In its most basic formulation, the predictive processing model of cognition (here is a good primer; Wikipedia) states that the mind forms a model of the world by constantly trying to reconcile top down heuristics (e.g. the Earth orbits the sun; there is a car coming towards me; it will rain later today) with bottom up sense data (meaning, the bare sensations that make up consciousness, including both the raw sensations coming from the sense organs, and thoughts). Predictions are made at every level of abstraction, ranging from predicting what sensations you will feel in the next moment, all the way up to highly abstract beliefs such as the belief that a particular political party best represents your value system. This group of predictions is essentially how you see the world, and encompasses everything you expect to happen in the future. In this model, the ground state is the state in which the mind’s predictions match reality exactly. The mind is constantly trying to get to that state by taking the error term between prediction and observation and incorporating it into the predictive model as a feedback parameter. As an example, take the case when the mind mistakenly believes that there is a chair behind it (the prediction). The first part of a sitting down motion proceeds according to the model (reflected in the sense data of lack of contact with the chair, and the feeling of motion through space), and all is well; however, at a certain point the mind expects to feel physical resistance and a cessation of motion. When this doesn’t occur, the prediction error becomes very large, triggering a rapid update of the model. Changing the model of the mind (changing how we see the world, essentially) is directly related to how strongly we notice the error between what the mind predicts and what we observe, and the accuracy of that change is directly related to how accurate the error term for each prediction is.
The way this applies to Insight meditation is pretty interesting, and seems to be a good fit. One of the core understandings in Buddhism is that many of our top down priors about the world are fundamentally wrong. Our minds naturally believe that things are permanent. We have a very strong felt sense of an unchanging self. Neither of those things are true, but all of us unenlightened beings have those beliefs as priors, and they can be very strong. Vipassana practice has you pay close attention to phenomena such that the falseness of those beliefs is revealed. Connecting this to the predictive processing model of the brain, Vipassana practice puts great attention on the bottom up sense data that reveals the untruth of some of our top down beliefs, allowing them to be updated. So, having a regular Vipassana practice essentially increases the constant tied to the feedback parameter which updates the mind’s model of reality, allowing for more accurate predictions of reality. This is true not just for the specific phenomena that one pays attention to in Vipassana practice, it is also true for all phenomena, as regular Insight practice increases the mind’s capacity for (and tendency to) noticing everything that arises.
