Anuraag.xyz

  • Beyond words

    What is the meaning of putting these words down? Is it an attempt to find some internal core, a feeling that must be rendered into language to be understood? Why can’t moods clarify themselves and reveal their deeper meaning without this intermediary? Language comes up short so many times.

    I suspect that with large language models, we will have a new type of language and communication—and hence, a new type of human experience. What I’m about to say may sound like dystopian sci-fi, but if we extend current AI with mass surveillance and some form of continual learning, it will create a personalized warden, marketer, guru, coach, parent, and perhaps even a god for each one of us. In such a world, maybe the only truly free human expression will be a silence that can only be deciphered by the soul in its midst. It would be a secret form of communicating with yourself, first and foremost, before we discover what a new language of shared human experience beyond words might be.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that LLMs, taken to their computational and logical extremis, will be the end of this era of language. What may emerge naturally from this mix of societal and political upheaval, as AI becomes omnipresent, is a new dimension of communication and connection between humans—one that would make the current era seem like the telegraph era feels to us today. It will not be about the efficiency and robustness of the channel, the medium, or the message. It might just be about how it remains, always, a few major steps away from being figured out computationally.

    If Roger Penrose is right that consciousness is not computational, then the very means by which we connect as seemingly separate instances of this larger, unified consciousness must eventually evolve to a dimension that computation cannot ever catch.

    And yet, we live in a time when AlphaFold has deciphered protein folding, which seems like precisely the kind of natural phenomenon that lies at the very limit of what is computationally possible to recreate in silicon.

    AI will force humanity to urgently redefine almost every aspect of what makes us unique—our very identity as a species. The greatest irony is that our god-like ability to create new technological and scientific breakthroughs is the very thing leading to a deeper existential crisis about our own nature. It turns out that when Nature or God gives you the ability to be almost anything and everything, you risk feeling like nothing specific. It leads to a crisis of both collective and individual identity.

    Across the ages, the deepest thinkers of the human condition have returned, again and again, to a similar conclusion: only one thing can be said with confidence about human nature. We seem cursed to always hang in the middle—too aware to be simply animal, but too impotent, unsure, and mortal to be God.

    (P.S. I keep returning to Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death so organically that I think it’s high time I re-read it and write about him.)

  • AI coding frustrations

    There’s a strange bargain being struck in the world of AI. Companies are launching powerful tools in what feels like a perpetual beta, with developers and early adopters serving as the de facto QA team. We hear endlessly about the power of these new coding assistants, yet so many users are caught in a frustrating loop of one step forward, two steps back. Features like Claude Code’s Sub Agents are added to amplify their capabilities, but without perfect execution, they often just create a high-volume mess of unhelpful code.

    In this race for market and mind share, it feels as though the Overton window for what is considered “production-ready” has been fundamentally shifted. We have tacitly agreed that it’s okay for our most advanced tools to be non-deterministic—for them to be confidently wrong. This has created an unprecedented dynamic where the burden of managing a tool’s inherent flaws is passed from its creator to its user. I can’t think of another major technology wave where the responsibility to use a product correctly—to work around its core deficiencies—was so squarely placed on the customer.

    As we release ever more powerful models, the immediate risk isn’t just a catastrophic failure, but a more pervasive and corrosive frustration for the people trying to integrate them into their work.

    Out of this mess, a new cottage industry is being born. Communities of practice are forming to share tips and workarounds. A massive opportunity has opened up for consultants, service providers, and content creators who can help others make sense of the chaos. In the short term, the people who will gain an edge are those who persistently experiment, learn from the collective, and keep tweaking these tools until they behave. The tech giants will surely improve their models over time, but we are still some ways from a truly seamless experience.

    This same friction between expectation and reality is why the first wave of AI-native hardware startups failed so miserably. Their products collided head-on with what we demand from a physical device: reliability. A piece of hardware is supposed to just work. This requires a cognitive upheaval from consumers, a new willingness to accept a certain level of failure from our gadgets. We don’t tolerate this from our phones, and the inconsistency of early voice assistants like Alexa bred a deep-seated distrust that they never fully overcame.

    So, how do we, as a consumer base, become okay with the non-deterministic nature of AI? No one has a clear answer. It’s a dealbreaker in coding, in finance, and in countless other B2B scenarios where precision is non-negotiable. The only places this unpredictability is celebrated are in creative applications—image and text generation—where the hallucinations are reframed as serendipity.

