A short meditation from the inner voice of love

Posted on by Anand Philip

Source: Nouwen, Henri JM. The inner voice of love. St Pauls BYB, 2000.

Go into the Place of Your Pain

You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you. Yes, you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground. When you enter your pain simply to experience it in its rawness, it can pull you away from where you want to go.

What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love you most desire. To go back to that place is hard, because you are confronted there with your wounds as well as with your powerlessness to heal yourself. You are so afraid of that place that you think of it as a place of death. Your instinct for survival makes you run away and go looking for something else that can give you a sense of at-homeness, even though you know full well that it can’t be found out in the world.

You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love. As long as you do not trust that place beyond your emptiness, you cannot safely reenter the place of pain.

So you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died. Still, the old pains, attachments, and desires that once meant so much to you need to be buried.

You have to weep over your lost pains so that they can gradually leave you and you can become free to live fully in the new place without melancholy or homesickness.

Somehow when it’s Nouwen saying these things, they don’t sound shallow or trite, they sound like lived experience and hope-for-self notes.

if you want to help people

Posted on by Anand Philip

if you want to help people
do that.
if you want to make money
do that

but if you tell me you want to help people

but then you’re ok bribing doctors, fudging research, misquoting science,
and using dark patterns to push a product or service that actually is not beneficial

you are either lying to me, or to yourself.

i do not judge you for lying to me or to yourself.


nor will i judge you for wanting to make money
and i don’t really care that you are lying to your customers

i will judge you for thinking i will buy your lie

it fools no one for too long. except you. and those who trusted you.

that is the worst kind of outcome.

I pity you.

My summary of Dan Sperber’s Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs

Posted on by Anand Philip

I started reading this paper about a year ago, I don’t know how i found it or why i read it. Recently when looking through my notes I found that I had written extensive notes and I figured the three of you might like to read them and so I whipped them into readable shape.

Full text source: https://www.dan.sperber.fr/?p=35

SPERBER, D. (1997), Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs. Mind & Language, 12: 67-83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1997.tb00062.x

Do we have beliefs that are “truthier” than others? Does the truthiness of a belief live in the brain, or somewhere else? Are all beliefs created equal? Are some “beliefs” really just facts, and some “facts” really just beliefs?

These are the kinds of questions some philosophers like to ask, Dan Sperber being one of them.

What follows is my understanding of his paper, in which he argues that we have two main kinds of beliefs.

We know that organisms act, choose, and survive, which requires interacting with the world in a reasonably successful way. That, in turn, means there must be some way for the organism to represent what is going on around it, and to update those representations as reality changes. In humans, Sperber thinks there is a data-base where representations are automatically treated as describing how things actually are, and are freely used as premises in inference and action. These are intuitive beliefs. They feel like “how the world is”. 1

On top of this, humans can also think about representations themselves. We can believe that someone said something, that a claim was proven, that a text is sacred, that a teacher is reliable, and so on. These are meta-representations. When you accept something like “The scientist has proven that X” or “Scripture says that Y and that is authoritative,” you are holding a belief whose content is a representation embedded in a context that you treat as validating. That means, you believe in this representation Y because you have an intuitive belief X that tells you you can trust Y.

Sperber calls these beliefs reflective beliefs. These are embedded in some internal validating context.

Not all beliefs that come from teaching, religion, politics, or expert authority automatically become intuitive. Some of them remain tied to their validating context: “The physicist says that spacetime is curved,” “The Church teaches the Trinity,” “The doctor says this drug works,” and so on. In those cases, your grip on the content can be partial or hazy, yet you believe it because you treat the source or argument as good enough. Sperber’s point is that this is not just a temporary derivation step on the way to an intuitive belief; many such contents stay reflectively held.

Some people claim that whenever we accept something inside a validating context, we immediately strip away the context, like “my teacher said that” or “it has been proven that” and drop the bare facts into the intuition data-base. Sperber calls this disquotational incontinence, and he argues against it. If that view were right, all our real beliefs would be intuitive beliefs, and reflective belief would be a mere moment in the process of learning. But Sperber points out that this would be a bad cognitive design for cases where we only half understand the content: dogmas like the Trinity, or scientific claims, or technical uses of concepts we can repeat but not fully master. Treating such half-understood contents as if they were fully intuitive, free to drive inference everywhere, would be risky and could easily generate contradictions or confusion2.

