Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:37:04 UTC No. 16251595

>>16251586
We were “designed” by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation—things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” At the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.

If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? At least three basic principles of design would make sense:

1.Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
2.The pleasure shouldn’t last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That’s no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
3.The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more.

As the Buddha said, pleasure is fleeting and this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied.

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:38:06 UTC No. 16251599

>>16251595
And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:39:07 UTC No. 16251602

>>16251599
Scientists can watch this logic play out at the biochemical level by observing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is correlated with pleasure and the anticipation of pleasure. They took monkeys and monitored dopamine-generating neurons as drops of sweet juice fell onto the monkeys’ tongues. Dopamine was released right after the juice touched the tongue. But then the monkeys were trained to expect drops of juice after a light turned on. As the trials proceeded, more and more of the dopamine came when the light turned on, and less and less came after the juice hit the tongue.

As time passed, there was more in the way of anticipating the pleasure that would come from the sweetness, yet less in the way of pleasure actually coming from the sweetness. If you encounter a new kind of pleasure—if, say, you’ve somehow gone your whole life without eating a powdered-sugar doughnut, and somebody hands you one and suggests you try it—you’ll get a big blast of dopamine after the taste of the doughnut sinks in. But later, once you’re a confirmed powdered-sugar-doughnut eater, the lion’s share of the dopamine spike comes before you actually bite into the doughnut, as you’re staring longingly at it; the amount that comes after the bite is much less than the amount you got after that first, blissful bite into a powdered-sugar doughnut. The pre-bite dopamine blast you’re now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it’s a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.

Natural selection's job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:40:51 UTC No. 16251606

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:41:54 UTC No. 16251607

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 22:10:26 UTC No. 16251687

>>16251586
>>16251595
>buddhists
cowards, you mean?

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Jun 2024 23:18:35 UTC No. 16251844

>>16251586
>>16251595
>>16251599
>>16251602
>>16251606
>>16251607
summarize everything in 20 words or less

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:01:25 UTC No. 16251898

Where do I start with meditation? I have had some minor success with breathing-based exercises, observing the effect of breath in the body etc.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:18:41 UTC No. 16253114

>>16251687
Can you elaborate?

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:19:43 UTC No. 16253116

>>16251898
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/WithEachAndEveryBreath/Section0003.html

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:46:16 UTC No. 16253157

>>16251844
[1] - Dukkha (suffering/stress)
[2] - the Origination [of dukkha]
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ShapeOfSuffering/Contents.html
[3] - the Cessation [of dukkha] (nibbana)
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/MindLikeFire/Section0007.html
[4] - the Path [to cessation of dukkha] (eightfold path)
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/OnThePath/Section0000.html

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:59:31 UTC No. 16253188

>>16251687
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo

The value of sensuality is that it provides you with pleasure from the pain of itself.

Sensuality touches you with pain, but at the same time, it offers you a solution for that same pain. It’s just like racketeering: “Okay, if you pay me, I’ll make your problems go away, problems that I put on you so that you will pay me”. So you get extorted by your own sensuality, your own desires. Sensual desires hurt, and giving in to them will remove that hurt and reward you with more pleasure. It’s a win-win. Or so it seems, until you realize that the true win is to not be pressured by the desires in the first place. The win is not having to pay the racketeering thugs for your safety; the win is to not have the thugs pressure you at all.

The more you give in to the pressure of sensuality, the more you will have to give in since its nature can never be changed.

The Nature of sensuality is that it hurts, burns, and pressures you.