    When you look at the mountain of capital that has poured into the AI market over the last five years, the path forward seems like a combination of storytelling, freebies, influencer marketing and a general fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude. For the valuations to make sense, the industry has to solve the problem of reliability. It must meet the deterministic expectations of the enterprise and the average consumer, or risk the entire boom leading to another long AI winter before fundamental breakthroughs such as continual learning come about. In and all, what a time to be alive!

  • The ultimate outsource

    I’ve been thinking about what it means to abstract the process of learning to an AI. You simply state the goal you want, and the entire journey of figuring it out is left to the LLM. This applies to any creative project, whether it’s coding, writing, or design. It’s as if the end product justifies the means, and the means is whatever the AI decides to do.

    This path leads to a world where, in an attempt to push more and more of the process below AI’s abstraction layer, humans are relegated to a very thin slice at the top. We are only supposed to focus on what we want, not how or why. A little of the why, perhaps, but a core part of the joy in doing anything is the learning process itself—a journey of understanding that can never be fully captured by this outsourcing.

    We are already seeing the cracks in the promise that AI will free us from mundane tasks so we can pursue more human, creative work. Instead of liberation, the expectation is simply more. If you’re a developer, you’re now expected to be a 50x developer. If you’re a creative writer, you’re expected to produce more content. The list goes on. The implicit message is, “Don’t spend time thinking about the how, or learning things deeply—just deliver more output.” It is the classic capitalist impulse to extract more, and it’s sad to see that, yet again, a new technological paradigm is being bent toward this purpose. Humans will be expected to produce more and more, while focusing less on the profound experience of what it means to truly engage with their work.

    I suspect this is creating a new class hierarchy between those who are in the know and those who are not. Take a highly skilled software developer who, through decades of trial and error, failure and success, has cultivated a deep knowledge of how to program well. The way they feel, I suspect, is a kind of in-group, out-group defensiveness. They see these newcomers who think they can just prompt an AI to get the output that they themselves struggled so hard for. This isn’t real, they might think. This isn’t earned. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

    And in a sense, they are right. What they feel is their hard work, their creativity, and their entire learning process being diminished. They know deep down how valuable that journey was as a human experience, even when it was full of suffering and hardship. They see newcomers as people taking a shortcut, emulating a mastery they have not earned. But perhaps it’s just two different ways of looking at the same thing. What I feel is missing from the conversation is a focus on the human, emotional, and psychological aspects of what it will mean to do something in the world to come.

  • Build >> Buy?

    One of the most significant impacts of AI will be the proliferation of custom-built tools and apps. While this was technically possible before, the friction for non-developers was simply too high. I believe we’re at the beginning of a genuine democratization of software, where curious individuals can finally build tools for their personal needs, perhaps extending them to a few people around them.

    This shift will eventually transform the classic “build vs. buy” calculation for businesses, starting with SMBs. For years, the default was to buy. Why would a small business spend precious time and energy building non-core functions? They bought, which led directly to the massive SaaS sprawl we see today. That tide is turning. For SMBs, the new incentive is to kill the bloat by building lean software that perfectly fits their use cases. Of course, common productivity tools will remain, but the custom plumbing and specific AI applications will increasingly be built in-house.

    As companies mature and complexity grows, this trend will only accelerate. The need for custom software will increase, but meeting that need won’t be the time-and-energy sink it once was, nor will it fall solely on the existing developer team. Instead, everyone will be expected to contribute a fraction of their time to building the tools they need to be more effective and successful in their own roles.

    My personal exploration has been focused on that first piece: building the tools I’ve always wanted but were either locked behind expensive SaaS subscriptions or a $10/month fee that made me think, “I can build this myself, why should I pay?” For me, experimenting with AI for coding has been a revelation. Now that I’ve committed to a $100 monthly Claude Code subscription, I suspect I’ll be building a lot more of these tools myself.

    Let’s see where it goes.

  • What if this life is a gift, and we are just supposed to learn how to say thank you?

    What if our primary task as human beings is to learn how to express the deepest gratitude for the unmerited gift of awareness? Our very existence is owed to it, an eternal mystery of unconditional love—or, as some might perceive it, an eternal ‘debt.’ This perspective re-frames the pervasive guilt we often carry: the relentless drive to maximize potential, the self-criticism for perceived shortcomings, the persistent feeling of being ‘not-good-enough-yet.’ Could this negativity stem not from our failings, but from a fundamental misunderstanding—the misplaced notion that we must somehow earn this gift, rather than simply accept it wholeheartedly?

