> In what sense does the right hemisphere "see the whole without breaking things into pieces"? Especially when it's implemented on a distributed computing medium like neurons.
https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e... goes into this a lot. It does that fairly literally. In split brain patients, if you have them, say, draw a picture using their left hand (right hemisphere), they tend to draw it impressionistically without much detail--you get the sense or form of the whole--it really doesn't see the "parts". The left hemisphere typically can't do this, and seems rather preoccupied with what it knows. If you ask a split brain patient to, say, draw an elephant with their right hand, they might draw a trunk, and ear, a tail, etc. and actually not have the ability to put them together in relation to draw an elephant. They might even draw skeleton, because they know about it--it really doesn't have a sense of the whole.
> I think mirror neurons are a good example. I still don't understand what difference it makes which neurons are involved in empathy. Pretty much every signal in the brain can be tuned out or strengthened, right?
I don't think it matters which neurons, but I think what the brain does matters quite a bit, like the difference between, say, someone who can work out a sum with a pencil and paper, vs someone who sees numbers and landscapes and just kind of squashes the images together and knows the sum (some people with exceptional calculation abilities have unusual synesthesias like that and can't actually tell you how they calculate at all). If Buddhism, say, makes a claim like "there's no difference between self and other", it makes a difference if, say, my brain just feels distress at seeing someone in pain, or if my brain has a representation of just exactly what that would feel like on my body in some detail. We know empathy is a thing, but neuroscience tells us in more detail by, say, various failure modes of the brain, that some people can't differentiate self and other, that seeing others, say, can invade their mental space in a very direct way that they can't tell from themselves. So to me, without knowing in detail by having already accomplished it, what the hardware could possibly do, then we can train it. Like, people run 4 minute miles all of the time now, but it was once considered not possible. Someone sets a new standard, and a kind of mental block of "that's impossible" seems lifted. Knowing just what various brain regions can do removes some mystery of what's possible--were some old spiritual masters spitballing theoretical possibilities, speaking perhaps metaphorically, or very literally describing something they achieved? It leans toward the possibility of the latter, and the ability to train the latter, if you know in detail that exactly some region of the brain does some thing exactly.
> Your last paragraph seems to make a more concrete claim, which is that we can tell which kinds of cognition are more or less draining, analogous to native vs emulated execution. This makes sense to me, but it's not clear that we couldn't already tell roughly how draining different modes of thought are without neuroscience, nor that the main claims of Eastern spirituality depended on how draining these different states are to hold.
I think my line of thinking on this is more of the same sort of thing. How would you know, say, that you're not emulating what's possible to run in hardware. Like you said, you could strengthen any signal of the brain. How would you differentiate between the thought that everything is one, vs the intuitive perception of it? So I tend to think that the reason they're pointing these things out is because of that sort of thing. Some claims of Eastern spiritually do depend on how draining a state is to hold. In Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, the recognition of emptiness is clarified as not being a matter of effort, and they use the metaphor of a bell. You don't continuously hammer the bell, you ring the bell and the tone simply continues to ring as long as it rings. If you notice it has stopped, you can ring it again, and eventually, recognition is continuous; it should not be a matter of effort, and effort would be one way to spot that you're not doing it right. So, I do have an unsupported suspicion that they're pointing alternative ways of being that aren't a matter of effort and that people often don't recognize.
Thanks for elaborating. I'm still not convinced about the strengths of claims that can be made in this instance, but I like the analogy to the 4-minute mile. However, I think that people didn't determine that a 4-minute mile was possible by using their knowledge of human anatomy. But I concede that knowledge of physics and thermodynamics could be used to rule out something like a 4-second mile.