“Suppose there was a bronze cup of beverage that had a nice colour, aroma, and flavour. But it was mixed with poison. Then along comes a man struggling in the oppressive heat, weary, thirsty, and parched. They’d say to him: ‘Here, mister, this bronze cup of beverage has a nice colour, aroma, and flavour. Drink it if you like. If you drink it, its nice colour, aroma, and flavour will refresh you. But drinking it will result in death or deadly pain.’
Then that man might think: ‘I could quench my thirst with water, whey, or broth. But I shouldn’t drink that beverage, for it would be for my lasting harm and suffering.’ He’d reject that beverage. After appraisal, he wouldn’t drink it, and it wouldn’t result in death or deadly pain.”
—SN 12:66

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:04:16 UTC No. 16253199

>>16253188
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT2gNmmQKjY

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:05:14 UTC No. 16253204

>>16253114
is it not obvious? The entire premise of buddhism is that there is suffering everywhere, in every facet of human life, overwhelmingly so.
Instead of telling people that the only way, the only 100% guaranteed way to avoid said suffering, is to never perceive it in the first place, they retreat into "meditation". Fucking spineless cope shit.
Instead of proclaiming the cure for the malaise, they rather take a palliative. Absolutely pathetic.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:05:18 UTC No. 16253205

>>16253199
When the brain is first exposed to a stimulus, the a process is unmitigated by compensatory brain mechanisms, and thus State A is experienced in full. However, as the b process is recruited, State A is dampened. This arrangement leads to an initial peak experience followed by a leveling off. While the a process is a direct reflection of the stimulus and so is always the same if the stimulus is the same (a certain number of ounces of alcohol or milligrams of heroin, for instance), this is not so with the compensatory b process. Generated by a powerfully adaptive nervous system, the b process learns with time and exposure. Repeated encounters with the stimulus result in faster, bigger, and longer-lasting b processes that are better able to maintain homeostasis in the face of disruption. Moreover, the b process can be elicited solely by environmental stimuli that promise the a process is coming—which is what happened with Pavlov’s dogs, who learned to salivate even when food was not present.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:06:27 UTC No. 16253211

>>16253157
>>>/x/

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:08:27 UTC No. 16253217

>>16253205
When Mick Jagger first sang “I can’t get no satisfaction!” in 1965, we could not have known that he was predicting the future. As Jagger told his biographer in 2013, he has been with about four thousand women—a different partner every ten days of his adult life.

Note that Mick didn’t follow up with, “. . . and at four thousand, I finally found satisfaction. I’m done!” Presumably he’ll keep going as long as he can. So how many lovers would be enough to get “satisfaction”? If you’ve had four thousand, we can safely say that dopamine is steering things in your life, at least when it comes to sex. And dopamine’s prime directive is more. If Sir Mick chases satisfaction another half century, he still won’t catch it. His idea of satisfaction is not satisfaction at all. It’s pursuit, which is driven by dopamine, the molecule that cultivates perpetual dissatisfaction. After he beds a lover, his immediate goal will be to find another.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:09:30 UTC No. 16253220

>>16253217
In this way, Mick isn’t alone. He isn’t even unusual. Mick Jagger is just a confident version of TV’s George Costanza. In nearly every episode of Seinfeld, George fell in love. He went to ridiculous lengths to get a date, and he was capable of almost anything if it might lead to sex. He imagined each new woman as a potential life mate, the perfect female who would go with him into happily ever after. But every Seinfeld fan knows how those stories ended. George would be crazy about the woman up until the moment she returned his affection. When he didn’t have to try anymore, all he wanted was out. George Louis Costanza was so addicted to the dopamine thrill of chasing romance that he spent an entire season trying to extract himself from his engagement to the only woman who continued to love him despite every awful thing he did. And when his fiancée died from licking toxic glue on the envelopes of their wedding invitations, George wasn’t devastated. He was relieved, even joyful. He was ecstatic to rejoin the chase. Mick is like George, and George is like all of us. We revel in the passion, the focus, the excitement, the thrill of finding new love. The difference is that most of us figure out at some point that dopamine lies to us. Unlike the former latex salesman for Vandelay Industries and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, we come to understand that the next beautiful woman or a handsome man we see is probably not the key to “satisfaction.”

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:13:53 UTC No. 16253230

>>16253211
What's paranormal about stress and suffering?