    If so, the path to truly deserving this gift lies not in relentless effort driven by a sense of cosmic debt, but paradoxically, in first learning to fully accept it. This means embracing the existence that is you—your body, your mind, and all your unique ways of being and acting. Such self-love becomes the primal act of receiving, the key to unlocking unbounded gratitude. Instead of striving to repay a debt, assuming we will feel worthy only after sufficient toil, we can choose to first learn how to genuinely say ‘thank you.’ This cultivates a kinder, purer, and more gentle relationship with ourselves, an inner alignment from which authentic goodness and impactful actions naturally flow into the world.

    Transforming our relationship with ourselves is a vital, yet often forgotten, lesson. It’s as if, somewhere in our evolutionary journey, the emergence of a ‘separate self’ created an enduring sense of separation—a deviation from an inherent perfection into a state of guilt and shame. This self, driven by a primal need to establish its worthiness and fearing its precarious position, strives endlessly, sometimes through prideful dominion, to earn its place and assert control.

    Yet, moving beyond this struggle of the separate self, I have come to see that the true ‘task’ a Higher Being, or the universe itself, ‘gives’ us is simpler and more profound: to experience and create love. This, I believe, is the whole point. Perhaps there is a cosmic interplay, not a war in the traditional sense, but a dynamic tension between this inherent drive towards love and the self-asserting dominion that has forgotten its source. Our journey, then, is to return to love. That, in essence, is the core ‘technology’ of the cosmos—the fundamental operating principle that gratitude and self-acceptance unlock within us, allowing love to remember its source and guide our way.

  • Hero’s Journey

    I realized today that I have misunderstood the notion of the hero’s journey. It’s not ‘a’ hero’s journey; it’s a motif for ‘every’ individual’s journey.

    What does it mean to be heroic? It is not solely about external validation, though widespread recognition for the journey is undeniably part of the experience. Heroism is about a profoundly personal internal battle with Fear: understanding its roots within us, then charging headfirst against that darkness to slay the dragons therein and emerge victorious.

    One can keep refusing the call—saying ‘no thanks,’ or ‘not yet’—but this refusal tends to keep the individual stuck, chained in a single place. No real progress occurs as long as a person remains subjugated by their fears.

    So, what are these fears? Why do they exist in the first place?
    To state the obvious, fear initially serves self-preservation, an animal instinct crucial for survival. In humans, however, this same instinctual capability has been weaponized for social situations, where public embarrassment or ridicule, for instance, can feel like a form of death.

    In other words, the socially constructed self can feel the fear of annihilation or injury, much like the physical substrate that supports it.

    In an ideal hero’s journey, the socially constructed self awakens to the reality of its non-essential nature—not meaning it gets annihilated, but rather that it becomes free from these socially constructed fears. This liberation allows one to operate with a kind of freedom previously unthinkable, unimaginable, while simultaneously allowing the body’s instinct for self-preservation to function, preventing reckless physical risks.

    I can maintain prudent physical behaviors and safeguard my health while attaining a sort of ‘immortality shield’ in approaching societal problems and challenges that previously instilled fear. Think of public speaking, expressing one’s mind freely, choosing friends and community unapologetically, and dealing with so-called ‘personal attacks’ in words from others.

    Will this necessarily make someone an inconsiderate, megalomaniacal narcissist, indifferent to how they make others feel? This is yet another social fear. One must trust that a higher form of morality will manifest once an individual begins speaking their truth, free from the anxiety of inadvertently hurting others. (This last part I still need to understand more deeply.)

  • Beginning, again

    Today marks the resumption of my daily meditation practice.

    It is important for a simple reason: to re-engage with, to remember, the conceptual, symbolic web of interconnections we are all caught within—indeed, what we largely are at that fundamental level. Our very being seems woven from language. ‘Me’ is defined by language and symbol. There appears to be no true ‘escape’.

    This remembrance brings a sense of okayness, a fragile peace that lasts until the forgetting inevitably returns. And we forget because the experience of language is now so all-encompassing. It is the ocean we float in each moment, the clothes we wear, the very air we breathe. It has even infiltrated the realm of sleep. Meditation on pure sensation offers the only remaining glimpse, a way to see through this pervasive medium. Ironically, I find myself crafting this reminder using the very ‘stuff’ I’m trying not to lose myself within.

    Language, it seems, has also claimed sovereignty over our emotional landscape. Our feelings often arise from how deeply we immerse ourselves in its narratives and structures. While a ‘pure’, non-symbolic emotional state might theoretically exist, I suspect it’s now so thoroughly intermingled with language that differentiating it becomes nearly impossible—at least, until one grows accustomed to extended periods of being ‘language-free’ (a state one might also call ‘thoughtlessness’).

