The computational unconscious: Adaptive narrative control, psychopathology, and subjective well-being

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.

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Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of adaptive narrative control, a conception of how subpersonal computational processes shape the contents of conscious experience to realize adaptive behavior. We unpack the implications of the theory for understanding the computational mechanisms underwriting psychopathology and improvements in subjective well-being associated with psychedelic therapy and meditation. The core idea of adaptive narrative control is that systems equipped with an ‘attention schema’ — a model of its own attentional states and how attentional states can be controlled — can come to anticipate not only the epistemic implications of certain attentional states, but also the pragmatic consequences, such as how certain attentional states potentiate certain affective responses. In anticipating affective states, the system is able to regulate affective states through ‘mental action’ — the endogenous control of attention. We argue that using mental action to bias the sampling of evidence to control the ‘narrative’ — the upshot of inference understood to correspond to the contents of conscious experience — allows the system to regulate affective and physiological states in ways that potentiate adaptive behavior. However, it is this adaptive capacity which gives rise to the computational mechanism — ‘avoidant mental action’, or equivalently ‘motivated inattention’ — which we argue is a core mechanism underlying psychopathology. We unpack this approach within the active inference framework to provide specification of the candidate mechanisms. We argue this conception can be used to account for the rigid belief formation characterizing ‘canalization’ and show how the decrements in subjective well-being come as a consequence of reduced recognition and categorisation of emotions (i.e., alexithymia or impaired emotional granularity). We argue that while avoidant mental action facilitates adaptive behavior, certain environmental conditions can lead it to resulting in decreased subjective well-being and psychopathology. Our account partially echoes a Freudian perspective on the function and effects of avoidant defense mechanisms like repression, and brings into view a novel computational conception of the dynamic unconscious— the ‘computational unconscious’. Finally, we explore how this conceptualisation can expand and refine the ‘REBUS’ model of psychedelic action and therapy, and explain some of the increments in subjective well-being associated with meditation.