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In his method, I think the happiness of the first few Jhanas is not caused by prediction error directly, but rather indirectly through the activation of the reward circuitry. So while the method involves creating some amount of prediction error, the ultimate result is less overall prediction error, because the reward neurotransmitters bring the experiential world closer to the ideal.
After the first three Jhanas, the reward circuitry is less relevant and you start to reduce overall prediction error through other means, by allowing attention to let go of aspects of the world model. In the ninth Jhana / nirodha samapatti that he mentions, attention lets go of everything and there’s no prediction error.
By comparison with higher Jhanas that are less attention grabbing, you can see the subtle discomfort present in the first few Jhanas, and I think that’s the remaining prediction error.
I would say the warm shower causes less prediction error than the cold shower because it’s less shocking to the body, but there’s still a very subtle amount of discomfort which is hidden under all the positive feelings. The level of discomfort I’m talking about is very slight, but you would notice it if there was nothing else occupying your attention. I don’t mean to say it causes negative emotions. It’s more like the discomfort of imagining an unsatisfying shape, or watching a video at slightly lower resolution. If you compare any activity to deep sleep or unconsciousness, you can find sensations that grab your attention by being slightly irritating. As long as it’s noticeable I think it causes slight negative valence. But this is often outweighed by other aspects of the activity that increase valence.
Sitting at home doing nothing might involve the negative sensations of boredom, restlessness, and impatience, all of which disappear when we go for a walk, so any discomfort is hard to notice underneath the obvious increase in valence.
Thank you for writing this! I’ve been curious about this exact intersection of topics, so I’m glad to see such a clear analysis.
My understanding of your framework is that Vipassana reduces suffering by training the mind to observe sensations without craving or aversion, which is to say it reduces unnecessary prediction error by training the mind not to compare reality to what is not the case. An accomplished meditator can therefore quickly dissipate stress by letting go of priors that would otherwise cause continued prediction error. I think this is a really valuable mapping of Vipassana to Active Inference.
At one point you write “suffering is fundamentally about experiencing prediction error” but then later you write that suffering is “the state which arises from updating one’s model to include fewer positive experiences in future or more negative experiences”. I think the first formulation is actually already sufficient. To me, it seems like suffering happens in the moment of discrepancy between prediction and sensation. For example, when I hear a sour note in a musical performance, I immediately experience distress. The sensation of the sour note clashes with my prediction, and that clash is unpleasant. So I would support the formulation where prediction error always contains an element of suffering.
You use the lottery winner as an example of positive prediction error, but I think even in that case the prediction error itself actually contains a faint discomfort which is hard to detect next to the joy and excitement. The actual happiness is not in the prediction error, but rather in the positive emotions the news brings. An analogy might be the high pitch noise a microwave makes. The noise itself is irritating, but the news that the food is ready is pleasant and usually outweighs the irritation.
Nice, these are interesting descriptions!
The inertia metaphor for depression is interesting because dopamine is associated with both mood and movement. So you see dopamine deficiency in mood disorders like depression and movement disorders like Parkinson's disease or restless leg syndrome. When you’re depressed and it takes enormous effort to move each muscle, that might be your brain searching for sources of dopamine because the usual sources aren’t working.
I’ve personally had the experience of lying motionless on my bed because I felt like I had exhausted all my options and I couldn’t see anything beneficial to do about my situation. It almost feels like the energy that would let me get up has been sucked out, and my body is just limp. I think in times like these, my brain isn’t able to find a promising action to take, and so it can’t find a source of dopamine to generate movement.
If Scott Alexander is right that depression is a “trapped prior on low mood”, maybe the brain rejects options that would produce dopamine because that would disrupt the expected low mood, which would be surprising and uncomfortable. So we actually maintain the conditions for low mood because our brain thinks it’s necessary in some way.
If there’s a non-chemical way to combat this, I think it’s by finding the cause of that prior and working with it until the brain is convinced it no longer has to maintain the low mood. I think that’s what therapy, meditation, or lifestyle changes are actually doing when they work. The brain gets enough evidence that the low mood is unnecessary, and it stops expecting it.
In my case I noticed that I was punishing myself with negative emotions because I had high expectations that I wasn’t meeting, and I felt like I could transform myself into that ideal if I just felt sad enough. Over time I gradually convinced my body that this didn’t help, and that I was more productive when I let myself relax into a kind of neutral, default state. This involved going back and forth many times between a low baseline and a neutral baseline until my body decided the neutral baseline was better. When my brain wasn’t automatically rejecting every plan I came up with, then I found I had plenty of energy and motivation.
But that’s just my model of how it happened, and I don’t expect my experience to replicate for everyone else.