Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

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There's a simple logical explanation why meditation works. A huge amount of suffering comes from people making value judgements about things they're thinking about: "X happened/is happening/will happen, X is bad, now I feel bad".

Meditation has two effects on this: firstly, it encourages non-thinking (or focusing on some specific thing like breathing), which means less time for random thoughts, which means less time for feeling bad because of random thoughts.

Secondly, it encourages people to reflect on the value judgements their thoughts are making, which makes them more likely to realise the subjectivity in their judgements (due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument), which makes them more likely to update their worldview into one in which fewer judgements are made. Fewer judgements means fewer thoughts cause unhappiness. This is expressed in a quote by Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "If you are distressed by something external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."; worldview has a huge effect on how much someone suffers, and meditation encourages reflection, and reflection encourages changes in worldview.

I agree with most of what you said, except I think you miss a core mechanism. Specifically, it doesn't just encourage non-thinking (though this is certainly an aspect), but it also encourages you to take a step back, and explore around what you are feeling. This is profound, because it very quickly leads to you figuring out chains of causality in yourself. You gain a much deeper understanding of why you do things, what you are like as a person, and what you could change in order to stop these cause and effect relationships. So, in essence, you get a root cause analysis for free, which gets built in to your muscle memory.

There's a problem with taking something as subtle as the internal workings of a human and saying "aha! I now understand what the effect of this is or why that is happening". We seek simplicity and conformance to our mental models, but nature doesn't have those constraints. It's naive to think "I've figured it out". And, that's a good thing. Many times desire for explanations is just to make oneself feel in control. Just being intimately exposed to that is therapeutic on its own.

It's not about describing the mind, it's about modelling the mind. E.g. if we have some reasonable axioms: thinking about things can cause suffering, how reaction to something depends on how we value it, and our values can be change, then from those axioms it follows that we can change how much we suffer from thinking about things by changing our values.

True enough. There's some balance to be struck between being observant and letting observations turn into blinding beliefs.

Sometimes it doesn't have to be "I figured it out". Just being able to say to yourself, "I feel X about Y, but maybe I don't want/need/choose/have to feel X about Y" can be very empowering. And I'm not talking abstract empowerment, I mean in a very practical "I have more control over my life, my self, and my choices" sense.

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