Synthesising boredom: a predictive processing approach

Darling, Tom

doi:10.1007/s11229-023-04380-3

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 173 publications

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“…As a result, the organism stops possessing the context-driven, high precision weight beliefs about the states it expects to occupy and observe, and it is these which drive the pragmatic action manifest in flow states. In other words, in line with previous accounts that posit boredom as guiding the organism's switches between exploration and exploitation, sufficiently easy tasks provoke boredom because the transition away from pragmatic action towards novelty seeking is called for in the organism's endless quest to minimise EFE (Danckert, 2019;Darling, 2023;Gomez-Ramirez & Costa, 2017).…”

Section: -Losing and Finding Flowsupporting

confidence: 61%

“…155-157). The bored organism then turns to epistemic exploration, or, more precisely, novelty-seeking -technically, maximising information gain about model parameters -since there is little information to gain about the states of the world as they are (Danckert, 2019;Darling, 2023;Gomez-Ramirez & Costa, 2017;Maisto et al, 2019;Schwartenbeck et al, 2013;Sterling, 2012). This indicates that reducing prediction error itself is not enough to enter flow.…”

Section: -Losing and Finding Flowmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States and How We Experience Ourselves Within Them

Parvizi-Wayne,

Sandved-Smith,

Pitliya

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Flow has been described as a state of optimal performance, experienced universally across a broad range of domains: from art to athletics, gaming to writing. However, its phenomenal characteristics can, at first glance, be puzzling. Firstly, individuals in flow report a reduction in their sense of self, despite the fact that they perform in a manner which evinces their agency and skill. Secondly, flow states are felt to be effortless, despite the prerequisite complexity of the tasks that engender them. In this paper, we unpick these features of flow, as well as others, through the active inference framework, which posits that action and perception are forms of active Bayesian inference directed at sustained self-organisation; i.e., the minimisation of variational free energy. We propose that the phenomenology of flow is rooted in the deployment of high precision over i) the expected sensory consequences of action and ii) beliefs about how action will sequentially unfold. This computational mechanism thus draws the agent to minimise the ensuing (i.e., expected) free energy through confident pragmatic action. Furthermore, given the challenging dynamics the flow-inducing situation presents, attention must be wholly focussed on the unfolding task whilst counterfactual planning is restricted, leading to the attested attenuation of phenomenal self-modelling. This, in turn, means that both the mechanistic and experiential aspects of flow are highly distinct from those involved in states of dissipative self-modelling, like those engendered by dissociative disorders. More broadly, our approach to action-centred phenomenology can be applied to similar facets of agentive experience beyond canonical flow states, providing insights into the mechanisms of selfless experiences, embodied expertise and wellbeing.

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Section: -Losing and Finding Flowsupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: -Losing and Finding Flowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States and How We Experience Ourselves Within Them

Parvizi-Wayne,

Sandved-Smith,

Pitliya

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…155–157). The bored organism then turns to epistemic exploration, or, more precisely, novelty-seeking — technically, maximising information gain about model parameters — since there is little information to gain about the states of the world as they are ( Sterling, 2012 ; Schwartenbeck et al, 2013 ; Gomez-Ramirez and Costa, 2017 ; Danckert, 2019 ; Maisto et al, 2019 ; Darling, 2023 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them

Parvizi-Wayne,

Sandved-Smith,

Pitliya

et al. 2024

Front. Psychol.

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Flow has been described as a state of optimal performance, experienced universally across a broad range of domains: from art to athletics, gaming to writing. However, its phenomenal characteristics can, at first glance, be puzzling. Firstly, individuals in flow supposedly report a loss of self-awareness, even though they perform in a manner which seems to evince their agency and skill. Secondly, flow states are felt to be effortless, despite the prerequisite complexity of the tasks that engender them. In this paper, we unpick these features of flow, as well as others, through the active inference framework, which posits that action and perception are forms of active Bayesian inference directed at sustained self-organisation; i.e., the minimisation of variational free energy. We propose that the phenomenology of flow is rooted in the deployment of high precision weight over (i) the expected sensory consequences of action and (ii) beliefs about how action will sequentially unfold. This computational mechanism thus draws the embodied cognitive system to minimise the ensuing (i.e., expected) free energy through the exploitation of the pragmatic affordances at hand. Furthermore, given the challenging dynamics the flow-inducing situation presents, attention must be wholly focussed on the unfolding task whilst counterfactual planning is restricted, leading to the attested loss of the sense of self-as-object. This involves the inhibition of both the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher–order, meta-cognitive forms of self-conceptualisation. Nevertheless, we stress that self-awareness is not entirely lost in flow. Rather, it is pre-reflective and bodily. Our approach to bodily-action-centred phenomenology can be applied to similar facets of seemingly agentive experience beyond canonical flow states, providing insights into the mechanisms of so-called selfless experiences, embodied expertise and wellbeing.

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“…Equation 2), Bayes-optimal future-pointing behaviour may also be governed by epistemic affordances, namely opportunities for information gain and novelty (Gomez-Ramirez & Costa, 2017;Jaynes, 1957;Parr & Friston, 2017;Schwartenbeck et al, 2013;Sun et al, 2011). This typically occurs in contexts of uncertainty or boredom, because in such situations the agent possesses no preferred observations (Danckert, 2019;Darling, 2023). This, in turn, means that all outcomes have the same expected utility.…”

Section: Accounting For Boredommentioning

confidence: 99%

Distrusting the policy: how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality in flow states and life more broadly

Parvizi-Wayne

2024

Preprint

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Time is a strikingly bizarre phenomenon. It is both objectively measurable – notwithstanding relativistic effects - and subjectively felt, and yet it is fundamentally fleeting, in so far as any attempts to demarcate the present are always tardy. Furthermore, the 'now' seems phenomenologically thick, constituted by the just-past and the about-to-happen in a manner described first by James (1890) and Husserl (2019). Although theoretical accounts of the structure of time-consciousness have begun to proliferate in the active inference framework, few models exist for the passage of time per se. The most prominent attempt comes from Hohwy et al. (2015), who ground the flow of time in a distrusting of the present hypothesis about the cause of sensory data. In this paper, I argue that a model which roots temporal flows in the dynamics of action policy selection, rather than pure perceptual inference, is more consonant with the phenomenal nature of the passage of time. This analysis begins with an explication of subjective time in flow states, to which this action-centric model is particularly well-suited, before expanding into a theoretical account of time-consciousness more broadly.

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Synthesising boredom: a predictive processing approach

Cited by 8 publications

References 173 publications

Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States and How We Experience Ourselves Within Them

Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States and How We Experience Ourselves Within Them

Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them

Distrusting the policy: how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality in flow states and life more broadly

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