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 [...]

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Outline:

(02:27) A quick intro to Active Inference

(03:30) Generative models and preferences

(06:00) Satisfying preferences

(10:33) Prediction error

(13:44) Vipassana Meditation

(15:28) What is suffering?

(22:51) How Vipassana Works

(26:50) How does Vipassana cause a change?

(31:19) Closing thoughts

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.