Physicalism, in the most abstract sense, is the view that everything is ultimately physical, whether it be the Earth revolving around the Sun or seemingly “mental” phenomena such as pain and pleasure. In this article, I will present what might be the strongest argument against physicalism.

But before getting to the arguments, we must first ask what it would mean for an argument to be strong. What standard do I consider epistemically prior?

I would say: phenomenality. By phenomenality, I mean the “what it is like” states—the lived, first-person character of experience. Whatever we claim, reason about, or theorize about must ultimately be intelligible in relation to some mode of experience. I therefore take an argument to be epistemically relevant, let alone stronger, insofar as it refers back to something experientially given.

Why? Because otherwise, philosophy would lose its purpose. This brings us to the infamous reference problem in the philosophy of language. When we talk about something, are we referring to a pre-identified notion, or are we appealing to a definition? If the latter, what licenses that definition? And how do we know that it meaningfully refers to anything at all? We must therefore, meta-philosophically speaking, take philosophy to refer to something beyond philosophy itself, ultimately grounding philosophical inquiry in phenomenality.

However, phenomenality alone, as an epistemic standard, threatens the philosophical spirit from another direction. If philosophy ultimately reduced to “I feel X,” what would we even be trying to achieve through philosophical inquiry? How would this differ from revelation? How could we distinguish between what we consider genuine philosophical insight and a mere subjective impression?

Some form of objectivity must therefore enter the picture—something that allows us to examine the structure, causes, and implications of an experience beyond the experience itself. Thus, phenomenality needs to be supplemented by intersubjective accessibility.

For example, rather than merely saying “I feel X,” philosophy could accommodate propositions such as “I feel,” “There is an ‘I’ in ‘I feel X,’” or even “I and only I exist.” Consider the last proposition. Taken literally, it denies the existence of every other philosopher. Yet philosophy could still accommodate it if others exist in some supposed sense, for they would nevertheless be capable of arriving at the same proposition, perhaps for the same phenomenological reasons that you do.

So what does it mean for an argument to be strong? It should be grounded, as far as possible, in phenomenality, while possessing sufficient epistemic force to be, in principle, recognized intersubjectively.

Now, coming to the arguments, the above-mentioned epistemic standards already rule out conceivability arguments.

Consider Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument: we are asked to conceive of Mary, who knows every physical fact about the colour red but nevertheless does not know what it is like to see red. Or consider David Chalmers’ Zombie Argument: we are asked to conceive of a being that is atom-for-atom identical to its conscious counterpart and yet lacks consciousness.

The problem, from my epistemic standpoint, is not simply that these scenarios are controversial. It is that they treat the conceivability of a scenario as evidence for its metaphysical possibility. But conceivability may instead reflect limitations in our concepts, imagination, or understanding of the relevant phenomena. The fact that I can coherently describe two things as coming apart does not necessarily tell me that reality permits them to come apart.

It’s something like a super-conditioned Gen-Z saying, “I cannot conceive of any possible world in which rape might be right.” Well… that seems like a you-issue!

For that matter, inconceivability arguments are off the table as well. “It is inconceivable that phenomenal states are reducible to physical states. Therefore, physicalism is false.” If conceivability does not entail possibility, then inconceivability cannot entail impossibility either.

So where does that leave us? An undergraduate in philosophy might think we have exhausted our options. Umm… philosophy is full of untraditional arguments darling! Consider the Many-Subjects Argument.

P1. There’s exactly one conscious subject in my vicinity: me.
P2. If physicalism is true, there are multiple conscious subjects in my vicinity.
C. Therefore, physicalism is false.

The key premise here is P1. But before coming to it, let me throw a few words on P2 in case it is not already clear to my readers.

Physical facts are facts concerning objects identified within the physical, say, spacetime. You may believe that only you exist at some location S, but there is also something else that exists at S: your body.

If you and your body are distinct entities, physicalism faces a difficulty in explaining why the physical facts at S make you conscious but somehow fail to make the coinciding body conscious. After all, if consciousness is wholly determined by the relevant physical facts, what prevents those same facts from determining consciousness in every entity that instantiates them?

(Sidenote: One might object that this involves an equivocation about physicalism itself. The question here is whether everything is ultimately physical, not the Hempel-style formulation according to which everything that can be meaningfully described is describable in the language of physics. The former is a metaphysical claim about what ultimately exists, whereas the latter concerns the adequacy or scope of a physical vocabulary.)

Coming to P1, in what sense is it the key premise? It appeals to phenomenality, but notice that P1 actually contains two distinct claims:

1. I am a conscious subject.

2. There is exactly one conscious subject in my vicinity.

Of these, only the first straightforwardly appeals to phenomenality. I know that I am conscious through the immediate presence of my own experience. But that does not by itself tell me how many other conscious subjects exist.

So P1 does not really do the work we need unless philosophers can independently ground the second claim.

There is, for example, the Cartesian move, according to which 2 is epistemically privileged: “I cannot be certain of anything but myself to exist.” Another route is the common-sense argument associated with Thomas Reid. If we strip away the cognitive conditioning acquired through decades of living in a world supposedly populated by other people, perhaps the most minimal common-sense position is simply that I exist as a conscious subject.

But one may reasonably object: perhaps common sense is simply wrong about how many conscious subjects there are.

This is where philosophers such as Brian Cutter come in. His argument begins with the idea that consciousness is not metaphysically innocuous. Unlike a table or a cloud, whose existence does not itself make anything better or worse for anyone, consciousness is tied to welfare. Phenomenal states can be good or bad for the subject experiencing them.

If there really are two conscious subjects, X and Y, then there are two distinct subjects whose welfare matters. If there are three, there are three, and so on. The number of conscious subjects is therefore not a metaphysically irrelevant fact.

This, however, does not by itself establish that there is only one conscious subject.

Cutter’s point is subtler. The moral significance of consciousness gives us a reason to treat the individuation of conscious subjects as substantive.

Consider me and my body. Suppose I am a conscious subject located at S, while my body is a distinct physical entity that also exists at S. If my body were itself a conscious subject, then there would seemingly be two distinct loci of welfare at the same location: mine and my body’s.

But what exactly would distinguish the welfare of my body from my own? If the relevant phenomenal state is identical, there appears to be no additional phenomenal fact corresponding to a second subject’s welfare. Simply pointing to another physical object, therefore, does not yet explain why there is another subject of experience.

So we ought to consider that there is only one conscious subject here.

But there is an important problem. The claim that we “ought to…” is a normative claim. P1, by contrast, is fundamentally a claim about what exists—a descriptive or metaphysical claim. Cutter can therefore make the individuation of conscious subjects normatively significant, but he does not straightforwardly establish their number.

This is precisely why I would not consider the Many-Subjects Argument to rest as strongly on phenomenality as the argument that follows. It certainly begins from consciousness and its phenomenal significance, but its crucial move is ultimately normative. Merely having phenomenality somewhere in an argument does not make the argument phenomenality-first in the stronger sense I am looking for.

So again, what remains? Is there an argument that does not merely appeal to phenomenality somewhere along the way, but is… submerged in it? Consider the Sensory Awareness Argument.

P1. There is a necessary connection between phenomenal and intentional properties. (For example, there is a necessary connection between what it is like to see a blue candy and seeming to you as though there is a blue candy.)

P2. Consciousness is temporally intrinsic. (Whenever you experience anything, it is experienced as occurring now.)

P3. If physicalism is true, P1 and P2 cannot both be true.

C. Therefore, physicalism is false.

I believe the stronger objection to this argument comes from P1, so I will throw a few words at P2 and P3 first.

One might say that “only now is experienced” does not entail that consciousness is intrinsically presentist or temporally instantaneous. A conscious experience can contain apparent awareness of the past and anticipation of the future.

When you hear a melody, for example, you do not experience each note as an isolated “now.” The present experience retains the preceding notes and anticipates the following ones. Similarly, remembering yesterday involves a present experience of the past.

But to this, the defender can reply: “Retaining” and “anticipating” do not really challenge the premise. Consciousness occurs now, but its physical or functional state at that moment might encode information about earlier and later times. How an experience comes about has nothing to do with the experience itself…

One might similarly object to P3 by saying that there is no obvious contradiction between P1 and P2 under physicalism. Why should a physical state be incapable of simultaneously realizing a necessary connection between phenomenal and intentional properties and an intrinsically present experience?

The defender of P3, however, can reply that this misses the relevant distinction. The question is not whether a physical state can represent the past or have a causal history. The question is whether the intrinsic character of the resulting experience can be completely captured in terms of physical facts.

My waking experience is not merely a physical event occurring at t; it is experienced as occurring now. Similarly, yesterday is represented within my present consciousness rather than being phenomenally present as yesterday. If this distinction between the physical state’s temporal relations and the phenomenal experience’s intrinsic presentness cannot be accounted for in purely physical terms, then simply identifying the experience with a physical state does not resolve the problem. It merely asserts the very reduction that P3 is challenging.

Now finally coming to P1. One might say that P1 faces a problem analogous to P1 of the Many-Subjects Argument. Both contain two aspects, only one of which is straightforwardly granted by phenomenality.

Here, while phenomenal states directly appeal to phenomenality, intentional states do not. After all, one might argue that intentional states are reflections upon, or interpretations of, phenomenal states rather than something phenomenally given in themselves.

The defender can reply that this objection assumes precisely what P1 is disputing. The distinction between the two is important. Phenomenality concerns what it is like to undergo an experience, whereas intentionality concerns what that experience is about or what it represents.

Consider seeing a blue candy. There is obviously something it is like to have the visual experience—the particular phenomenal character of seeing blue, the shape, the brightness, and so on. But the experience also seems to present itself as being of a blue candy.

I do not first have a bare phenomenal experience and then reflect upon it to conclude, “This must be an experience representing a blue candy.” The experience is already directed toward the candy. Indeed, I can perceive the candy without having any reflective thought about my experience whatsoever.

Hallucination makes the distinction even clearer. Suppose I have an experience as of a blue candy when there is no candy in front of me. The experience can still have intentional content: it presents itself as being of a blue candy, even though there is no actual blue candy for it to refer to.

This suggests that intentionality cannot simply be identified with the truth of the phenomenal experience or with a later judgment about it. The experience can misrepresent reality while retaining its intentional character.

The defender can therefore argue that intentionality is not an external interpretation imposed upon phenomenality. P1 is not claiming that we can phenomenally “see” intentionality as though it were some additional object sitting alongside the phenomenal experience. Rather, it claims that, in certain cases, the phenomenal character and intentional character of an experience are necessarily connected.

The analogy here might be with logical necessity. Being a bachelor necessarily entails being unmarried. “Unmarried” is not an additional observation we make after discovering that someone is a bachelor; it is already constitutively connected to what being a bachelor means.

Of course, the analogy has its limits. The bachelor case involves a conceptual or analytic necessity, whereas P1 is making a stronger claim about the necessary connection between phenomenal and intentional properties. The analogy therefore does not establish P1 by itself. It merely illustrates what the defender means by a constitutive connection rather than an external interpretive overlay.

And this, ultimately, is where the argument becomes interesting.

If intentionality really is constitutively connected to phenomenal character, and if consciousness is intrinsically present, then the physicalist owes us more than the identification of consciousness with some physical state. They must explain why that physical state has this phenomenal character, this intentional directedness, and this intrinsic presentness.

That is a much deeper demand than simply asking whether we can imagine consciousness coming apart from the physical.

And perhaps that is where the question in the title finds its answer.

The strongest argument against physicalism may not be the one with the most elaborate thought experiment, the most exotic possible world, or the most counterintuitive metaphysical scenario. It may instead be… this.

Physicalism may ultimately be true. But if it is, it must explain not merely why certain physical processes accompany consciousness, nor merely why we are disposed to speak about experiences in certain ways. It must explain why there is something it is like to be a physical system at all—and why that phenomenal character has the structure it does.

PS Thank you Sudhanshu for asking me to draft this.

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A child, was playing in my hand. His delicate fingers brushes against mines. His tender body shifted around the cradle that I made out of my hand. His face, full of life—maybe even what can be considered as the most beautiful child (not in the sense parents say so, but literally). Wait a minute? Is it my child ? I looked closely, I looked around, I was in a hospital ward—a woman whom I didn’t recognise was lying there, but I knew her, she was my wife. My dear wife and my child in my arms giggling.

Another flash and my child grew from a newborn to Toddler, I saw in him not only beauty but intelligence, brewing at every step of his life. Soon the toddler turned to a child of 5-6 years.

The mother of the child vanished from the picture. Where is she? Has she died or she ran away? I stand without any answers.

Though the child seemed to have grace of gods, flourishing with beauty and intelligence, doing the complex studies of physics and maths that we could hardly imagine at that age. He was indeed one of those people who are famously called “gifted”.

My admiration of him grew larger, perhaps because only he was with me—last thing I can call mine after my wife left. This fondness was to go above and beyond the human capacities.

On a dull day, while it was drizzling I was returning from my work, crossing the road. The city was in its busy hours, roads were bustling with vehicles—loud and honking. I was lost in my routine worries—“will he be okay? Has he eaten something? Who will look after him?...” With this thoughts I walked down, bit carelessly I assume.

*Collision...*

*Some people murmured indistinctly...*

*Darkness...*

My eyes opened in a bright light, I must have been operated.

As my eyes adjusted to new light, I realised I wasn’t in a hospital, I was in the afterlife. A figure glaring with golden light, was infront on me. A servant of his was throughing water on my face to wake me up from unconsciousness.

Unlike what I was taught of the word “god” this man looked more like a owner of some big industry. Wearing tuxedos, with piles of MoU’s lying infront of him to be signed.

“Welcome to the afterlife!”

“Ah...is it hell or heaven?”

“Haha, it’s both... You humans,” his long satirical laugh followed, “ you guys really think that... There’s no heaven or hell, it’s something that can be both and none at the same time.”

He stopped talking for a while. His secretary who was standing right beside him all this while coughed and continued.

“This place is called Afterlife Inc., managed by him. It’s from where we decide all that happens down on Earth—who gets born and who dies—everything! ...And don’t you think that you are going to sit and enjoy as you petty humans thought afterlife was like. Here you have to work.”

“I see, he has worked in the accounts department in his human life. Weren’t we in desparate need of an accountant for the environment department?” Said that glowing tuxedo guy.

“Indeed,” followed secretary.

In no time, a paper was presented in front of me.

“Hereby Mr.____ takes the role of accountant in Environment Department of Afterlife Inc. till eternity.”

A blank space was left for my sign. Without my consent, my hands obeyed their direction and accepted my faith as a bonded labour.

As the clouds cleared and I found myself shoved in the department building infront of piles of data, it came to my mind that I have truly died. Now stuck, forever in this oblivion.

