Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
George Deane, Mark Miller, Sam Wilkinson
88 citations
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of self can lead to either devastating depersonalization or sought-after selfless experiences in meditation. Using the active inference framework, the authors propose that selfhood emerges from a temporally deep generative model that tunes agents to counterfactually rich possibilities for action. Depersonalization may result from an inferred loss of allostatic control, contrasting with the euphoric selfless experiences reported by meditation practitioners. This unified account conceptualizes the experiential similarities and differences between these states, with implications for understanding dissociative disorders and the therapeutic potential and dangers of meditation.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 24, 2020
George Deane
48 citations
Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT can profoundly alter experience, sometimes dissolving the sense of being a self—a phenomenon known as ego-dissolution. This paper explains such experiences using active inference, a theory from cognitive science. The self is described as a model built by the brain over time to guide an organism toward stability. Psychedelics lower the precision of high-level expectations, causing the brain to learn too quickly from new sensations. This relaxation of deep assumptions collapses the brain's sense of time and self, leading to a loss of ordinary selfhood. The account may illuminate both normal self-consciousness and its disruptions in conditions like psychosis, autism, depression, and dissociative disorders.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2021
George Deane
38 citations
A predictive processing account of consciousness is proposed, grounded in active inference, which holds that phenomenal consciousness arises from 'subjective valuation'—a deep inference about the precision of self-evidencing outcomes of action. The account aims to inform the attribution of consciousness to non-human systems via their deep self-models and sensory attenuation mechanisms. An objection from psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution states is considered; such states do not undermine the theory but instead corroborate subjective valuation as constitutive of experience, highlighting psychedelic research's potential for consciousness science and computational psychiatry.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2024
Xu Ji, Eric Elmoznino, George Deane et al.
13 citations
Conscious experiences feel rich and hard to fully describe or recall, a puzzle that partly motivates the explanatory gap—the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical processes. This work offers an information-theoretic dynamical systems framework: richness corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state, and ineffability to information lost during processing. Attractor dynamics in working memory cause impoverished recollections, language's discrete symbolic nature cannot capture high-dimensional experiential structure, and similar cognitive function between individuals improves communicability. The model advances a physicalist explanation of these puzzling aspects, though it may not settle all questions about the explanatory gap.
George Deane, Jonas Mago, Aikaterini Fotopoulou et al.
7 citations
preprint
A computational theory called adaptive narrative control explains how subpersonal processes shape conscious experience to enable adaptive behavior. Systems with an attention schema can anticipate the epistemic and pragmatic consequences of attentional states, using mental action—endogenous control of attention—to regulate affective states. This capacity also produces avoidant mental action or motivated inattention, which is argued to be a core mechanism underlying psychopathology, leading to rigid belief formation, reduced emotional recognition (alexithymia), and decreased subjective well-being under certain environmental conditions. The account partially echoes Freudian defense mechanisms and introduces a computational unconscious. It refines the REBUS model of psychedelic therapy and explains improvements in well-being from meditation.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Jonas Mago, George Deane, Lars Sandved-Smith et al.
People under the influence of psychedelics often report encountering autonomous entities such as spirits, elves, or ancestors. A neurocomputational model, grounded in the active inference framework, explains these experiences by proposing that psychedelics reduce the predictability of sensory perceptions, leading the brain to interpret both internal and external perceptions as coming from non-self agents. The model synthesizes earlier theories including the entropic brain model, computational accounts of felt presence, and sensory attenuation theories of self-other discrimination. It aims to account for how the brain supports entity encounters and for the diversity and similarity of these experiences across cultural contexts.
George Deane, Daphne Demekas
preprint
A state of pure awareness stripped of conceptual content, known as minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), can arise from a computational architecture where a policy model generating behavior is recursively coupled to a program model that synthesizes structured explanations of that behavior. These programs function as hypothetical self-models that condition future behavior, creating attractor dynamics that stabilize into a coherent identity. MPE emerges when programs remain simple and interoceptively focused, the self-hypothesis distribution stays broad, and the agent sustains awareness without recruiting extended conceptual structures.