Losing Ourselves: Active Inference, Depersonalization, and Meditation

Active inference and agency.

I greatly enjoyed Seth's compelling synthesis of sensorimotor contingencies and active inference. I would also like to thank Jim Hopkins for sending me the quote (below)-which speaks directly to the embodied nature of perceptual inference that underlies the perspectives reconciled in Seth (this issue). These perspectives include perception as hypothesis testing, affordance, and sensorimotor con...

Active inference and learning

This paper offers an active inference account of choice behaviour and learning. It focuses on the distinction between goal-directed and habitual behaviour and how they contextualise each other. We show that habits emerge naturally (and autodidactically) from sequential policy optimisation when agents are equipped with state-action policies. In active inference, behaviour has explorative (episte...

Ourselves

Migraine and depersonalization disorder.

In a recent study of 204 patients with depersonaliza-tion disorder attending a specialist psychiatric clinic, Baker et al. (1) reported that 31% had a self-reported history of migraine and, of these, one third believed that their headaches and depersonalization were connected. Depersonalization disorder is classified as a dissociative disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnosti...

Dopamine, Affordance and Active Inference

The role of dopamine in behaviour and decision-making is often cast in terms of reinforcement learning and optimal decision theory. Here, we present an alternative view that frames the physiology of dopamine in terms of Bayes-optimal behaviour. In this account, dopamine controls the precision or salience of (external or internal) cues that engender action. In other words, dopamine balances bott...