Negative aspects of Christianity rarely talked about, even by atheists

[The Grand Nudger]

So what I'm saying is, I thought we'd moved beyond talking about Buddhism as a philosophical theory, and onto questions about the value of the actual practices in a standalone sense rather than as part of a wider philosophy?, which for the sake of argument we're accepting isn't coherent unless you believe in the supernatural claims.

I'm suggesting that even stripped of all of that (and mind you describing it in clinical language or insisting that we are secular materialist does not actually do that...), that mindfulness as a practice and peoples beliefs about what it is, how it works, and it's benefits, still rely on beliefs that a critical observer might accurately recognize as supernatural, or woo, or faith based.  That cognitive science and neurobiology strongly suggest are absolute bunk, even.  

No, don't get me wrong... equanimity is my ultimate goal... but I'm just saying that I've seen for myself how hard it can be when in real physical pain. But I am still trying to develop it and learn about it to some extent... for instance with my cold showers, and generally preferring not to rely on pain pills etc, or doing while doing exercise etc... trying not to push away pain, or discomfort, at least some of the time... as well as trying new things, that's another good way of developing it I think, because unfamiliarity itself can be a form of discomfort.

OTOH, there are many other types of "practices" that come from other traditional belief systems that use ritual pain or intentional discomfort to achieve the desired altered state.  Let me give you a comparison to something utterly scientific as a way to explain why I find this interesting.  If I told you that the way to make a rocket fly was to increase -or- decrease it's thrust to weight ratio....you'd have questions about that.  You might think that only one or the other could be true - or that if both things seem true we don't actually understand how we're making the rocket fly.  That it's some third unspoken thing.

I didn't say, or didn't mean to say, it was science, or even 'logical' in a wider sense, just that it was causal in an immediate sense, ie changing the focus of your attention in an immediate sense. Would it make any difference if we changed the name, if 'mindfulness' has too much baggage in your view? Say we replace the word mindfulness with 'attention focus changing practice', which does what it says on the tin, just a practice that causally changes the focus of your attention, is that still 'uncausal' or illogical... in an immediate sense... to you?

It might be literally impossible.  Illusory.  You...we....think that's how it works and what's happening but it doesn't and isn't.  There are a number of unresolved and often deeply problematic metaphysical claims or assumptions just in this belief or description alone.

 if it's working it's working.

So do rituals and charms and magic spells.  We may be considering whether superstitious beliefs can be effective...at something.  That they are superstitious is being masked by their mundanity - which isn't how we're taught to think about superstition even though most superstitions are completely mundane from an experiential perspective.  

Personally, I'm willing to throw alot of our experiential beliefs about our minds in that bin.  A great number of them are in demonstrable error...and at a fundamental level, we can't even establish whether there is a self or no self...which is actually more important to the clinical expression of this type of thinking than the religious expression.

[emjay]

So what I'm saying is, I thought we'd moved beyond talking about Buddhism as a philosophical theory, and onto questions about the value of the actual practices in a standalone sense rather than as part of a wider philosophy?, which for the sake of argument we're accepting isn't coherent unless you believe in the supernatural claims.

I'm suggesting that even stripped of all of that (and mind you describing it in clinical language or insisting that we are secular materialist does not actually do that...), that mindfulness as a practice and peoples beliefs about what it is, how it works, and it's benefits, still rely on beliefs that a critical observer might accurately recognize as supernatural, or woo, or faith based.  That cognitive science and neurobiology strongly suggest are absolute bunk, even.

Well you tell me, what exactly do you think the supernatural, woo, or faith based claims are against it, and for that matter what cognitive science and neurobiology thinks are bunk, about it?

