The life-changing magic of illusionist meditation
Best thing I've done in years
DISCLAIMER: I am not a mental health professional. This is just one strategy for general quality-of-life meditation that has worked for me. If you are experiencing extreme negative emotions and you think anything I am advocating here would encourage you to tamp those down to treat them as “fake”, this is not an approach that will work in that scenario and you should talk to a professional, not an undergrad in philosophy of mind.
Meditation has made me a happier and clearer thinker than any single factor since getting a long-term partner.
I have tried meditating at many sporadic times over many years, and read lots of books on it, and none of them worked. Then in late January of this year, there was a sudden phase change and everything made sense and I am just much less stressed, as a busy Princeton student, then I have been since high school at least, and maybe before that. I can handle a lot now!
Far and away the most important factor in meditation working well was taking illusionism seriously, and thinking like an illusionist. (If you don’t know what illusionism is, we’ll get there.) Thus, I call what I do “illusionist meditation”, even though it is far from original and you do not need to be an eliminitavist/quietist about qualia to practice it.1
Since most meditation I tried before this was close to futile, and this kind of meditation has been a step-change in my well-being, I figured it’d be worthwhile to write down in case it helps other people.
Step 0: how meditation advice works
I started taking voice lessons about a year ago. For many months, I heard stuff like: relax your throat, stay centered, support your voice with your breath, don’t strain, etc. I tried and tried to do those things, and never got them quite right. Then, one day, after lots of nudging from my vocal coach, I actually did sing that way, and it felt way better, and it all made sense to me in the moment! What was I doing? Well… I was relaxing my throat, staying centered, etc.
I had no new insight that I could put in words. My vocal coach didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already heard in high school chorus. Rather, her advice, coupled with a lot of practice, nudged me towards a place where I could actually feel it. This is ineffability, if you like, but it’s the ordinary kind of ineffability, like riding a bike: you can read a lot about how to ride a bike and still struggle to “get it.”
Think about a Rinzai Zen kōan, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” It’s not as though the acoustic properties of palms are actually that important. It’s that thinking about that question really hard, bringing your full attention to it, meditating on it, etc., and actually setting solving it as your goal (not “trying to solve it”), which triggers you to break through into a new way of thinking.
All this to say: I am going to give some advice, and offer a lot of references for mindset, which may sound strange or banal or make you think, why would this work? My answer is: it’s all triggers. It’s all about trying to put you in the right state of mind where you can do the damn thing, and get to know it by experience.
Do not expect reading this blog post, without doing the things in this blog post, to be revelatory. Do not expect it to sound profound. Do not expect anything to work unless you actually do it. Set yourself the goal of doing it. Do not set yourself the goal of “trying to do it.”
(If those sound like the same thing, they aren’t, and you should read this and this before proceeding.)
This will take Actual Work. If you put in the Actual Work, though, I think it will work. You could probably do it in three weeks, if you afford yourself lots of time for your mind to wander in between doing interesting things—and you absolutely do not need to set everything else in your life aside to fit in the Actual Work. In fact, that’s probably a bad idea. But if you are unwilling to put in a couple hours a day for a short period of time, sorry, I can’t help you.
Step 1: get in the illusionist mindset
As I said, you do not need to be an illusionist to practice illusionist meditation. You do need to be able to take illusionism seriously. You need to be able to, approximately, imperfectly, and temporarily, get into the headspace of a smart person who actually thinks illusionism is true.
I am about to present one version of illusionism, the one which is most intuitive to me when I am in the right meditative mindset. If you are a skeptic about illusionism, from “seems false” to “obviously incoherent,” please, please, please try to suspend that judgment right now; even if you are right, if you are already assuming you are right or looking for arguments, this won’t work. If you need to, think of this as a trick to get into the right mindset—but the trick only works if you actually take it seriously, and don’t just “try” to take it seriously. Here we go:
We have experiences. We see, hear, smell, feel.