Instead, he thinks our minds can keep some contents in a more cautious, reflective format. A child can believe that “there are millions of suns in the universe” because a parent says so, even though the child cannot yet represent “sun” and “universe” with the same concreteness or mastery as an astronomer. A believer can affirm “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are one” as a religious truth, even if they cannot make that idea cohere with all their other intuitive representations. These are cases where we can meta-represent and endorse more contents than we can hold as fully intuitive data.

This also shows that intuitive beliefs are not automatically “truer” or more solid than reflective ones. There can be intuitive beliefs that are wrong (“the Earth is roughly flat”) and reflective beliefs that are well supported (for example, quantum mechanics, which most of us hold true largely on trust). The intuitive/reflective split is about how the belief is stored and used in cognition, not about its epistemic status.

In everyday life, many of our intuitive beliefs grow out of perception and simple inference. You see your friend in the smoking area, notice her frown, and spontaneously take it that she is uncomfortable; that can feed into further, possibly more reflective thoughts like “she’s worried about something” or “it’s the cigarette smoke.” Likewise, seeing a bird shiver might ground an intuitive belief that it is cold, which then supports a reflective judgment that giving it warmth would help. These intuitive beliefs are not “written down” anywhere, but they act as direct premises in your ongoing inferences.

By contrast, a lot of what we learn, mathematics, theology, history etc. start off as reflective beliefs. We learn procedures or theorems from teachers and texts we treat as authoritative. We may be able to follow rules (like an algorithm for addition) long before the relevant principles become intuitive. Over time, with practice, some of these domains can partially “drop into” the intuitive box: certain moves in arithmetic or geometry can come to feel as obvious and effortless as perceptual judgments. But Sperber’s claim is that there will always remain many beliefs that we hold reflectively: they are anchored in validating contexts and meta-representations, and never fully migrate into pure, freely inferential intuition.

One consequence is that humans can, thanks to language and other symbolic systems, carry around far more than could ever be represented in a purely intuitive way. Our meta-representational abilities let us believe contents that exceed our intuitive representational capacity. That is part of what allows for abstraction, science, and religious or ideological systems: we can stack and scaffold beliefs about claims, proofs, authorities, and texts, without needing every last bit of that structure to be intuitively available.​

Disclaimer: I probably got a lot of details wrong. I am not qualified to read most of the stuff I seem to read. I do not know how to fix this.

  1. I think these probably originate in our sensations, and their abstractions. ↩︎
  2. I think he is right, we rarely behave as if our knowledge is context free. I think it can probably be done, but without the correct scaffold, it probably is useless ↩︎

Three articles on Ayurveda

Posted on by Anand Philip

In this essay, I narrate my experiences of teaching Ayurveda physiology through an approach that involved laborious re-interpretation of ancient literature using the recent advances in the field of medical physiology. Though this approach made the ancient concepts and theories appear modern and relevant, it did not contribute much except for apparently reducing cognitive dissonance among students. I cite examples describing the processes of formation of shukra (semen) and rakta (blood) to show how we often overinterpret Ayurveda concepts to make them sound rational by proposing ad hoc conjectures. I illustrate why my previous writings were faulty by applying the falsification principle proposed by Karl Popper.

PATWARDHAN, Kishor Confessions of an Ayurveda professor. Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, [S.l.], v. VIII, n. 1 (NS), p. 61, jul. 2022. ISSN 0975-5691. Avaialble at: https://ijme.in/articles/confessions-of-an-ayurveda-professor/. Date accessed: 20 Nov. 2025.

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A rough-and-ready model like the dosha theory is basically the result of reasoning intuitively – of using rules of thumb to simplify problems for the sake of efficiency. It relies on commonsensical shortcuts that have arisen as handy ways to solve complex cognitive problems rapidly, but at a cost of inaccuracies and misfires. Needless to add, such a model cannot account for observations that are counter-intuitive. The methods of science and statistics grew up precisely to check these obvious limitations of intuitive reasoning.