The first thought was of my child. How will he survive? Who will he look upto? Who will give him food and care? The child services would have taken him by now? Will he get adopted? And what not…

The very thing that was dear to me was gone.

Whilst thinking of such things, I continued to work, endlessly in a loop. Working—having supper at the mess—and again working.

Rarely did I talk to anyone. And whenever I did , I heard long ancedotes of how they could have lived their lives better—“I should have told him that I loved him,” “I should’ve cared more for my parents,” “I should’ve tried so and so atleast once” etc.

During one such rant, while is dissociated into my own worries of well being of my son, in backdrop I heard someone talking about Department of Genius.

I couldn’t hear any coherent sentence than this in their entire conversation. So there was a department of Genius. I wonder what they do.

Once done with dinner, I waited for the group of people who were talking about it to get up. I followed them to washroom and went to stand next to a guy whom I recognised as the chief orator in the conversation.

“Hi,” I said awkwardly in the washroom while peeing.

“Hello.”

“You were talking about some department…”

“Oh yeah, that…,” he smiled as his hastened his zip, “... There is a department. I’ve heard they make Geniuses... Like literal geniuses...but it’s in the far extreme of Afterlife Inc. Only authorised people have clearance to go in.”

“Uhmm…”

I said, and I was lost in my what ifs. He stood there for 10 seconds making sense of my response and my queries , but as he realised that I won’t be giving him any satisfactory answer whatsoever, he left.

I was still standing in there—unzipped , thinking: what if… what if in some impossible reality I go in there and make my child a genius? He was intelligent already but if I could list him as a “Genius” at the department, that’d ensure he wins the world.

He would forever be happy then.

I realised that this was indeed selfish, but it was what it was. I was fond of my son. And I could do anything in my capacity to save him from misery of orphan life.

From there, my planning started. During my work hours, I used to sneak into department website to gather information about the Department of Genius (DOG) . Little was available on internet, and any in-depth intel required special clearance, which I didn’t have.

Over the next few days, I found out list of 20 people associated with D.O.G. directly or have been retired or have changed their department.

Among them, was one of my senior Mr. Wickham. He worked in that department during the early days of human civilization and have name for creating several unrecognised geniuses that made us what we are today. One of his Genius discovered Fire.

The only problem with Mr Wickham was that we was very reserved, unlike his wife.

Mrs. Wickham was a cheerful lady. She talked with various workers, and had a bad reputation for having “secret affairs” with Mr. Wickham’s Juniors.

I saw my chance. All I have to do is seduce the old lady, which happened with ease, given her reputation. A few nice words were thrown in her way and she picked up each of them carefully, and fell in my trap.

In one of our intimate nights, as she was resting her head on my chest, I asked her.

“So your husband worked in DOG… must’ve been very lonely livin’ alone here.”

“No, of course, Mr. Wickham is suspicious enough to not leave me alone here. I lived with him on the other side of Afterlife Inc. ...But I must say, it was such a lonely place. Not a single fine man like you darling.” She kissed me.

“So is it gloomy place? Did you ever get in there?”

“Me...uhmm I guess once. Though not entirely inside, but when Mr. Wickham made the man who made fire, he was promoted to the head of DOG and there was a promotion party in the hall... yeah… I do remember him telling me that there are atleast 10 more security level after which we can actually reach the facility.”

“Ten! That’s too many , isn’t it? I wonder what’s cooking in there.”

“Huh.. who knows, it’s all business, I don’t want to remember that gloomy place again.” And we went on for another round.

After that, I stopped talking to her. She gave me the most information she can.

So there were 10 levels to cross. What ten levels?

This search lead me to another man—Xino. He was one of the best strategy and escape room game player in the entire Inc. Some have even speculated about his involvement with the establishment of the finest of security systems in the Inc.

But the question was how to reach him.

After deliberate planning, it came to my notice that he loves to drink too and one of the best place to find him in a condition that might be beneficial for me was the only bar in the entire Inc. They served Something similar to alcohol there—called “Toko.” It was sharp, bitter and gave you a slight escape from your endless life as a worker.

I somehow managed to figure out that Xino was a Friday-Regular (A person who came only on Fridays, was given the name Friday-Regular there).

On the very next Friday I found myself, in the bar, packed with people as I navigated through it to find him sitting with a girl and guy on his lap, while he smoked and drank Toko. I went close to him, stuck in how to initiate a conversation, nervously I picked up a drink kept in front of his table only to spill it infront of him.

Xino laughed at me.

“Fella doesn’t even know how to hold a drink.”

“Uhm, sorry Xino.”

“How do you know my name?”

“ From Xtent Escapes.”

“ You play that game?”

“Yep, it’s fun.”

“You’re my man fella. Come on. Sit with us have a drink.”

At last my stalking skills were of some use.

I was with my man, drinking. In fact I made sure that he drank enough for the confession. Once he reached a limit,

“Xino. Let’s go, I will drop you by.”

“Yeaaaahhh...Fella. You are such a fine man.”

Walking out and when I reached in secluded area, I turned to him but he was already gone lying in the middle of the road.

I needed my answers, so I was left with no choice but to kidnap him. Next morning, he woke up tied.

“Uhmm...what am I doing here...what are you doing fella…”

“Calm down, I just need some information.”

“What fella... Let me free.”

“Tell me all you know about DOG facility and its security.”

“Free me fella...”

I punched him twice in the face, so hard that he started bleeding from nose.

“Free...me...Felllaaa”

“Just tell me…”

“I can’t.”

The only thing left in my plate, which I planned last night of things went wrong was to get a snipper behind his girl. I shared this news to him.

“Fella, don’t hurt...her...no.”

“Then tell me..”

“…The facility has 10 levels, first two levels are were they need a password and your security clearance QR. In third there is robotic verification. In forth and fifth, there are some gaurds, in sixth , seventh and eighth there are certain weapons and lasers. And in ninth you have robot gaurds.

And in the tenth you face another password to finally reach your place....now leave her alone.”

“Ok...I will let your girl free.”

Then I shot him, as he might spill the information.

My hands were red, but goal was right infront of me.

In the course of next year, I worked on these information. Working in dark, solving potential puzzles, finding people who might have been involved in it, seducing some and finishing others.

I was able to figure out password of first floor, and stole the QR of Mr. Wickham from his office through his wife .

On a pre decided day, I packed all the equipments and the weapons that I stole or bought to enter into the facility with the mission to make my child a Genius. I travelled for two days to reach DOG. A black huge building, stood before me. It felt like that even light doesn’t escape it. It was just dark.

I entered the facility, gaurded by robots that thought of me as a general visitor.

As I walked in, I asked the receptionist for the washroom and he directed me there. From there I sneaked my way to the hall that Mrs. Wickham mentioned.

Through it, followed a long passage and at the end was level one. I quickly entered the password with a gun ready in my hands. “AF₹5+7819.”

Unlocked.

The next level, was easy to pass, as I had QR.

But for third , I have to do something, I took a computer virus infested disc in my hand and inserted it in the open port of the robot as soon as I entered. One of the design engineer told me that these robots are loosely built despite him telling to upgrade them.

Now the challenge was forth and fifth level, before entering them, I positioned myself to fight with a good number of people. As the door of level 4 openned and repeated in my mind “it’s for my child. I can do anything.”

The door opened slowly with a creaky sound and I charged in without looking.

BUT the room was EMPTY!

No gaurds, nothing.

I was confused. I moved to sixth level, wearing laser detection glasses thinking that no gaurd must be a trap to make the person comfortable, but again! No lasers were there . I shook me glasses to make sure they are fine. Some weapons were seen positioned to attack anyone.

I carefully moved through them making sure I don’t touch or trigger any of them.

In ninth floor, the robot gaurds barged on me as I entered . After such a peaceful journey it was a shock to me, though I no time I postioned myself and broke them into pieces. Something for which I have trained for a year.

And now I was in the tenth, level. Only one level from the goal for which I have meticulously planned. A goal for my happiness of my child— my beloved. I entered the cryptic password, and filled bullets in my gun , just in case I encounter anyone who might stop me.

My anxiety grew so did my happiness that I finally made it.

As the door opened a gust of wind full of dust came on my face. I saw darkness, not lights. The room was dark.

Not a single soul was there. The entire place looked abandoned. I took out my torch .

And walked in.

It took me a moment to realise that the department has closed. That’s why there were no guards, that’s why it was so easy to get in.

But why did they close it?

I felt so disappointed. All the years of planning, all the efforts I made gone in vain? My child couldn’t be made Genius. I felt sad for his future. I felt like an incapable dad. I failed my child.

Yet, with the burden of failure on my shoulder I roamed around with my torch and curiosity to know why have to shut down?

Roaming and going through some dusty files, and finding nothing but lists of reports of traits of intelligence and some business analysis of performance of the products of each trait.

Till I reached a corner, with huge board. I moved my torch up .

It said “LIST OF ALL GENIUSES—CHRONOLOGICALLY.”

I slowly moved my torch from top to bottom, reading names, some that unrecognised from my life on earth others complete alien to me.

“1. The first human, 2. The fire man—John.............. Newto, Hegel, Hume .....”

So many names. But where did it stop. Who was the last person. Perhaps my son? I hurriedly moved my torch over the board trying to reach its end.

The date was August 8,1902.

It read,

PAM Dirac.

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1. Sleeping with someone while thinking about someone else, OR sleeping with someone while thinking about someone else in an agreed-upon manner?

2. Real exhibitionism, OR rape fantasy?

3. A 40-year old sexualising a 14-year old, OR vice versa?

4. Giving oral even though you don’t like it, just to make the other person feel obligated give it to you, OR receiving oral even though you don’t like it, just to make the other person feel obligated to let you give it to them?

5. Deriving sexual gratification from humiliating your partner from the same country, OR deriving it from lovemaking with your partner from another country your country is at war with?

6. Manipulating someone to get into their pants, OR gaslighting someone into thinking they were able to manipulate you so that they could get into your pants?

7. Giving oral to a mother holding her infant in her arms, OR sucking her breasts with the infant? (In both cases, the infant is unaware of your involvement or of any sexual aspect.)

8. Stuffing something in your partner’s mouth so they’re unable to respond when you call your ex’s name during sex, OR stuffing something in your own mouth so you can call your ex’s name as many times as you want without your partner figuring it out?

9. Getting cozy with your man in front of his female friends to signal that he’s yours, OR getting cozy with him in front of his mother to signal the same?

10. Touching yourself while peeping at your neighbour touching themselves through their bedroom window, OR touching yourself knowing that your neighbour is touching themselves while watching you through your bedroom window?

In the next room, for some reason, there was a Baba Ji. You can think of him as the local equivalent of someone like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, someone respected, revered, almost worshipped in that area. One of those men who, the moment my mum would see him, she’d fold her hands right away.

He was old, tall, and had the kind of air that made him seem like he was always waiting to be called on stage to demonstrate his tricks or his words. The kind who could make sand turn to gold, or so they said.

My parents told me, “if you’re really an explorer of truth, you should be open to everything. Yes, maybe no one until now has been able to convince you of the supernatural, but now we have this Baba Ji.”

They must have thought of him as the final hope to get me on track. So they knocked on his door, greeted him humbly, and pleaded with him to talk to their disinclined son. They wanted him to teach me something I was just unwilling to accept.

He agreed. “I’ll not just talk to him,” he said, “I’ll make him experience the supernatural, maybe even a glimpse of the afterlife.” He said we’d do this one-on-one, walking down the street beside the Ashoka garden. He just needed five minutes to freshen up and put on proper clothes.

My parents were overjoyed. They had nothing to lose. I was already a lost case in their eyes. If the Baba could convince me, great. If not, I’d remain as I was—disinclined.

Five minutes later, he got outside of his room. I was in the hall watching TV. He met me there but since my parents weren’t there, he knocked on their door to inform them we were heading out. Meanwhile, I switched off the TV.

As he proceeded towards me, he announced that I might not see me in the most natural way—that his aura would allow me to feel the supernatural just by being near him.

When he returned to my view, I froze. I saw a skeleton walking toward me. No muscles, no veins, no nerves, no flesh—just a structure of bones moving in rhythm.

He told me not to panic. “Others have fainted at this sight before. This is what you’ll be after you die. The ants will eat away your flesh and what will remain is bones.”

He pointed at my grandparents’ dog, Taffy. I looked—and even Taffy appeared like a skeleton, moving as if life had returned to bare bones.

We went outside and walked along the street. Everyone was looking at him. He said, “Pure people shine like stars. They attract others because deep down, everyone longs to be like them.”

He began talking about rebirth. I began referencing his thoughts with my Indian philosophy reading. As I reflected on what he was saying, I started to see him again—with flesh. He looked normal now.

We walked until we reached besides a clothing store. I asked him if we can drop by the store as I needed to buy a T-shirt. He said he needed a shirt and trousers too—something for his visa interview at the US consulate the next day. So we entered the store.

Inside the store, we were mostly together, him speaking in that deep, hypnotic tone, explaining things as if he was narrating the universe. But we also took our individual time to try out new clothes in the changing rooms.

While looking around, we found a T-shirt with the Sun and Earth printed on it. He pointed to it and said, “Einstein saw the whole cosmos as a fabric—with the Earth and Sun resting on it.”

He snapped his fingers.

Suddenly, I saw it—blue lines of the spacetime fabric, dented at two points: one for Earth, one for the Sun.

“Everything,” he said, “is connected.”

“The concrete walls of this shop are not separate from the metal machines or from us. When you wave your hand, air molecules move—creating a wave. The same happens when you slap the wall. Only the amplitudes differ. Everything can be understood as threads, some easy to wiggle and some hard.”

He snapped again.

My vision turned strange—the entire store started appearing as black threads on a white background. The more dense something was, the more blackish it was. On the other hand, the space betweent objects was white.

At this point, I was feeling, how can a guy have so much control over me. So I picked up my phone to call someone. But the phone disappeared into its outline—only its contour remained. Wherever I clicked on it, the black threads would vibrate.

Anyway, we went through the billing. For some reason, instead of changing back to his clothes, he continued wearing the shirt and pant he had just bought.

Got back to my grandparents home. The whole interaction lasted not more than 25 minutes. He told my parents, “I’ve made him experience what lies beyond.” He said it with a smile, and they received it with one. He must’ve thought he’d done enough to convince me.

“How do you feel now?” he asked.

“I’m grateful,” I replied. “Thank you for the experience.” Then, in amazement, I added, “But how can this even be possible?”

He chuckled. “This was just a glimpse,” he said. “Questions about the world beyond can’t be answered by a mere glimpse. Have faith, dear kid.”

I folded my hands, like my mum had folded already. He smiled again—as though taking pride in accomplishing my parent’s request and affirming his authority as the connection to the world beyond.

