Shamil Chandaria: AI, Awakening & Predictive Processing

Today's guest, Shamil Chandaria, is an advisor to Google's Deep Mind, and a philosopher, neuroscientist and meditation researcher in consciousness studies at both Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College London. 

Shamil and Bernardo will dialogue on the most recent neuroscience of awakening, and their perspectives on consciousness and on artificial intelligence.

Shamil draws on the most recent scientific perspectives of how our minds construct experience. He offers a clear framework that demystifies spiritual awakenings and a path towards greater human flourishing. His approach reveals how you can harness practices like meditation to systematically reshape your brain’s predictive processes, reduce suffering, and reconstruct a whole new experience of reality. 

His work combines disciplines ranging from computational neuroscience and predictive processing to the nondual traditions of Buddhism, Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism, as well as 38 years of meditation and academic experience.

He has collaborated with some of the world's leading scientists in Bayesian brain theory, perception, artificial intelligence and psychedelic research.

More about Shamil Chandaria

You can sample Shamil's work in the recent paper ‘A Beautiful Loop,’ or in podcast conversations with Sam Harris and FitMind.

He has a full 10-hour course you can find here:

Rewiring your Reality: A 4 Week Course with Shamil Chandaria on the Neuroscience of Meditation, Awakening and Human Flourishing

Thu 17th Jul 2025, 7pm – Thu 31st Jul 2025, 9:30pm BST (UTC +01:00)

• Senior research fellow at the centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, University of Oxford. 
• Research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, London University, where he focuses on philosophical issues in neuroscience and well-being
• Research fellow at Imperial College in the neuroscience of psychedelics
• Bye-fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University.  

“weaves together the latest ideas emerging in computational neuroscience, active inference, predictive processing, and the free energy principle into a compelling narrative of how our minds construct reality and indeed our ‘selves'.”

Zoom link

6-8pm UK time / 7-9pm CET / 1-3pm EST