When all it is, to me, is essentially a choice of where you place your attention, with some places better than others. I don't see how that can be considered supernatural, woo, faith-based or even debunked, because it is simply a choice of where to place your attention... it's not a claim... it's just a choice. Maybe not everyone in the world benefits from it, in the sense that what you choose to focus on is ultimately your choice and if you'd prefer not to focus on the present, and instead on your emotions or thoughts or whatever, then that's your choice at the end of the day, but it wouldn't be mine. Is your issue that you consider it a claim what type of focus is universally better than another? Is that what this is about? That you take issue with considering 'mental formations' a bad thing to avoid, the second arrow of suffering in Buddhism so to speak. If that's the case, I don't know what to say really, other than each to their own, but for me, my mind is much more at peace when it's not focusing on all of that... and mindfulness, even if just used for a second, every now and then, has a wonderful 'resetting' ability... whatever stress you're going through, focusing your attention on the present, and letting your 'mental formations' just fade away of their own accord, because they're no longer being 'fed' is just awesome in my opinion. Can I claim that that would be universally great for everyone, I don't know, probably not, and is that your concern? That it perhaps claims it's better for everyone? If that's the case then, does it make any difference if I just say, 'it's better for me', but whether it's better for you or anyone else, is your all's business and call? Is that what your concern is with all of this?  

No, don't get me wrong... equanimity is my ultimate goal... but I'm just saying that I've seen for myself how hard it can be when in real physical pain. But I am still trying to develop it and learn about it to some extent... for instance with my cold showers, and generally preferring not to rely on pain pills etc, or doing while doing exercise etc... trying not to push away pain, or discomfort, at least some of the time... as well as trying new things, that's another good way of developing it I think, because unfamiliarity itself can be a form of discomfort.

OTOH, there are many other types of "practices" that come from other traditional belief systems that use ritual pain or intentional discomfort to achieve the desired altered state.  Let me give you a comparison to something utterly scientific as a way to explain why I find this interesting.  If I told you that the way to make a rocket fly was to increase -or- decrease it's thrust to weight ratio....you'd have questions about that.  You might think that only one or the other could be true - or that if both things seem true we don't actually understand how we're making the rocket fly.  That it's some third unspoken thing.

With equanimity I'm not looking for an altered state, but rather the ability to accept any state. I'm not looking for pain reduction per se... though of course that would be nice... but rather some way of accepting whatever pain/unpleasantness I face. Maybe that could be considered an altered state in a sense, but rightly or wrongly, I primarily think that if I ever get there it's going to be about perspective/outlook rather than some physical experiential change in experience.

I didn't say, or didn't mean to say, it was science, or even 'logical' in a wider sense, just that it was causal in an immediate sense, ie changing the focus of your attention in an immediate sense. Would it make any difference if we changed the name, if 'mindfulness' has too much baggage in your view? Say we replace the word mindfulness with 'attention focus changing practice', which does what it says on the tin, just a practice that causally changes the focus of your attention, is that still 'uncausal' or illogical... in an immediate sense... to you?

It might be literally impossible.  Illusory.  You...we....think that's how it works and what's happening but it doesn't and isn't.  

Well to the extent that free will doesn't exist in any bio-mechanical sense, if you believe that, as I do, then yes this willful change of the focus of attention can be 'illusory' but beyond that, I have no idea what you mean. What exactly do you mean is 'literally impossible' about changing your focus of attention? The free-ness or wilfullness of it? Whether our conscious experience is an illusion of causality or not, is a bit too deep is it not? I don't see how we'd ever get to the bottom of that with this.

 if it's working it's working.

So do rituals and charms and magic spells.  We may be considering whether superstitious beliefs can be effective...at something.  That they are superstitious is being masked by their mundanity - which isn't how we're taught to think about superstition even though most superstitions are completely mundane from an experiential perspective.  

Personally, I'm willing to throw alot of our experiential beliefs about our minds in that bin.  A great number of them are in demonstrable error...and at a fundamental level, we can't even establish whether there is a self or no self...which is actually more important to the clinical expression of this type of thinking than the religious expression.

I can accept that superstition can creep in in some ways, in that it's often as if our brain kind of shortcuts its way to certain outcomes through the creation of expectations... for instance, there's no way to be sure whether that pain-relief dancing was actually pain-relieving in itself every time or was just luckily pain-relieving once and thereafter became a symbolic, shortcut to a placebo effect of pain relief or whatever... and I think that probably happens a lot, but I'm not complaining about it... that sort of expectation based, placebo effect, shortcutting 'superstition', if it exists, can be useful.

