Abstract
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of selfhood underpin both pathological and “enlightened” states of consciousness. People suffering from depersonalization can experience the loss of a sense of self as devastating, often accompanied by intense feelings of alienation, fear, and hopelessness. However, for meditative contemplatives from various traditions, “selfless” experiences are highly sought after, being associated with enduring peace and joy. Little is understood about how these contrasting dysphoric and euphoric experiences should be conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a unified account of these selfless experiences within the active inference framework. Building on our recent active inference research, we propose an account of the experiences of selfhood as emerging from a temporally deep generative model. We go on to develop a view of the self as playing a central role in structuring ordinary experience by “tuning” agents to the counterfactually rich possibilities for action. Finally, we explore how depersonalization may result from an inferred loss of allostatic control and contrast this phenomenology with selfless experiences reported by meditation practitioners. We will show how, by beginning with a conception of self-modeling within an active inference framework, we have available to us a new way of conceptualizing the striking experiential similarities and important differences between these selfless experiences within a unifying theoretical framework. We will explore the implications for understanding and treating dissociative disorders, as well as elucidate both the therapeutic potential, and possible dangers, of meditation.
Highlights
In daily life, we take for granted the existence of a self: we feel that we are possessors of certain qualities, the experiencers of certain sensations, that we are different and distinct from one another, and that we endure from day to day
That we have introduced the control-theoretic notion of allostasis, and how it is achieved via active inference, we go on to develop our view of the sense of self
We present a novel account of the self, in terms of an allostatic control model (ACM; Deane, 2020)
Summary
We take for granted the existence of a self: we feel that we are possessors of certain qualities, the experiencers of certain sensations, that we are different and distinct from one another, and that we endure from day to day. What the brain has to do, on such a view, is minimize prediction error (free energy) as efficiently as possible This requires it to come up with an overall hypothesis or model about what is going on in the world. There exists, at any given time, more than one model that fits the incoming sensory signal This is where the notion of prior probability, often shortened to prior, comes in (and with it, the Bayesian element of the framework). In low-quality contexts, prediction errors will be taken less seriously This turning up and down of the gain on prediction error signaling is most commonly called precision weighting, and it plays a role far beyond the second-order dynamics that we used to introduce it. On our view, is central to allostasis, a notion we introduce shortly
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