SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain

A journal-club explainer of Friston & Carhart-Harris's REBUS (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics) model. Under predictive coding, psychedelics weaken high-level priors via cortical 5-HT2A agonism, producing both hallucinations (relax 'walls don't breathe' -> walls breathe) and possible therapy (re-examine frozen priors like 'I am a failure' or PTSD's 'the world is unsafe'). The annealing/energy-landscape metaphor: flatten the belief landscape so the ant of consciousness escapes a shallow local minimum and settles in a deeper, truer valley (cf MDMA for PTSD). Scott is skeptical of the paper's 'most if not all mental illness' claim (Carhart-Harris's enthusiasm outrunning evidence) and contributes his own extension — 'psychedelic woo as cognitive HPPD': priors that relax and never re-strengthen (so ghosts/mysticism become compelling), or newly-set bad priors.

Quality 75 · Excellent. 75 — Excellent floor. A clear, insightful explainer of an important neuroscience model, lifted by excellent exposition (the annealing / Sword-of-Shannara analogies), well-judged skepticism, and a genuinely original contribution (woo-as-HPPD). Explaining someone else's model keeps it at the floor.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. 50 — Moderate. The model is F&CH's, but Scott's woo-as-HPPD framing and the lucid synthesis are a fresh, memorable angle.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. 3 — an influential explainer of the REBUS / predictive-coding-of-psychedelics model within the rationalist/psychedelics-discourse sphere.