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ShapeOfSuffering/Section0004.html

As you walk to the door of your parents’ house, thinking about the situation (2b — verbal fabrication), you pull up memories of things your uncle has done in the past (2c — mental fabrication). This provokes anger, causing your breathing to become labored and tight (2a — bodily fabrication). This makes you uncomfortable (2c — mental fabrication), and you are aware of how uncomfortable you feel (3 — consciousness). Hormones are released into your bloodstream (4f through 4i — form). Without being fully aware that you are making a choice, you choose (4c — intention) to focus (4e — attention) on the perception (4b) of how trapped you feel in this situation. Your consciousness of this idea (5 and 6 — mental contact) feels oppressive (7 — feeling). You want to find a way out (8 — craving). At this point, you can think of a number of roles you could play in the upcoming dinner (9d and 10 — clinging and becoming). You might refuse to speak with your uncle, you might try to be as unobtrusive as possible to get through the dinner without incident, or you might be more aggressive and confront your uncle about his behavior. You mentally take on one of these roles (11 — birth), but unless you keep your imaginary role actively in mind, it falls away as soon as you think of it (12 — aging and death). So you keep thinking about it, evaluating how your parents will react to it, how you will feel about it, and so on (2b — verbal fabrication). Although the stress of step (12) in this case is not great, the fact that your role has to be kept in mind and repeatedly evaluated is stressful, and you can go through many sequences of stress in this way in the course of a few moments.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:15:39 UTC No. 16253236

>>16253230
You have been walking to your parents’ house with the above thoughts in mind (2 through 4), already in a state of stress and unhappy anticipation. You knock on the door, and your uncle answers (5 and 6) with a drink in his hand. Regardless of what he says, you feel oppressed by his presence (7) and wish you were someplace else (8c). Your mother makes it obvious that she does not want a scene at the dinner, so you go through the evening playing the role of the dutiful child (9c, 10a, 11). Alternatively, you could decide that you must nevertheless confront your uncle (again, 9c, 10, and 11). Either way, you find the role hard to maintain and so you break out of the role at the end of the dinner (12). In this way, the entire evening counts as a sequence of stress.

Instead of dropping the role you have taken on, you assume it for the rest of your life — for instance, as the passive, dutiful son or daughter, as the reformer who tries to cure your uncle of alcoholism, or as the avenger, seeking retributive justice for the many hardships you and your mother have had to endure. To maintain this role, you have to cling to views (9b) about how you should behave (9c) and the sort of person you are or should be (9d). You keep producing (10) and assuming (11) this identity until it becomes impossible to do so any further (12). In this way, a full sequence of dependent co-arising could cover an entire lifetime. If you continue craving to maintain this identity (8b) even as you die, it will lead you to cling (9) to opportunities for rebirth (10 and 11) as they appear at the moment of death, and the full sequence of dependent co-arising could then cover more than one lifetime, leading to further suffering and stress on into the indefinite future.

Anonymous at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:07:08 UTC No. 16253373

>>16253188
–“Magandiya, suppose that there was a leper covered with sores and infections, picking the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, cauterizing his body over a pit of glowing embers. A doctor cures him and he's now happy and free. Then suppose two strong men were to grab and drag him to a pit of glowing embers. What do you think? Wouldn’t he twist his body this way and that?
–“Yes, Master Gotama. The fire is painful to the touch, very hot & scorching.”
–“Now what do you think, Magandiya? Is the fire painful to the touch, very hot & scorching, only now, or was it also that way before?”
–“Both now & before it is painful to the touch, very hot & scorching, master Gotama. It’s just that when the man was a leper covered with sores and infections, picking the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, his faculties were impaired, which was why, even though the fire was painful to the touch, he had the skewed perception of ‘pleasant’.”
–“In the same way, Magandiya,
>sensual pleasures in the past were painful to the touch, very hot & scorching;
>sensual pleasures in the future will be painful to the touch, very hot & scorching;
>sensual pleasures at present are painful to the touch, very hot & scorching;
but when beings are not free from the passion for sensual pleasures—devoured by sensual craving, burning with sensual fever—their faculties are impaired, which is why, even though sensual pleasures are painful to the touch, they have the skewed perception of ‘pleasant’.”
—MN 75