My dad—who’s a fairly rational man—began to fold his hands too. He’s a believer of sorts but doesn’t believe in crap. At least this is what I suppose of him… He doesn’t believe, for example, that god would literally ask you to do so and so, that a black cat crossing your path is an omen etc. He does all the rituals but that for the sake of his loved ones’ sentiments.

When I saw him almost folding his hands, I had to break out of character. I disjoined mine and said:

“Ek cantaap maarunga bhosadike tumko. Chutiya kisi aur ko banana!”

For my English readers: I’ll give you one under your ear, [foul word]. Go trick someone else!

The three of them were stunned. How could I—someone who had supposedly just been convinced of the supernatural—suddenly turn like that? The Baba Ji seemed even more shocked than I was when I saw him as a skeleton. It must have something to do with expecting a kid to curse an old man like that. I enjoyed his expression, haha.

Then I turned to my dad. “It was expected from mum to surrender, but honestly, I’m disappointed in you. This guy drugged me and here are my reasons to think so:”

1. Why did I see him as a skeleton in particular? Because I was watching Funnybones (1992) on TV.

2. How was he able to play by? Because he knew I was watching Funnybones (1992) on TV.

3. Taffy looked completely normal before he drew my attention to him—right after I was shocked, seeing living beings as skeletons for the first time.

4. Why did everyone stare at him while we walked to the store? Not because of an aura, but simply because he looked odd. How many people do you find wearing bhagwa in public! In fact when he didn’t had it on while returning from the store, no one was staring at him.

5. How come I saw the “fabric” only after he described it and snapped his fingers?

6. And why did I specifically see the 2D spacetime? Einstein, by the way, speaks of a 4D continuum that shouldn’t even be called a “fabric.” Then why specifically 2D?Because it was just like the ones in documentaries. The same blue lines. If anything, since it was printed on a T-shirt, a more appropriate reduction would’ve been a one-dimensional thingy—only showing depressions where the Earth and Sun are.

7. Why did I start seeing everything as threads after he described it and snapped his fingers?

8. And if you really think about it—what I saw wasn’t even consistent with his description. He said some threads are easy to wiggle and some are hard. But in my vision, all the threads were equally easy or hard to wiggle. What made the difference between the wall and the air was the density of the threads.

9. When I took out my phone to call someone, it turned into threads too. But if it were threads, I couldn’t have called anyone. “Do you hear the siren from outside? I had intended to call police. I suppose I was able to…”

Panicking, he asked, “What proof do you have?”

“That,” I said, “is where you should’ve waited for my tenth point.”

10. While you were trying clothes in the changing room, I found a small pouch of white powder in your pocket. If you yourself had the power to see others as skeletons—not in the Funnybones manner but in the more accurate manner where the absense of flesh would result in transperency—you’d have noticed that I’ve been carrying that pouch in my pocket ever since. Gotcha!

And that’s when I woke up. Thirty minutes before posting this article.

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Whether in philosophy, science, or law, the question “Who bears the burden of proof?” keeps resurfacing. It’s treated as a logistical matter—something to sort out before we can do the real thing.

Atheists, for instance, often insist that they don’t bear the burden of proof. Theists, in turn, leave no opportunity in reminding atheists that they do. So who does, by the end of the day?

Before assigning the burden, we must recognize something deeper: the burden of proof concerns knowledge, and knowledge is normative.

What is normative? Let me begin indirectly, with an answer my epistemology professor, Adam Carter, once gave when I asked how philosophy differs from physics. He said:

Philosophy aims to answer not only descriptive questions but also normative questions. Physicists aren’t trained to do that (even though they sometimes try to weigh in!).
An accurate description of the world does not give us answers to philosophical questions of interest—when beliefs are justified and known, when behaviour is right or wrong, when a policy is just, etc.
Moreover, physics tells us only about the actual world—what is the case, not what might have been. Philosophy helps us think about what could be, what must be, and what should be.
A physicist might object that there are no normative facts, only physical facts—but that claim itself is philosophical, not scientific.

Now directly, the universe doesn’t tell us we shouldn’t murder the way it tells us that the Moon orbits the Earth. Then what grants that we shouldn’t commit murder? Norm. It’s something we define, perhaps because we wouldn’t want us to live in the insecurity of being stabbed anytime. We call something good or bad because we agree to regard it so. Norms don’t describe the structure of the world—they prescribe a stance toward it.

In other words, our is-questions hide should-questions. When we ask “Is this good?” we actually mean “Should this be considered good?” The former merely acts as a short-hand to the latter in our day-to-day conversations.

Now returning to knowledge, the question “Is this knowledge?” really asks, “Should this be considered knowledge?”

It’s important to understand the difference between truth and knowledge. Any truth unfolds itself to the human mind as knowledge. As much as we would like to peek at its naked form, there’s no way we can access it without the interface of knowing. While truth isn’t normative, knowledge is. Whether the Moon revolves around the Earth isn’t a matter of how we define it to be—but whether we should regard it as knowledge is indeed a matter of how we define it to be, based on the standards we choose to uphold.

The way we can easily imagine the norm of greeting “hello” to turn into “sup” over generations, we should be able to easily imagine if a proposition’s status as knowledge changes.

What would account for this change? What decides whether something counts as knowledge? What decides our standards?

Intent.

If your intent is to go to the Moon, you’ll define knowledge such that the facts like “the combustion rate of this fuel is X” count as knowledge. You’ll rely on the laws of physics as stable grounds. But if your intent is to assess how stable they are—why or whether they hold at all—then you’ll define knowledge particularly such that combustion rate should no longer qualify as knowledge.

So the breadth of what counts as knowledge depends on the your intent. At one extreme, knowledge can be defined as broadly as to include every proposition as knowledge. At the other, it can be defined conservatively—to include very limited or even no proposition at all.

I cannot tell you what would be the most conservative norm but I can try giving a conservative norm—a norm that both of us could agree should be deemed conservative.

Imagine discarding everything you currently believe—everything learned in school, from parents, from experience—as not yet knowledge. You start afresh, accepting only what survives your highest scrutiny.

Yes, under such a radical norm, you’ll exclude much that’s true. So why might you do this? What could your intent be?

To find the ultimate truth (perhaps, truth that stands independent of all contingent human frameworks)! Whatever remains will most likely be very close to truth. You trade completeness for certainty.

And it’s under this light that René Descartes says that all I know is that I exist. Under an even more conservative light, Socrates, Kant, and others claim that they know nothing. Of course, they knew how to brush their teeth! But now we can articulate—that’s under a different intent.

Now finally, to the burden of proof. Since “proof” is defined more strictly in philosophy, let me use “justification.” The burden of justification. Who bears it? The answer depends entirely on the intent of the dialectic.

On the spectrum, if your intent is on the pragmatic end—to live by and make functional decisions—then the burden can be distributed as per comfort and values of the agent, whether you, your family, or society as whole.

In law, for example, the burden shifts with stakes and context. If a defendant says, “I couldn’t have picked the victim’s pocket; I was in another city,” we may place the burden on the defendant to justify that claim—perhaps by presenting evidence like photos. But if the case involves the death penalty, we might demand that the prosecution prove the defendant was in the same city. Why? Because the intent—preserving life—changes the norm.

But what if our intent is not pragmatic but ultimate—if we are seekers of truth rather than convenience? Then the burden must remain with the claimant, regardless of the claim.

If I claim that unicorns exist, you’d say that since I’m the odd one out—saying something that doesn’t align with our default position—I should bear the burden to justify my claim. But if our intent is to seek the ultimate truth, then even if I say that unicorns don’t exist—something that aligns with our default position—the burden to justify it must still rest on me. Even for something as obvious as “the glass of water exists there,” I must be required to justify it—for the simple reason that we intend to be as confident and grounded as possible in developing our catalogue of ultimate truths.

The same applies to god. In some communities, where the default norm is that “god exists,” while “god doesn’t exist” is seen as the deviant claim—the burden naturally falls on the atheist. But in communities, such as scientism proponent kids on social media calling themselves rational, where things are otherwise, the burden naturally falls on the believer. And under a different intent—say, again, the pursuit of ultimate truth—the burden must be taken to whoever makes the claim. Can we really afford not to?

Of course, no one lives entirely at the conservative end. We are humans. We balance our epistemic ideals with our existential needs. Even philosophers, those regarded as the soldiers of the ultimate truth, aren’t very strict (discussed later). The point isn’t whether we always bear the burden of proof, but that who bears it depends on what we’re trying to achieve. If you intend to build a bridge or launch a rocket, you relax the norms—if your aim is to find the metaphysical truth of existence, you tighten them.

But whenever atheists say, say on social media, that they don’t bear the burden, I simple reply they do, for these three reasons:

1. To highlight what’s most likely a conceptual boo-boo on their side. Many atheists claim exemption by dividing existence claims into ontically radical “positive” and “negative.” This is most likely the result of projecting their anthropogenic understanding of claims—how many so called positive and negative claims are kept in the balustrade of their thoughts.

2. I suppose they’re invoking the truth-seeking intent. Otherwise, they could have easily avoided bringing up the question of god altogether. From the “living-by” intent, it’s simply not necessary to fuss over whether god exists or not, say, to deploy the idea as a tool to keep society in structure—much like how no one really cares whether Santa Claus exists. You don’t just want to drift through life, taking the liberty to transfer burdens back and forth. This isn’t about going to the Moon or arguing in court; it’s about uncovering the truth about god.

3. I cannot possible summarise this article in a few words I’m willing to dedicate in my replies. I leave it to their intelligent reading to figure out how the enterprise of burden works!

At this stage, it’s important to note that:

1. Philosophy, as a discipline, has no global court to set these norms. There’s no “World Association of Epistemic Norms” issuing universal decrees. As I often say, there are more terrorists than philosophers—let alone meta-philosophers, those who study what philosophy is, how it works, and thereby how it should. Philosophers, for all their rigor, make use of this flexibility once in a while. They are often left with no choice but to regard certain things—such as language and classical logic (basically, reason itself)—as knowledge without further grounding, so they can treat them as axioms to unravel truths that are compromised yet as ultimate as possible. So while philosophers often shift the burden depending on intent, inevitability, the extent of acceptable compromise, and local subscription to particular methods, such cases are so nuanced that no pop-culture atheist should be allowed to cite them. It’s not a matter of Philosophy 101, basically!

2. When a philosopher takes upon themselves the burden and asserts J in the name of justification, and other philosophers find J unsatisfactory, the latter take it upon themselves to justify ¬J—thus returning the original philosopher to a renewed point of burden. This act of critique should not be seen as lifting the original burden from the claimant. Even though the other philosophers are also justifying something after all, and hence bearing the burden of a justification, that does not mean they bear the burden of the justification.

So who bears the burden? Depends. But for all you know, you do!

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Why? When we ask any why-question, as opposed to in case of any how-question, we’re looking for a responsible, agential answer. When we ask, for example, “Why does the Earth revolve around the Sun,” we’re not really looking for Einstein to explain it in terms of geodesics and spacetime. We register it as something philosophers like to call the “Hard problem.” Why at all?

And so, when we ask why-questions about our existence, it feels personal—as if there’s a god we’re confronting and not for a mere explanation, howsoever grand, but for an excuse. And when our questions sprout from despair, it’s as though we’ve tied him to a chair, slapping him for answers beneath the flickering light in a dark interrogation room.

And what does he answer?

Every element of your existence is confined to a jail. Oh pardon me, I missed something! There’s one that extends—it’s your knowledge about it.

In this article, I will explore these two aspects.

Metaphysical Pessimism, which concerns the possibility that existence itself is a trap—an elaborate performance in which meaning is a scripted illusion; and Epistemic Pessimism, which arises when the mind realizes this trap and finds no escape from its awareness of it. One is about the design of the world; the other, about the suffering of knowing it. Together, they form the architecture of despair.

Life seems like you’ve been dropped into the confines of a spectrum. There are always two ends of the spectrum, and every human act is a balancing act.

Every human effort, though disguised as liberating, is quite the opposite actually—a quest to find the middle. How much should a woman fight for equality, and how much should she surrender? How much should a father teach his son integrity in a world that rewards corruption? How much should a thinker rebel, and how much should he succumb?

Here’s a fairly ellaborate example:

Imagine you want to experience crazy love. More crazy than less, so that’s liberation in true sense! But here’s a peculiar theory. The person who can give you this intensity—your crazy lover—is unlikely as crazy in other areas of his life. In fact it’s because he’s not crazy in Y that he’s crazy in X. A monk is spiritual because he isn’t political. Einstein was a brilliant scientist because he didn’t expend all his energy on domestic life. Imagine if Einstein had tried harder to save his marriage—would General Relativity have even emerged?

While you want to experience crazy love, you also have other desires: maintaining a good relationship with your family, with society, perhaps even with your partner’s family etc. If you want a partner who embodies “crazy love,” it comes at a cost—you cannot satisfy all your desires as they lead to contradictions. The wildness of love might demand, say, swinging partners or posting your pornographic content online—actions that clash with all your other desires mentioned above. But your mind craves peace. So what do you do? You reject the crazy lover.

You don’t have in you to bet on theory, and just like that, liberation slips away; as though you were always set to find the middle.

I just found a comment on internet suggesting that a cheater is more likely to cheat again, for he no longer fears cheating. So it’s an advisory to proceed with caution. As how I see it, thanks to Abraham Wald’s survivorship bias insight, while the “cheater is…again,” if he doesn’t cheat,

• He’s more likely to genuinely love his partner (the “crazy love” we were talking about), and

• We’d have stronger ground to affirm that genuineness.

Cheater: “Of course I can trick my partner into letting me get away with cheating—except I won’t! I love her.”

Non-cheater (on the other hand): “I think I can trick her into…but I don’t know if I really can. And I don’t know if I’m not cheating because I genuinely love her or I might be guilted later.”

Now, as always, there’s a spectrum. If you long for liberation to an extent beyond your willingness to risk peace, you won’t break up. Otherwise, you would, effectively chosing a non-cheater. But the very urge to issue an advisory points at the metaphysics of the middle.

It’s like you’re thrown into a parabolic potential well (that’s my tribute to the 2025 Nobel Prize). The harder you try to swim upward, the stronger you feel the invisible weight of design pulling you back toward the center.

And when it becomes personal, you question if it’s not just resistance but orchestration. As though all this fuzz, this chaos, this endless negotiating distances, was nothing but a cosmic sitcom written for the god’s amusement just as how we’ve written lines of code for video games like GTA, where the characters beyond everything else are supposed to be entertaining. Imagine if our universe, with all our suffering and laughter and longing, were simply his birthday gift—beautifully wrapped with a psycopathic cheatcode.

This is the metaphysical pessimism: the belief that you cannot transcend the architecture of your own being. You may philosophize about freedom, morality, or love, but the code remains untouched. You can only act within it, like a character endlessly trying to become self-aware. You look at your hands, you speak your thoughts, and you wonder—who wrote me this way? Every emotion, every moral awakening, every “I’ve found purpose” might only be the next stage in the simulation’s design.

