Towards a computational phenomenology of meditative deconstruction: modelling ‘letting go’ and the deconstruction of experience with active inference

Meditative experience has long been associated with conceptual attenuation, reduced reactivity to phenomena, increased present moment perception and more pleasant experience. However, the computational mechanisms underlying such meditative “deconstruction” are not well understood, with no formal computational models available to explicate how deconstruction alters perception and action during meditation. Using the active inference framework, I demonstrate that the phenomenology of deconstruction–in terms of conceptual attenuation, reduced reactivity and shorter temporal scale perception–naturally emerges from the dynamics of hierarchical inference when the deconstructive notion of letting go is cast as a reduction in belief precision over hidden states at a specific level of the generative model. I present a formal hierarchical three-level generative model and simulate deconstruction as an intervention in a facial recognition task, where the agent selects a letting go policy when perceived affective valence becomes excessively negative. The results demonstrate that the capacity to deconstruct permits agents to self-regulate experienced affect via letting go. I furthermore propose that the proposed letting go mechanism may underlie the emergence of minimal phenomenal experiences such as pure awareness states. The model offers a novel perspective within the paradigm of computational phenomenology on conceptual attenuation, equanimity, stillness and affect during meditative deconstruction.