Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results.
"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile.
Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
As someone noticed, you are trying to say something similar the private language argument of Wittgenstein.
But notice that this isn’t really private to a person.
How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands.
Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago.
Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time.
For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice).
A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience.
But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
However, I question whether there's actually a shared context when it comes to meditation. Unlike for external phenomena like gravity and QM, there's a lot of ambiguity related to communicating internal processes. For example, basic emotions like happiness and fear are easily communicated because they show up on the face. Two people can agree that the emotion that causes them to make the same face is the same one, and so can agree to call the emotion by a word. But are we sure the same is true for things that don't work like this? If someone says "do this and you'll feel like that" and I do and I don't feel that, what am I to understand? Is it that I did it wrong, that I did it right and my brain just works differently, or that the speaker and I are failing to understand each other? Did the speaker misuse a word? Did I mistakenly think a word meant something other than what was intended? Particularly when it comes to subjective feelings there's going to be a lot of metaphors involved, which never help for unambiguous communication.
So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this: Your brain is sick, yes you are hallucinating me, but that doesn't make me less real.
You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).
Thank you for your reply. In most ways I agree, in all ways actually. But my point is that the term "real" doesn't mean strictly material. The picture I'm painting is to bring away "reality" from strictly material and external. I do this to argue with the point above your original reply, saying that the scientific method is incompatible with these things. We're in philosophical territory and I won't pretend to be an expert but I think we will have plenty of tools to bring the scientific method even to our most personal experiences.
Which is why I originally asked what was meant by "real". From a consensus-realistic perspective, things that are purely subjective and non-material things are definitely less real or at least less-obviously real. From a solipsistic perspective the only real thing is one's subjective experience, and everything else is in doubt. But most people are not capable of consistently maintaining a solipsistic perspective, so I didn't assume that's what was meant.
Even the solipsistic must surely realise that there are simulacrum of external reality that can be dismissed as, say, 'it was just a shiver' rather than being a 'real' part of one's subjective experience.
Reflecting, I guess I'm questioning if the solipsist really believes all that which is put before their minds is really "experience", per se.
Necessarily, that which is experienced is experienced. The belief that one merely thinks is experiencing something but is actually mistaken is untenable. The question is whether the feeling of these keys under what I think are my fingers is caused by something that exists more or less as I perceive it, rather than some contrived hallucination or an illusion. But I'm not able to doubt that I am in fact feeling what I feel. Besides mathematical truths, it's all I can be certain of.
Fun fact: unlike linear motion, rotation is absolute. Accepting that the Earth does not rotate would require us to accept that distant galaxies circle it at tangential speeds many times greater than c. It can be logically consistent, but we would have to come up with an explanation for why the entire universe rotates around a particular object, and for why the speed of light has an exemption for this particular type of motion and none other.
As real as the rest of your feelings in that they color, if not drive, your subjective experience of the world. Which applies to pretty much every person on the planet.
Maybe not impossible, but if it was easy or if the gp didn't have a point, wouldn't we have figured out what fibromyalgia is by now? Also maybe we would have given more scrutiny to the widespread marketing and distribution of oxycotin in the U.S., at least enough to prevent the disaster it caused?
That does not make those results any less real.