claim

active

claim:buddhist-awakening-can-be-formalised-as-bayesian-model-reduction-of-the-separation-prior-sigma-yielding-a-post-dual-agent-with-unconstrained-qrf-deployments

Buddhist awakening can be formalised as Bayesian model reduction of the separation prior sigma, yielding a post-dual agent with unconstrained QRF deployments

Central theoretical contribution of the paper unifying contemplative path with active inference framework

Source paper

extracted_from

There is no self-evidence: A physics of emptiness realisation

(2026) · Lars Sandved-Smith · Chris Fields · Thomas Doctor · Ruben Laukkonen +1

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Findings (1)

finding

The change in free energy from pruning sigma is negative (delta_F = delta_Complexity + delta_Accuracy < 0) because complexity cost remains while accuracy contribution approaches zero after contemplative trajectory
supports
Formal result establishing that BMR prunes sigma when the metacognitive model is in place

Hypotheses (1)

hypothesis

Agents who have undergone stable emptiness realisation will exhibit neural dynamics closer to criticality than matched controls
associated_with
Primary empirical prediction derived from the reduced VFE of the post-dual agent

Concepts (1)

concept

Dereification
associated_with
Disengagement from automatic tendency to treat mental constructions as ontologically real; formalised as pruning of sigma

Claims (2)

claim

No finite agent can obtain evidence for its own separability from its environment
supports
Core claim of the paper; derives from Corollary 3.1 of Fields & Glazebrook (2023)
Contemplative practice, particularly vipassana, can be understood as progressive opacification: systematic development of metacognitive access to previously transparent structural features of the generative model
supports
Formal model of the contemplative path as active inference directed at the evidential basis of one's own priors

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Buddhist phenomenology's careful attention to dependent origination makes tanha-like building blocks particularly likely to have simple, elegant neural implementations.claim0.779
Argues that Buddhist analysis primes us to find clean neural mechanisms.
Once visible, the prior is eliminated via Bayesian model reduction resulting in a post-dual agent with unconstrained QRF deployments.claim0.777
Formal description of the transition to post-duality.
Such priors suppress the inherent contextuality of the boundary and that their removal constitutes a formal counterpart to the Buddhist notion of emptiness realisation.claim0.776
Equivalence claim between prior removal and emptiness.
Buddhist awakening, in the sense of stable realisation of emptiness, can be understood as the embodied recognition of this impossibility.hypothesis0.773
The paper's core proposal linking physics to Buddhist philosophy.
The removal of such priors constitutes a formal counterpart to the Buddhist notion of emptiness realisation.claim0.770
Direct equivalence claim between model reduction and enlightenment.
Structure learning via Bayesian model reduction has a clear biological interpretation in terms of synaptic decay and switching off certain synaptic connections, reminiscent of REM sleep.claim0.766
Biological interpretation of Bayesian model reduction.
The results of abductive reasoning (reduced model priors) can be communicated to other agents as prior beliefs, provided all agents share the same model lexicon or hypothesis space.claim0.766
Explanation of how knowledge (not just parameters) is shared between agents; links to pre-Cartesian consciousness
We formalise the belief in separation as a structural prior over an agent's quantum reference frame (QRF) deployments, constraining all measurement frames to respect a self/environment partition.claim0.763
Formalisation of the dualistic belief.