[Belacqua]

a choice of where to place your attention

When I was a freshman in college I had an eccentric Intro to Philosophy teacher. Instead of giving us the standard survey course he had us spend the whole semester on Language Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer. This is considered the founding text of Logical Positivism. It is an extremely dense, tightly-argued book, with lots of terms that your average small-town freshman (e.g. me) had never heard before. 

I remember lying on my back on the sofa in my dorm room, thinking that NOBODY could read such a text, that it was far beyond what humans could be expected to take in. I couldn't decide if something was wrong with the writer or with me. 

It turned out that the teacher didn't expect us to come away from it believing in Logical Positivism, but the main point of the course was to throw us in the deep end and have us work sentence by sentence through a grade-A difficult book. (Well, Kant is probably harder, but too long for one semester.) And it worked, too, because I remember the almost physical sense of having my mind expanded, and the very great pleasure of realizing that I had finally understood what the writer was getting at. 

Currently every teacher and academic person I know says that American education is in crisis. Young people today are unable to read a whole book in a semester, even a much easier one. Reading comprehension, even if they can make it to the end of the page, is falling fast. The main culprit is probably smartphones, which shorten attention spans and give immediate gratification. The new slang word in Japanese is "dopagaki," where "dopa" is short for "dopamine" and "gaki" is the Japanese word for "brat." A dopamine brat needs constantly changing input and can't sustain more than a few minutes on any one task. 

All of which is just to say that OF COURSE human minds are malleable, that their abilities are shaped by environment and habit, and OF COURSE they can be trained to change. Minds that jump around and react strongly to every passing idea can be trained to calm down, and minds that obsess can be trained not to react emotionally to problems when such a reaction won't help. 

I don't see how any of that can be questioned.

[emjay]

a choice of where to place your attention

When I was a freshman in college I had an eccentric Intro to Philosophy teacher. Instead of giving us the standard survey course he had us spend the whole semester on Language Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer. This is considered the founding text of Logical Positivism. It is an extremely dense, tightly-argued book, with lots of terms that your average small-town freshman (e.g. me) had never heard before. 

I remember lying on my back on the sofa in my dorm room, thinking that NOBODY could read such a text, that it was far beyond what humans could be expected to take in. I couldn't decide if something was wrong with the writer or with me. 

It turned out that the teacher didn't expect us to come away from it believing in Logical Positivism, but the main point of the course was to throw us in the deep end and have us work sentence by sentence through a grade-A difficult book. (Well, Kant is probably harder, but too long for one semester.) And it worked, too, because I remember the almost physical sense of having my mind expanded, and the very great pleasure of realizing that I had finally understood what the writer was getting at. 

Currently every teacher and academic person I know says that American education is in crisis. Young people today are unable to read a whole book in a semester, even a much easier one. Reading comprehension, even if they can make it to the end of the page, is falling fast. The main culprit is probably smartphones, which shorten attention spans and give immediate gratification. The new slang word in Japanese is "dopagaki," where "dopa" is short for "dopamine" and "gaki" is the Japanese word for "brat." A dopamine brat needs constantly changing input and can't sustain more than a few minutes on any one task. 

All of which is just to say that OF COURSE human minds are malleable, that their abilities are shaped by environment and habit, and OF COURSE they can be trained to change. Minds that jump around and react strongly to every passing idea can be trained to calm down, and minds that obsess can be trained not to react emotionally to problems when such a reaction won't help. 

Thanks for that... interesting

I don't see how any of that can be questioned.

