I wonder how one could explain the pleasures of learning about a subject as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief. Maybe they’d describe it as getting rid of the suffering-inducing desire to get knowledge / acceptation from peers / whatever motivates people to learn?
I’m sure it would be possible to find meditators who came to the opposite conclusion about well-being.
If someone reading this happens to know of any I’d be interested to know! I wouldn’t be that surprised if they were very rare, since my (layman) impression is that Buddhism aligns well with suffering-focused ethics, and I assume most meditators are influenced by Buddhism.
Pleasures of learning may be explained by closing open loops, which include unsatisfied curiosity and reflection-based desires for resolving contradictions. And I think anticipated relief is implicitly tracking not only the unmet needs of our future self, but also the unmet needs of others, which we have arguably ‘cognitively internalized’ (from our history of growing up in an interpersonal world).
Descriptively, some could say that pleasure does exist as a ‘separable’ phenomenon, but deny that it has any independently aggregable axiological value. Tranquilism says that its pursuit is only valuable insofar as there was a craving for its presence in the first place. Anecdotally, at least one meditator friend agreed that pleasure is something one can ‘point to’ (and that it can be really intense in some jhana states), but denied that those states are all that interesting compared to the freedom from cravings, which also seems like the main point in most of Buddhism.
I wonder how one could explain the pleasures of learning about a subject as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief. Maybe they’d describe it as getting rid of the suffering-inducing desire to get knowledge / acceptation from peers / whatever motivates people to learn?
If someone reading this happens to know of any I’d be interested to know! I wouldn’t be that surprised if they were very rare, since my (layman) impression is that Buddhism aligns well with suffering-focused ethics, and I assume most meditators are influenced by Buddhism.
Pleasures of learning may be explained by closing open loops, which include unsatisfied curiosity and reflection-based desires for resolving contradictions. And I think anticipated relief is implicitly tracking not only the unmet needs of our future self, but also the unmet needs of others, which we have arguably ‘cognitively internalized’ (from our history of growing up in an interpersonal world).
Descriptively, some could say that pleasure does exist as a ‘separable’ phenomenon, but deny that it has any independently aggregable axiological value. Tranquilism says that its pursuit is only valuable insofar as there was a craving for its presence in the first place. Anecdotally, at least one meditator friend agreed that pleasure is something one can ‘point to’ (and that it can be really intense in some jhana states), but denied that those states are all that interesting compared to the freedom from cravings, which also seems like the main point in most of Buddhism.