Particularly when it comes to subjective feelings there's going to be a lot of metaphors involved, which never help for unambiguous communication.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  Doesn't that make it basically impossible for research to be done on many medicines, including pain medications?
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Maybe not impossible, but if it was easy or if the gp didn't have a point, wouldn't we have figured out what fibromyalgia is by now? Also maybe we would have given more scrutiny to the widespread marketing and distribution of oxycotin in the U.S., at least enough to prevent the disaster it caused?
vanderZwan 4y ago
Uh, how exactly? What's unfalsifiable about self-reflection leading to painful confrontations, or those confrontations being provocative in ways that can manifest differently depending on the person? To name just one superficial aspect of mindfulness. Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Just to be blunt about it, people lie about the state of their mind all the time. People make stuff up for attention, to fit in, or just for fun.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    So? That might make it hard for you and me to figure these things out in daily life, but psychology as field of science has been trying to study the mind rigorously for at least a century by now, and it's not exactly naive about this problem.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Sure, and people lie on surveys used in studies too. Only some percentage lie like this though.
    - weregiraffe 4y ago
      Yes, and you can never know which percentage, so surveys in general only teach you about how people answer surveys.
      - naasking 4y ago
        Of course we can. fMRI will be able to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate brain states.
      - op00to 4y ago
        Used to work in a neuroscience labs. fMRI can not be used as a lie detector.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car". Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to understand. Its a not very wise and not very calming endavour. After all the machine that should reassemble it, is the one that took it apart.
- feoren 4y ago
  A good response to "that's not falsifiable" is offering a test that could prove the assertion false. This is only more unfalsifiable metaphor. Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    The rewritting of what has actually percieved and what has happened, after it happened as a inability to act, is for many a enigma. Otherwise you wouldnt regularly get this stammered stories in front of some judge after traffic accidents. The idea, that cause and effect, could be rewritten by your visual system to keep its story straight, even after a failure, is quite the enigma in my eyes.
cahooon 4y ago
Anything that happens only inside peoples’ minds is in a pretty tough realm to study. It’s okay to be afraid of it or to assume it doesn’t mean anything, but it would be really stretching “skepticism” to say that people don’t have visions/hallucinations of all kinds in response to meditative practice. You’d just be using “falsifiability” to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  Well danger if done wrong is a good selling point. it suggests that the method must be powerful. I'm sure some gurus exploit this (manipulative technique) to be perceived as more serious or experienced. The problem is now, speaking about the (real or not) dangers of meditation could also induce some kind of nocebo effect in practitioners. And since most people open for this stuff will be more on the irrational spectrum of humanity ... the danger of meditation may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We speak about mindfulness here but there is the same discussion and warnings about kundalini for example. Obviously focusing (or not) on something and sitting for a long time will alter you state of consciousness to some degree like a trance. But are there real and objective dangers besides the rewiring of your brain?
yamrzou 4y ago
So what? All our inner experiences are unfalsifiable.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Why do you think of affirmative to that is unacceptable? Is it scary?
naasking 4y ago
Meditation is empirically associated with some degree of danger in some subset of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-behavior/201604/the-little-known-downsides-mindfulness-practice https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b... Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.
tarotuser 4y ago
It's easy to dismiss a whole class of phenomenon just because there isn't an ample understanding of it. And much of mind is unfalsifiable becuase we don't yet understand how to make heads or tails of the largest neural network in our existence: our brains. And before you look at my username, instead look no further than "Placebos". Why does a sugar pill named "morphine" work? Obviously, handing them a teaspoon of sugar does nothing, but when relabeled, works. And most of the occult as well is of mind - either my own mind, or that of others. Science even has a semi-explanation with the holographic universe theory, which says that every particle is encoded with the information of everything, just at the simplest resolution. And if mind could be tuned so, could access everything within their own mind. (The old occult principle is 'As above, so below.') But it's easy to paint things you either don't like or don't understand as "pseudoscience". Flat earth used to be science. Earth-centric orbits used to be science. Wearing masks full of herbs when dealing with plague victims used to be science.
astrange 4y ago
> Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you. This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.

Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results. That does not make those results any less real.