But as to this, I don't know who you're addressing here; me, him, or both of us? If you mean him or both of us, I'm perfectly happy with this conversation because I know it's not meant in any ill-will, even if it is somewhat unexpected. But isn't that one of the things philosophy is known for; questioning everything even the things we take for granted? So this is going a lot deeper than I was expecting, but I'm still finding it very enjoyable, and who knows what I'll have left at the end of it, but personally I don't mind this 'streamlining' or drilling down process, however far it's going to go, because as I said, I don't believe it to be meant in any kind of ill-will... we are friends... and he himself says he is interested in Zen, which I'm not too familiar with myself - either in reference to his interest in it or in my knowledge of it compared to other types of Buddhism that are more familiar/appealing to me - and don't yet understand how it applies to all of this discussion... ie basically still waiting for the punchline, if there is one... but ultimately, I'm very much enjoying this conversation, even if I end up with nothing left of Buddhism to 'cling' to at the end of it... which ultimately is one of Buddhism's teachings anyway; that everything, including beliefs themselves, even about Buddhism, shouldn't be clung to in more than a raft kind of sense... something to help you in your journey but not hung onto beyond that, like carrying a raft around on your back after you've used it to cross a river. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's not the point here, but who knows, maybe I have got too much into Buddhism, and maybe it can indeed be streamlined to the point where it's not even recognisable as Buddhism any more, but rather just a set of useful ideas, regardless of where they came from. Who knows... I don't know where this is going to end up, but I am enjoying it, and as to your statement above, if that was meant in a 'concern for me' sense, then no need to worry about me - but thank you for your concern - I'm perfectly fine here, with this conversation, and how deeply it's streamlining/drilling, but if it was meant in a 'concern for the ideas' sense, again I don't think there's a problem, in that philosophy is known for that.... for streamlining/drilling down/questioning everything, even, or often especially, the things we take for granted. At the end of the day, however much we analyse it and prod at it from different angles, it's not going to change the fact that mindfulness, whatever it's called and wherever it came from, is meaningful to me, and not something, hopefully at least, I'm going to give up in a hurry, even if our understanding of what it is, changes.

[awty]

It should be obvious that nobody but you knows what you are feeling in consequence of this practice. Nobody posting here knows what the group is like or what effect they have on their members. 

Whether you call it Buddhism, or Buddhist-inspired group therapy, or The Group Designed to Trigger Nudger, it doesn't matter. If it's working it's working. 

One thing we can be sure of is that when you find something good, and it's working, and you're optimistic about the future of it, then for sure some slob from the Internet is going to speak up and try to wreck it all. Please don't let that happen.

It would seem to me that when you routinely slam the members of this forum you would remember that you are also a member of this forum.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well you tell me, what exactly do you think the supernatural, woo, or faith based claims are against it, and for that matter what cognitive science and neurobiology thinks are bunk, about it?

We started with buddhism as a whole and agreed that alot of things had to be cut out in order to make ground for a plausible claim about a specific practice being woo-free.  We chose to focus on attention regulation and open monitoring as medicine or therapy.  You have a set of anecdotal experiences that inform your beliefs about that.  However, medicine or therapy and peoples ideas about it are often full of mundane superstitions, misattributions, and misunderstandings.  Mindfulness hype is a thing, and a major market in new age thought.  The early studies that purported to show benefits both overstated those benefits and did not have rigorous controls.  They would compare people who did mindfulness based cbt against people who received no treatment and did nothing.  It would be nice to know whether the thing we're depending on to produce health outcomes outperforms, say, feeding birds in a park or taking up knitting or learning to play a musical instrument.  Especially because some of those things have been tested with mindfulness but not against mindfulness and they appear to make the mindfulness work better™ than just mindfulness itself.  Interestingly, there was very little attention paid to whether or what it's adverse effects were or might be.  Turns out it can also worsen anxiety, depersonalization, and psychosis.  Think about this in the terms of what either of us use mindfulness for - and my example of the rocket.  Praying to gods or doing ritual magic appears to work the same way and have about the same range of effect - whether a person believes in gods or magic or not...though it can produce even greater relief in people who do have a personal and genuine faith in those items and this has been compared to secular relaxation techniques, including mindfulness.

