Special Issue: Experiencing Well-BeingPlayfulness and the meaningful life: an active inference perspective.
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller
Neuroscience of Consciousness 2023 DOI: 10.1093/nc/niad024 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Keywords | Active inference Meaning in life Playfulness Predictive processing Tolerance of uncertainty |
| Citations | 6 |
| Key points | Argues that playfulness, as a learned high-level prior that tolerates uncertainty, can promote human flourishing by fostering open attention, growth at the edge of abilities, and positive exploration of affective responses to uncertainty. |
Abstract
Our paper takes as its starting point the recent proposal, at the core of this special issue, to use the active inference framework (AIF) to computationally model what it is for a person to live a meaningful life. In broad brushstrokes, the AIF takes experiences of human flourishing to be the result of predictions and uncertainty estimations along many dimensions at multiple levels of neurobiological organization. Our aim in this paper is to explain how AIF models predict that uncertainty can sometimes, under the right conditions, be conducive to the experiences of flourishing. Our focus is on playfulness, because playful individuals have learned a high-level prior that in certain safe contexts, uncertainty and error should be tolerated and explored. They have expanded the phenotypic bound on the amount of surprise they are prepared to tolerate in their lives. The positive embracing of uncertainty has a number of positive knock-on effects for the kind of lives playful individuals are able to lead. First, a playful individual attends to the world in a way that is open and expansive, a mode of attending that is effortless and therefore conducive to being in the present. This openness to the present moment allows for deep engagement and participation in experience that can furnish a renewed appreciation for life. Second, playful individuals will actively seek out spaces at the edge of their own abilities and will therefore be more likely to grow and develop in their skills and relationships in ways that contribute to their living a good life. Finally, playful agents seek out situations in which they can monitor, observe, and learn from their own affective responses to uncertainty. Thus, uncertainty becomes something familiar to them that they not only learn to tolerate but also enjoy positively exploring, in ways that provide them opportunities to grow. For these three reasons, we will argue that playfulness and openness to experiences of uncertainty and the unknown may be important ingredients in human flourishing.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cited by 2
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them Frontiers in Psychology June 3, 2024
- Judging Passage and Passing Judgment: From Distrusting the Present to an Error Dynamics Account of Passage of Time Judgments Review of Philosophy and Psychology June 17, 2026
Cites 5
- REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics Pharmacological Reviews June 20, 2019
- From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews September 1, 2021
- Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2021
- Pattern breaking: a complex systems approach to psychedelic medicine Neuroscience of Consciousness 2023
- The Really Hard Problem September 26, 2007