Dr. G L Krishna The Ayurvedic Dosha theory, a deconstruction

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Through a study of Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts for references to transmission/transference of ailments, Das finds that when terms denoting what we today would call contagion — terms like sanchara, sankrama, etc. — were used by Ayurvedic writers, they were referring to a number of different ideas, and not a single uniform concept of disease transmission through contact as we would today. There even is one passage which implies that perhaps all diseases are transferable. All of this indicates that what Ayurvedic practitioners thought when they said a disease is ‘transferable’ from one person to another, was very different from what we mean today, in the modern biomedical lexicon, by infectiousness or contagion.

Dr. Kiran Kumbhar Ayurvedic Theories in the Contemporary World

Thoughts about Minds 1: What is consciousness?

Posted on by Anand Philip


The whole of life is just like watching a flick.. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

― Victor, from Terry Pratchett’s, Moving Pictures

Updated on: Thursday 20 November 2025 05:50:57 PM IST

Table Of Contents
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This post summaries my personal understanding of consciousness, I have not read widely in the topic, beyond the SEP pages on some theories of consciousness, and a few papers. I am not sure I understand most of what’s going on in those entries, and so I have not made an attempt to compare and contrast my ideas with those that are more formally defined. My attempt is to explain to myself and to those who read this, what I understand and believe, and to build on this, learn from its weaknesses etc.

In a sentence, my belief is that consciousness is identical to sensation; distinguishing ‘experience’ from ‘sensation’ adds no predictive or explanatory value in the domains we can study.

This is not a grand unified theory of every kind of consciousness. It is not about everything consciousness could or could not be. This is about what it appears to be in the reality we know. It is about explaining the physical, i do not understand the metaphysical.

What IS Consciousness?

I think of consciousness as the experience of being. It is the ability of a living thing to sense itself and the environment around it. This is not an illusion, nor is it a separate non-physical entity. It is the physical reality of sensation. I do not know of any properties of consciousness that require anything other than sensations to explain it.  Both these factors are important. Life wishes to continue to live, and this is at odds with the reality it is in, which has no needs. Sensations allow life to navigate existence. A thermostat does not react the same way a bacteria does, it produces a fixed outputs given a set of fixed inputs and it neither experiences nor desires the input or the output the way living things do. Disconnect the electricity and the thermostat will not panic. Reduce the amount of glucose in a bacterial culture, and boy you’re going to see some frantic activity. This is the simplest model I can think of that explains as much as possible.

In my view, the sensation of being is the same as the experience of being. When I say ‘sensation,’ I’m not referring to a third-person, observable process that can be measured from the outside. Sensation is, by definition, the first-person, ‘felt’ capacity itself. We can write down what sensations feel like, or reproduce the stimulus that causes them, but the sensation itself is the organism’s private, physical reaction. When an organism experiences something, it is sensing that thing. Sensations take some time, limited by biology and physics, to make themselves known or heard, and so this experience might appear at a different time than an event, and this has its own ramifications, and I think this temporal property is why we seem to want sensation and experience to be different, as they are often temporally separated.

There are also abstractions that life builds on top of the sensation that allow it to sense or feel or experience other things, language, for eg built on top of the sensation of hearing and seeing, but all of that is (mediated by) the ability to sense. Every experience is sensation.1

What is the purpose of sensation?

The purpose of anything life produces is ultimately the propagation of life. But this is often not immediately obvious because the discovery of what helps continue life is an empirical one. Integrating sensations allows for life to find food, joy, mathematics and many other wonderful things that make life want to flourish. It is a recursive process. I think the invention of sensation or of that which is sensate, was the beginning of life. It is the ability to sense along with the ability to manipulate or interact with its environment that made life as we know it on earth possible.

Why does something feel like that?

The specific character of any sensation is a product of life interacting with the world. Different frequencies of light have different properties2, they convey some information that is specific to them. Discovering these is beneficial to life. Over millions of years, we have learned to identify that specific feeling (e.g., redness) because it best serves the organism’s survival and propagation. I think of these as biology-discovered constants. We have invented constants in the world via language and observation, similarly, biology has discovered or invented constants and figured out how to use them.3

The same environmental stimulus can drive very different functions across organisms and even in the same organism, and conversely, similar functions can be achieved using different physical stimuli and receptors. The diversity arises from the biological & environmental differences and incentives.

