Special Issue: Experiencing Well-BeingPlayfulness and the meaningful life: an active inference perspective.
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2023 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1093/nc/niad024 via PubMed
Summary
Playfulness helps people tolerate and even enjoy uncertainty, which can contribute to a meaningful life. Using the active inference framework, the paper argues that playful individuals learn a high-level prior that in safe contexts, uncertainty and error should be explored rather than avoided. This openness allows them to attend to the world in an expansive, effortless way, fostering deep engagement and appreciation for life. They also seek challenges at the edge of their abilities, promoting growth in skills and relationships, and learn from their own affective responses to uncertainty, making it familiar and enjoyable.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Playfulness, through a learned tolerance for uncertainty, promotes flourishing by enabling open attention, growth at the edge of abilities, and positive exploration of uncertainty. |
Abstract
Our paper takes as its starting point the recent proposal, at the core of this special issue, to use the active inference framework (AIF) to computationally model what it is for a person to live a meaningful life. In broad brushstrokes, the AIF takes experiences of human flourishing to be the result of predictions and uncertainty estimations along many dimensions at multiple levels of neurobiological organization. Our aim in this paper is to explain how AIF models predict that uncertainty can sometimes, under the right conditions, be conducive to the experiences of flourishing. Our focus is on playfulness, because playful individuals have learned a high-level prior that in certain safe contexts, uncertainty and error should be tolerated and explored. They have expanded the phenotypic bound on the amount of surprise they are prepared to tolerate in their lives. The positive embracing of uncertainty has a number of positive knock-on effects for the kind of lives playful individuals are able to lead. First, a playful individual attends to the world in a way that is open and expansive, a mode of attending that is effortless and therefore conducive to being in the present. This openness to the present moment allows for deep engagement and participation in experience that can furnish a renewed appreciation for life. Second, playful individuals will actively seek out spaces at the edge of their own abilities and will therefore be more likely to grow and develop in their skills and relationships in ways that contribute to their living a good life. Finally, playful agents seek out situations in which they can monitor, observe, and learn from their own affective responses to uncertainty. Thus, uncertainty becomes something familiar to them that they not only learn to tolerate but also enjoy positively exploring, in ways that provide them opportunities to grow. For these three reasons, we will argue that playfulness and openness to experiences of uncertainty and the unknown may be important ingredients in human flourishing.