Dependent Origination as Generative Dynamics: A Predictive Processing Reinterpretation of the Twelve Nidanas

The twelve nidānas of Buddhist dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) describe both the causal mechanism of suffering (dukkha) and the structure whose reversal constitutes liberation. Interpretations remain divided between a cosmological reading (twelve stages across lifetimes) and a psychological reading (twelve moments of a single cognitive episode), with neither achieving full analytical precision. This paper proposes a third reading grounded in contemporary cognitive science: the twelve nidānas map, with systematic structural fidelity, onto the architecture of predictive processing. Avijjā corresponds to structural misrecognition of one's priors as mind-independent reality — the absence of meta-cognitive awareness that priors are model-generated constructs rather than direct apprehensions of the world; saṅkhāra to compulsive volitional formations driven by priors that are not recognized as such; viññāna through saḷāyatana to the construction of a hierarchical generative model; vedanā to valenced prediction error; taṇhā and upādāna to precision-weighted prior consolidation and attractor reification; bhava through jarāmaraṇa to the instantiation and progressive degradation of a system operating under misaligned priors. The correspondence is theoretically productive in both directions: predictive processing provides a mechanistic vocabulary that extends the nidānas beyond Buddhist cosmology; the nidāna chain supplies a diachronic account of why a system already operating under structural misrecognition necessarily perpetuates and deepens that misrecognition toward attractor reification and suffering, rather than correcting itself — a developmental logic that existing diachronic extensions of predictive processing do not address. The paper concludes by marking four limits of the analogy: the rebirth doctrine, the normative weight of nibbāna, the phenomenal character of vedanā, and the relationship to the Madhyamaka reading of dependent origination. A central interpretive claim is that avijjā should be understood not as an information-theoretic blank slate but as structural misrecognition of the conditioned character of one's own cognitive processes — a misrecognition available only to a system that already possesses priors, and that consists in taking those priors as transparent windows onto mind-independent reality rather than as model-generated constructions.