The brain, as Lisa Feldman Barrett shows, is a prediction machine—forever forecasting and assembling from educated guesses. It’s narrative as survival. Large language models mirror this, stringing together probable words to simulate coherence.
But meditation breaks the loop. It halts the brain’s automatic storytelling, interrupts the fiction of certainty, and calls us back to sensation—to perception before prediction. Like Wittgenstein’s call to free philosophy from the snares of language, meditation frees consciousness from the tyranny of anticipation.