How much weight do you give to the self-reports of long-term meditation practitioners on their experience of consciousness? Do they have a privileged perspective on the true nature of conscious experience?
I do suspect it’s possible for long-term meditation practitioners to have observations about the “internal” explananda of consciousness that non-practitioners (such as myself) can’t have. Susan Blackmore may be one such person. Of course, before taking any particular report seriously I’d want to check whether the reporting practitioner seems to be a reliable and clear reporter of their internal experience, whether their reports can be replicated by others in a certain way, etc.
As for determining the “true nature” of conscious experience: that’s more a matter of normal science, and especially of proposing cognitive algorithms that would instantiate the observed explananda of consciousness, and the meditation practitioners who are helpful for increasing our understanding of the explananda of consciousness might or might not happen to also be useful for doing the scientific work of coming up with strong explanations of those explananda.
How much weight do you give to the self-reports of long-term meditation practitioners on their experience of consciousness? Do they have a privileged perspective on the true nature of conscious experience?
I do suspect it’s possible for long-term meditation practitioners to have observations about the “internal” explananda of consciousness that non-practitioners (such as myself) can’t have. Susan Blackmore may be one such person. Of course, before taking any particular report seriously I’d want to check whether the reporting practitioner seems to be a reliable and clear reporter of their internal experience, whether their reports can be replicated by others in a certain way, etc.
As for determining the “true nature” of conscious experience: that’s more a matter of normal science, and especially of proposing cognitive algorithms that would instantiate the observed explananda of consciousness, and the meditation practitioners who are helpful for increasing our understanding of the explananda of consciousness might or might not happen to also be useful for doing the scientific work of coming up with strong explanations of those explananda.