And as if this wasn’t enough, welcome to Chapter 2. You may think that with proper thought, truth could be taken care of by adjusting its perception. One may yield to find some optimism by working internally, devising a philosophy, etc. However, there’s a substantial pessimism waiting in this line.

The first is the despair of being; the second, the despair of knowing. The former is the wound, the latter the mirror that keeps showing it to you, over and over, even when you try to look away. Metaphysical pessimism is god designing you with acrophobia, the phobia of heights, and epistemic pessimism is him taking you to the top of Burj Khalifa and forcing your neck down. In the former, you suffer because you exist; but in the latter, you suffer because you understand that you exist.

To explain this radical add-on, let me explain the process of getting “meta.” Meta is not a place but a layer.

Take a simple system—you and your girlfriend. She doesn’t want anything from you, howsoever you want to do something good for her. Perfect, isn’t it? Now imagine she wants you to do something good for her. She just became one step meta. Now imagine she wants you to do something good for her but because you want to do something good for her. That’s two steps meta. Now imagine she wants you to do something good for her but because you understand that she wants you to do something good for her because you want to something good for her. Three steps meta, and the regress goes on.

The more meta one gets, the less genuine everything feels. Feeling trades off to thought. You begin to ask:

Is she doing this because she loves me, or because she feels she should? Where does this “should” coming from? The society? If so, what does that say about the genuiness of whatever we shared by “love?”

This trading off to thought—a mind turning its own tenderness into data, its own faith into hypothesis—enables you see layers everywhere. As a result, something that you see is your own despair.

Now you might say, “Well, just stop thinking!”

I wish it were that easy. In fact, I’m one of those philosophers who take a salary from the philosophy department, yet whose philosophy is that philosophy should not be done!

But steps of meta seep into everything. Our everyday interactions with the universe happen at degrees of meta, particularly when conscious agents stand in for the universe. Ordinary chores—texting a friend, doing your work, smiling at a stranger—become tainted by meta. You begin to “reflect” everywhere.

For example, I was talking to one of my friends recently. Once in a while, he talks to a girl who doesn’t seem interested in him, for whatever justified reason. She doesn’t pick up his calls etc. Recently, she fell ill and our Romeo wanted to talk to her. What a beautiful thing to do, isn’t it? But instead of actualising the act, we pointed out the meta-scape for him.

She knows that she isn’t interested. She knows that he knows that she isn’t interested. She, however, doesn’t know that he knows that she knows that she isn’t interested. Calling her and getting a rejection at a time when any interested person would pick up would grant this knowledge to her. As a result, their dynamics might change, making things awkward or simply going against his desire.

Okay, in all fairness, I might have more to do with making it meta, but you get the point. It’s not something super rare—it’s ingrained in our everyday chores.

Epistemic pessimism is about being too awake. You see the wires behind the puppet show and lose the ability to dance. The awareness itself becomes a wound. You wish you could forget, that you could go back to thinking the gift was just a gift, the smile just a smile, the love just love. But meta never lets you return. You can’t unknow the artifice of existence once you’ve glimpsed it.

In the end, epistemic pessimism feels like being trapped in an infinite hall of mirrors—each reflection more aware than the last, until the original face disappears. You don’t know which one is real anymore, or if there ever was one.

The cruel irony is that awareness was supposed to free us. Knowledge was supposed to make us gods. At least that’s what we are taught. But instead, it made us witnesses to our own futility. The metaphysical pessimism laughs from the outside, and the epistemic one laughs from within.

Perhaps that’s what makes human life so unbearable. But is that what makes it so magnificent? To know the cage and still paint its walls. Or people painting the walls are painting the walls because they are ignorant of the cage? Or dismissive?

Maybe meaning doesn’t exist—but maybe that’s what gives us the right to make it. Maybe freedom is not the absence of design, but the courage to play beautifully within it.

So we end with questions, not answers:

If the world is a simulation, what does rebellion even mean?
If awareness itself is the source of pain, should we strive to be less aware?
And if pessimism is the truest sight of all—can we ever close our eyes again?

Perhaps the act of asking is all that’s left of freedom.

And then I saw them. Two children, maybe ten years old, playing with sticks. To anyone else, that might have looked like a random neighborhood game. But to me, in that moment, their little duel transformed into something far grander. I don’t know if it was the music in my ears or my tendency to dramatize things, but suddenly, one of them looked like Maharana Pratap, the other Akbar. Their sticks turned into swords, and the walkway into a battlefield.

Now don’t get me wrong—I don’t support violence of any kind. But this wasn’t violence. It was play. It was imagination. It was something I could appreciate kids doing. And honestly? They were good at it. For ten seconds or so, I just smiled. A long, widening smile.

But there’s always an “until.”

One kid couldn’t block fast enough. The stick hit his ear. Immediately, tears. No pause, no slow-motion moment of realization—just straight to the crying. I rushed over, instinctively, just to check in, hold his shoulder, let him know there was an adult around and he was okay. But his cry—oh, his cry—was loud enough to summon the gods, or in this case, his guardian.

She ran over, a nanny perhaps. And without even listening, without even taking a breath, she moved to beat up the other kid—the friend, the fellow duelist, the accidental “attacker.”

And at that point, it was no longer my business. The stranger kid was okay and an adult had taken over so I walked on. Twenty steps down the trail, though, I realized I had just watched a philosophy lesson unfold right before my eyes.

Imagine the two kids are philosophers. Opposite stances, different swords, clashing ideas. And the nanny? She represents the people of the world—the non-philosophers.

What happens on a philosophical stage? There’s a fight, yes. But it’s a fight of arguments, objections, counter-objections. Sometimes, one philosopher lands a blow, and the other can’t parry it fast enough. That doesn’t mean one is good and the other bad, or that one should be punished and the other celebrated. It just means—well—that in this moment, on this point, one argument came out stronger.

But here’s the funny thing: even when philosophers look like they’re miles apart—say, one arguing for God’s existence and the other against—they still share about 99% of their journey. Their methods, their tools, their ways of reasoning. They might disagree on some premise buried deep within a chain of assumptions, but to even get there, they’ve already agreed on so much. They’ve already walked hand-in-hand through logic, mathematics, induction, inference, and centuries of tradition.

Think of the cosmological argument for God’s existence. The theist says: every effect has a cause, so the universe too must have a cause, which we call God. The atheist replies: well, who caused God then? If every cause has a cause, why should God be exempt?

See what happened there? Both sides are leaning on induction, on causal reasoning. They share the same fundamental commitment: that explanation is necessary, that patterns matter, that causes exist. The disagreement is not on everything—it’s on that one slippery step, that one assumption that maybe we shouldn’t extend induction all the way to existence itself.

So tell me: is the theist the absolute winner and the atheist the absolute loser? Should we throw a grand party for one, and exile the other into darkness? No. If the winner gets a cash prize of Rs. 100,000, the loser doesn’t deserve zero. Maybe Rs. 99,999. And at the party, both should be invited. The winner gets—what?—maybe one French fry extra. That’s it.

But here’s where people—non-philosophers—mess everything up. They don’t see the two philosophers as fellow travelers in search of truth. They see enemies. They polarize. They disrespect. They go around spreading bad words against those with opposite stances.

And that, I think, is terrible. Because it discourages disagreement. And disagreement, my friends, is the lifeblood of philosophy. Without it, we stagnate. With it, we inch forward, sometimes clumsily, sometimes elegantly, but forward nonetheless.

Now let’s circle back to the kids. Both of them had been swinging their sticks for minutes, maybe longer. They were equally invested in the game. It just so happened that one failed to block and got hit. Does that mean the other should be punished? Beaten up?

Imagine: just one swing earlier, maybe the roles were reversed. Maybe the crying boy had swung harder, but his friend managed to block it. Nobody punished him then. So what exactly are we punishing—the act of striking, or the act of failing to defend?

What signal does that send? That it’s okay to “commit the crime” as long as you don’t get caught. That punishment depends not on the action itself but on whether it produces a visible scene.

That’s exactly how people treat philosophical debates. When someone raises a difficult objection, like I once did—saying, “Rape being wrong is contingent after all, as much as my existence. It could easily have been different in another possible world”—people don’t hear the philosophical move. They hear a provocation. They react with moral panic. They polarize.

By the time my walking trail looped back, I passed the kids again. Guess what? They were already back at it. Laughing, dueling, hitting each other with sticks. As though nothing had happened.

And that’s exactly what philosophers do. We know our disagreements are healthy. We know the clash of swords is not meant to destroy but to sharpen. We know that even after a blow lands, the game goes on.

It’s the outsiders—the nannies of the world—who misunderstand. They see conflict and want to intervene, to punish, to separate. But inside the circle of philosophy, disagreement is not a sign of failure. It’s the whole point of the game.

So the next time you see philosophers debating—about God, about consciousness, about morality—don’t rush to pick sides like the nanny. Don’t assume one must be absolutely right and the other absolutely wrong. Don’t punish disagreement.

Instead, see it for what it is: two kids, two sticks, one playground. And maybe, just maybe, when it comes time to reward the winner, remember to invite both kids to the party. Give one of them one French fry extra. That’s enough.

Have you ever wondered whether god exists? The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas pondered this very question and famously propounded five arguments for god’s existence. To this day, they remain widely regarded and frequently referenced in debates by theists seeking to present a reasoned case for their stance. In this article, we shall restrict ourselves to his second argument, commonly called “the first cause” argument.

Here’s the classic structure:

P1: There exists an order of efficient causes—some things depend on others for their existence.
P2: Nothing is the cause of itself.
P3: If you remove a cause, you also remove its effect.
P4: A chain of causes cannot be infinite—otherwise, there would be no first cause, and thus, no effects.
C: Therefore, there must be a first cause—something that is not itself caused by anything further.

Aquinas stipulates the first cause as god.

Pop culture atheism objects to this argument by suggesting that modern cosmology might have just founded or, in all justification, extrapolated the big bang—the origin of our universe. And there’s nothing so-called godly about it! The big bang is just a physical event, as much a part of the fabric of physics as brushing your teeth this morning.

This objection, however, doesn’t really land with much force, because it misinterprets what Aquinas actually means by causation. To see why, it helps to step back and think about how radically different kinds of explanations can coexist without undermining one another.

Suppose I ask you, “Who are you?” In one context, you might answer, “I am my body.” In another context, you might say, “I am a son.” At first glance, these responses may seem to conflict, as though one must be the real answer. But that isn’t the case. Each answer reflects a different mode of existence. To say “I am my body” is to describe yourself in terms of substance and to say “I am a son” is to describe yourself in terms of relation. Both the substantial and the relational are true descriptions of you—you are indeed a body, and you are indeed a son, without either description exhausting your full identity.

What does this show us? That existence can take on different modes, and with each mode comes a distinct explanation.

One may object by highlighting the limits of language in capturing the full depth of what exists as a matter of truth, making it a logistics issue as opposed to a real issue. They’d argue, language, by design, is a tool of economy. It aims to optimize communication: to say as much as possible with as few words as necessary. In one context, “Who are you?” might be a shorthand for, “Who are you as a substance?” and in another, for, “Who are you as a relation?”

This, however, doesn’t seem to undermine the relavant point, which is not whether shorthand “fails” in some absolute sense but whether it actually creates its own conceptual reality. Through habitual use, “Who are you?” forms a common-sense notion of identity that is neither strictly substantial nor strictly relational after all. Even if this notion might be deemed “illusory” from a metaphysical standpoint, it is nonetheless real in practice. And since it actively shapes our understanding and communication, it deserves recognition as a phenomenon that our metaphysics and epistomology must account for.

Aquinas’s account of causation operates at a very different explanatory level than many of his critics assume. To dismiss it as if it were a crude, outdated explanation of physical processes is to overlook the subtlety and depth of what is really being claimed. Aquinas was not competing with physics or cosmology; rather, he was addressing a question those sciences cannot reach—the question of why there is a causal order at all.

To understand this, it is useful to distinguish between two kinds of causation: linear causation and hierarchical causation.

Linear causation can be pictured as a sequence unfolding along a timeline—the kind of cause-and-effect with which we are most familiar. Since we often represent time along a horizontal axis, imagine plotting events across that axis.

If I ask you, “What causes your existence?” and you answer from this perspective, you might say, “My parents.” Then if I ask what caused their existence, you would say, “Their parents.” The chain continues: back through human ancestry, to the first life forms such as amoebas, to the formation of the Earth, to the birth of the Sun, and then further back to the formation of atoms and subatomic particles in the early universe, ultimately tracing back to what modern cosmology calls the Big Bang.

This form of causation explains things in terms of a historical sequence. It is important, but it is not the whole story. Hierarchical causation is different. It does not ask what came before but rather what holds things together right now. To visualize it, imagine not a horizontal line but a vertical tower of dependencies.

If I again ask, “What causes your existence?” but this time from the standpoint of hierarchical causation, you might answer: “My shape.” And what causes your shape? “The arrangement of atoms in my body, balanced by the forces acting on them.” And what causes that balancing? “The fact that the laws of nature—gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces—hold consistently.” Why don’t the laws suddenly fail, making your hand dissolve into liquid or a ball stop mid-trajectory? Because the laws are, in some sense, “given.” They apply universally and reliably.

But then we can still ask: Why do the laws of nature apply at all? Why is there this stable structure of reality in which such laws hold, rather than chaos or nothingness? This is not a historical question but a metaphysical one. The regress of hierarchical causation runs “vertically” until we reach a foundational ground—the “first cause” in Aquinas’s sense. And crucially, Aquinas does not mean the first cause as a first event in time, but rather as the ongoing basis without which no causation—no order—would exist here and now.

This alternative way of approaching Aquinas’s insight is through the proof from contingent facts.

A contingent fact is something that could have been otherwise—it exists, but there is no necessity that it had to. For example, my existence is contingent. I might not have been born, or the universe might not have developed in such a way as to allow me to exist. The same is true of the existence of this tree, that planet, or even the arrangement of physical laws as we currently observe them. They are all real, but their reality is not necessary. They might easily not have been.

Now, when we look at the totality of contingent facts, we are confronted with a pressing question: why does anything exist at all rather than nothing? A series of contingent things cannot, on its own, explain existence. Imagine lining up an infinite chain of dominoes. Even if it stretches back without end, the chain itself doesn’t explain why dominoes exist in the first place. Something outside the contingent series must account for the very possibility of their being.

This is where Aquinas’s idea of a “first cause” aligns with the argument from contingency. There must be at least one necessary being—something whose existence is not dependent on anything else, and which explains why contingent things exist at all. For Aquinas, this is what we mean by God: not a being among beings, but the ground of being itself.

