grateful hat-tip to an indirect collaborator for raising this issue and offering these quotes:
On a totally different tangent, the specific knowledge models basically state or imply that awakening will somehow magically provide hidden conceptual information about all sorts of specific things in life, such as the workings of particle physics, how to bring about world peace, who our disciples should marry, and the like. Some go further and state that enlightenment progressively brings complete omniscience, meaning the ability to know everything simultaneously about every single part and particle of the entire at least eight hundred trillion mile–wide universe.
[…]
While these might seem to some people like reasonable things awakened beings should somehow know, let’s include other things it might be good to know, such as how to create safe, inexpensive lithium ion batteries for electric cars, how to consistently beat the return of an S&P 500 index fund over the long haul, how to balance the federal deficit while providing everyone with outstanding social services and not raising taxes, how to instantaneously make every blue-collar Republican realize that they are voting against their own self-interest, and how to build a fusion reactor that is safe, inexpensive, produces enough energy for everyone on the planet, and has no radioactive disposal issues. When you consider these, the concept of specific knowledge gained by merely seeing the true nature of ordinary sensations begins to seem as ridiculous as it really is.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf
After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he _can’t_ think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize. Just as it makes no sense to try to teach factual content without giving students opportunities to practice using it, it also makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content.
Ok. There is nuance that many meditation teachers don’t grasp, OR they DO grasp it, to a greater or lesser degree, but they are simply offering a precise, skilled, one-sided correction to people who think meditation will confer direct mystical knowledge on how to pick stocks, heal interpersonal relationships, or cure cancer.
So, there are TWO types of knowledge.
(1)
First, there is knowledge that is true, all the time, everywhere, such as the laws of physics, laws of mind, and phenomenology, as it were (the latter two loosely speaking). For these, any individual person has an extremely OVERDETERMINED dataset, by the time they’re maybe just weeks or a few years old. (It’s not the kind of physics data that will output quantum mechanics or string theory, but still.) This dataset is sufficient to yield insight into emptiness, the true nature of (body)mind, some aspects of physical grace, and, qualifiedly, almost-unconditional wellbeing.
Furthermore, insight into knowledge of mind, all things being equal, will boost IQ and general thinking skills! IQ is not hardwired, nor is “thinking,” except for a slight limning of development and genetics. Intelligence is 99% malleable software.
The reason that “critical thinking can’t be taught,” and the reason that the world isn’t filled with meditator-Einstein’s, is that gradual, and sometimes sudden upgrades in reasoning can take thousands of hours of not-McMindfulness, to yield fruit. The brain changes slowly. It takes on the order of 10,000 hours (yeah, that popularized-for-shaky-reasons number, but really) to “turn over the whole mind, for the first time,” though plenty of stuff will contingently happen before that time interval elapses.
(2)
Now, there is also the second type of knowledge. In addition to what is always true, everywhere, as I put it, Ingram points out that pesky domain knowledge is a thing:
For a new human, aside from those universal types of data, mentioned above, that massively overdetermined implications, there all also true unknown unknowns, from that new human’s point of view.
But, setting aside, for a moment, those true unknown unknowns, there are also knowable unknowns, which are knowable through personal action (experiment) and inference (theorizing), as it were. [Edit 2020-09-06: Further, I should have made the point, here, too, that the “relative” world is massively overdetermined, highly self-correlated, and coherent, all things being equal, as well. It’s possible to know so, so much, from sparse, thin slices, if those slices used properly and sought out, as needed, as per below.]
To make an extended analogy, science was a civilizational upgrade for the acceleration of converting knowable unknowns to the known and for pushing out the unknowable to the “true bleeding edge” of “real” unknown unknowns, as they disclose surprise, or not, according to necessity and contingency.
So, analogously to civilizational-science-as-upgrade, now, for an individual, good meditation is, over time, like personal science (ultimately effortless, partially-implicit, costless), a bare-metal epistemic upgrade that improves that meta-bootstrapping process of ever more proactive and effective knowledge-seeking [Edit 2020-09-06: and evidence-using]. An advanced meditator (using a fully comprehensive system) will eventually be experimenting more, faster, more frequently, more effectively/constructively, less dangerously, with better implicit and explicit theoretical frameworks, to acquire raw data to feed into the [Edit: 2020-09-06 proactive and spontaneous] generation of personal moral and practical domain knowledge (and ever-better epistemics).
(I think meditation teachers hate to go anywhere near any of this, because fallible meditation teachers and sociopathic gurus, with necessarily imperfect meditation methods, make harmful mistakes ALL THE TIME. And, when someone gets hurt, it’s often way better to assume ignorance, blindspots, or myopic malevolence than to assume a teacher or guru is playing long-run benevolent, n-dimensional chess. So, yeah, suggesting that meditation teachers have domain knowledge can be very fraught, without also communicating how to assess a teacher’s domain knowledge, along particular dimensions. And that’s it’s own chicken-egg problem. So, sometimes, it’s better to not talk about POTENTIAL meta-bootstrapping meditative epistemic upgrades at all, if they’ll be unreflectively read into seeming advanced meditators. But, we do value the practical wisdom and physical grace of some meditation masters–so when people deny it’s a thing it all, it seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating, for a community.)
(conclusion)
To summarize, meditation is a vehicle for disclosing both absolute and relative (domain) truths.
And, one eventually runs out of absolute truths, to discover and align with.
But, our expanding light cone retains the possibility of truly surprising us, in very mundane ways, as well as very not-mundane ways, as things disclose across the “unknown unknown boundary.” But, we can be ever-more-skillfully-poised, truly as best we know how, as best we can do, at any particular moment in our personal lifetime, or history, to facilitate and grab that possibly surprising data, the instant it appears, to wring out every last bit of de-fanged uncertainty, safety, joy, excitement, sociology, non-authoritarian governance, humane biomedical engineering, world peace, intimacy, and wellbeing it can offer. And meditation is especially suited to facilitate that poise, all things being equal.
meditationstuff 