Today is poster day #2 at @iscr.bsky.social
here in Chapel Hill. I'll be sharing work on how deep meditative experience challenges existing computational accounts of affective valence. Come by and pepper me with questions, 4:30-6pm :)

#ISCR2025

I'll be at the International Society for Contemplative Research 2025 Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina next week.

Looking forward to it and will be on a great panel on Tuesday at 1:30pm with @matthewsacchet.bsky.social, Nicco Reggente, Winson Yang and David Zarka.

@iscr.bsky.social
#ISCR

I'm presenting my work on affective valence, meditative experience and active inference this Sunday 9:30am GMT at the 3rd Annual Web Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind: www.ispsmind.com/internationa...

Come by!

3/ Results show how deconstruction:
▪️ Increases short temporal scale perception
▪️ Reduces conceptual complexity
▪️ Increases equanimity (non-reactivity) and stillness
▪️ Aids the self-regulation of affective valence

New preprint: Modelling meditative deconstruction via letting go! 🧘

Model shows how the phenomenology of defabrication naturally emerges from the dynamics of hierarchical active inference.

I take a computational phenomenology approach, with a model that is in-silico and formalised.🧵

@bethfisher.bsky.social giving a greak talk on modelling the optimism bias at @acnsau.bsky.social

This work formalises many core ideas from work done with @kevinberryman.bsky.social in 'Towards an active inference account of deep meditative deconstruction' osf.io/preprints/ps...

A great paper on understanding Pure Awareness and MPE by Edmundo Lopez-Sola, @ruffini.bsky.social et al. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Finally, we discuss what the decrease in conceptual complexity under deep deconstruction can tell us about core-knowledge structures that form the substrate for more abstracted experience.

In the process we contextualise the jhanas, cessations of phenomenal experience and interpret meditative notions like equanimity and meditative stillness in terms of computational mechanisms that may plausibly give rise to them.

Can we explain deep meditative deconstruction via Buddhist defabrication, its phenomenology and the active inference framework?

New preprint of my work with @kevinberryman.bsky.social, 'Towards an Active Inference Account of Deep Meditative Deconstruction'.

osf.io/preprints/ps...