It amplifies the precision of internally generated activity, treating spontaneous (often related to that day’s memories) cortical/hippocampal patterns as high‑fidelity “data,” while weakened monoaminergic tone relaxes top‑down priors.
One claim of this post is that desires and epistemic priors are enconded in essentially the same way in the brain
I think it’s a good idea to introduce the basic story of how active inference represents preferences in the introduction of this post, i.e. C = p(o) because it’s quite different from how other paradigms do it. People are often confused by this IME. And walk through some kind of toy example for precision and updating and prediction errors overriding the “deeper” beliefs v.s. the “deeper” beliefs persisting. And then say smth like “the payoff for this weird mixing of is and ought is it lets you explain depression really damn well”, then get into the neuroscience
Also, you may be interested in: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17957 (basic idea here is we not only introduce preferences over observatioins p(o), but also over hidden state beliefs p(s), to model stuff like why people are reluctant to update their beliefs due to social reasons)
In the 1950s, the correlation of increased central ACh and depression has been discovered, and in the 70s it has been formalised as the cholinergic-adrenergic hypothesis of mania and depression
I think “internally generated” is confusing here, since by sensory I assume you mean the descending prediction errors as a result of the actual observable states differing from the predicted ones? maybe just scrap this phrase
Epistemic status: An attempt at a synthesis of the cholinergic theory of depression and the role of acetylcholine in the Active Inference theory of the brain, by a neuroscience layperson. I acknowledge that my understanding of the math behind FEP is also incomplete, but it seems to me that it’s worth writing out a potentially mathematically mistaken idea, rather than delaying shipping by continually getting sidetracked by deeper and deeper theory.
-> its
Woah this is quite cool
I think it’s a good idea to introduce the basic story of how active inference represents preferences in the introduction of this post, i.e. C = p(o) because it’s quite different from how other paradigms do it. People are often confused by this IME. And walk through some kind of toy example for precision and updating and prediction errors overriding the “deeper” beliefs v.s. the “deeper” beliefs persisting. And then say smth like “the payoff for this weird mixing of is and ought is it lets you explain depression really damn well”, then get into the neuroscience
Also, you may be interested in: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17957 (basic idea here is we not only introduce preferences over observatioins p(o), but also over hidden state beliefs p(s), to model stuff like why people are reluctant to update their beliefs due to social reasons)
-> encoded
There’s a lot of very interesting literature about how the (interoceptive) problem of feeling your emotions is also an inference problem: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5390700/
(So it’s just the FEP story again, with emotions as hidden states)
I can’t parse this
-> cognitive enhancers, (+remove quotation marks?)
“has been” → “was” in both cases
I think “internally generated” is confusing here, since by sensory I assume you mean the descending prediction errors as a result of the actual observable states differing from the predicted ones? maybe just scrap this phrase
specify which one in the text?
peak lesswrong mood
mundane, but also tag “predictive processing”?