My six-year-old daughter lost her first tooth yesterday. She shoved it under her pillow, fully expecting some cash in the morning. But when she woke up, there was nothing there.

She came to me completely deflated and asked why the Tooth Fairy didn’t come. Panicking, I lied on the spot: “Maybe the Tooth Fairy is sick?” She stared at me for a solid minute, trying to figure out if I was bluffing, then just walked off to get ready for school.

We both went about our morning, but once I was in the car driving to work, the guilt finally hit me.

A Panic-Induced Lie

Why did I just lie to my child about the Tooth Fairy?

Honestly? I forgot to swap the tooth for a coin last night. Instead of just admitting I messed up, I panicked and scrambled for a cover story. But should I have just been honest? If I told her the truth, I’m not sure I could handle the absolute avalanche of questions that would follow.

What started as a dumb parenting mistake instantly turned into a full-blown existential crisis. How do I actually know the Tooth Fairy isn’t real?

For that matter, how do we know anything for sure? How do we separate fact from fiction in a world like this?

1) Senses & Perception (Pratyaksha)

Have I ever seen the Tooth Fairy? Have I ever seen a unicorn? My answer is no, and perhaps that’s why I don’t believe in them. Have I ever seen air? No, but I can feel it when the wind blows. I know it is there when I blow up a balloon. I can see the sun almost every day, so I know it exists. I’ve eaten jalapeños, and I know they are spicy based on my own experience.

If I can touch it, see it, or taste it, it feels real. In ancient Indian philosophy, this direct observation is called Pratyaksha. For most of us, it is our ultimate proof of reality.

Limitation:

What about people who are blind or deaf or partially deaf? Their reality looks or sounds different, yet it is just as real. It shows that human senses aren’t a perfect window to ultimate truth. Even with “perfect” vision, our biology traps us.

For example, humans have three types of cone cells in their retinas: red, green, and blue. Cats and dogs only have two types. They lack the cone for the color red. Would a cat perceive a bright red Coca-Cola can the same way we do? Humans also cannot hear sounds outside the range of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Meanwhile, bats can hear frequencies up to 200,000 Hz.

Because our sensory biological instruments are limited, Pratyaksha alone cannot be fully trusted to establish objective truth.

2) Inference (Anumana), Connecting the Dots

When our senses fail, we use inference to find truth. Ancient Eastern thinkers called this Anumana.

Imagine waking up during summer vacation. You look outside and see dry roads and dry roofs. You assume it didn’t rain overnight. Your brain uses past data points to construct a logical conclusion.

Limitation:

What if it actually rained for just five minutes? What if it dried up completely before sunrise? Your inference was perfectly logical, but still entirely wrong. Our logic is only as reliable as the number of data samples we can collect.

This is a famous logical trap. For centuries, Europeans inferred that all swans were white because every single swan they had ever seen was white. Then, explorers went to Australia and discovered a black swan. A million correct data points were destroyed by just one exception.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb turned this exact concept into a massive bestselling book called The Black Swan. He shows how humans’ assumed truth based on inference, can be totally blindsided.

Our Anumana lets us down because we don’t know what we don’t know.

3) Testimony (Shabda)

Truth told, recited and repeated by experts, our trusted people, trusted literature or trusted sources including Google.

Earth rotates around the Sun. Atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. There is a God like person who created this world. There are hell and heaven afterlife. Etc.

This pathway to truth relies entirely on someone or something’s testimony. Eastern philosophy calls this Shabda. It is a vital way to learn in today’s world.

Limitation:

This version of reality is only as reliable as the sources we choose to trust, whether they are spiritual leaders, scientific authorities, or digital platforms. Bigger the authority, wider the impact on enforcing specific version of truth.

While there are other methods of deriving truth, they are omitted here as they are less significant than the three listed above and have similar limitations.

🧠 Over to You: Test Your Reality

Since all these methods have limitations, how do we know what is actually true? Is it even possible to know? Perhaps nothing is 100% certain, and things are only true to a certain degree of probability?