The confusion between the two kinds of causation is used by pop culture narratives and movements, such as New Atheism, to proclaim the whole edifice disproven—convincing many that the strongest classical arguments for God are hopelessly weak.
This tactic trades careful engagement for rhetorical knockout punches.

Don’t let that shut down your curiosity: keep interrogating the premises, distinctions, and scopes of arguments rather than accepting dismissive slogans. Practice critical charity—object rigorously, but read charitably.

Ask instead why generations of philosophers and theologians keep returning to Aquinas: they are wrestling with the deep problem of contingency and explanation, not celebrating an easy proof. Referencing him signals a continuing problem-space, not an uncritical endorsement.

This is not an appeal to authority. We don’t accept Aquinas because others do; we study him because his formulations carve out the issues we must clarify. There are, of course, serious objections to the “first cause” move—for example, Hume’s critique of causation and induction and Graham Oppy’s denial of a universal Principle of Sufficient Reason, the possibility of brute facts or an infinite regress.

Think critically, read charitably, question relentlessly, and keep doing the hard work of philosophy every day!

Have you ever been in love with someone who didn’t love you back? Or worse, loved you in a way that didn’t feel like love at all?

Have you ever wondered if the thing you call “love” is even the same thing someone else means when they say it?

And—here’s the real kicker—have you ever thought that maybe, maybe, the problem isn’t that they don’t understand love the way you do… but that neither of you knows what the hell love is in the first place?

It seems to me there are two big camps here—two main ways of thinking about love. And they’re both so vivid, so defensible, that it feels almost cruel the universe makes you pick one (or at least live like you’ve picked one).

The first kind is transcendental in some sense. This is the kind of love mystics and certain philosophers rave about — Osho, Krishnamurti, Rumi, and countless others before them.

Here, love is not something you do or choose.
It’s something you are.

In this love, there’s no distinction between loving a cat and loving the rat it hunts. Between loving your partner and loving the person your partner leaves you for.

It’s not about fairness, reciprocity, or desire. It’s a state. A being-ness.

It’s a love that doesn’t ask, “Will you love me back?” because the question itself collapses in on itself.

And if you live here, you never really get “heartbroken” in the usual way. Sure, you might feel sadness. You might feel loss. But you don’t feel robbed. You don’t feel owed. Because in this kind of love, you don’t own anything in the first place.

It’s utopian. It’s weightless. It’s divine.

The second kind, however, seems polar opposite. This is the kind therapists and relationship books talk about. The kind where love is not a cloud you float on but a practice you wake up to every morning.

Here, love is a choice. And not a “romantic” choice in the cheesy way—but a deliberate, disciplined one.

You might not even like the person you love every day. Hell, you might resent them sometimes. But you stay. You work. You choose them. Over and over.

This is the love that can raise children, survive illness, and pay rent. It’s rooted in agreements, boundaries, and mutual responsibility.

It’s earthy. It’s gritty. And yes—it’s mortal.

Thus far, we’ve been talking about two very different ideas under the same label—“love.” But does that mean we’ve actually answered the question, “What is love?” If a person can, without much trouble, subscribe to either of these notions, does it even make sense to ask that question in the first place? And if it does, what kind of answer are we really hoping for?

These questions bring us to what I regard as the most significant philosophical problem of all—an invisible anchor that ties everything together but is almost never addressed.

How do we identify what exists—in the relevant sense? Or to put it another way: what does it really mean to say that something exists?

Imagine someone tells you: “There is a perfect being who exists necessarily in all possible worlds.” That’s from the famous ontological argument for God’s existence. You might immediately think—wait, just because we can define such a being, does that automatically make it real? Can we simply talk something into existence?

This is where the real puzzle begins. It’s not just about God, or unicorns, or atoms. It’s about the connection—or possible lack of connection—between our words and the world.

How do definitions, concepts, and references relate to the actual existence of the things they refer to?

We can phrase this more provocatively:

• If I can describe something perfectly, does that mean it’s out there in reality?

• If I dream about a talking cat, is that cat “real” in some sense?

• If two people both agree on what “true love” is, does that make true love an actual thing in the universe, like gravity or oxygen?

• And perhaps the most unsettling: when I say “you,” how do I know you exist in the way I think you do, rather than as a character in my mind?

Philosophers call this a meta-ontological problem. “Ontology” is the branch of philosophy that studies what exists. Meta-ontology goes one level up—it’s not about whether electrons, gods, or souls exist, but about what it even means to say that something exists, and how our ways of thinking and talking connect (or fail to connect) with reality.

A quick formal sketch makes the tension visible:

P1. We can meaningfully refer to entities.
P2. If meaningful reference entailed existence, all these entities would exist.
P3. But clearly, not everything we talk about exists (sorry, unicorn fans).
C. Therefore, meaningful reference doesn’t entail existence.

And if meaningful reference doesn’t entail existence, then—how do we know when something does exist? How do we avoid placing electrons, ghosts, and fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes in the same metaphysical bucket?

This question is not merely another topic among many. It’s the edge of the map.

Philosophy has tools for reasoning, clarifying concepts, and exposing hidden assumptions. But here, the very tools we use start to become suspect. When we say “exists,” are we describing an objective state of affairs, or are we just describing how our language behaves? If our concept of existence itself is unclear, then every philosophical claim that uses the word “exist” risks floating free of solid ground.

It’s like trying to measure a room without knowing what counts as a “meter.” You can still walk around, compare distances, and even agree with others on measurements—but the underlying standard is fuzzy.

Why is this the limit? Because even philosophy, which prides itself on self-critique, has to assume certain connections between thought and reality in order to function at all. Once you start questioning that connection, you find yourself staring into a gap that can’t be bridged with argument alone.

What makes this problem the most significant is that it hides inside ordinary thinking:

• “If I can’t see it, is it real?”

• “If I can imagine it, could it be real somewhere?”

• “If billions believe in it, doesn’t that make it real?”

All of these are casual restatements of the same deep puzzle: how do talk, thought, and reality connect—and where is the line between existence and nonexistence?

Here’s the irony: to solve this problem, you would already have to know the answer. You can’t investigate whether something exists without already having a method for distinguishing the existent from the nonexistent. And any method you propose will itself rest on assumptions about what existence is, making the problem self-referential. You try to climb higher to get a better view, only to realize you’ve been standing on the ladder you’re questioning.

You might think—well, this is just philosophers overthinking again. But it has real consequences:

• In science, it influences how we interpret unobservable entities like strings, multiverses, or quantum wavefunctions.

• In ethics, it affects whether “rights” or “values” are real features of the world or just useful fictions.

• In AI, it determines whether we can meaningfully say a machine is “conscious” or just behaving as if it were.

The existence question is the soil in which all philosophical roots grow. If the soil is uncertain, so is everything built on top of it.

For a philosopher like me, this triggers a peculiar kind of existential crisis—an epistemic one. One way to approach it, which isn’t so much a “wow, how could one ever do this?” kind of challenge, is to simply acknowledge that there’s no real difference between existence and non-existence. We’ve merely surrendered to some determining factor—what a few might call God—that guides us in deciding what counts as “existing” in the relevant sense and what doesn’t.

But here’s why I think this is a far bigger problem than it might seem. A problem becomes truly significant when it holds some suspense—when it feels like there’s a hidden answer waiting to be uncovered. In this case, I feel so strongly about the existence of certain things that I’m tempted to believe they must exist. I’m tempted to justify them—biases and all—instead of letting them go. Something in me insists there’s an answer that frees us from this surrender. And yet, philosophy (or more precisely, meta-philosophy) seems to suggest the opposite. That’s what makes it worse.

Okay bye.

In this article, we’ll be exploring who is a philosopher; is he required to make original contributions?

Before anything, let’s understand the dichotomy between the two questions.

Who is a philosopher? vs. Who is called a philosopher?

It’s important to note that one can be a philosopher without being called one, and one can be called a philosopher without truly being one. Take cognitive scientists, for example. Many of them deal heavily with questions in the philosophy of mind. They engage with philosophical literature, address conceptual problems, and contribute to long-standing debates. Yet, they’re rarely called philosophers. On the flip side, someone creating bite-sized philosophical content on Instagram or YouTube might often be called a philosopher—though their engagement may be superficial.

So why is someone called something, regardless of whether they are that thing? What’s the motivation? Let me explain this with an example:

Consider the question, who is an engineer? To keep it neutral, I asked ChatGPT:

“An engineer is someone who turns ideas into systems and problems into solutions.”

By that notion, a 10-year-old playing with LEGO bricks and building a bridge qualifies as an engineer. (And honestly, in spirit, that kid may very well excel than some paper-qualified professionals.)

But now imagine a real-world scenario: there’s a project to build a 20-kilometre bridge connecting two cities. A construction firm puts out a job ad seeking engineers. Technically, nothing is stopping the LEGO kid from applying. But clearly, the company needs a way to filter applicants, since its operations are limited by time and resources. It cannot afford to interview the kid—doing so might mean missing the chance to evaluate a PhD in ultrasonic concrete testing, whom the company might need to hire.

So society (group of companies) creates a norm: we call someone an “engineer” if they have, say, an accredited engineering degree. This naming practice isn’t primarily about recognizing someone’s being, but about streamlining practical decisions. This is what I call the application-angle—society uses titles to optimize resources, trust, and responsibility.

Returning to the questions about philosopher, “Who is a philosopher?” is a rather forgiving question. Allow me to explain how.

One person might say, “A philosopher is someone who engages in thought.” By that definition, a 4-year-old asking, “Why is the grass green?” or “What are those twinkling lights in the sky?” already qualifies as a philosopher. Another might add, “A philosopher is someone who engages in thought but systematically.” Someone else may go further, “A philosopher is someone who engages in thought but systematically—such that he contributes original ideas.”

So yes, “Who is a philosopher?” would indeed have a right answer—but it’d be of little value to people. People are generally willing to accept different usages in different contexts. But not just that—if one uses a particular answer in a particular context, the usage is often granted even by those who would use a different answer in the same context.

For example, when I teach Philosophy 101, I often tell my students—to motivate them—they are philosophers the moment they begin engaging with an argument. My co-participant from the video might disagree but would not object (or so I hope).

So the more relevant question, then, is not “Who is a philosopher?” but rather “Who is called a philosopher?” or even “Who should be called a philosopher?” And it’s in regard to this latter question, I suppose, that my co-participant said, “None of us are philosophers, really.”

Now remember, a question like this—“Who should be called a philosopher?”—ultimately comes down to the application-angle. To explore it, we need to turn to a story from our intellectual history.

Once upon a time, not long after humans discovered agriculture and settled into more stable, less survival-driven communities, a few elders in the tribe decided to set up a school. But what should it be called? A school of physics? Of chemistry? Of engineering? Well, since no such specializations existed at the time, it was simply called “School.”

For nearly a thousand years, the pursuit of knowledge remained shallow and undifferentiated—there was no need to divide it into departments because there was no application-angle demanding it. But eventually, that changed. Society began to ask: Is it really necessary for those studying the stars to also study ethics? And should judges be expected to know about eclipses? For the first time, a distinction was made—astronomy and mathematics were separated from what we might now call “value-driven” or axiological subjects.

Soon, astronomy and mathematics became their own departments, and then those split further into more specialized fields, eventually forming the academic departments we recognize today.

Now, replace “School” in our story with “Philosophy.” As the etymology suggests, philosophy means “love of wisdom”—a pursuit not confined to one domain of knowledge but embracing all inquiry, whether into ethics or astronomy. That’s how the term “philosophy” was originally used, and accordingly, anyone engaged in such inquiry was called a “philosopher.”

Here’s a fun fact: the man widely regarded as the father of modern physics, Isaac Newton, was never called a “physicist” in his lifetime. He was referred to as a “natural philosopher.” Why? Because the department of physics hadn’t birthed yet. Even much later, in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant contributed to both ethics and astronomy still under the broad philosophical umbrella.

To briefly digress: it wasn’t until the mid-19th century, in the era of James Clerk Maxwell, that the term “physicist” was first used. His scientific predecessor Michael Faraday was commonly referred to as a “philosopher” and sometimes even a “mechanic.”

(By the way, any guesses on which subject was the last to split from the philosophical mainstream? Let me know in the comments.)

There was a time when someone who built irrigation channels for a village was called a philosopher—and then there was a time when he wasn’t. Newton was once called a philosopher—now he isn’t. Today, the word “philosopher” is reserved for those left behind in what remains of the original philosophy department—now a smaller, though still diverse, domain of inquiry.

This brings us to the question: should we demand original contributions from someone to call them a philosopher? To answer that, we need to reflect on how progress has occurred—and continues to occur—in this pared-down version of philosophy.

If you’ve been paying attention, the emergence of new departments in our story correlates with the degree to which a subject has practical application. As subjects peeled away to form their own specializations, the most fundamental—and often the least “applicable”—questions remained with philosophy. Questions like:

– Why is there consciousness at all? (The Hard Problem)
– Does reality fundamentally constitute of one or many substances? (Pluralism vs Monism)
– Does God exist?
– Are we living in a simulation?

These kinds of questions have remained unanswered for millennia—perhaps because of the limits of human capacity or perhaps because of their very nature—and are likely to remain unanswered for the very same reasons. Take the Hard Problem of consciousness: the phrase was coined by David Chalmers only in 1995, but the problem it refers to is ancient. And it’s remained so resistant to resolution that Chalmers also proposed a new question: the Meta-Problem—why is the Hard Problem so hard to solve?

So clearly, philosophy today is not simply about finding answers. It’s also about (rather more about) refining questions, rethinking assumptions, reassessing frameworks, and much more. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that a philosopher will solve the central question they set out to explore in their PhD dissertation.

So—does that mean over 99% of people working in philosophy departments aren’t really philosophers? No. Does it mean they shouldn’t be called philosophers?
Again, and in contrast to my fellow participant, I stand by a clear: No.

Why? To answer this, let’s return to the application-angle.

Imagine a hospital faced with a difficult and not uncommon dilemma: two patients, both equally qualified on medical grounds, need a heart transplant—but there is only one heart. Whom should it go to? The hospital doesn't know. So, in search of ethical guidance, it posts an ad asking for a philosopher to help navigate this moral problem.

Now, clearly the hospital wouldn’t want to consider applications from 4-year-olds. But would it not want to consider applications from seasoned academics—those who’ve spent their entire careers studying ethics—just because they haven’t made original contributions? Of course not. Their deep and systematic familiarity with centuries of moral philosophy makes them uniquely qualified to address the question, even if they’re not publishing new theories.

Take another example. World leaders convene to discuss the future of AI development. One concern they raise: what if AI systems eventually develop something like consciousness, and act against human interests? Who should they consult, particularly in the light that no one has been able to solve the question of machine consciousness? Naturally, they would turn to philosophers of mind and AI—perhaps even someone like David Chalmers—not because he has definitively solved the question of machine consciousness, but because he’s one of the most informed voices on the topic. To reject his input on the grounds that he hasn’t proven whether machines can be conscious would be absurd. His role, like that of many philosophers, is to clarify the stakes, trace conceptual boundaries, and help structure the debate in other meaningful ways.