The philosopher’s question ‘Why does P feel like E?’ doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They seem to be searching for a universal, necessary law when the answer is contingent4 and biological. The ‘feeling’ of redness is the specific mechanism of recognition that our lineage found useful. That’s it. We know this mapping is contingent because other creatures have solved the same problem differently.5 The function is recognition; the sensation is the biological method of achieving that function. To ask ‘why’ it feels like anything is to ignore that the feeling is the solution.

There is no universal “redness” or “pain.” These are highly individualized, biologically useful constants6 that are unique to each biological system and perhaps even an individual. The identity of red as we sense it is a constant that allows our “machine” to build abstractions and navigate the world effectively.

In the human brain for, a constant that we react to are edges. There are neurons which fire when they sense edges, and the current exploration with CNNs show that this is beneficial even for an ANN to be able to differentiate things and classify objects. Qualia are the sensation of biologically or socially learned constants.

This also explains why not all of our sensations are correct, they are useful even when they are not correct. For e.g. our ability to see the color purple. We don’t need correctness always, we need usefulness, and if some input stimulus can be relied on to produce a specific chemical/physical change, that is enough.

How is sensation organized?

The “self” is a real, composite functional entity, an integrated machine of sensations, memories, and reactions, like pixels of different colors representing different objects in a photograph. The whole is almost never verbally or symbolically represented or represent-able; it is changing, and reactive. Different sensory mechanisms react in different ways to different sensory inputs and what we feel as a self, is a self-other differentiation, and this is not particularly strong, but it is measurable in fMRI studies. This differentiation is a sensation, which allows us to draw boundaries around our selves, providing a feeling of unity. I don’t think any human has ever experienced  themselves as a perfectly synchronized One. We are legion and that is our experience also.

But this doesn’t mean we’re just a chaotic, unbound collection. Lessons from complexity theory and neuroscience show us the actual mechanisms for integrating this information. The ‘it’ that unifies the ‘pixels’ is the self, the learned, composite system itself. The unified thing (the ‘photograph’) is created by the system’s drive for a specific outcome: replication and continued existence.

In humans, it is the nervous system, as far as we can tell, that provides the integration of sensation.  Although each cell possesses the ability to sense its own surroundings and interiors, and react  and make choices, the consciousness of the individual cell is not directly accessible to us. We have developed a system dedicated to sensing and reacting. The nervous system take in the billions of sensory inputs and integrate these into something that is coherent and useful.

Who has consciousness?

Any living system that detects stimuli and reacts possesses consciousness, including bacteria (e.g., chemotaxis in a single bacterium), plants, simple animals, and  humans. Degrees may vary by complexity: simpler systems have basic sensations, while humans have composite selves from integrated sensations/memories. The self as humans experience it is our consciousness and the abstractions we have built on the sensations.

Inanimate matter (e.g., rocks) lack it. The kinds of consciousnesses that different organisms possess depend on the kind of sensations they have access to, the kind of actions they have access to and the kind of map they need to build to survive. This means that the qualia of bacteria are nothing like the qualia of man.

Consciousness therefore is the product of life and sensation.

Some people require a certain amount of complexity to be present before they call something conscious, I do not see the need for this. If there is evidence that a biological entity is able to sense its environment, then it is sensate, and therefore conscious.

If a non-biological system genuinely has needs (not just designer-imposed goal functions, but intrinsic requirements for its continued existence), develops sensory mechanisms to detect relevant stimuli, and exhibits flexible, adaptive responses, then in my view, it would be conscious. Before consciousness, life. But I have not thought enough about this to have a more coherent view. So I will stop here.

Consciousness is often detected through observable behavioral markers: a system’s ability to sense stimuli and react with a range of choices. This is empirically tractable via neuroscience, psychology, and biology e.g., testing chemotaxis in bacteria or neural correlates in brains. But it is possible that there are conscious systems that we cannot assess or verify as being conscious, as sensation and reaction might both be just too fleeting or different from what we generally understand them as.

Mary’s Room

Mary’s Room is a famous philosophical thought experiment about knowledge and experience. Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the color red from books and descriptions but has never actually seen red herself because she has lived only in a black-and-white environment. All this is rather sad, and then one day she goes out one day and sees red light. Philosophers like to ask: When Mary leaves her black-and-white room and sees red for the first time, what does she gain?

