The below could be clarified and de-equivocated and de-contradicted tons and tons, but I thought it might be pretty useful for some people. “Enlightenment” isn’t “weird” or “unnatural” or “extreme” or a “hack.” It’s just currently an unusual thing for a person to do.
Fwiw, I don’t think of things in terms of overdriving brain region X, or replacing “what cognition” with “where cognition,” or “attenuating disinhibition circuit Z“…This is vague and metaphorical, but my position is that enlightenment is just ultimately pretty low-key (though highly stable) changes in software, not firmware (nor hardware). The body/brain in the relevant senses are just doing the same things they’ve always done. Same operating principles. Also, the firmware/hardware doesn’t need to be hacked or rooted in any way to get the new software to run.All meditation is doing is tweaking the input (sensory) stream, fractionally improving the “quality” or “learning value” or “Bayesian surprise factor” (whatever, vague, toy model, here) of the incoming data, and that’s enough, a cascading bootstrap, to “naturally” reprogram the entire system, all things being equal. “Learning that meditation is a thing” is the beginning of that cascading bootstrap, seamlessly: There’s not really different data types. In one sense we’re just causal systems bopping around, and stuff is happening to us, and we do some processing and do stuff in response.There’s fractal activation energy humps, nonmonotonicity, but the system stably “likes” the new thing better, according to unchanging “bare metal”/genetic/hardwired values. No hacks, no going against the evolutionary grain, nothing like that. The system is lawfully, globally albeit nonmonotonically, “trying” to go in the direction it’s always been trying to go. (“Better predictions,” “better homeostasis,” something.)Enlightenment is a “natural” outcome of correctly engaging a system that is “naturally flexible” all the way to the “bottom.” The bodymind is just doing what it’s “supposed to do” all the way through.(Please pardon my overloading “natural,” as well as the telos and anthropomorphism.)The neuroscience is still going to be super interesting. It’s just going to need another 50 to 150 years, imo.