    During those brief moments when the language of words pauses or diminishes, a visual symbolic language often takes its place. Interpretation then feels automatic, instantaneous—much like the sounds we hear without conscious effort.

    The idea behind the Vipassana-style abandonment of symbolic processing isn’t to kill the mind. Rather, it’s to generate a sense of utter freedom from the cages of symbolic orientation—a system which, knowingly and unknowingly, operates as the most complex, interconnected mechanism for the control and management of human beings.

    Yet, this glimpse of how utterly free we truly are does not shatter the symbolic order once and for all. It cannot, because our very identity is composed of the same building blocks that function as crucibles of power dynamics and control within the larger, interconnected symbolic fabric. As one might ask: “Can a part of the set, whose whole definition is that it is part of that set, escape the set?”

    And so, this potential for freedom is often framed as destruction—as the death of the idea of self.

    I feel the only way forward is to play with it—to engage in an infinite game that never reaches a final closure, but instead enables a dance that makes one feel profoundly alive. This isn’t about subjugation, but about an acceptance of this symbolic Other, and a realization that we all possess the means to rehash and redefine the language and symbols. Through this play, we can spark countless rebirths of our idea of self, our identities, the very stories that shape who we think we are, how we feel, and how we interact with our fellow symbolic meat puppets.

  • Mono no aware

    I

    Witness it All

    The remembrance and The forgetting

    Of the fact That

    I

    Witness it all

  • Being what is

    “Appearances do not exist in themselves but only relatively to the subject in which, so far as it has senses, they inhere.”

    – Immanual Kant

    I first heard of Joscha Bach when YouTube suggested that I watch his discussion with Lex Fridman. I thought I’m in for a deep discussion on just AGI, but the talk was nothing short of spiritual for me. There were a lot of amazing things that Joscha said on the podcast, and I’ll probably write a detailed post on that someday. For this post, one specific thing that he mentioned is relevant. This was in context of what is the ‘true’ nature of reality vs what we perceive it to be. Joscha in his trademark calm demeanor quips that “there is no color or sound in the Real world”.

    We of course know this, but it’s easily forgotten in our daily experience. Kant discussed this quite eloquently in his classic work, ‘Critique of pure reason’ where he differentiated between Phenomenal and Noumenal ‘things’. Color perceptions are entirely phenomenal. It’s a conscious experience that would not exist in itself if there were no conscious mind to have those experiences in the first place. In addition, the same ‘color’ (i.e., wavelength of light that is reflected vs absorbed) is perceived differently by different people, though they all might agree to call the different perceptions by the same name (for example, there is a lot of strong evidence that color perception varies across gender).

    In contrast, Kant defined Noumenal as something whose existence does not depend upon being perceived by some mind. These ‘things’ exist independently of us and our sensibilities. (Joscha calls this the ‘quantum graph’ in the podcast)

    In his notion of ‘transcendental idealism’, Kant went on to propose that:

    it is possible to demonstrate the empirical reality of space and time, that is to say, the objective validity of all spatial and temporal properties in mathematics and physics, but this empirical reality involves transcendental ideality. Space and time are forms of human intuition, and they can only be proved valid for things as they appear to us and not for things as they are in themselves.

    In general, Kant’s investigations in the ‘Transcendental Logic’ lead him to conclude that:

    understanding and reason can only legitimately be applied to things as they appear phenomenally to us in experience. What things are in themselves as being noumenal, independent of our cognition, remains limited by what is known through phenomenal experience.

    This brings us to the title of this post. To begin to talk about ‘Being what is’, we need to first clearly define ‘Being’ and ‘What is’ to the best of our ability. I give the Kantian context above because I think that it’s a clear way of wrapping one’s mind around ‘what-is’:

    ‘What-is’ is Kant’s ultimate Noumena.

    ****

    “Whereever you look, you see what you are looking for.”

    – RamDass

    Trying to observe what-is is a key initial teaching for anyone exploring meditation. A lot of guided meditations start with the instruction of bringing awareness to the breath. Every thought and sensation is allowed to appear as it is. The only other instruction is to observe what is happening without trying to change or engage with it in any other way.

    The challenge of course is that the very act of observation (Phenomenal) changes what-is (Noumena) and mixes it up with our mind’s what-ought-to-be. Our conditioning will always color the way we observe and interpret the information from our senses, and this sensory information is itself a model of the Noumenal Reality. The simple act of noticing the sensations arising in consciousness carries with it a ‘concept’ map of the body in which it is apparently located. The apparent act of observation also creates the observer (the ‘me’) who is seemingly acting on objects.