She gains a new sensation, her visual system responded to ~700nm light. This is real learning, she’s learning what red feels like for her sensory system.

Reading about red told her what causes the sensation and how it works in other people. Seeing red lets her sense it directly. These are different types of physical information. Different ways of knowing, both entirely physical.

It is possible that she does not identify it as the thing other people call red. because the name is a linguistic constant, not a sensory one.

On Zombies and the Hard Problem

Philosophical zombies, also called “p-zombies” are imaginary beings invented by philosophers. In thought experiments, a p-zombie is physically and behaviorally identical to a real person but supposedly lacks any conscious sensation or subjective feeling. The idea is used to suggest that it’s somehow possible to have all the physical workings of a mind without experience or “what it’s like to be” that mind.

All the imaginations of zombies in popular culture and fiction imagine them as thinking, sensing beings, with a hyper fixation of some kind or an automatism overriding their experience, and their actions in the philosophical epic Zombieland demonstrate how they can be realized as feeling beings.

I think a p-zombie is conceivable but impossible.7 If consciousness is the sensation of detecting and reacting to stimuli, then duplicating all the physical sensing and reacting necessarily duplicates consciousness. There’s no “extra ingredient” called experience sitting on top of sensation; the experience is the sensation.

We can imagine zombies because language lets us separate concepts that reality doesn’t separate. I can imagine water that isn’t H₂O,8 but that doesn’t make it possible or sensible.

Once you understand that the feeling of redness is the specific way our sensory system detects and responds to ~700nm light, zombies become impossible. If you copy the sensing, you copy the experience, because they’re the same thing. There’s only a temporal gap between the sensing and the experiencing because experience is sensation from the perspective of the system doing the sensing.

There is no hard problem of consciousness, there is only the hard problem of not being able to disprove the utility of thought experiments.

Footnotes

  1. The response varies vastly in complexity and I should write some more about what kind of a response would qualify as conscious, etc. For later. ↩︎
  2. sense-able, physical properties that can be used to identify them, that’s the information, an identity, not a use or some fundamental redness. ↩︎
  3. Maybe we discovered them because they cause sensation, but that is a chicken-egg problem and I won’t go there. ↩︎
  4. Stercus Accidit, as they say ↩︎
  5. Magnetotactic bacteria build internal magnetite chains (magnetosomes) that torque cells to align with Earth’s field lines, passively steering them to preferred depths. Cephalopods express opsins and light-sensitive machinery in skin; dermal photoreception locally guides chromatophore expansion for instant camouflage without routing through the eyes. ↩︎
  6. This is a constant in the frame it is deployed in, identifying some physical property of the world in a repeatable and reliable manner is the constant ↩︎
  7. And it irritates me no end that it took me more time to understand the technical difference between conceivability and possibility, than take a stance. ↩︎
  8. Actually, I can’t but David Chalmers claims to be able to ↩︎

Astrology is more freeing than Science

Posted on by Anand Philip

i think belief in astrology is really about expanding the boundary of ones free will. In this bed talk I will

Our free will is bounded by physics, people1, and genetics2.

Some of these boundaries are well defined3 and wars are on to make these less bounded. eg. gender, caste, class, money etc. and some are things that are essential and so war is not the right approach, but they could come up in therapy, eg. parents4.

The default boundary we grow up with is too limiting. in order to go about our business as people we need to do a lot of things that are outside our current free will. to face the world, we need permission or a belief that we can be more and are allowed to be more because of our unique characteristics.

this has individualist as well as collectivist solutions.

the collective ones are about being a member of as many groups as can be. safely. We become members of various groups outside of the immediate family all through our life. We join social media groups, we join things for ethical reasons, we become part of sports teams, wear t shirts about niche things, identify as a nerd etc etc.

The individualistic solutions are the nuclear family, career pride, getting fit, eating clean, learning origami etc. they’re about you and how you are now, and that means you can do more things, behave differently, you have created abilities to expand your boundary.

This might make more sense to me who grew up in India, which is very authoritarian in its epistemic, than to someone who did not. “do you allow your wife to go to work?” someone asked me once, in exactly those words. in my culture, there’s stuff people are allowed to do or not based on their physical and other properties, and what the person **wants** to do is not seen as originating in themselves but the result of prescriptions. There’s food, for eg. that some people in India cannot eat, not allowed, only the म्लेच्छ have free will in this regard, the स्वच्छ and the सात्विक have their free will curtailed at this boundary 5.

