Predictive meditation

I’ve been combining what I’ve been learning about Predictive Processing with my meditation practice. The result has been awesome so far.

I intend to push it further.

Daily routine

I spend ten minutes doing the new Waking Up Course guided meditation each day. On any day Sam Harris uses one or more of the techniques he’s introduced. Each has led to an insight—and many have led to repeated and more profound insights as I’ve practiced them.

I’ve done that for at least 125 days(!)

Then I do (with less regularity) a 30-minute TMI-style timed sit. My experience with those sits has been inconsistent. Sometimes I’ve kept attention on the breath or at least in peripheral awareness. But most times I’ve forgotten and mind-wandered.

Predictive meditation

After rereading Scott’s posts (and my own) on Predictive Processing, I thought it might be useful to predict my ability to keep attention on my breath and see if it made a difference in my meditation.

My experiment: I’d predict keeping attention for the next ten breaths. Then at the end of the ten, I’d predict again.

The first time I did it, I maintained attention for almost the whole 30 minutes. Not perfect, but far better than usual.

I expect the novelty helped. But I think that prediction reinforced my intentional strength.

I’ve since done a few more sits that way. The novelty has worn off, and I’ve mind-wandered a little. Still, I’ve been staying more focused than before.

This brief contemplation (and some reading from Surfing Uncertainty suggests a further refinement:

In PP, attention measures “the confidence interval of your predictions.” Sense-data within the confidence intervals counts as a match and doesn’t register surprisal. Sense-data outside the confidence intervals fails and alerts higher levels and eventually consciousness.

Said differently: if I unconsciously predict that nothing unexpected will happen and nothing unexpected happens, then breathing will fade from consciousness, and my mind will wander.

But if I predict that it will be fascinating and things that are not expected in detail happen then “the higher levels and eventually consciousness” will stay engaged.

This reminds me of the Sam Harris pointing out instruction that I wrote about in my post about “Waking Up”. You can look out the window for years, and never catch your reflection. But if someone points out that is what you’re looking for, you’ll see it readily. And if someone points out that the “waking up experience” is like the experience of realizing you are watching a movie instead of being immersed in the life of one of the characters in the film, you’ll recognize the similar experience when it happens in real life.

As I’m writing this, I’m reminding the processing units and sub-minds of my nervous system of the fascinating experiences that I’ve had when paying close attention to my breath, looking deeply into my visual field with eyes closed, experiencing a “cloud of sensations” instead of a body, and the thoughts that float through my mind.

What can I predict?

I want to decide to spend an hour sitting with stable attention, and predict with high confidence that I will do it, and then have my belief borne out in reality.

But I can’t make that prediction. And I can barely make that decision.

Right now I can decide to sit for half an hour and pay attention for ten breaths at a time over that time. I can predict success, each time, with very high probability and predict doing that repeatedly over thirty minutes with high probability.

Right now I’m reminding myself that a good process for maintaining stable attention includes: deciding to pay attention to the next ten breaths; predicting whether that decision will result in my paying attention, being confident in that prediction; being aware of any change in that prediction as I take each breath, and perhaps making adjustments to my state of mind if I am aware of a drop in predictive confidence; repeating these steps.

If I were to decide to pay attention for a more extended period—twenty breaths, or one hundred—my confidence in predicted success would drop. Perhaps I’m polling subminds, assessing their willingness and ability to stay the course, or their estimate of the willingness of other subminds.

Awareness of deviation

From Surfing Uncertainty:

High attention means that perception is mostly based on the bottom-up stream, since every little deviation is registering an error and so the overall perceptual picture is highly constrained by sensation. Low attention means that perception is mostly based on the top-down stream, and you’re perceiving only a vague outline of the sensory image with your predictions filling in the rest.

Maintaining strong and stable attention requires—and results from—awareness of every deviation.

The mindset needs to be: every breath is different from every other breath. Some are deeper, some shallower. The pauses between them vary. The little sensations in the nose and throat are different. Breathing may change—or not—with the rising and passing away of thoughts, or other sensations and perceptions.

If you break it down, get all sciency and shit, breathing is a miraculous experience.

I predict increasing enjoyment.

​