The point is: people working in philosophy departments, even without making original contributions, are still deeply engaged in the rigorous thinking that such societal problems demand. In that respect, they should be called philosophers; and by the way, they are—rigthfully—called philosophers.

A question I’m often asked is: Was Osho a philosopher?

Having read my article, why don’t you try answering that yourself.

And worse: what if you’re one of them?

What if you’re the person who believes their worldview is just as what is required to explore the ultimate truth, when in fact it’s only the loudest voice in your echo chamber? What if the thing that’s keeping you away from truth is the belief that you already have it?

This article is not just about the “other” person. It’s about all of us. About our stubborn convictions, our isolated rationalities, and what we might articulate in terms of The Gawaar Paradox.

The Gawaar Paradox (gawaar means, or at least this is how I take it to mean here, “dumb” or “ignorant” in Hindi/Urdu) describes a curious state of epistemic lockdown:

A gawaar wants to know the truth—but his worldview, no matter how shallow, appears sound so he has no motivation to explore alternative worldviews. But the truth demands a different worldview—so how does he get closer to truth!

It’s not a paradox because it’s logically inconsistent. It’s a paradox because it’s existentially tragic.

The gawaar isn’t stupid in the traditional sense. He may be articulate, educated, even wise within his system. But he is trapped in a web of self-justification, and no internal mechanism exists to nudge him out of it. And further, it’s, but natural, for him to think that it’s others who are are gawaar, not himself.

It’s important to note that he is not motivated to explore alternate worldviews not because they contradict his own or because his worldview justifies dismissing them. It’s a a-thoughtful process. It’s because his worldview feels just as fine, just as sound as any reason that could convince him to stop and reconsider.

So even if there exists a better worldview out there—more coherent, more truthful, more beautiful—he will never find it. Not because it’s hidden. But because he will never look.

You may recognize a familiar echo here: Plato’s famous Meno’s Paradox.

How will you search for something when you don’t know what it is? Even if you find it, how will you recognize it?

The Gawaar Paradox builds upon this but adds a more socially and psychologically grounded twist.

Meno’s Paradox is about ignorance—how can the ignorant pursue knowledge?

The Gawaar Paradox is about conviction—how can the convinced pursue alternative convictions?

It’s one thing to not know; it’s another thing to not want to know because you think you already do. That’s the real philosophical horror: the epistemic firewall that blocks us from even wanting to update our beliefs.

If rational motivation can’t lead us out of our worldview, what can? The answer, surprisingly, might be faith.

But not the kind of faith that demands blind obedience to dogma. No. We’re talking about a methodological, systemic kind of faith. A leap—not into a void, but into a possibility.

Historically, philosophers have wrestled with the idea of faith:

• Kierkegaard described the “leap of faith” as an existential act beyond reason.

• William James believed that in some domains, believing in order to see may be more rational than withholding belief.

• Wittgenstein recognized that some commitments (for example, belief in an external world) are not conclusions of logic but preconditions for reasoning itself.

In the context of the Gawaar Paradox, faith is not a failure of reason. It is a tool for surpassing the limitations of reason.

Imagine a person locked in his worldview. He has no incentive to leave. Everything seems justified. But he wants to know the truth. He wants to explore—so how can he begin?

By a voluntary, temporary, rational leap of faith into another worldview.

Take for instance the famous thought experiment of Mary the neuroscientist. She knows everything about color, but has never seen it. When she sees red for the first time, does she learn something new?

In my experience, I’ve seen many people promptly reply “No.” I’ve seen fewer who take a moment to think and then say “No.” But what’s the right thing to do—methodologically?

Philosophers must, at least temporarily, suppose she does. Why? Because it allows us to explore the idea of qualia, the “hard phenomenon.” It opens up a worldview that includes subjective experience as fundamental.

That worldview might be better in explanatory power. If so, you might adopt it. If not, you can discard it.

If the new worldview turns out to be better, you don’t just gain a better perspective—you also inherit a new set of questions, the very gaps you leapt across. If it isn’t better, your previous subscription becomes even more justified, and you gain something meta-philosophical: an understanding of how and when to strategically place your faith. As a philosophy student, that sounds like a win-win to me!

One might say, “That sounds far too fuzzy a path to take—too likely to fail.” And guess what? You’d be right. But here’s the point I want to draw your attention to: philosophy, as the pursuit of more fundamental than other concerns—can it afford not to include a ray of optimism in its methods just because its twisted? Does God exist? Does consciousness exist? We can anyway not have easily disposed answers due to our cognitive and conceptual capacities. We’re functioning in the realm where our pusuit meets its boundaries.

So yes, the structure I describe—reason guided by an act of faith—may seem off-putting but so what? It’s the best tool we have. Beggers can’t be chosers. Well, to dismiss this structure would be outright entitled and further ignorant of you to conceive what might the ulmitate truth be that philosophy takes its objective to unravel.

This is also one reason why I suggest people not to get into philosophy until they are well trained soldiers who can afford a lifetime dedicated to a super esoteric question resulting in vain.

So, faith here is a philosophical prosthetic: a tool to extend our reach beyond the prison walls of our own reason.

The Gawaar Paradox doesn’t mean we’re doomed. It just means that we need a new tool. And that tool is faith.

So ask yourself, what’s a belief you’ve never dared question? What if it’s wrong? Can you temporarily adopt the opposite belief—just to see where it leads? Would you be willing to think like a dualist? Try out moral relativism? Suppose the universe has a purpose and pretend your own mind might be a simulation?

What’s the wildest worldview you could explore for a week?

Drop your answers. Make polls with your friends. Ask your family what they’d change their mind about if they had to. Make it a game, a ritual, a weekly challenge.

Let’s leap.

But guess what? This notion may be fundamentally flawed—leading to the biggest irony of all: philosophy objecting to philosophy. So if you’re going to school or university in search of truth, then maybe you should reconsider just how you spend your parent’s money. (Don’t take this line seriously!)

Let’s formalize the argument a little, so we can get a sharper grip on it. Let:

• V denote a candidate view from nowhere.

• C be some epistemic context or perspective.

• S be any philosophical claim or position.

• E(x,y) mean “perspective x evaluates y.”

The idea behind the view from nowhere is:

∃V:∀C, E(V,S) is independent of C,

This reads that there exists some perspective V that can evaluate any claim S without relying on any particular context C.

So what’s wrong with this idea? There are several objections—infinite meta-regress, meta-relativism (or the claim that all meta-methods stand on equal footing), and the self-referential paradox, to name a few. But for the purposes of this article, I’ll focus on the “no Archimedean point,” or the contextuality objection.

P1: Every act of evaluation or judgment happens inside some context C: some historical background, language, culture, cognitive framework, or tradition.

P2: No epistemic context C is privileged in an absolute sense; different contexts have different assumptions, vocabularies, and criteria, and none can claim universal authority.

C: Therefore, no truly context-free “view from nowhere” can exist.

Formally,

P1: ∀S, ∃C such that E(C,S) occurs in C.
P2: ∀C, ¬F(C),F(X):=X is epistemically privileged.
C: ¬∃V such that E(V,S) is independent of all C.

P1 is relatively uncontroversial, leading the argument to rest heavily on the strength of P2. Consider the following argument for P2. Let:

• C be a candidate epistemic context,

• F(X) = X is epistemically privileged (the context X is not only valid for its members, but binding for all rational agents, without contest).

P1: To claim F(C) (that C is epistemically privileged) is to assert that the principles, standards, or methods internal to C are universally binding—no other context could rationally dispute them.

P2: For any such claim, there always exists at least one rival context C’ with incompatible or differing standards, whose advocates deny the universal authority of C.

P3: Any justification for F(C) can be provided only:

1. Using the standards internal to C, in which case, it is circular (C is privileged because C says so), or

2. Using standards external to C, in which case privilege is lost (C appeals to the authority of another context).

P4: Circular justification is inadequate for establishing true, context-independent privilege; justification that appeals externally surrenders the claim of unique privilege.

C: Therefore, no context C is epistemically privileged in an absolute sense; none can claim universal authority.

Formally,

P1: ∀C, F(C) ⇒ (C’s standards are universally binding).
P2: ∀C, ∃C’ ≠ C: (C’ rejects C’s universal authority).
P3: Justification for F(C): [internal to C ⇒ circular; external ⇒ not privileged].
P4: Circular or non-privileged justification cannot claim context-independent authority.
C: ∴ ∀C, ¬F(C).

Again, the argument’s weight falls primarily on P2. But why accept P2—why believe that there necessarily exists a rival context C’? Is this just a sociological observation about intellectual history? Defenders maintain it is not. Instead, they argue it follows from the very structure of reasoning and the character of language. Human beings possess the intellectual freedom and creative capacity to conceive, devise, and defend—in principle—alternative frameworks, even in the face of the most entrenched systems.

One may say, even if we grant that for any context C, a rival context C’ can be constructed, it doesn’t follow that C and C’ are equally privileged. Isn’t it possible that C’ is simply wrong, or less justified, while C really is the privileged epistemic vantage point?

However, here’s the nuance: this evaluation—that C’ is “wrong”—itself takes place within some evaluative context or uses some pre-existing standards, whether they’re those of C, a third context, or an inter-contextual negotiation. So the claim that “C’ is simply wrong” isn’t independent of all contexts; it’s always from somewhere.

One can, of course, argue for C and C’, or any other context for that matter, resting on different levels within the heirarchy of authorities. However, this mainly explains how a context functions in application or practice, not whether it captures ultimate truth—the supposed objective of philosophy. Distinguishing between contexts might show which is more effective or reliable for certain tasks, but it doesn’t settle the deeper question of their universal or metaphysical correctness.

This reminds me of Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Bro says: philosophy is like a ladder you climb to escape confusion; once on top, you see the world clearly—but the ladder itself should be discarded afterward. In this metaphor:

• The “ladder” refers to philosophical theories, meta-methods, conceptual frameworks.

• The “climb” refers to performing philosophy to clarify meaning, remove confusions.

• The “discoarding” refers to once you’ve gained insight, recognize the theories are not absolute truths.

This is not nihilism but an acknowledgment that:

• Theories and meta-perspectives are pragmatic tools.

• Philosophy’s job is to clarify limits of language, thought, and sense.

• Attempts to establish absolute foundations or privileged meta-views are misguided.

• At the pinnacle, you’re beyond words and theory—the ladder discarded.

What do you think?

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But quietly woven through our reels and shorts is something called scientism—not science itself, but the belief that science is the only, or at least the best, way to answer every meaningfully framed question. It is the only serious avenue to knowledge. Anything not stateable in scientific terms—whether it’s the nature of beauty, the existence of free will, or ultimate questions about what is real and how we should live—is often dismissed as unworthy, fuzzy, or even meaningless.

It is against this scientism, not science(!), that I wish to present.

Typically, I hesitate to express my personal bend with the debate until I have a strong case. A strong case is when a weak case, grounded in “it seems” arguments, is supplemented by the arguments expressed in terms that would be acceptable to those on the other side of the debate. In this case, I do have a strong case against scientism; how?

For starters, it’s a weak case, for I can at least conceive metaphysical notions as ontologically radical from physical notions science intends to address. It seems that I have free will—it seems that Mary learns something new while experiencing the color for the first time, that there is indeed a hard phenomenon—and so on. And on top of that, I adapt the same logic as a tool that scientism proponents should accept for a work done well.

Allow me, in this article, to walk you through the journey of the latter concern.

The most ambitious statement of scientism or logical positivism came from Rudolf Carnap, a German-Austrian philosopher who wanted to show, with mathematical rigor, how all meaningful knowledge could be built on a carefully constructed logical foundation. Imagine trying to create a language so precise, so mathematically structured, that it could:

• Express every scientific truth,

• Avoid metaphysical confusion,

• Distinguish meaningful statements from empty ones.

This is Carnap’s “Language System” (LS). Here’s how it works:

1. Formation Rules: These specify which combinations of symbols are legitimate sentences. Think of this as grammar—like how English determines that “The cat sleeps” is well-formed, but “Cat the sleeps” isn’t.

2. Transformation Rules (L-rules): These are the logic-mathematical rules of deduction. They tell you what you can legitimately infer from what. For example, “If all mammals are warm-blooded and cats are mammals, then cats are warm-blooded.” This is logic at play.

Let’s zoom in on three key types of sentence in LS:

• Analytic (L-valid): A sentence is analytic if it can be proven true using only the logic-mathematical transformation rules, starting from nothing (“All bachelors are unmarried”).

• Contradictory (L-contravalid): A sentence is contradictory if its negation is analytic (“Some bachelors are married men”).

• Synthetic: A sentence is neither analytic nor contradictory (“The cat is on the mat”).

Carnap’s hope was that all scientific truths could be expressed in or translated to this kind of language. Add a few words for “observation” (like “red,” “heavy”) and physical laws, and you’ve got a formal way to represent all knowledge.

But not everyone was convinced. Enter Willard Van Orman Quine, the philosophical detective who would expose where Carnap’s “science of everything” hides its own assumptions.

Quine’s main concern? The “analytic/synthetic” distinction—the pillar dividing what is true by meaning (analytic) versus true by discovery (synthetic). “All triangles have three sides” is an example of the former, and “It is raining outside” is an example of the latter.

Carnap’s LS assumes we can always tell which is which, using the system’s internal rules. But Quine asked, How do we, in practice, know which rules are logic and which are content? How do we know if “all bachelors are unmarried” is analytic, but “every bird can fly” is not?

Quine pointed out a deep logical problem: Carnap’s distinctions only work relative to the fixed, artificial language LS itself. That’s fine for made-up languages, but what about English, or the languages of real science?

Suppose you want to define “analytic” as “derivable from the logic rules (L-rules) alone.” Cool. But how do you decide, in the first place, which rules are the logic ones and which are empirical? If you already knew that—if you already had a tidy analytic/synthetic divide—you wouldn’t need LS to tell you! It’s like organizing your bookshelf by “good books” and “bad books,” but you only tag the books as good or bad after rearranging them.

Quine puts it bluntly: “We know which sentences these rules treat as analytic, but we don’t know what they mean by ‘analytic’ at all.” Stating “analyticity in LS” only sorts the sentences—it doesn’t explain why those sentences are analytic in terms that will work for science, or for ordinary language.

Consider, “All vixens are female,” for example. Is this analytical or synthetic? At first glance, it seems analytic—by definition, a “vixen” means a female fox. So, “all vixens are female” sounds like a truth by definition. But here’s the twist—whether this is analytic or synthetic depends on how you’ve set up your language (in Carnap’s LS or any other system). If in your language rules, “vixen” is defined as “female fox,” then “all vixens are female” is analytic. If, however, someone uses “vixen” as a label for a type of fox based on appearance, and not all described “vixens” happen to be female, the sentence is no longer true by definition—it might then become a synthetic truth because you would need to check in the world whether all labeled “vixens” really are female.