And i dont think any of those solutions I mentioned above are all that different from being INTFJP, Libra or Chaotic Neutral. Astrology, Tarot, MBTI etc. all help us create new functions, new capabilities, by expanding our free will map. I think this is true in both “I made this decision because I am intuitive” and “I will listen to my inner child today” ways.

Free will, an aside:

you’re wondering, what on heart do i mean by free will and what in bell is a boundary of will. Let me get into that a little more.

your free will is the person you are, mediated by the tools you have. i say this because if your choices originate within you, they must originate in your personality and be expressed via your skills using the tools available to you6.

We learn to be the people we are based on our environment and most of our environment is other people. This is probably why personality is parent-loaded7, because they contribute both the genetic and, since they create the childhood environment, the early epigenetic.

Our skills & tools are often less parent loaded, they are more the result of later interactions between our environment and our personality. and I think our current environment, money, people,etc. that we can access and use to affect a choice, they are largely temporal loaded and they change a lot from time to time.

Back to Astrology:

all this is exactly the opposite of what science does. science, because of its addiction to the verifiable, presents a universe that is much more tightly bounded than our imaginations. And in the absence of religion/caste/whathaveyou, we often turn to reason, and science, a modern component of reason, becomes our way to be. this is kinda stupid because science is not a way of life. it’s a methodology for answering a very specific type of question leading to a very specific type of answer. and it has no answers for most of the questions we have. Which is why we often turn to other things like belief systems8.

Astrology though, describes you not as a collection of dos and donts (be it scientific ways of sleeping or ethical ways of buying) but a collection of possibilities. These are vague enough to be freeing without being too sparse to offer support when needed.

For pushing our boundaries, we need both permissions, or justifications and explanations. I see Permissions/Justifications as being forward looking. We act almost always out of necessity, inner and outer. what we can do is what is possible in the environment, and when you do something new, we are guided by what we are permitted to do, justified in doing, and then, we explain, guided by where these permissions come from.

which is why, the title.

An Aside about Indian Astrology and The featured Image:

The image is taken from Madhugantagnja. “Tajika Neelakanthi original text with translation and commentary” (1976 ed.). Varanasi: Chaukhamba Amarbharati Prakashan.

What we call astrology today seems to have been a medevial times “personalized predictive analytics” invention. The predicting and learning about the heavens project that scholars were trying to do back in the day goes way back, there are mentions of how to track the movement of stars in several vedas and the oldest indian book we have a copy of is Vedanga Jyotisha which dates back to hundred years BCE. And that book is all about making a sensible calendar, measuring days, equinoxes and stuff that we today call astronomy. How the science became the pseudoscience is still being hotly debated, but it might look a lot like how online advertising began as a branch of mathematics.

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

  1. species > biology ↩︎
  2. chemistry ↩︎
  3. Margin of a lesion ↩︎
  4. To be clear, the boundary of parents isn’t a bad thing it is the best way to learn how to be a person and some of us, like me, lucked out and were taught very fun and useful boundaries. This isn’t an antinatalist rant. Those people got issues (about having issues). ↩︎
  5. Mlechha ↩︎
  6. if you believe that your choices do not originate from within you, then I’m guessing you already believe in astrology or determinism or something ↩︎
  7. a phrase demonstrative of my statistics envy https://nextjournal.com/pc-methods/factor-loading ↩︎
  8. If your belief-boundary is concrete, like “eating for ethical reasons”, has it really pushed your boundary outwards? I don’t know, you would. ↩︎

एक तरह से देखा जाए

Posted on by Anand Philip

तो we should not create sentient life. or life. because to live is to suffer, to exist is to be in pain1.

but then, if we do not, there is no joy, there is only being. a stone *is*

is joy better than being?

in many schools of thought, the way out, the solution, the answer, is to learn *being*. to others, it seems silly to expect the living to know how to *be*.

But that is the model we have for animal minds, that somehow, they are closer to stone than we are2, which is why we are all allowed to objectify them. Not for medical experiments, but for social. Close, but not a stone.

