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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 perso
by 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 agoHowever, 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.