Ego-- harmful delusion or pragmatic necessity?

[bennyboy]

The problem is that such people have attained a certain result by the practice, but have adopted fanciful explanations for what that result is and why it is.  The fact that different brands of woo layered on top seem not to matter one whit to the result suggests that the woo is an extraneous imposition — the woo doesn't matter, it's the practice.  But the woo has become embedded in our culture(s) to the effect that the explanation that the practice rids you of ego — which is part of the woo — is the reality.  It's mistaking metaphysics about the practice, which is likely wrong, for the nature of the result.  The explanation — which is just religious horse hockey — has come to be mistaken for the reality.

I'm interested in meditation because of the possible effects on the brain.  But those effects are unlikely to be as the mystics describe them.  What the actual brain / psychological effects are is still largely unknown.  I don't think adopting a woo filled explanation of it gets us any closer to that goal, except as a descriptive report of the subjective experience.

Yes, I agree with this very much. However, looking at quotations or teachings of both the Buddha and subsequent buddhists, I think it's easy enough to determine which are purely treatises on mental experience and the nature of delusion, and which are speculative BS about karma and rebirth etc. Also, modern western Buddhists (some of them anyway) seem determined to reconcile the process of meditation with modern philosophy or science, which would be why Sam Harris, for example, can comfortably call himself a Buddhist atheist.

I think psychology lost something when introspectionism was snuffed out as a scientific process in the 1920s. Surely, subjects with better control over their mental function would allow for richer results even when it comes to measuring brain waves, blood flow, etc. In fact, a very well-trained subject might even be instructed to modify his experience in ways normally only possible through selective brain damage. I've heard of the mental feats of some Buddhist monks, and I believe them for the most part to be true, if not literally true in terms of the woo content you are talking about.

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I find it odd that Father Darwin saw a need to create illusions in the first place. Why should the brain, as a computer, require that it think it is doing one thing when it is really doing another?

Interesting question.  Possibly, it's just a side effect.  Once you start the thinking bus, it's going to go willy-nilly.  Self-consciousness could be a mental appendix.   Perhaps a computer brain just doesn't work on it's own, and requires the illusion to properly function.  Perhaps the illusion serves as a carrot for the computer brain.  Quite honestly, I haven't gotten this far yet!

I think the essence of the philosophical problem is this: "mind" represents a top-down view, while physics represents a bottom-up view. But you can't really answer "why" questions with bottom-up views: we can't track all the QM particles in the point of a pencil, let alone in the human brain, and we have pretty good reason to believe we never will.