Comment by electriclizard
1 year ago
The west has shifted into believing subjective experience is useless compared to objective knowledge.
This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists.
We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value.
Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.
> Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community
Has it?
Most of traditional medicine is quackery, as useful and correct as a broken clock.
The placebo is effect is nearly the strongest, and completely opaque as to its operation.
Yes. All my therapists have referred me to meditation and explained to me that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy takes some influence from it.
There are tons of articles published in journals on it.
As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
I once told a CBT therapist that it sounded very similar to religious ideas an quoted something from the Bible that matched it. He agreed. Really the follow up to that is another Biblical quote: "there is nothing new under the sun".
> As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
If it works it should be testable. A lot of traditional medicine does work, but then it can be incorporated in to medicine. If alternative medicine (traditional or otherwise) works we call it "medicine". If it shines in subjective experience but is not testable, it just sounds like it provides a temporary feel good experience.
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I don't know, it seems everyone has different idea of what meditation is and if it doesn't work for me I will be told I am doing it wrong in some way. At least CBT seems to have a clear enough definition and instructions.
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*Case in point