    So how can one really observe what-is if the act of observation will change it? Well, you cannot. The only possibility is being what is.

    ****

    This subject-object perception is a by-product of our brain’s basic nature of information processing and discrimination (most of this happens in the neocortex).

    The emergent mind manufactures various preferences, likes, goals, desires, needs and wants that fracture what-is into multitude of opposites: Good-bad, right-wrong, pain-pleasure, happy-sad, true-false. Fear is a key underpinning knob of this system, and the dial is adjusted via an interplay of a variety of conditioned patterns. Some of these patterns go back thousands of years in our evolutionary history and they manifest as instinctive fight or flight responses.

    For most of us now, our basic survival is not under threat on most occasions, and we don’t know what to ‘do’ with this default evolutionary survival toolkit that we ship with. Since it doesn’t really need to be used to ensure survival against a harsh environment, we use it in our everyday life. This large hammer of survival instincts creates an existential nail out of every life situation. A work situation makes our anxiety and stress go up to the same degree as if we are going to be attacked by a wild animal. A small financial setback floods our body with cortisol, as if our food security is under threat.

    Instead of letting this toolkit run our day to day life, we should try to transcend it. It is simply not required in most life situations. And in an unforeseen situation that poses an actual threat to your survival, trust that your default toolkit will come to your aid automatically.

    This transcendence of the toolkit requires you to practice abandoning the use of your mind when it is not really needed. Just like your tongue is not actively trying to taste when there is nothing in your mouth, we should learn how to switch off our discriminating minds when there is no real problem to solve.

    Meditation is the practice of switching off your mind’s default activity – trying to solve so-called problems by discriminating what-is into what-ought-to-be. The resulting state of such a meditation is called ‘Being’ – a state of complete non-discrimination.

    Being is a state of complete acceptance and surrender by your mind, where there is a momentary cessation of its entire activity. And in this state of complete non-discrimination, there is an opportunity to be what-is, not by observation, but by complete dissolution of any subject and object.

    It’s impossible to describe this state in words. The various pointers that sages have left us over the years can cause this collapse of the mind to happen, but there are no rules to this. It’s a causeless happening. The beingness is not due to or dependent upon any sort of intellectual understanding. It is our essential nature that cannot ever be recognized by the mind ; the empty set that contains everything.

    Any attempt by the mind to cause this will necessarily lead to illusions that can get quite tricky to see through. An extremely common one is the fact that once your mind understands the above intellectually, it tries to objectify its non-discriminating state itself. 1

    ****

    One practical ‘method’ that I’m trying out to get around this trickery is the ‘fractal object collapse’ meditation. In a nutshell, it’s a state of recursive observation that collapses the process of observation completely.

    Start by doing the only thing you can ‘do’ – observe your mind’s discrimination process by the automatic stream of thoughts that come up to the surface. When you initially begin, the act of such an observation will become an object in itself. Instead of resting your mind here, continue to follow the process of observing-objectification ad infinitum. As you continue to observe recursively, you will feel a sense of going deeper and deeper into a bottomless pool of pure awareness. The effort can feel excruciatingly frustrating since there will be a sense of the process always being one step ahead of your ability to catch it via observation. Observation -> Objectification -> Observation….

    Eventually, there would be a complete cessation of this observation process and hence any objectification. No one can say how ‘long’ this will last, but you’ll notice a complete rest and relaxation of the observing-objectification loop. The energy being spent on this process will subside and along with it your mind will come to a sudden pause; a glimpse of the great silence and peace of the void that lies at the core of your being.

    And That is pure ‘being what is’.

    Root:

    1 – In some sense calling it a state causes this to happen. It should be called ‘state-less’ state to begin with.

    [This post originally appeared on my substack]

  • Recognizing the ‘I thought’

    “Mind is only a collection of thoughts and the thinker who thinks them. The thinker is the ‘I’-thought, the primal thought which rises from the Self before all others, which identifies with all other thoughts and says, ‘I am this body’. When you have eradicated all thoughts except for the thinker himself by ceaseless enquiry or by refusing to give them any attention, the ‘I’-thought sinks into the Heart and surrenders, leaving behind it only an awareness of consciousness. This surrender will only take place when the ‘I’-thought has ceased to identify with rising thoughts. While there are still stray thoughts which attract or evade your attention, the ‘I’-thought will always be directing its attention outwards rather than inwards. The purpose of self-enquiry is to make the ‘I’-thought move inwards, towards the Self. This will happen automatically as soon as you cease to be interested in any of your rising thoughts.” – Annamalai Swami