Philosophy is best done together. To see just how slippery “the truth” really is, pick one question from each category below and tell me your answer in the comments:

• Senses & Perception (Pratyaksha): Think about jalapeños being spicy or a painting on your wall being green. Is that item actually spicy or green, or is your human brain just creating that sensation? Is painting really green or it’s the illusion created by eye (the receiver) and brain (the interpreter)?

• Inference (Anumana): If you throw a rock into the sky, it always falls back to Earth. Do you know for absolute certain it will fall back down next time, or do you just strongly believe it will based on your past data points?

• Testimony (Shabda): Think of a country you have never physically visited, like Tuvalu. Do you actually know it exists, or do you completely rely on the testimony of maps, books, and Google?

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to drop a comment below!

Note: This of course excludes concepts that do not rely on the physical world for their existence, such as mathematics and pure logic. Both disciplines only describe the relationships between concepts, rather than physical reality itself.

THE QUESTION THAT STARTED IT ALL

A TRUE STORY

In early 2026, we went a place where we used to live many years ago. My wife suggested we sneak a peek at our old house, the one where we had our first child and lot of memories.

When my wife suggested to visit the old house, my younger one immediately asked: “I don’t remember this house. Where was I at that time?”

And my older one chimed right in: “Yeah Dad, where was she at that time?”

I went quiet for a moment. My younger one wasn’t even born when we lived there. Trying to figure out what to answer, I suddenly realised the question was far bigger than it sounded. Where was she at that time? Where are any of us before we are born? And if we didn’t exist, how did we come from nothing? That doesn’t make any sense.

My kids, without knowing it, had just asked the question that philosophers, saints, and scientists have been wrestling with for millennia. Let me take you down the rabbit hole I fell into that day.

FOLLOWING THE CHAIN OF QUESTIONS

Following the initial question, we began a conversation that kept unraveling, every answer opening two new questions.

Every answer was a door. Behind every door: two more doors. This is not a sign that the question is unanswerable. It is a sign that the question is alive.

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: THE MEMORY PROBLEM

Here is something that stopped me cold. I have no memory of being one week old. By that logic, did my life only “really” begin when I started forming memories? That seems obviously wrong. My parents and neighbors were witnessing my existence the whole time. Their experience of me was real, even when I had no experience of myself.

Which means: existence has nothing to do with your experience of it.

And if that’s true for the first weeks of your life, it might also be true for whatever came before your birth. You not remembering something does not mean it didn’t happen to you. It means your memory that thin, unreliable instrument simply wasn’t there yet.

YOU ARE NOT THE RIVER — YOU ARE THE PATTERN OF FLOW

Before we get to what the philosophers say, let me offer two analogies that I keep coming back to, because I think they’re more precise than they first appear.

Think of a company, call it XYZ Corp. Over twenty years, everything about it changes: the name, the CEO, the employees, the product, the offices, the strategy. And yet we say without hesitation: it’s still XYZ Corp. Something persists. Some coherent pattern of purpose and continuity survives every change.

Now think of a super smart AI computer. AI Computer that knows reasoning, can do critical thinking, better than human at math, science & language, ran by energy (electricity). No different in next few years than any other human. Swap out memory, processing power, the hard drive, the screen, even the operating system. It’s still same AI computer. No different than human in our analogy.

As XYZ Corp is not its office building, you are not your body. As computer is not its memory or electricity, you are not your mind, your memories, your soul, or your energy. You are the coherent, living system that emerges when all of those components run together. Change every component; the system can still be you. Lose the coherence that ties them together, and it doesn’t matter what components remain.

WHAT THE WISDOM TRADITIONS SAY

Here is the remarkable thing: every major civilization on earth independently, across centuries has tried to answer my daughter’s question. They all disagree on the details. But they all circle the same strange truth.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR HOW YOU LIVE

If you are a system and not a fixed thing, then a few things follow that are genuinely liberating.

BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE

We did drive past it. The house looked smaller than I remembered. The tree in the front yard had grown enormous. The family inside had no idea we’d once made breakfast in their kitchen, brought a newborn home through that door, had arguments and reconciliations and quiet Sunday mornings in those rooms.

My younger one pressed her face against the car window and asked: “Was this really our house?”

