I was watching a vlog of a man who built a hovercraft and spent three days alone near the Arctic, traveling in it and camping. There he mentioned motion sickness. I instantly thought of the vestibular system in the inner ear, the cerebellum, and all that. I asked AI, particularly ChatGPT, for some thought experiments so it could simulate ideas around what I was thinking. Things like, what if the fluid of the inner ear somehow vanished? What if the hair cells relying on that fluid vanished? And eventually I arrived at a much older question, are things real in the way we perceive them to be?
So the question I deliberately asked was: is the physical world real in the way we see it, and the way we perceive it? Or are there too many filters, fillers, and distortions? The essential question was, if perception is constructed, then what is real?
It answered without diplomacy. The physical world is not as we see it, which is a pretty obvious answer once you sit with it. But then it gave a genuinely good analogy, video games, where the game engine is just coordinates, velocities, and geometry, and what appears on screen is a rendered representation of those numbers. Similarly, the universe may contain a physical reality while conscious experience is the brain's rendering of it. And the rendering is accurate because organisms whose models matched reality survived better than those whose models didn't.
So I guess what we're living inside is a controlled hallucination.
It eventually said these things sit on the borderline of neuroscience and philosophy. So I kept exploring, read a few experiments and studies. I am not a neuroscientist. I am not a philosopher. I am certainly not qualified to settle centuries-old questions. At most, I can read an experiment, apply logic, logic fails at some point, go back to the experiment, do the same thing again, and the loop goes on. Nevertheless, I moved to philosophy next, since it doesn't need a certificate and personal experiences and questions are mostly fair game.
The AI gave me a few names. René Descartes, Plato, Kant. That was essentially it, the entire conversation revolved around those three. Which surprised me because the ideas themselves, illusion, self, perception, reality, are verbatim the core questions in which many Bharatiya scriptures are rooted. Mandukya Upanishad, Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Ashtavakra Gita, and more.
So why did the conversation naturally gravitate towards Europeans? Were they the first to notice and speak about it? Did they invent this idea themselves? Or are modern knowledge systems simply structured around a particular historical narrative?
The last one seems closer to the truth. It may be pure data bias during training, which seems likely for now. Or deliberate tuning of the model, which I don't naturally lean towards, but it could be the case. Because if Bharat had one text on this, you could say okay, data bias, it's just one text. But there are multiple texts. Not only in Bharat, but across the entire East.
What surprised me wasn't that Descartes appeared. It was that the others didn't. Because when people find themselves at the edge of material explanations, they naturally lean toward questions of consciousness, self, the nature of reality. And there's a long pattern of that leaning eventually arriving at something rooted in Bharat's civilization. As philosophy. As serious inquiry into what experience actually is. That pattern is hard to miss once you start looking.
Thousands of years of inquiry into exactly these questions. Multiple traditions. An entire civilization built on them. And the conversation doesn't go there. A corpus not including texts like this seems unnatural.
It is not just that credit gets lost somewhere in the retelling. It is that the answers get lost with it.
Descartes asked what he could know for certain and arrived at, I think, therefore I am. A starting point. A question mark. He established that experience exists but didn't map much further into what experience actually is.
Traditions like Advaita Vedanta, the Mandukya Upanishad, the Ashtavakra Gita didn't just ask the question. They built detailed maps of what consciousness is, how perception operates, what lies underneath ordinary experience, and how to investigate it directly. The inquiry went further. It produced something closer to answers, or at least a much more detailed cartography of the territory.
So when the default checkpoint is Descartes, you inherit a question mark. When the checkpoint includes these traditions, you inherit centuries of mapping.
Every generation begins its search from a map it inherited. What gets remembered becomes the foundation. What gets forgotten doesn't just disappear from history. It disappears from the future too
Who gets remembered shapes what gets asked next.
Knowledge can't really be stolen, it belongs to humanity. But the question of how much has been quietly skewed, reordered, misattributed, that sits uncomfortably. And the unsettling part is that I stumbled onto this through a hovercraft video and a thought experiment about inner ear fluid. If the bias showed up here, in this one random thread I pulled on, it's probably not contained to philosophy. It's likely in history, in science, in medicine, in how entire fields got framed and who got credited for what.
Because what gets asked next shapes everything that follows.