We make judgments and form beliefs about the world around us. Often, the beliefs we form are associated with our experiences.
Sometimes, our experiences lead us to err in our beliefs.
The first-order kind of error is when our beliefs are correct about our experience, but wrong about the world. I see two lines on a piece of paper, and one looks bigger than the other, so I infer that in reality one really is bigger than the other. In actuality, they are the same size; I am wrong about the world, but not necessarily wrong about the nature of my experience.
The second-order kind of error is when our beliefs are incorrect about the contents of our experience.
I believed for a long time that I see in full color throughout my visual field—not that the colors were always accurate to reality, but that I experienced a full-color visual field. I was wrong.
Pete Mandik was once on acid, watching German television, and thought he could understand what the people were saying… but he couldn’t tell you what any of the words meant, not even a hallucinated idea of what they meant. He was wrong. You could form false beliefs about your own experience.
Say it again: You could form false beliefs about your own experience.
When many people encounter the “hard problem of consciousness”, or think about “philosophical zombies,” or think about robots and functional states, introspect and form a belief: that their experience cannot just be a functional state. That it must be something private, ineffable, intrinsic, and directly accessible to them.
True or not, this is a belief.
And you could form false beliefs about your own experience.
Therefore, it is possible—in principle!—that your judgment that your experiences are private, ineffable, etc. is a false belief about your experience.
Many things about the “mind-body problem”—interaction, brains, self-reporting, fallibilism, etc.—begin to make a lot more sense if you take this perspective.
This is a really difficult position to get your head around. Make the attempt, and please withhold judgment for now. You need to grok at least a little bit of this for the meditation to work.
If illusionism seems silly or baffling or not quite right to you, do not try to understand it by picturing in your head what illusionists must be thinking, or thinking about the word “illusion” and what it typically means. Instead, actually read what illusionists are saying. I recommend first reading these blog posts:
Then, these four papers:
Dennett, “Quining Qualia”
Frankish, “Illusionism as a theory of consciousness”
Kammerer, “The hardest aspect of the illusion problem — and how to solve it”
Mandik, “Meta-illusionism and Qualia Quietism”
Yes, you actually need to do this. Read these seven articles. Try really hard to understand them. Interrogate Claude if you need help; feed Claude this very post too, and insist that he steelman the illusionist perspective as hard as possible. If you don’t make a serious attempt at this, you won’t get it, and the meditation tips probably won’t work on you. So don’t complain that illusionism doesn’t make any sense until you’ve put in the work!2
If you work hard and keep an open mind, I think you can get to a place where (a) illusionism actually seems like a serious theory, (b) it still really seems false on some fundamental level, but (c) you can get yourself to a mental headspace where you don’t completely shut it down.
Congratulations! That’s where I am! That’s the right mindset for illusionist meditation to start working! You don’t need to take illusionism to be true or even likely, you just need practice to get yourself around to that general way of thinking.
If you don’t feel like doing this work, and you read the sections below, you’ll be tempted to draw the conclusion that you don’t actually need to do it at all; the later advice doesn’t appear to depend on illusionism. If you are thinking this, go read step 0 again. The point is that the later advice, coupled with illusionism, trigger the right kind of mindset, and based on my experience you do actually need the illusionism to get there.
Step 2: basic meditation modality
The basic practice of this kind of meditation is:
Get your body in a reasonably relaxed sitting position, in an environment with few distractions.
Breathe normally. Don’t try to force big, deep breaths; just relax your stomach and let yourself breathe there.
Just notice and observe the thoughts and sensations in your mind. Don’t try to quiet them, or chase them down. Just kind of… watch them, like a detached observer.
This takes practice, so don’t sweat it if it seems awkward. Lots of standard meditation guides can help with this part; Pema Chödrön and Thích Nhất Hạnh write good stuff.