Suppose, to fix this, we say an analytic sentence is just a special kind of truth: one true by logic alone, not by experience. But that means identifying, in every language, which rules are the logical ones and which are not. But that’s exactly what LS failed to clarify.

Quine shows that any time you circle back to define your terms, you implicitly rely on the very analytic/synthetic distinction you want to explain. The attempt to “science-ify” all of knowledge ends up treading water in its own assumptions.

Scientism Is Itself Not Scientific.

For those in love with science as the final measure, Quine has a harsh message. The very distinction that lets logical empiricists dismiss metaphysics as nonsense is itself not justified by scientific standards—it’s an “article of faith.” The analytic/synthetic boundary isn’t a discovery of science, but a metaphysical piece baked into its method. This, Quine says, reveals an “unexamined dogma at the heart of scientism.”

We live in a golden age of technology and information, and our faith in science is well earned. But the story of scientism and Quine’s powerful objection reminds us: science, as amazing as it is, draws its strength from somewhere—from metaphysical speculation. The world (and what we can know about it) cannot be squeezed into a test-tube or a theorem.

Sometimes, the sharpest minds are those that notice the boundaries, not just the contents, of what can be known. So, next time a pop-science headline claims to have “debunked” philosophy, consciousness, or the meaning of life, remember: science is wonderful, but even it has mysteries it cannot solve—and that’s more fascinating than any easy answer!

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When you try to pin down how, in everyday life, you know what you know—how you justify believing that your car is parked outside, that your friend genuinely likes you, or that the milk in your fridge hasn’t spoiled—a simple and intuitive explanation often surfaces. The core tenet of Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), prominently defended by one of my favorite philosophers, Michael Huemer, can be formulated as:

If it seems to S that P, then S thereby has prima facie justification for believing P, absent any defeaters.

It’s intuitive, almost comforting. After all, much of our knowledge just feels right—we trust our experiences, perceptions, and even memories until we’re given a reason not to. On first glance, this is the scaffolding for our everyday rational life.

But pause. Look a little closer. Is this really what’s happening under the hood of our minds?

PC places immediate experiential states—or Seemings—at center stage. Seemings are not mere propositional attitudes or beliefs but non-inferential (yet epistemically authoritative) appearances, akin to sensory impressions. Can we conceive of a case where Seemings occur just as readily if any proposition P is false as if it is true?

Yes, says the Bayesian Objection. Bayesian Epistemology (BE) conceptualizes justification through the lens of probability theory. It treats beliefs not as binary justified or unjustified states, but as degrees of belief (or credences) represented by real numbers between 0 and 1. BE postulates that rational agents should update their credences in the face of new evidence by conditionalization. That is, upon receiving new evidence E, an agent rationally updates their credence in P to the conditional probability P(P∣E) using Bayes’ theorem:

Where:

• P(P) denotes the prior probability assigned to proposition P,

• P(E∣P) is the likelihood of evidence E assuming P is true,

• P(P∣E) is the updated posterior probability after considering E.

Evidence is informative only insofar as it changes the relative probabilities. That is, evidence E justifies belief in P only if P(E∣P)>P(E∣¬P), otherwise providing no basis to increase confidence in P.

Applied to PC, consider a Seeming E that it is raining. In ordinary circumstances, the seeming is more likely if it is raining (P) than if it is not (¬P). But in skeptical scenarios (brain-in-a-vat, hallucination), the seeming may be just as likely regardless of whether it is raining or not. Thus, according to BE, the seeming provides no evidence favoring P. Hence, PC’s claim to immediate justification is undermined—there is no rational basis to believe P just because it seems so.

Proponents of PC have developed several nuanced responses to the objection raised by BE, robustly defending its central assertion that seemings provide immediate, defeasible justification for belief after all. At the same time, some defenders question BE as a fully adequate descriptive model of human epistemic practice.

1. Critique of Bayesian Modeling Assumptions: A notable strategy, evident in the works of Luca Moretti and also endorsed by Michael Huemer, targets the formal modeling assumptions in BE’s conditionalization framework. They argue that Seemings are ill-suited to be interpreted merely as new evidence that probabilistically updates prior credences. Instead, Seemings serve a qualitatively distinct epistemic function as internal rational foundations for immediate doxastic attitudes—a mode of justification unavailable to purely probabilistic accounts.

2. Compatibility: Several proponents, including Ernest Sosa and Duncan Pritchard, contend that PC and BE are not necessarily at odds but operate at distinct explanatory levels within epistemology. PC elucidates the ground-level entitlement granted by the presence of Seemings, whereas BE elucidates the higher-order processes of belief revision, justification modulation, and defeat through probabilistic updating within an already-formed belief system. This dual-tier framework respects PC’s internalist approach while accommodating BE’s formal sophistication, suggesting their compatibility within a layered epistemic architecture in which prima facie justification and normative doxastic management can coexist without mutual reduction.

3. Contextual Sensitivity: Proponents, such as Matthias Steup, emphasize that PC is best understood as giving contextual justification: the justification provided by a Seeming can be weakened or defeated by information that the Seeming is unreliable or uninformative, but only in one’s context.

4. The Normativity of Rationality: Internalists like Thomas Reid (historically), as well as contemporary figures like Earl Conee, emphasize the subjective rational perspective at the heart of PC. They argue that justification should be appreciated from the internal, first-person standpoint of the subject. PC proponents here are not mainly concerned with the mechanics or levels of epistemic processing, but with what rationality requires from the inside. If, from within your own cognitive perspective, you have a Seeming and no defeaters, then wouldn’t it be irrational not to believe what seems true? BE may fail to capture the first-person authority that genuine Seemings impose on rational agents in practice.
   
   It took me a while to understand how this point is different from 1. Unlike 1, it doesn’t talk about Seemings but the thinker’s authority—what the thinker is entitled or rationally obligated to do in light of them.

5. Critique of BE: Lastly, defenders, such as John Greco, challenge BE’s descriptive comprehensiveness, arguing that foundational and a priori forms of justification—including perceptual, memory-based, and moral intuitions—do not seamlessly fit into the probabilistic updating paradigm. BE may lack the conceptual resources to fully describe human epistemic life.
   
   This critique invites a form of epistemic pluralism, where BE and PC are best seen as occupying complementary niches in the landscape of justification, rather than occupying strictly rivalrous, exclusionary positions.

Maybe this debate sounds as though it’s just calling for a meta theory to fix things, but the heart of it is something we all experience: that flicker of trust when your gut tells you something, versus the cautious pause when you start to ask, “Could I be wrong?” Next time you say, “I just know it!”—do you think you’re tapping into the spell of direct experience, or does your brain quietly crunch the odds behind the scenes?

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
“The Earth revolves around the Sun.”
“How did Maxwell deduce that Saturn’s rings must be composed of solid particles rather than a liquid or gas?”

At first glance, these statements seem entirely unrelated—one is a proverb, another an astronomical fact, and the third a historical question in the philosophy of science. And yet, there is something quietly, conceptually common to all of them: the presupposition of Being. Every concept, no matter how mundane—be it an apple, the Sun, a ring, or a doctor—is grounded in the silent background of Being. We cannot so much as frame a sentence, formulate a theory, or make an inquiry without already operating within the horizon of Being. Here, “Being” is not used in the grammatical sense of a present participle, but rather as a noun—as the fundamental condition for the intelligibility of anything whatsoever.

Among all the problems in philosophy, none has proven more inescapable, elusive, and perennial than the question of Being itself. And yet, my motivation for writing on this topic does not arise solely from this.

It also stems from a deeper impulse—one that seeks to gather truth holistically, stepping beyond local, situated vantage points toward the most metaphysical horizon. This is a movement from a pluralistic view of reality, where distinctions and differences abound, to a monistic outlook, where those very distinctions begin to dissolve. The farther I step back, the more the concepts that seem radically distinct in our everyday world begin to converge. The difference between loving your partner and loving your cat, for instance, might converge into a more general mode of Love—into Love as such.

Yet merely being able to articulate such convergences in language does not mean we can truly conceive them. I may be able to grasp that good and bad must ultimately converge into something, but I cannot say what that something is. It eludes representation.

Being, it seems to me, is one of those rare concepts that already occupies this space of convergence—as Hegel famously notes, Being cannot even be clearly distinguished from pure non-being, and yet remains strangely immediate. It’s as if, in the architecture of reality, the creator had overlooked—or deliberately left open—this chapter.

The matter of Being takes me closer to the creator’s vantage point, and what happens when we try to do so? We are met with a paradox!

To begin thinking about anything for that matter, we can turn to abstraction, generalisation, or composition.

1. Abstraction is the process of stripping away the particularities of beings to arrive at what is common to all. For instance, from many animals, one abstracts the genus “animal”; from many triangles, the concept of “triangularity.” But Being does not lend itself to this process, for Being is not a genus. If it were, then it would require a differentia to divide it into species—and yet any such differentia would already presuppose Being (differentiae is that which specifies how species within the genus differ from one another). Abstraction, therefore, fails because being is not one property that things “have” in the same way they have color or shape; it’s not a predicate; it’s not a category. It is the condition for all categorisation.

2. Similarly, generalisation does not capture Being. To generalise is to go from specific instances to broader rules. For example, if you see that all swans you’ve seen are white, you might generalise that “all swans are white.” You might think, let’s look at all the things that exist and then generalise a concept of Being from them. But this doesn’t work as Being is not derived from beings. It’s not like we look at chairs, dogs, and stars and conclude a general rule called “Being.” Rather, it is that without which no instance, no case, no law, could even arise.

3. If Being escapes the grasp of both abstraction and generalisation, perhaps it can be caught through composition—the strategy of breaking things down into their constituent elements, or building them up through structural parts. But this approach fares no better.

   
   In metaphysics, composition often refers to the structures that constitute entities: substance and accident, matter and form, essence and existence. For instance, Aristotle would say that a statue is composed of bronze (its matter) and its form (its shape). Similarly, Aquinas distinguishes between essence—what a thing is—and existence—that it is. Such compositional analyses work well when applied to beings, to entities within the world. But Being itself is not a being. It is not a compound entity made from more fundamental parts. As Heideggar warns us, one cannot ask what Being “is made of” without already treating it like something within the inventory of the world.
   
   In language and logic, composition refers to how propositions are built: a subject, a predicate, and the copula that connects them. In the sentence “The apple is red,” “apple” is the subject, “red” is the predicate, and “is” is the copula. In formal logic, this gets systematised through expressions like ∃x (Apple(x) ∧ Red(x))—there exists an x such that x is an apple and x is red. But here, too, the “is” carries more than a grammatical function. It serves as the connective tissue of intelligibility itself. It is not just a bridge between subject and predicate, nor a feature of syntax; it is what allows for anything to show up meaningfully as something. As Heidegger might put it, Being is the clearing—the open space—within which beings can appear at all.
   
   Even in Fregean logic, where the existential quantifier ∃x attempts to formalise being, we run into the same circularity. The use of ∃x already presupposes the existence of a domain of discourse—a universe of objects over which variables range. But this domain itself must already be. Thus, even the most rigorous formal languages cannot speak of Being without silently assuming it. They cannot generate Being; they merely operate within its already-given horizon.

We are thus left with the paradox: Being is the most universal concept, and yet the most elusive. It cannot be defined, and yet it structures all definition. We cannot not speak of it, for to speak at all is to assume it. The problem of Being is not just a problem about Being—it is a problem within Being: within our thinking, within our saying, within our existing.

Philosophers often use “transcendental” for Being. A transcendental concept refers to a concept that is not derived from experience, but rather one that makes experience itself possible. In other words, it is not something we learn from the world—it is something our mind brings to the world in order to make sense of it. For example, space-time. We cannot experience anything unless it is in space and in time.

If we cannot define Being, then what next? Can we at least learn to navigate it—by asking what it truly means to be in different ways? Might Being, then, be less a solution to find and more a paradox to live, glimpsed in every act of understanding?

Subscribe to my Substack to get notified about future articles where I may explore these questions.

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Studies indicate a growing trend of abusive behaviour toward AI, with significant implications for human interactions. For instance, users of companionship apps, such as Replika, often subject their AI partners to sustained verbal mistreatment. Likewise, virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana frequently receive inappropriate and sexually charged comments. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, the question of how we treat these systems is no longer trivial. The ethical, psychological, and philosophical stakes make the question “Can machines genuinely understand?” more urgent than ever, demanding a re-evaluation of our assumptions about cognition, responsibility, and empathy.

One of the earliest attempts to address this question is the Turing Test, introduced by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing suggested that if a machine could engage in a conversation that is indistinguishable from a conversation with a human, it could be said to understand. While the Turing Test focuses on the machine’s ability to produce human-like responses, it effectively sidesteps the issue of whether the machine genuinely understands the conversation. This pragmatic approach shifts the emphasis from internal processes to observable behavior, often summarized with the phrase, “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might as well be a duck.”

John Searle's Chinese Room argument, introduced in 1980, presents a thought experiment challenging Turing’s idea of machine understanding. Searle asks us to imagine a person who does not understand Chinese, sitting in a room. Let us call him Liam.

Liam’s task is to respond to Chinese characters he receives through a slot with Chinese characters. But since he does not understand the language, how does he fulfill this task? He refers to a rulebook written in English, a language he does understand, to determine the appropriate responses in Chinese. For example, the rule book contains instructions, such as “If the input is ‘猫是什么?,’ then reply with ‘猫是一种动物.’”

To an outside observer, it seems as though Liam comprehends Chinese, but in reality, he is only following syntactic rules without grasping the meaning of the symbols he’s handling. Searle argues that this process mirrors how AI operates: machines can process input and generate output based on rules, but they lack genuine understanding of meaning. This distinction between syntax (the structure of language) and semantics (the meaning behind it) forms the core of Searle’s critique. While AI systems are proficient at manipulating symbols and producing responses, Searle contends that they fall short in achieving true semantic understanding, as they only simulate comprehension rather than experiencing it.

Searle’s thought experiment provoked a range of responses, one of the most prominent being the “systems reply.” Proponents of this view argue that while the individual inside the room does not understand Chinese, the system as a whole does. In this case, the system includes Liam, the rule book, and the room. Liam is just one part of a larger system, and it is the system as a whole that should be evaluated for understanding, not the individual parts. According to the systems reply, understanding may arise from the interaction of various elements, even if individual parts lack it.

Searle has a direct response to the systems objection. He counters this argument by extending the thought experiment. He asks us to imagine that Liam somehow internalizes all the rules and symbols in his mind, thus becoming the entire system himself. Even in this scenario, Searle argues, Liam does not understand Chinese. He is still manipulating symbols based on rules. This, Searle claims, shows that even if we treat Liam, the rule book, and the room as a unit system, it still lacks understanding because no semantic comprehension takes place after all.

