sturb

I want to thank Jan Kulveit, Tomáš Gavenčiak, and Jonathan Shock for their extensive feedback and ideas they contributed to this work and for Josh Burgener and Yusuf Heylen for their proofreading and comments. I would also like to acknowledge the Epistea Residency and its organisers where much of the thinking behind this work was done. This post aims to build towards a theory of how meditation alters the mind based on the ideas of active inference (ActInf). ActInf has been growing in its promise as a theory of how brains process information and interact with the world and has become increasingly validated with a growing body of work in the scientific literature. Why bring the idea of ActInf and meditation together? Meditation seems to have a profound effect on the experience of people who practise it extensively, and in many cases purports to help people to come to great insight about themselves, reality, and in many cases profoundly alters their relationship to their lived experience. ActInf seems to promise a legible framework for understanding some of the mechanisms that are at play at the root of our experience. Considering these ideas seem to both be pointing at something fundamental about how we experience the world it stands to reason they might be talking about some of the same things in different languages. The hope is that we can use these two to explore these two theories and start to bridge some of the gap in science in providing a theoretical explanation for how these meditative techniques work. This post will be quite speculative in nature without me providing much in the way of experimental evidence. This is a weakness in the work that I may try to address later but for now I would like to stick to what the theories say and how we can fit them together. I will focus on the technique of Vipassana meditation and in a future post I will examine Anapana and Metta meditation. I’ll be talking about these techniques because I have a reasonable body of pe