Then there are all the problems of consciousness studies that any set of claims - whether explicitly made or implicit in a description of alleged or puported function and effect - about mind and subjective experience have.  You (we) think that you are placing your attention somewhere...but we may be attention itself, or even just a story about attention.  Assuming there's a we and that this we actually can place things we're still left with the observation that our subjective experience or internal description of what our brain is doing does not match it's actual behaviors as demonstrated through objective means....and not just about mindfulness.  Whatever we are, if we are, we often don't know what we're doing and sometimes can't know - because there is no direct connection or monitoring structure between a and b....or maybe because we have yet to find any central processing structure whatsoever to do it...so we just flat out make shit up, creatively remember things that did not happen, and make connections in the present that did not arise in our experience in the past.  On and on it goes.   Mindfulness and zen are both ways to achieve something approximating a flow state (there are other ways and even drugs) - but that state is not one of calm or emptiness or detachment - it's actually so furious and energetically active that electrochemical communication pathways are overloaded - like a bandwidth issue on the internet - and this is why we report it as such even though it is demonstrably not so.   

I can accept that superstition can creep in in some ways, in that it's often as if our brain kind of shortcuts its way to certain outcomes through the creation of expectations... for instance, there's no way to be sure whether that pain-relief dancing was actually pain-relieving in itself every time or was just luckily pain-relieving once and thereafter became a symbolic, shortcut to a placebo effect of pain relief or whatever... and I think that probably happens a lot, but I'm not complaining about it... that sort of expectation based, placebo effect, shortcutting 'superstition', if it exists, can be useful.

You appreciate the difference between a set of superstitions being useful and a set of superstitions not being superstitious because they are useful, intellectually, I'm sure.... but you're probably also aware that our subjective experience and our attachment to those useful outcomes and to our self subverts that understanding.   Like a lucky rabbits foot.  A favorite deck of cards.  Wearing the same clothes for every home team game.  It works, they're not complaining.

However it works, if it's what's doing the work - it's about as good at it, for some people, some of the time, as a maintenance antidepressant. It's at least possible that it achieves this by leveraging superstitious thinking for effect. You might note that the guy wearing the dirty clothes isn't actually making his team win - but it's likely that mindfulness isn't providing some benefit you hope it will or think it does or might some day - and the smelly clothes are creating the same outcomes you're experiencing. The team may lose - but they feel better when they wear them, and they feel shittier and more anxious when they don't. Try having a convo with that guy after his team wins....christ it's the worst.

[The Grand Nudger]

One thing we can be sure of is that when you find something good, and it's working, and you're optimistic about the future of it, then for sure some slob from the Internet is going to speak up and try to wreck it all. Please don't let that happen.

It would seem to me that when you routinely slam the members of this forum you would remember that you are also a member of this forum.

One of the things I find so interesting about a whole range of stuff like mindfulness-as-medicine, is that no one can take it away from anyone.  You cant even take it away from yourself.  You don't have to believe in mind for mindfulness to work.  You don't have to believe in gods for prayer to work.  You don't have to believe in ritual magic for ritual to work.  You don't have to believe in sympathetic magic for a charm to work. 

I personally believe that the members here can enjoy things without turning them into some sort of idol beyond reproach, consideration, or scrutiny.  Case in point...I've been having this convo with Em... we've talked about this stuff quite a bit and have very similar metaphysical views, sticky disagreements too...Ems still into mindfulness, I'm still into zen.  Knowing that this stuff has baggage and isn't quite or always what it purports to be, understanding that our subjective experiences are unreliable narrators, doesn't actually seem to wreck anything for either of us.

The members here, and their views, aren't exactly fragile. The place for braindead affirmations and polite taboos is www dot iwannabelieve dotcom, or some such shit.

[emjay]

Well you tell me, what exactly do you think the supernatural, woo, or faith based claims are against it, and for that matter what cognitive science and neurobiology thinks are bunk, about it?

