Human Flourishing in the Age of Computational Neuroscience: The predictive brain framework, meditation, and psychedelics for flourishing

The predictive brain hypothesis explains subjective experience as active model building: the brain generates predictions about sensory input and perception emerges from matching and mismatches between those predictions and incoming data. The piece uses perceptual illusions like the viral “dress” and the checker shadow illusion to argue that what people experience is not a direct readout of objective reality, but a constructed inference shaped by context and prior experience. It frames mental life as a continuously updated generative model, optimized for survival rather than perfect accuracy. It connects this framework to meditation and psychedelics as practical ways to “recalibrate” predictive models. Meditation is presented as gradually loosening rigid constructs of self and emotion through increased awareness and equanimity, while psychedelics are linked to the REBUS model, where reduced precision of top-down predictions may allow bottom-up sensory information to reshape beliefs. The goal is reduced suffering and improved human flourishing through greater lucidity about the constructed nature of experience.