Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem
Article
Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 21, 2021 and November 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Last month I wrote a post, Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem”; “for example, in Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem”. It most often appears alongside ACX Grant, Alaska, Andrés Gomez Emilsson.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 21, 2021
- Last seen: November 07, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- ACX Grant (1 shared issues)
-
- Alaska (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrés Gomez Emilsson (1 shared issues)
-
- Bobby Fischer (1 shared issues)
-
- Britain (1 shared issues)
-
- Buddhism (1 shared issues)
-
- Buddhists (1 shared issues)
-
- Darwins (1 shared issues)
-
- EA Virtual Programs (1 shared issues)
-
- effective altruism (1 shared issues)
-
- Fidel Castro (1 shared issues)
-
- Huxleys (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
1: Last month I wrote a post, Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem, about some of Andrés Gomez Emilsson’s theories. Anders has since written a post of his own giving longer commentary on some of the things I said and explaining his theories in more length. Check it out!
Inline links: Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem, Check it out
But also, it does seem to match some of the other ground we’ve covered about what people notice during meditative experiences - for example, in Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem. The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss? The qualiologists propose that you’re just bad at sitting in a dark room. If you were good at it - that is, a trained meditator who could calm their brain down enough to pay full attention to the lack of stimuli - it would be amazing. This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel. And from here it’s a short hop to the symmetry theory of valence, where the unpleasantness of mental states tracks a sort of irregularity or asymmetry in brain activity.
Inline links: Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem, the symmetry theory of valence