The twelve links of Buddhist dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) describe both the causal mechanism of suffering (dukkha) and the structure of its reversal in liberation. Existing interpretations split into a cross-life cosmological reading and a single-cognitive-event psychological reading, but neither attains mechanistic precision. The paper proposes a third reading grounded in contemporary cognitive science: the twelve nidānas map onto the architecture of predictive processing with systematic structural fidelity.
Avijjā corresponds to a structural mis-recognition of one's own priors — the absence of meta-cognitive awareness that priors are generative-model constructions rather than direct grasp of the world; saṅkhāra corresponds to the compulsive volitional construction driven by unrecognised priors under structural mis-recognition; viññāṇa through saḷāyatana correspond to the construction of the hierarchical generative model; vedanā corresponds to valenced prediction error; taṇhā and upādāna correspond to precision-weighted fixation of priors and attractor reification; bhava through jarāmaraṇa correspond to the instantiation and progressive degradation of a system operating under misaligned priors.
The correspondence is theoretically productive in both directions: predictive processing supplies the nidāna chain with a mechanistic vocabulary that goes beyond Buddhist cosmology; the nidāna chain supplies a diachronic account — explaining why a system already operating under structural mis-recognition necessarily maintains and deepens that mis-recognition toward attractor reification and suffering, rather than self-correcting — a developmental logic absent from existing diachronic extensions of predictive processing.
The paper closes by marking four limits of the analogy: the doctrine of rebirth, the normative structure of nibbāna, the phenomenal character of vedanā, and the relation to the Madhyamaka reading of dependent origination.