Regarding the effortlessness, I think it completely depends on the stage of the practice. I can relate to that, sometimes I do strain myself too much only to discover an effortless flow sometimes. But I understand that without that extreme effort put prior, I would not get that effortless flow. It's like yin-yang to an extent. Of course, someone who's very experienced will probably find it all mostly effortless, but to get to that stage in the first place, intense effort is required. If I was in a very anti-Zen state, like being "in my head" / feeling disconnected from my body - which I still get quite often unfortunately, as I work 60h/week+... if I felt like that and I really lacked momentum and I decided to take the effortless way, I would just not get out of it. I would be drowning in my own thoughts. I have experienced that so many times as I experimented with it. Only intense effort and intense focus could help me break through a major lack of Zen-momentum. Sometimes when I do have Zen momentum, if I put good effort and focus very intensely during the time I reserve just for Zen practice, just taking a walk and dropping any effort and just trying to be subtly aware makes sense all out of the sudden. But it drops without prior intense practice, at least that's what I have noticed on myself. I do hope to get to the point where I could just "ring the bells", but I'm not there yet and I would warn anyone new to the practice to stay away from shortcuts or anything involving effortlessness. It's an easy trap to fall into in the beginning. I fell into it after the first 6 months, when I made very good progress, I started to wonder, woah, it could be all so effortless. What followed is that I started taking the regular practice less seriously, and before I noticed, I got into the "thinking that I'm aware" thing - that set me back for like one year or more. It took me a long time to realize what I was doing and then to fix that.
https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e... goes into this a lot. It does that fairly literally. In split brain patients, if you have them, say, draw a picture using their left hand (right hemisphere), they tend to draw it impressionistically without much detail--you get the sense or form of the whole--it really doesn't see the "parts". The left hemisphere typically can't do this, and seems rather preoccupied with what it knows. If you ask a split brain patient to, say, draw an elephant with their right hand, they might draw a trunk, and ear, a tail, etc. and actually not have the ability to put them together in relation to draw an elephant. They might even draw skeleton, because they know about it--it really doesn't have a sense of the whole.
> I think mirror neurons are a good example. I still don't understand what difference it makes which neurons are involved in empathy. Pretty much every signal in the brain can be tuned out or strengthened, right?
I don't think it matters which neurons, but I think what the brain does matters quite a bit, like the difference between, say, someone who can work out a sum with a pencil and paper, vs someone who sees numbers and landscapes and just kind of squashes the images together and knows the sum (some people with exceptional calculation abilities have unusual synesthesias like that and can't actually tell you how they calculate at all). If Buddhism, say, makes a claim like "there's no difference between self and other", it makes a difference if, say, my brain just feels distress at seeing someone in pain, or if my brain has a representation of just exactly what that would feel like on my body in some detail. We know empathy is a thing, but neuroscience tells us in more detail by, say, various failure modes of the brain, that some people can't differentiate self and other, that seeing others, say, can invade their mental space in a very direct way that they can't tell from themselves. So to me, without knowing in detail by having already accomplished it, what the hardware could possibly do, then we can train it. Like, people run 4 minute miles all of the time now, but it was once considered not possible. Someone sets a new standard, and a kind of mental block of "that's impossible" seems lifted. Knowing just what various brain regions can do removes some mystery of what's possible--were some old spiritual masters spitballing theoretical possibilities, speaking perhaps metaphorically, or very literally describing something they achieved? It leans toward the possibility of the latter, and the ability to train the latter, if you know in detail that exactly some region of the brain does some thing exactly.
> Your last paragraph seems to make a more concrete claim, which is that we can tell which kinds of cognition are more or less draining, analogous to native vs emulated execution. This makes sense to me, but it's not clear that we couldn't already tell roughly how draining different modes of thought are without neuroscience, nor that the main claims of Eastern spirituality depended on how draining these different states are to hold.
I think my line of thinking on this is more of the same sort of thing. How would you know, say, that you're not emulating what's possible to run in hardware. Like you said, you could strengthen any signal of the brain. How would you differentiate between the thought that everything is one, vs the intuitive perception of it? So I tend to think that the reason they're pointing these things out is because of that sort of thing. Some claims of Eastern spiritually do depend on how draining a state is to hold. In Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, the recognition of emptiness is clarified as not being a matter of effort, and they use the metaphor of a bell. You don't continuously hammer the bell, you ring the bell and the tone simply continues to ring as long as it rings. If you notice it has stopped, you can ring it again, and eventually, recognition is continuous; it should not be a matter of effort, and effort would be one way to spot that you're not doing it right. So, I do have an unsupported suspicion that they're pointing alternative ways of being that aren't a matter of effort and that people often don't recognize.