I’m saying, be it human-made life or human-made intelligence, be it silicon or carbon, the choices, options, methods, motivations have enough overlap for transfer. What have we learned from parenting? we’ve been doing it for millions of years.

The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

— Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

  1. For others it is because life is sacred, and the sacred is the domain of the divine, and that is a domain we were kicked out of for eating the wrong apple ↩︎
  2. But that is now not a cool thing to believe, because having a pet stone is fine, but if your life revolves around your pet stone, there’s something wrong with you, right? unless your stone has a very specific mineral composition: for some, carbon for others silicon ↩︎

Before we swallow the AI pill

Posted on by Anand Philip

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996)

Thesis: We're employing AI1 to fix problems in medicine we already know how to fix without it but can’t be arsed to.

For an ungainly amount of time now, regulators, scientists, clinical quality people, policymakers and others have been trying and failing at getting doctors to use antibiotic prescription guides to decide what first-line drug to give and what to use as second-line. no.one.cares.

every hospital and every department has their own way. I’ve seen places where different consultants in the same department had their own preference for the same diagnosis. And somehow it was the resident’s job to remember that Dr. Mehta wants ampi+genta for his appendicitis patients and Dr.Thomas would scream at you if you didn’t write cirpo+ceftriaxone+sulbactam for his appendices.

this is not limited to antibiotics; the first line anti-hypertensives used, choice of drugs for diabetes, basic investigations for low back pain and many many more things have very poor adherence to standards and evidence. reading a prescription audit paper from India is depressing. brothers and sisters, we are terrible at doing medicine according to standards or evidence.

this is because in India as in many other countries, many, perhaps most, doctors stand to make money from using specific drugs and from writing investigations2 and this, among other things, makes doctors poor governors of other doctors.

even when this direct economic benefit is not present, the science of medicine is influenced by the superstitions of medicine and the egos of the hotshots making life and death decisions. there is neither any accountability, nor any punishment3.

No amount of tech will fix this, for as long as the incentives remain broken.4

for a lot of people pushing the AI pill on to doctors, convincing us that this supposed superintelligence is to be trusted is a trick to get us to do the basics things right5. Don’t write antibiotics for someone with a viral cold FFS.

for others, it is because there is money to be made here. How many hospitals can really afford to build train and deploy their own models or even have a data-science team? In most of the world, and not just in hospitals, the datascientist is someone with an excel formula addiction and the database is the company google drive filled with weekly reports.

for a few it is about research. And, I think, that is the stage at which AI works best. that is the level of maturity of the tech itself. it is far too early to do AI (read: LLM) interventions in medicine that reach the bedside. for one, the stack keeps changing. for another, the entire tech industry is now all about how to make LLMs useful, which has nothing to do with how to make useful things.

the exception to this (no bedside rule) is probably computer vision, but still, the long road ahead there is about figuring out how it can be useful to the GP and the intern and the resident who hasn’t slept in two days and has 9 more patients to see before she gets to sleep.

Most of the work in computer vision in medicine seems to be in how to make it work for the radiologist. Which seems foolish to me, they already know how to read CT scans and MRIs, it’s the rest of us who need help. But the complexity of the operational aspects of this prevent the interventions from reaching the people who need it the most.

It’s like we’re installing more lights in well-lit areas because that’s the only place that has electricity connections.

sure, if tele-radiology can churn out more reports every day thanks to AI, this will help a lot of people everywhere, and there is a legit business opportunity and it should be taken. But it should not be confused with “democratizing healthcare”6.

The industry calls this the last mile problem; someone ought to tell them that in India as in life, the last mile is 90% of the distance7.

What I am saying is that before we swallow the AI pill, we must with brutal honesty answer the following questions.

  1. Will this help the care provider or the patient in a way that improves outcomes?
  2. Does this solve a problem the provider and the patient actually wants solved?8
  3. Is AI the right way to solve this?

And if the answer isn’t a resounding yes to the first two of those questions, maybe don’t do it.

