Neurophenomenology is a research programme aimed at bridging the explanatory gap between first-person subjective experience and neurophysiological third-person data, through an embodied and enactive approach to the biology of consciousness. The present proposal attempts to further characterize the bodily basis of the mind by adopting a naturalistic view of the phenomenological concept of intentionality as the a priori invariant character of any lived experience. Building on the Kantian definition of transcendentality as “what concerns the a priori formal structures of the subject’s mind” and as a precondition for the very possibility of human knowledge, we will suggest that this transcendental core may in fact be rooted in biology and can be examined within an extension of the theory of autopoiesis. The argument will be first clarified by examining its application to previously proposed elementary autopoietic models, to the bacterium, and to the immune system; it will be then further substantiated and illustrated by examining the mirror-neuron system and the default mode network as biological instances exemplifying the enactive nature of knowledge, and by discussing the phenomenological aspects of selected neurological conditions (neglect, schizophrenia) In this context, the free-energy principle proposed recently by Karl Friston will be briefly introduced as a rigorous, neurally-plausible framework that seems to accomodate optimally these ideas. While our approach is biologically-inspired, we will maintain that lived first-person experience is still critical for a better understanding of brain function, based on our argument that the former and the latter share the same transcendental structure. Finally, the role that disciplined contemplative practices can play to this aim, and an interpretation of the cognitive processes taking place during meditation under this perspective, will be also discussed.

Key words: neurophenomenology, kant, a priori, prereflective awareness, default mode network, ongoing activity, free-energy, meditation.

The surge of interest about mindfulness meditation is associated with a growing empirical evidence about its impact on the mind and body. Yet, despite promising phenomenological or psychological models of mindfulness, a general mechanistic understanding of meditation steeped in neuroscience is still lacking. In parallel, predictive processing approaches to the mind are rapidly developing in the cognitive sciences with an impressive explanatory power: processes apparently as diverse as perception, action, attention, and learning, can be seen as unfolding and being coherently orchestrated according to the single general mandate of free-energy minimization. Here, we briefly explore the possibility to supplement previous phenomenological models of focused attention meditation by formulating them in terms of active inference. We first argue that this perspective can account for how paying voluntary attention to the body in meditation helps settling the mind by downweighting habitual and automatic trajectories of (pre)motor and autonomic reactions, as well as the pull of distracting spontaneous thought at the same time. Secondly, we discuss a possible relationship between phenomenological notions such as opacity and de-reification, and the deployment of precision-weighting via the voluntary allocation of attention. We propose the adoption of this theoretical framework as a promising strategy for contemplative research. Explicit computational simulations and comparisons with experimental and phenomenological data will be critical to fully develop this approach. Highlights: • A general mechanistic understanding of meditation steeped in neuroscience is needed. • The active inference framework appears optimally suited for this purpose. • We illustrate the approach for the case of focused attention meditation (FA). • The alternation of attention and distraction in FA is epistemically and pragmatically relevant. • The meditative non-action is crucial in this process.