Now, I actually journal while I do this; I write down my thoughts, or dictate them aloud. I don’t worry about being precise or neat or well-organized, it’s really just a dump of observations. It helps me examine them better for the next step, but YMMV; I could see it feeling easier or harder to do this way for different people.
Step 3: detach, decouple, step back
The illusionist perspective is: don’t assume you have direct access to what the state of your mind is actually like. All that is floating around you in the mind-space are sensations, and beliefs about those sensations. Those beliefs, the content of those beliefs, will try to tell you a coherent story, something consistent, something that paints a unified picture. But actually, there really isn’t unity there. Don’t assume your experience must be coherent. Don’t assume that your sensations carry coherent propositional content. So you have to question the nature of your observations: what actually is it that you are observing?
It’s best to illustrate this through examples. I used to believe in something I labeled “cognitive exhaustion.” I had this belief, for a long time, that willpower was like a battery that could be depleted; that if I worked really hard on a math problem, my “willpower battery” would run out and I would need to recharge. I believed, basically, in ego depletion theory, despite knowing that it fails to replicate experimentally. So I was working on some hard combinatorics problems for about half an hour, and sure enough, I got that feeling of cognitive exhaustion; it was time to stop and let the batteries recharge.
But then I stopped, and entered this observer headspace. I thought: I have this belief, now, that I am out of “willpower juice.” It could be true. But it also could just be wrong. Let’s not assume that I have direct access to some kind of truthful will-o-meter. So: Why do I have that belief? What’s behind it? Things I noticed:
Bodily sensations: a feeling of pressure, or heaviness, around the temples.
A feeling of restlessness.
A disposition to do things like: play a video game, watch YouTube, lie down and listen to a podcast. Things I might label as passive activities.
A disposition to not do things like: read a book, keep working on the math problem, learn about ML with Claude, do homework. Things I might label as cognitively effortful.
A strong belief that I am running low on some kind of resource.
So this is what cognitive exhaustion is, not a unified primitive which I have, but a loose bundle of things which I label as one thing. Are we done?
Nope! Not at all! Time to ascend one level of abstraction, and start questioning these things I noticed.
What precisely does it mean to say that I feel pressure around the temples? What actually is that sensation? Is it localized to a specific region? Where are its boundaries? Is it uniform? How intense is it? Why do you label that sensation as “pressure”?
What the hell is a “feeling of restlessness”? Is it a belief that you have restless energy, whatever that is? Is it a bodily sensation? If so, what sensory modality, and where is it located? Is it just noticing an impulse to get up and do something? Do what, exactly?
Similarly, what is a “disposition” introspectively? Does it mean that you judge it would be best to go watch YouTube? That you start thinking about watching YouTube without conscious intention? That the thought of watching YouTube gives you a pleasant feeling, and the thought of not watching YouTube gives you an unpleasant feeling?
How do you observe a disposition not to do something? Are you disposed not to punch a puppy, or are you simply not disposed to punch a puppy? What difference is there, and how would you detect it?
Do you actually know which one you were talking about, or did you have to think hard to even decide? If so, is it possible that you’re mistaken about even having such a disposition, beyond believing you have a disposition?
What precisely does depletion of this resource do? What happens if it runs out? Does my work get objectively worse? Does it take me longer to make the same connections? Is it merely less “pleasant” in some sense? (What sense?) Can’t I just choose to keep doing it anyway?
Imagine fusing Dan Dennett and Socrates in your head; question everything, and take no fact about your mental state for granted. Or rather: start on one level, observing your first-order thoughts and taking the observations for granted, then “kick away the ladder” and question your second-order observations, and so on.
You can’t keep on like this forever, but you generally don’t need to. After a couple rounds of this, my working hypothesis is: when I spend a long time doing hard mental work, I feel pressure around my temples—and then a long chain of inferences about what that means, and what I want to do, and what I should do, gets set off, and those inferences paint this picture of a scarce mental resource which depletes, and the lower it runs the “harder” it is to do good mental work (whatever that means). This could actually be a helpful signal, or not. So then I tested it, by putting on a Focusmate session and reading a philosophy paper for 50 minutes while in this “exhaustion” state. The feeling of pressure stayed, but the quality of my comprehension and writing did not degrade—and I was able to concentrate the whole time.
