Thinking elsewhere: designer environments for religion and literature

This article investigates how certain kinds of reading and meditation reduce attention to the here-and-now in order to leave room for imaginative experiences in carefully crafted religious and cultural designer environments. The article thereby engages with recent accounts on cultural acquisition and religious beliefs. From the perspective of active inference and 4E cognition, we argue that designer environments allow practitioners to go beyond modulating their predictions according to the minds of others, and instead enable them to go “elsewhere,” that is, to imaginatively experience different sets of probabilities that can change how they predict the world in the here-and-now. Three different works are studied: Amadis of Gaul (1508), a best-selling series of chivalric novels by Garcia de Montalvo, The Spiritual Exercises (1548), a meditation manual by Ignatius of Loyola, as well as Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. These works have in common that they rebuild expectations in relation to the self by positioning it in new environments, and thereby extending the range of experience. Through such thinking “elsewhere” in designer environments, we argue, readers and meditators can modulate their attentional systems so as to perceive and act in the world in new ways.