Introduction

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Vipassana Meditation and Active Inference: A Framework for Understanding Suffering and its Cessation, published by Benjamin Sturgeon on March 24, 2024 on LessWrong.
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 personal experience with them and because I have found their practice leads to fairly predictable and replicable results in those who practise them. My personal experience is the source of much of the discussion below.
Anecdotally, I have found that thinking about suffering in the way described below has helped me to recognise and escape from painful thought cycles where I was able to realise I was generating needless prediction error by simply going back to observing reality through sensations. This has been very helpful to me.
A quick intro to Active Inference
My goal in this section is to give a barebones summary of some key concepts in ActInf that we will use to examine various meditative practices. My focus will be on defining terms and concepts so that if you have never heard of active inference before you can have the context to follow this post and judge the merits of the arguments yourself. The precise neuroscience is not explored here, but by hypothesising we can work towards a story that seems to fit our observations.
ActInf is a theory that tries to explain how and why agents (in our context this refers to all living things) act in the world in the way that they do. The key concept of ActInf is that the primary objective of an ActInf agent is to minimise the gap between its predictions of the world and how the world actually appears.
This happens through 2 methods: it improves the accuracy of its world model, or generative model, by updating that model with new information, and by taking action in the world to bring the world more in line with the predictions of its generative model.
Generative models and preferences
ActInf hinges on the ...