We started with buddhism as a whole and agreed that alot of things had to be cut out in order to make ground for a plausible claim about a specific practice being woo-free.  We chose to focus on attention regulation and open monitoring as medicine or therapy.  You have a set of anecdotal experiences that inform your beliefs about that.  However, medicine or therapy and peoples ideas about it are often full of mundane superstitions, misattributions, and misunderstandings.  Mindfulness hype is a thing, and a major market in new age thought.  The early studies that purported to show benefits both overstated those benefits and did not have rigorous controls.  They would compare people who did mindfulness based cbt against people who received no treatment and did nothing.  It would be nice to know whether the thing we're depending on to produce health outcomes outperforms, say, feeding birds in a park or taking up knitting or learning to play a musical instrument.  Especially because some of those things have been tested with mindfulness but not against mindfulness and they appear to make the mindfulness work better™ than just mindfulness itself.  Interestingly, there was very little attention paid to whether or what it's adverse effects were or might be.  Turns out it can also worsen anxiety, depersonalization, and psychosis.  Think about this in the terms of what either of us use mindfulness for - and my example of the rocket.  Praying to gods or doing ritual magic appears to work the same way and have about the same range of effect - whether a person believes in gods or magic or not...though it can produce even greater relief in people who do have a personal and genuine faith in those items and this has been compared to secular relaxation techniques, including mindfulness.

I think we're talking at cross purposes here; it has never been, to my knowledge a hyped up 'magic pill' or suchlike to me, that's not my approach to it at all. And in any case, any external magic pill, or external anything is not what I'm after... the whole point of this to me is about trying to learn how to accept anything, good or bad, that comes my way... and nothing other than something like mindfulness and equanimity, or Stoicism's equivalents, could do that job... it's not about finding some external hyped up quick fix, like a distraction, pain pill, or whatever that is ultimately subject to change and therefore unreliable, but rather learning how to deal internally with anything that arises... that's the sort of stability I need and seek, and which, in my subjective, potentially flawed opinion I accept, has already helped me so much through my mental issues after my op. If it bothers you that my use of the term 'mindfulness', feeds into what you consider an unearned positive hype/reputation, then I suppose I can consider refraining from using that word in the future, or at least being more mindful (), of how I use the term... only referring to my own personal, subjective experience of its benefit, rather than talking about it any objective hype/buzzword sense... to my knowledge I don't treat it that way, but maybe I do, subconsciously, I do after all, recommend it to people... so maybe I need to be more mindful (again ) about how I word it, would that make you happier?

Then there are all the problems of consciousness studies that any set of claims - whether explicitly made or implicit in a description of alleged or puported function and effect - about mind and subjective experience have.  You (we) think that you are placing your attention somewhere...but we may be attention itself, or even just a story about attention.  Assuming there's a we and that this we actually can place things we're still left with the observation that our subjective experience or internal description of what our brain is doing does not match it's actual behaviors as demonstrated through objective means....and not just about mindfulness.  Whatever we are, if we are, we often don't know what we're doing and sometimes can't know - because there is no direct connection or monitoring structure between a and b....or maybe because we have yet to find any central processing structure whatsoever to do it...so we just flat out make shit up, creatively remember things that did not happen, and make connections in the present that did not arise in our experience in the past.  On and on it goes.   Mindfulness and zen are both ways to achieve something approximating a flow state (there are other ways and even drugs) - but that state is not one of calm or emptiness or detachment - it's actually so furious and energetically active that electrochemical communication pathways are overloaded - like a bandwidth issue on the internet - and this is why we report it as such even though it is demonstrably not so.

I can't remember what Dan Dennett's term was for the 'subjective reports' of his subjects, and ai hasn't helped me either in figuring that out, but please do just accept whatever I say here as a 'subjective report' or 'internal description' or whatever that may or may not be objectively correct about what's going on in my mind, and of course I accept that irrationality and stuff can also be involved. But all those sorts of questions aside, and not trying to make any hyped up claims about it, all I can say is that personally, subjectively, perhaps irrationally, and perhaps mistakenly, it has been or felt awesome for me, but I'm not making the claim that it would be for everyone. That's just my 'subjective report' or 'internal description' which people can either take it or leave it.

I can accept that superstition can creep in in some ways, in that it's often as if our brain kind of shortcuts its way to certain outcomes through the creation of expectations... for instance, there's no way to be sure whether that pain-relief dancing was actually pain-relieving in itself every time or was just luckily pain-relieving once and thereafter became a symbolic, shortcut to a placebo effect of pain relief or whatever... and I think that probably happens a lot, but I'm not complaining about it... that sort of expectation based, placebo effect, shortcutting 'superstition', if it exists, can be useful.