Similar things happen with stress. Looking at a to-do list stressed me out—or rather, I had the belief that looking at a to-do list stressed me out. But once I actually opened mine, in this meditative state, I didn’t actually notice the physical feelings getting much worse. Instead, I had gotten myself in an anticipatory tangle of thinking that I was going to be stressed out, which led me to avoid the thing. But stepping a couple levels back and realizing that it was a belief, and in fact a wrong belief, dissolved a lot of that tension.
This has two wonderful effects.
In cases like so-called “cognitive exhaustion”, I learn that I am capable of doing more than I thought I was. It was false beliefs about capacities, not actual capacities, which were holding me back. And indeed, I’ve been able to concentrate for a lot longer since!3
The act of doing the meditation often dissolves the negative feeling in the first place. I don’t just understand the feelings of stress, I feel less stressed afterwards. It’s something about the distance, the stepping back and picking a part, and the noticing of how loosely all of it hangs together, that lightens my burden. It’s a huge qualitative shift.
I describe this as a feeling of “detachment”, and that sounds negative, suppressive, or robotic to some people. But there really isn’t any forcing or suppression happening. It feels most like dredging feelings up, exposing them to air and light, and seeing them dissolve or change. Or hovering lightly over a swirling river. This is still a work in progress, but there are times where I really am able to achieve a Flo Bacus level of control and detachment, and it is awesome.
Step 4: quit or practice
This is not a “you’ll get there someday” kind of practice, where you put off being tranquil into some future when you’ve got everything else figured out. If you read and understand the papers, and try (for real, not like Luke Skywalker) regularly for several weeks, and turn around the philosophy in your head, and you’re still getting nothing, it’s probably not going to work out for you and you should try something different.
For me, it took a month of reading illusionist stuff out of intellectual curiosity, plus a couple days of experimenting with meditation, to stumble upon this method. But once I started, I experienced an immediate and lasting qualitative shift after maybe half an hour of meditative journaling. I was far from done—there were still lots of sources of stress, lots of things to work out—but it was extremely easy to point out measurable progress. I did not need to force myself to practice: I found it pretty fun and interesting to do whenever I wanted to raise my quality of life. So now I’m getting better and better at it! And it’s fun to experiment with: what other emotions and sensations are going unexamined? What other ways might I be limiting myself in ways I don’t need to? What if we turn this attention to positive, not just negative, emotions?
Let me know if you give this a try; I’m really curious to see if it transfers, and it’s a pretty cheap experiment to run personally. For the returns on your well-being, it’s definitely worth a shot.
From here on out, when I say “it really helps to do x” or “you should think about x”, you can mentally add “that’s what helped me, Jack Thompson.” I don’t claim any of this is universal or strictly necessary. I am hoping my words will act on your brain and nudge you in helpful directions.
I am not accusing all phenomenal realists of doing this; I think there are lots of intellectually serious and admirable people who have given illusionism a shot and still think it’s wrong. I also think there are a lot of qualia realists on the internet and in undergrad classrooms who actually haven’t done their due dilligence, and haven’t tried.
I am not claiming, of course, that I can concentrate indefinitely or perfectly, and I would be surprised on a biological level if a brain can work on hard math for a really long time without degradation of output quality. The revelation wasn’t that there was absolutely nothing to conserve, but that I was being much too conservative because of some shoddy beliefs.
Great article; nice combination of consciousness studies and meditation advice. I’ve done similar exercises in my own sitting practice, and continue to find it to be worthwhile.
Is illusionism really so controversial? Maybe it’s the meditator in me, but the definition you gave makes complete sense.