Meditation and Introspection: Insight through Transformation (original) (raw)
This paper sketches how transformation of the mind through Buddhist meditation practice can support introspective investigations of experience in science. Rebuffing conventional associations between transformation and distortion, it carves out a space for epistemically-beneficial transformations. §1 first introduces meditation's place within Buddhist thought, outlining traditional claims that the practice cultivates attentional gestures important for interrogating the mind. It then outlines proposed uses of these practices within science, before introducing worries over their utility. Such worries propose that meditative gestures transform and thereby distort the mind, making resultant introspective judgements unrepresentative of untrained or inattentive experience. The remainder of the paper combats these worries using material from two distinct fields. §2 introduces literature from the cognitive psychology of attention to sketch a first-pass account of how meditative transformations might be of benefit. It argues that converging models of attention here can precisify the phenomenological changes available through meditative training, such that their epistemic merits can be better evaluated. I identify one kind of meditation practice as training a form of top-down attentional control. And using cognitive psychological models of this capacity, I argue that it can (i) accentuate and (ii) isolate particular features of experience, to our epistemic advantage. §3 outlines some more challenging, distortive dangers surrounding the introspective use of top-down attentional control, showing how it can be misappropriated to yield genuinely unrepresentative accounts of experience. Responding to these, §4 brings the attention literature into dialogue with the pedagogical literature on meditation practice to show how to use this attentional faculty appropriately in introspective investigations, addressing such dangers. This allows me to conclude in §5 with some comments on prudent approaches to introspective inquiry within science.
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