Losing Ourselves: Active Inference, Depersonalization, and Meditation

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Philosophy of Mind

Background:

• Disruptions in the sense of selfhood are central to both psychiatric conditions like depersonalization and spiritual states like meditative selflessness.
• Depersonalization involves a distressing loss of self, while meditative experiences often yield profound peace and joy.
• The contrasting phenomenologies of these selfless states remain poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a unified theoretical framework for understanding contrasting experiences of selfhood, including depersonalization and meditative selflessness.
• To conceptualize selfhood within the active inference framework, positing it as an emergent property of a temporally deep generative model.
• To explore the implications for dissociative disorders and the therapeutic potential of meditation.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing the active inference framework to model selfhood as a generative process.
• Developing a computational account of self-modeling and its role in structuring experience.
• Analyzing the phenomenology of depersonalization and comparing it with selfless meditative states.

Main Results:

• Selfhood is proposed to emerge from a temporally deep generative model, shaping agents' interaction with possibilities for action.
• Depersonalization may arise from an inferred loss of allostatic control.
• Meditative selflessness is contrasted with depersonalization, highlighting similarities and differences within the proposed framework.

Conclusions:

• The active inference framework offers a unifying account of diverse selfhood experiences, from pathological loss to spiritual transcendence.
• Understanding self-modeling is crucial for addressing dissociative disorders and evaluating meditation's effects.
• This approach provides novel insights into the neuro-computational basis of selfhood and its alterations.