fluoridation 4y ago
"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile. Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  As real as the rest of your feelings in that they color, if not drive, your subjective experience of the world. Which applies to pretty much every person on the planet.
- Frummy 4y ago
  So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this: Your brain is sick, yes you are hallucinating me, but that doesn't make me less real.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).
    - Frummy 4y ago
      Thank you for your reply. In most ways I agree, in all ways actually. But my point is that the term "real" doesn't mean strictly material. The picture I'm painting is to bring away "reality" from strictly material and external. I do this to argue with the point above your original reply, saying that the scientific method is incompatible with these things. We're in philosophical territory and I won't pretend to be an expert but I think we will have plenty of tools to bring the scientific method even to our most personal experiences.
      - fluoridation 4y ago
        Which is why I originally asked what was meant by "real". From a consensus-realistic perspective, things that are purely subjective and non-material things are definitely less real or at least less-obviously real. From a solipsistic perspective the only real thing is one's subjective experience, and everything else is in doubt. But most people are not capable of consistently maintaining a solipsistic perspective, so I didn't assume that's what was meant.
        Frummy 4y ago
        Thank you for the conversation. Your style reminds me of "Theaetus" by Plato. Maybe you'd like it.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Accidental Wittgenstein :)
- enugu 4y ago
  As someone noticed, you are trying to say something similar the private language argument of Wittgenstein. But notice that this isn’t really private to a person. How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands. Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago. Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time. For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice). A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience. But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    However, I question whether there's actually a shared context when it comes to meditation. Unlike for external phenomena like gravity and QM, there's a lot of ambiguity related to communicating internal processes. For example, basic emotions like happiness and fear are easily communicated because they show up on the face. Two people can agree that the emotion that causes them to make the same face is the same one, and so can agree to call the emotion by a word. But are we sure the same is true for things that don't work like this? If someone says "do this and you'll feel like that" and I do and I don't feel that, what am I to understand? Is it that I did it wrong, that I did it right and my brain just works differently, or that the speaker and I are failing to understand each other? Did the speaker misuse a word? Did I mistakenly think a word meant something other than what was intended? Particularly when it comes to subjective feelings there's going to be a lot of metaphors involved, which never help for unambiguous communication.
jtbayly 4y ago
Doesn't that make it basically impossible for research to be done on many medicines, including pain medications?
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Maybe not impossible, but if it was easy or if the gp didn't have a point, wouldn't we have figured out what fibromyalgia is by now? Also maybe we would have given more scrutiny to the widespread marketing and distribution of oxycotin in the U.S., at least enough to prevent the disaster it caused?

vanderZwan 4y ago

Uh, how exactly? What's unfalsifiable about self-reflection leading to painful confrontations, or those confrontations being provocative in ways that can manifest differently depending on the person? To name just one superficial aspect of mindfulness. Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.

bpodgursky 4y ago
Just to be blunt about it, people lie about the state of their mind all the time. People make stuff up for attention, to fit in, or just for fun.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  So? That might make it hard for you and me to figure these things out in daily life, but psychology as field of science has been trying to study the mind rigorously for at least a century by now, and it's not exactly naive about this problem.
- naasking 4y ago
  Sure, and people lie on surveys used in studies too. Only some percentage lie like this though.
  - weregiraffe 4y ago
    Yes, and you can never know which percentage, so surveys in general only teach you about how people answer surveys.
    - naasking 4y ago
      Of course we can. fMRI will be able to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate brain states.
    - op00to 4y ago
      Used to work in a neuroscience labs. fMRI can not be used as a lie detector.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car". Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to understand. Its a not very wise and not very calming endavour. After all the machine that should reassemble it, is the one that took it apart.

feoren 4y ago
A good response to "that's not falsifiable" is offering a test that could prove the assertion false. This is only more unfalsifiable metaphor. Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  The rewritting of what has actually percieved and what has happened, after it happened as a inability to act, is for many a enigma. Otherwise you wouldnt regularly get this stammered stories in front of some judge after traffic accidents. The idea, that cause and effect, could be rewritten by your visual system to keep its story straight, even after a failure, is quite the enigma in my eyes.

cahooon 4y ago

Anything that happens only inside peoples’ minds is in a pretty tough realm to study. It’s okay to be afraid of it or to assume it doesn’t mean anything, but it would be really stretching “skepticism” to say that people don’t have visions/hallucinations of all kinds in response to meditative practice. You’d just be using “falsifiability” to avoid feeling uncomfortable.

Silverback_VII 4y ago
Well danger if done wrong is a good selling point. it suggests that the method must be powerful. I'm sure some gurus exploit this (manipulative technique) to be perceived as more serious or experienced. The problem is now, speaking about the (real or not) dangers of meditation could also induce some kind of nocebo effect in practitioners. And since most people open for this stuff will be more on the irrational spectrum of humanity ... the danger of meditation may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We speak about mindfulness here but there is the same discussion and warnings about kundalini for example. Obviously focusing (or not) on something and sitting for a long time will alter you state of consciousness to some degree like a trance. But are there real and objective dangers besides the rewiring of your brain?

yamrzou 4y ago

So what? All our inner experiences are unfalsifiable.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Why do you think of affirmative to that is unacceptable? Is it scary?

naasking 4y ago

Meditation is empirically associated with some degree of danger in some subset of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-behavior/201604/the-little-known-downsides-mindfulness-practice https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b... Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.

tarotuser 4y ago

It's easy to dismiss a whole class of phenomenon just because there isn't an ample understanding of it. And much of mind is unfalsifiable becuase we don't yet understand how to make heads or tails of the largest neural network in our existence: our brains. And before you look at my username, instead look no further than "Placebos". Why does a sugar pill named "morphine" work? Obviously, handing them a teaspoon of sugar does nothing, but when relabeled, works. And most of the occult as well is of mind - either my own mind, or that of others. Science even has a semi-explanation with the holographic universe theory, which says that every particle is encoded with the information of everything, just at the simplest resolution. And if mind could be tuned so, could access everything within their own mind. (The old occult principle is 'As above, so below.') But it's easy to paint things you either don't like or don't understand as "pseudoscience". Flat earth used to be science. Earth-centric orbits used to be science. Wearing masks full of herbs when dealing with plague victims used to be science.

astrange 4y ago

> Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you. This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.