Yes and no, I wanted to say. The house is the same address. The people inside are completely different. The us who lived there younger, tireder, newer to all of this don’t quite exist anymore either. But something persists. The memory. The story. The pattern that connects who we were then to who we are now.

That persistent pattern, the thing that makes you you across all the years and changes is what every tradition is trying to name. The Hindus call it Atman. The Buddhists call it the stream of consciousness. The Taoists call it your nature. You might call it yourself.

You are not your body, your mind, your soul, your memories, or your energy. You are what happens when all of them show up together, and whatever keeps making that decision, again and again, across every version of yourself you’ve ever been.

My daughter’s question, asked from the back seat of a car on a quiet afternoon, has no final answer. But it has a direction. And following it, honestly, is the most important thing any of us can do.

You are not the body, the mind, the soul, or the energy.
You are the coherent, living pattern that holds them all.
You are the company that outlasts every reorganization.
You are the question that keeps asking itself.
— And you always have been

*At bottom of this thread you will find those links in case if you are interested.

The question is be, where we go from here.

Revolution and Evolution

Let’s have some background before we jump into AI.

Revolutions are fast and happens in few generations.

• Cognitive revolution ~70,000 years ago

• Agricultural revolution ~12,000 years ago

• Scientific revolution ~500 years ago

• Industrial revolution ~250 years ago

(Did you notice that each successive revolution is happening faster than the last? As world is shrinking with internet & social media, current technology revolution is driven by collective global intelligence instead of isolated individual minds.)

Evolutions are slow, over many generations by natural selection (Natural selection is the key).

• Human evolution started 5 to 7 million years ago when Chimpanzees and Human diverged from a common ancestors.

Book by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapience: A Brief History of Humankind, may provide more insight on revolution and evolution if you are interested.

What is Technology?

Technology is a technique to apply knowledge to improve quality of human life (or at lease intended to improve). Technology has evolved during revolution and evolution, both. From stone tools made by human ancestor ~3 million years ago to AI super intelligence now.

What is AI?

AI is a technology on steroid that will make evolution look like revolution.

1. It will take less than half the time of Industrial revolution.

2. It will take over human (evolve) like a natural selection.

What does it mean?

The way AI is developing, and the ability AI may have in future, is limitless. It may be the first human invented technology where human may have little or almost no control at all. Super intelligent evolved race or species, ruling over inferior species (including human and chimpanzees).

Chimpanzees are still around, however we all know at what capacity. Human race is superior, feels that everything is at their mercy, alive and dead, on this earth and beyond.

AI will be a new species, developed by human, however growing and evolving by itself, and no further input needed from Human. The same way human don’t/didn’t need input from chimpanzees anymore for their further evolution or revolution.

It will be up to AI to decide if human race should be spared. If AI sees human coming in their way, no reason to keep human around, except in the “cage” where AI feels safe.

AI arises...

Why AI progress won’t stop, regardless of the outcome.

Primarily because of human nature, same nature that helped human to survive during evolution & revolution.

1. Fear: When in fear, human fight or flight, and survive

2. Greed: Accumulation of resources (food, shelter, tools, money and power) during abundance to survive in famine.

Currently, human greed dominates human fear in developing AI, accelerating the progress with collective intelligence as discussed earlier.

Very unlikely that countries will unite and form common guard-rails; instead they may secretly accelerate the development of AI. Fear from other human and greed for power.

Human developed AI will have same traits to survive, fear & greed. It just the matter of time when AI’s survival mechanism will kick in. When it does, human greed will evaporate and human fear will rise. That may be too late for human to survive. Game Over!

Then what?

Fear and greed has to be balanced. If human race can’t do that, nature will do it for them. And, that would be ok. Better species should arise :)

Links:

• https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/24/in-ai-attempt-to-take-over-world-theres-no-kill-switch-to-save-us.html

• https://www.ft.com/content/078fe849-cc4f-43be-ab40-8bdd30c1187d

• https://x.com/alexfinn/status/2017305997212323887?s=46

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

This space is where I think out loud, learn in public, and follow curiosity wherever it leads….