You appreciate the difference between a set of superstitions being useful and a set of superstitions not being superstitious because they are useful, intellectually, I'm sure.... but you're probably also aware that our subjective experience and our attachment to those useful outcomes and to our self subverts that understanding.   Like a lucky rabbits foot.  A favorite deck of cards.  Wearing the same clothes for every home team game.  It works, they're not complaining.

However it works, if it's what's doing the work - it's about as good at it, for some people, some of the time, as a maintenance antidepressant.  It's at least possible that it achieves this by leveraging superstitious thinking for effect.   You might note that the guy wearing the dirty clothes isn't actually making his team win - but it's likely that mindfulness isn't providing some benefit you hope it will or think it does or might some day - and the smelly clothes are creating the same outcomes you're experiencing.  The team may lose - but they feel better when they wear them, and they feel shittier and more anxious when they don't.  Try having a convo with that guy after his team wins....christ it's the worst.

If it'll make you happy then, I accept I can be superstitious sometimes, maybe often, because that seems to be a natural bug/feature of how our brains work. I try not to be superstitious, but maybe it's ultimately unavoidable, but at least where the most obvious ones are concerned, like walking under ladders, black cats, all that sort of thing, I'm not superstitious about that at all, but yes, I accept that it can creep into our thinking in the ways we've both described, and it can be beneficial, as I said in that kind of shortcutting way if nothing else.

[The Grand Nudger]

@emjay
I wouldn't worry too much about my happiness or your word choice.  This is more an exploration of what unsupported beliefs or expectations people..you, me, the housecat might have about a historically sanitized religious practice that we both enjoy.  

Fame in the brain was dennets thing.  The most popular stories we're telling ourselves at any given moment - in a sea of other stories with alternative content detail.  Zen, as opposed to mindfulness, makes the better psuedoscientific claim from the sort of framing that dennet approached consciousness.  Mindfulness is meant to build up this (seemingly) indepedent ego - zen is (alleged to be) the recognition that there's no I in there in the first place.  No boundary between you and your environment.  I've had interesting experiences with both.  

I get a good chuckle every time I notice my mind wandering off to magical thinking as a person who doesn't believe in magical things.  We'd probably have a hard time explaining the persistence of superstitious ideation in the context of evolutionary psychology if it had no utility.

[emjay]

@emjay
I wouldn't worry too much about my happiness or your word choice.  This is more an exploration of what unsupported beliefs or expectations people..you, me, the housecat might have about a historically sanitized religious practice that we both enjoy.  

Fame in the brain was dennets thing.  The most popular stories we're telling ourselves at any given moment - in a sea of other stories with alternative content detail.  Zen, as opposed to mindfulness, makes the better psuedoscientific claim from the sort of framing that dennet approached consciousness.  Mindfulness is meant to build up this (seemingly) indepedent ego - zen is (alleged to be) the recognition that there's no I in there in the first place.  No boundary between you and your environment.  I've had interesting experiences with both.  

I get a good chuckle every time I notice my mind wandering off to magical thinking as a person who doesn't believe in magical things.  We'd probably have a hard time explaining the persistence of superstitious ideation in the context of evolutionary psychology if it had no utility.

Okay, are you saying that from a 'selfless', Zen-like POV, that lacks 'self-consciousness' in the sort of ways Sam Harris describes (and seeks)... are you saying that you think 'attention' or the 'control' of it (by a 'self') is an illusion, that having an ego, as something you think mindfulness (?indirectly) builds up, leads to? Don't get me wrong, that lack of self-consciousness (in so many senses) that Sam Harris, or now you it seems, talk about and seeks, sounds great and if I could turn off self-consciousness completely, that would be great... but nonetheless, I don't see how that better explains the seemingly 'willful' control of attention that we have? if 'I' 'notice' thoughts arising, 'label' them sometimes, then divert my attention to something else in my consciousness, some other 'object' of attention, how do you explain that in selfless terms, in Zen-like terms? Something influences what arises in consciousness does it not? and if it is not 'willful control'... an illusion or not... what do you think it is?