Despite Searle’s rebuttal, the systems reply has garnered support.

Jack Copeland, for instance, argues that Searle’s focus on individual understanding overlooks the possibility that understanding could emerge from the collective interaction of components within a system. Just as individual neurons in the human brain do not understand language but collectively give rise to understanding, Copeland suggests that a complex system of artificial components could similarly achieve understanding through the interaction of its parts.

John Haugeland, in addition, questions the nature of understanding itself. He argues that Searle’s concept of understanding is overly anthropocentric and restrictive. According to Haugeland, understanding does not necessarily require the kind of conscious experience that humans have. He suggests that understanding could be defined functionally, in terms of the ability to respond appropriately to inputs and produce meaningful outputs.

Haugeland's functional perspective brings us to the concept of the “virtual mind.” The idea of a virtual mind posits that understanding might not be tied to physical substrates. Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers have contributed to this discourse.

Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained, argues that mental states can be understood in terms of their functional roles within a system. He compares mental states to software running on the hardware of the brain, implying that if AI systems could run similar “software,” they could achieve a form of understanding.

David Chalmers contributes to this discourse with his concept of the “extended mind,” developed in collaboration with philosopher Andy Clark. The extended mind theory suggests that cognitive processes are not confined to the human brain but can extend into external devices and environments. From this perspective, an AI system integrated into its environment could engage in cognitive processes similar to those of humans, potentially leading to a form of understanding. Chalmers’ view supports the idea that understanding might emerge from the interaction between an AI system and its environment, further blurring the line between human and machine cognition.

While these functionalist perspectives offer a more expansive view of machine understanding, they still leave open significant questions about the nature of understanding. The debate between those who emphasize behavior and function, such as Turing and Dennett, and those who prioritize semantic understanding, such as Searle, continues to shape discussions in AI, Philosophy, and Cognitive science.

Have you ever truly paused and imagined what life was really like for our ancestors? Not just the inventions, monuments, or philosophies we often read about—the pyramids, Athens, the Vedas—but the actual experience of living day to day? What did a regular evening feel like? How many people would you meet in a day? How many names would you need to remember?

We often think of the past in grand strokes—empires, battles, golden ages—but the real story of humanity is also about something quieter, something almost invisible: the shift from deep personal connection to mass-scale anonymity. And what’s fascinating (and maybe a little alarming) is how suddenly this change occurred, especially when we zoom out and look at the broader canvas of human history.

Let’s rewind.

Around 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were barely holding on. Estimates suggest there were somewhere between 10,000 to 100,000 of us across the entire planet. Imagine that—the whole of humanity, fewer in number than the crowd at a Taylor Swift concert today!

We lived in small, tight-knit tribes, typically around 50 to 150 people strong.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that humans can comfortably maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people—a number now famously called Dunbar’s Number.

In those days, you didn’t just “know of” people—you knew them.

You knew who made the sharpest arrows.
You knew who could charm a wild dog into loyalty.
You knew who could be trusted in a crisis, and who couldn’t.

Empathy wasn’t something to be taught or philosophized about—it was built into the fabric of daily survival. Successes were collective, and losses were mourned together.

Even when agriculture came along and civilizations began—say, with Jericho around 10,000 years ago—populations remained modest. Jericho’s peak population? About 2,000 people. That’s less than the number of residents at my apartment community.

And when we move to the so-called “great” civilizations, the numbers are still surprisingly small.

Ever imagined how massive Athens was during its glory days? A million? Half a million? Not even close. Historical estimates suggest around 100,000 inhabitants—including slaves and foreigners. Even Pataliputra, the famed capital of the Mauryan Empire in the East, only boasted around 150,000 people. Today, the Melbourne Cricket Ground can seat over 100,000 spectators—and that’s just for a few hours of a sports match.

In 1 CE, humanity numbered around 300 million.
By 1800 CE, we reached 1 billion.
By 2000 CE, we exploded past 6 billion.
As of 2024, we are over 8 billion—and counting.

Most of this explosion has happened in just the last few centuries, and that’s the real twist.

We evolved over tens of thousands of years for small communities—where every face meant something. Yet now, we live in megacities where 20 million people might be crammed together, and still, we don’t recognize most faces we see. I, for example, have lived next door to the same neighbour for over a year—and yet, we’ve never even exchanged names.

It’s not just a cute observation. It’s showing up in real numbers. According to a 2018 Cigna survey, nearly half of Americans report feeling lonely or isolated. Despite being more “connected” than ever, with instant messaging and endless social media, we are often emotionally starving.

It’s not just emotional starvation we’re dealing with. The deeper cost of our rapid expansion is something even more fundamental: an erosion of our moral fabric.

Imagine, once upon a time, a small tribe wandered the wilds. They didn’t yet know how to create fire—only how to keep it alive. Somewhere among the tall grasses and dense forests, one person must have carried that precious flame, sheltering it night after night from wind and rain. That fire was more than warmth or safety. Without realizing it, they were carrying the future of humanity itself.

They may not have understood the stakes. Unaware of any grand evolutionary plan, simply by bearing responsibility toward their tribe, they bore responsibility toward all of humanity.

Today, as individuals living in a world of eight billion, can we say the same about ourselves?

Psychology studies show that in group settings, responsibility often dilutes. Hiring more people doesn’t always increase production—it often lowers it. And you can understand why? Because when accountability can be shifted, it usually is. Excuses like, “Yes, preparing the report was my job—but someone else failed to send me the data,” are all too common.

For the first time in history, a species might be in the process of creating its own competitor: AI. Yet, instead of pausing for thought, we’re rolling out LLM updates every few months. We once devised religion—meant to be a guide—and yet we embedded within it cruelties.

If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone them to death, because they tried to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Taken from Bible Deuteronomy 13)

Was this a responsible thought? Are we being responsible now as we continue our subscription today?

We often pride ourselves on being the species that invented philosophy, the only ones capable of articulating morality. But the real question is: Are we moral? Was the torchbearer who protected the fire for his tribe perhaps more of a man than us?

Evolution, of course, brings change. It always has. And it’s natural—even beautiful—to imagine that humanity might someday live in even bigger communities, perhaps even colonizing other planets. Growth itself isn’t the problem. The concern lies in the rapid boom—the breakneck speed at which population sizes and societal structures have expanded.

Evolution prepared us for gradual changes over thousands of years. It did not, however, design us to adapt overnight to living among millions of strangers, to managing anonymous economies, bureaucratic systems, and a constant flood of information and faces. The speed of change is staggering compared to the slow, careful rhythms our minds were shaped by.

So it’s important to ask: are we mentally equipped yet for the scale and speed of these changes? Can our ancient brains—fine-tuned for empathy in small tribes—cope with the emotional demands of a global civilization?

Maybe understanding this mismatch is key. It can help us be more forgiving of our modern struggles with loneliness, anxiety, and societal alienation. It reminds us that feeling lost in the crowd isn’t a personal failure. It’s a side effect of running software built for small villages on the massive, chaotic server of modern civilization. It can also help us devise a better morality.

But here’s the kicker: those older cultures had an excuse. They lacked the scientific tools we have now. Their leaps to supernatural explanations were born out of genuine ignorance. But us? We’ve got neuroscience, cognitive science, computational theory—and still, we cling to this mysterious, undefined “hardness” as if it’s some sacred truth. We don't even have good reason to believe there's a genuinely Hard Problem in the first place. No experiment points to it. No logical necessity demands it. It’s just... there, floating in philosophical space because someone said, “Hey, what if subjective experience can’t be explained physically?” And we all nodded like that was enough.

I can totally imagine future philosophy students being taught this as a cautionary tale: “This is how not to do metaphysics.” Just like we’d find it absurd if someone today suddenly claimed that God had a sister who told him to create the world—completely unmotivated, not grounded in any kind of necessity or evidence—future thinkers might say, “You don’t just insert a ‘hard phenomenon’ into your ontology out of nowhere.”

Because, honestly, what if there was never a Hard Problem at all? What if it’s just the philosophical equivalent of seeing a shadow in the dark and calling it a ghost?

That said, not all philosophers of mind are obsessed with the Hard Problem. In fact, the majority aren’t. It’s one of those questions—like “Does God exist?”—that shows up more in the popular understanding of philosophy than in serious, day-to-day academic work. Within professional circles, questions like these often don’t command much time, not because they’re dismissed outright, but because they don’t promise much in terms of tangible progress.

Still, if you were to ask those very same philosophers, “What’s the one question you’d love to see answered before you die?”—chances are, a surprising number would point to the Hard Problem. Even if they’re not actively working on it, it haunts the edges of their curiosity.

And so, as a philosopher of mind of five years now, I feel a kind of responsibility—a need to explain why many of us are drawn to this far-flung pursuit. Why, even if it turns out to be a ghost, we’d still rather keep staring into the dark.

Our motivation to pursue anything ultimately comes down to what it brings to the table—balanced against the losses we’re willing to bear. So, before I talk about the potential gains of engaging with the Hard Problem, let me lay out the most significant cost: it could mean, at most, an entire lifetime gone in vain. That’s it. And that’s a cost many philosophers are strangely willing to accept. Even if we end up with nothing concrete, we’re not devastated—because what we risk losing is just a lifetime.

This isn’t strange at all; history has shown us that philosophers have often been among the least self-oriented individuals. Detached, to varying degrees, from family, friends, and societal expectations, we are often willing to invest decades for even the faintest hope of philosophical progress.

Much of contemporary philosophy, if we’re honest, doesn’t radically deviate from what the ancient Greeks or the Vedic sages once said. We add—at best—subtle shifts in perspective, new ways of seeing old questions. But we still chase those shifts. We still dedicate our lives to them. We are like soldiers—doomed to fall short, perhaps, but willing to march anyway.

So, why do philosophers engage with the Hard Problem of consciousness?

The first reason is this: if consciousness is taken to genuinely exist—then it doesn't sit alongside other philosophical questions. It is the most fundamental question. More fundamental than space, time, or matter.

From the very beginnings of philosophical inquiry, human beings have wrestled with a central metaphysical question: Is reality made of one kind of substance or many? The tension between monism and pluralism has echoed through both Eastern and Western thought. Whether it was the Advaita tradition in India or the pre-Socratics in Greece, this question has always been at the heart of metaphysics.

David Chalmers’ formulation of the Hard Problem in 1996 is, in many ways, just a contemporary reframing of this ancient debate. The question—why does subjective experience exist at all?—forces us to ask whether subjective experience can be reduced to physical processes—whether what we call the “mental” can be reduced to the “physical.” If we find a coherent bridge between the two, monism gains ground. If not, we may have to accept that consciousness is a fundamentally distinct kind of entity—leading us to pluralism.

But the significance of solving the Hard Problem goes far beyond metaphysical bookkeeping. It would transform how we understand the self, the world, and our place within it. It would touch everyday questions in profound ways: How should we live? Is morality objective or emergent? Is there a god, or something akin to one? What does it mean to be a person, or to have rights? What counts as a mind?

In resolving the Hard Problem, we wouldn’t just be tweaking the edges of philosophy—we’d be redrawing the entire map. Questions that have perplexed theology, ethics, politics, and art for centuries would suddenly gain new coordinates. That is why, even in the face of potential failure, many philosophers are still drawn to the Hard Problem. Not because it’s easy, but because it might just explain everything.

The second reason philosophers continue to engage with the Hard Problem of consciousness is that conscious experience, in itself, seems to represent a kind of total or complete knowledge—a knowing that bypasses the usual cognitive machinery we rely on for understanding the world.

Think about how we know something like gravity exists. This kind of knowledge comes through a long chain of processing. You see an apple fall. But at that point, you haven’t yet “understood” gravity. All that’s happened is that your eyes have captured raw sensory data—light patterns, motion, contrast. This data then moves through several internal interfaces: your brain processes the motion, situates it within a space-time framework, and your mind assigns meaning—“That's an apple falling.”

But this is just the start. Knowledge, in this mode, is a multi-step pipeline. Each layer—sensation, perception, memory, categorization, interpretation—adds meaning, but thereby, also introduces potential points of failure. What if your visual cortex misfires? What if your conceptual model of an “apple” is flawed? What if you’re prone to synesthesia, and instead of seeing the apple, you hear it fall like a note in a symphony? What if a philosopher walks up to you and successfully challenges your justification for linking the falling apple to gravity? All of this makes knowledge a construct—elaborate, layered, and vulnerable to distortion.

Now contrast that with conscious experience. When you’re experiencing something—say, watching a sunset—there’s no elaborate cognitive scaffolding you need to climb. You don’t need to know the sun’s rate of descent or the spectrum of wavelengths painting the sky. You don’t need a theory. You just know what it is like to see a sunset. That knowledge is direct. Immediate. Complete. It feels like it contains everything you need, in itself. It’s not broken down into steps and therefore has fewer avenues for corruption or misinterpretation.

Of course, someone might raise the familiar Cartesian objection: What if you're being deceived? What if an evil demon is feeding you the illusion of a sunset? What if you're in a simulation? But here's the thing: even if the sunset is an illusion, the experience of it is all that would ever matter. You may not be seeing the real sun—but you are undeniably having the experience, and anything meaningful about that event is bound to that experience.

Take love, for example. Does the illusion of love feel any less intense than love itself? Does it matter whether you’re eating a real apple or a holographic simulation of one that satisfies your hunger and delights your senses in exactly the same way? The very idea of “illusion” only makes sense in terms of conscious experience. We say that a holographic simulation of apple is an illusion because it doesn’t meet our total experience of apple. In this respect, the total experience of an apple, which may otherwise be an illusion, will always be as meaningful as it can get.

That’s why conscious experience holds such philosophical weight: because it delivers knowledge that cannot be reduced, avoided, or bypassed. You can doubt gravity. You can doubt whether the apple is real. But you cannot doubt what it is like to experience these things. (It may seem as though the experience is doubtful, but that’s only because it is inherently ineffable—and by the time you claim it, the moment has already passed. What you’re doing now is using an internal language to revisit your experience, which is not the same as really experiencing. Your subjective experience has now become the object of your process.)

In conclusion, if the two central reasons outlined above—the fundamental status of consciousness and its capacity to provide immediate, complete knowledge—hold true, then the Hard Problem is far more than a speculative puzzle. It becomes a pursuit of profound philosophical significance. For thinkers already prepared to invest entire lifetimes in pursuing subtle shifts of perspective, the chance to engage with a question of such depth and consequence is not just defensible—it’s almost inevitable. If we are willing to bear that cost for incremental progress, then the pursuit of solving the Hard Problem becomes not only understandable but perhaps the most rational philosophical commitment we can make.

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