Sandved-Smith and Da Costa (2024) Metacognitive particles, mental action, and the sense of agency

Findings (8)

• The FEP is asymptotically equivalent to the Principle of Unitarity: as prediction error approaches zero, A and B would need to share identical reference frames, which requires entanglement rather than separability (Fields et al. 2022)

  Demonstrates that optimal modelling erodes the very separability condition that defines a bounded agent

• A cannot measure the entanglement entropy across any internal boundary of its environment; it cannot verify that any part of the world it attends to is genuinely independent of everything else (Fields & Glazebrook 2023, Corollary 3.2)

  Generalises the self-evidence impossibility to all boundaries; grounds the teaching that all dharmas are empty

• Experienced meditators in jhana/dhyana states exhibit a shift toward a metastable near-critical regime characterised by increased neural signal diversity, reduced chaoticity and enhanced perturbational sensitivity (Mago et al. 2025)

  Empirical convergence with the paper's criticality prediction for post-dual agents

• 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

  Formal result establishing that BMR prunes sigma when the metacognitive model is in place

• Bayes-optimal perception inherently produces self-organised instability (local Lyapunov exponents fluctuating around zero), so FEP drives the system toward criticality (Friston et al. 2012)

  Establishes the mechanistic link between lower VFE and critical dynamics, supporting the paper's criticality prediction

• The total Hamiltonian H_U is equally consistent with any factorisation of the Hilbert space, so nothing about the physics privileges any one boundary placement (Zanardi 2002)

  Establishes that the boundary is a modelling choice not determined by the underlying physics

• No finite system A can measure the entanglement entropy S(|AB>) across the boundary B that separates it from its environment B (Fields & Glazebrook 2023, Corollary 3.1)

  The core impossibility result imported from quantum information theory; basis of the entire argument

• Whole-brain modelling demonstrates that jhana states are associated with dynamics approaching criticality using neurophenomenological methods (Vohryzek et al. 2025)

  Second empirical convergence with the criticality prediction, using computational brain modelling

Claims (25)

• Contemplative practice, particularly vipassana, can be understood as progressive opacification: systematic development of metacognitive access to previously transparent structural features of the generative model

  Formal model of the contemplative path as active inference directed at the evidential basis of one's own priors

• A purely cognitive particle has no representational basis on which to distinguish self-generated from environment-generated observations; metacognitive architecture is the prerequisite for the separation prior

  Developmental account of why and when sigma emerges during ontogeny

• The Buddhist understanding of emptiness (lack of svabhava) is the same structural feature as quantum contextuality: the impossibility of assigning context-independent properties to a boundary

  Proposed identification between philosophical traditions enabling formal translation of contemplative insight

• The belief in separation is a structural prior over an agent's quantum reference frame (QRF) deployments, constraining all measurement frames to respect a self/environment partition.

  Formalization of the sense of self as a QRF constraint.

• The ontological commitment to a bounded self is computationally equivalent to having the dual sectorisation constraint as a rigid transparent prior rather than revisable hypothesis

  Formal counterpart of Metzinger's phenomenal transparency applied to the separation prior

• A QRF-induced sectorisation plays an analogous role to a coordinate system in general relativity: pragmatically indispensable but ontologically unconstrained

  Clarifying analogy for why separation belief can be pragmatically useful without constituting evidence for ontological separation

• 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

• Buddhist compassion can be understood as unbounded VFE minimisation over all states the agent can influence, enabled by the removal of the separation prior

  Formal account of why emptiness realisation and compassion arise together in Buddhist tradition

• Free energy minimisation is asymptotically equivalent to the Principle of Unitarity, driving agent and environment toward dissolution of separability

  Remarkable convergence result showing optimal modelling erodes the distinction the modeller imposed

• Emptiness realisation does not imply irrealism or solipsism; the subjective unevidenceability of boundaries does not entail the absence of structure

  Pre-empts the objection that emptiness realisation dissolves the agent's ability to model reality

Hypotheses (4)

• Emptiness realisation and compassion practices are jointly necessary for post-dual optimal inference: emptiness removes the constraint; compassion orients the agent toward QRF alignment

  Formal account of why Buddhist traditions present emptiness and compassion as inseparable

• If sigma is pruned, the agent gains access to QRF deployments and predictive strategies that were structurally excluded under dualistic fixation

  Formal consequence of moving from constrained (Eq. 13) to unconstrained (Eq. 14) optimisation over QRF space

• Agents who have undergone stable emptiness realisation will exhibit neural dynamics closer to criticality than matched controls

  Primary empirical prediction derived from the reduced VFE of the post-dual agent

• Emptiness realisation is accompanied by altered dynamical regimes in neural systems.

  Empirical prediction from the model: brain dynamics change after the transition.

Questions (4)

• How can formal models of awakening contribute to interfaces between biology and technology that are ethically grounded and conducive to human flourishing?

  Motivating question for the broader research programme articulated in the introduction

• If any boundary is just a modelling choice, not a discoverable feature of reality, does emptiness realisation lead to irrealism or solipsism?

  Addressed in §5 via structural realism and the distinction between losing an ontological commitment vs losing a capability

• Under what conditions does developing a belief in separation confer short-term adaptive benefits?

  First of three future computational work directions proposed in §6.4

• Can a finite agent obtain evidence that it is separable from its environment?

  The central question the paper answers negatively via quantum information theory

Similar preprints — Semantic Scholar