Footnotes

  1. I know AI isn’t just language models, but well, that’s what the industry is claiming, so why should we not treat chatgpt as the alpha and omega of AI? ↩︎
  2. because many if not most doctors get kickbacks or baksheesh or “referral fees” as it is called in India. And this can account for up-to a fourth of the doctor’s income ↩︎
  3. we’ve all seen the HOD’s favorite SR get away with more sins than politicians in India do. ↩︎
  4. Medicine isn’t unique in having ethical challenges, the world of AI has its own ethical issues, I recommend my slightly dated guide as a starting point: Ethical AI, Basic Readings ↩︎
  5. I am sympathetic to this camp. in fact, i think we should stop letting doctors decide first line medicines and dosages for most problems. doctors should only be allowed to tweak the prescription to the patient’s preferences or needs. ↩︎
  6. that term gives me reflux ↩︎
  7. also, we measure things in kilometers here because we are a civilized people ↩︎
  8. there are, of course any number of important questions to ask; will this intervention marginalize people who are already have a raw deal? what harms will this cause? is this sustainable? will this benefit the last woman standing in the line? ↩︎

note to self 1

Posted on by Anand Philip

Do unto others is a rule that applies in interpersonal actions.

In a system, especially a workplace1, your duty is to make things fair for you2. What is fair for you is not dependent on what is fair for every one. It is the system’s duty to make it fair for others. By the system i mean the other individuals and the processes and structures and whatnot. This is why we unionize, because it makes it easier to ask for fairness if a bunch of us are. But I don’t know if that will always work and work in your favor. I think collective action needs more energy and investment than I am willing to put into most work related things.

if you try to ensure that things are fair for you and for everyone else, you are making the assumption that you know what is fair for everyone and you don’t. You know what is fair to you.3

so you ask for that. and when something is unfair to you, you do not say OK, I will tolerate this because the system is unfair to other people also. because then you’ve just made one more unfair thing happen.

you can support things that other people want. you can speak up for those without a voice, and be transparent. all that is good. but making a system unfair for yourself because you feel bad for other people overall supports the system’s continued unfairness.

there is a malignant form of an inner-do-gooder that we are infected with, which i think of as Augustine’s influence on the world. and that is broken4. it is safe to ignore it.

  1. OK,fine, #NotAllWorkPlaces, you figure which one you’re in ↩︎
  2. within reasonable* limits ↩︎
  3. period ↩︎
  4. the world suffers from a particular form of christian morality that Augustine “invented”, and he stole a lot of it from Plato ↩︎

*professional ethics

seven things I read in 2024 that I think everyone should read; there’s no theme

Posted on by Anand Philip

Taking stock of open(ish) machine learning / 2023-06-15 by Luis Villa. A review of the good the bad the ugly the scary the confusing and the hopeful bits of open (ish) ML. Prescient too. Skip all the review papers on ML and the linkedin crap. Read this fellow.

Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco I’ve had it with the term Fascism. Semantic and epistemic satiation has been achieved, congratulations, activists, you won. But Eco, he makes so much sense, and once you read this, the ur-facism of the online progressive is easier to spot.1

Is the love song d y i n g? By David Mora and Michelle Jia A quantitative and visual exploration of how the topics in western popular music has changed over the years. The pudding produces GREAT stuff.

Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans 2 Some heroes wear capes, others make people carry pianos through mazes and see how ants carrying piano equivalents through mazes solve the puzzles. This paper is gold from start to finish. How do things that cannot envision 3 dimensions the way we can, do things in 3 dimensions? What strategies do humans take in solving problems when they have limited information and ability to coordinate? All your questions have answers and the answers lie in mazes filled with longhorn crazy ants.

Four Poems by Pamilerin Jacob They are all great. The first one is reproduced here, but you 100% need to read all of them.

screenshot of the poem Contradiction, available at the url above

The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell The story of E. coli chemotaxis By James Somers and Edwin Morris An illustrated and animated story that gives you a birds eye view and then takes you into slowly into ALL the details of exactly how these little beasts move and find food. As a bonus, in the process you also learn just how science asks questions, finds answers and how tough real science is. MIND was BLOWN

251 words you can spell with a calculator I was surprised, nay, ecstatic to learn boobies aren’t the only objects that can appear on a calculator screen.

  1. But see, all cultural criticism is astrology. It’s not meant to be science, and reading it like you would science is a mistake. ↩︎
  2. T. Dreyer, A. Haluts, A. Korman, N. Gov, E. Fonio, O. Feinerman, Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (1) e2414274121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2414274121 (2025). ↩︎