Shamil Chandaria on the Computational Turn: ideas, methods, and how computational thinking shapes psychedelic experience and research

Computational thinking is framed as a practical way to make sense of psychedelic experience by turning subjective reports into more structured, testable signals. Shamil Chandaria connects the shift toward models and computation with goals like better measurement, clearer hypotheses, and more reproducible interpretation across experiences. The discussion emphasizes turning “what it feels like” into quantities or descriptions that can be compared across people, sessions, or contexts. The wider implication is that psychedelics and consciousness research benefit from computational methods to improve analysis, reduce ambiguity, and support more rigorous collaboration between experiential knowledge and formal scientific approaches.