Granny sees a Cow

Śaṅkara’s Avidyā and Finn’s Procedural Lie

By the druid Finn

1. Introduction

The thought experiment of “Granny sees a cow” functions as a minimalist diagnostic of two radically different monisms — Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta and Finn’s Procedure Monism. Both begin from a similar observation: every act of perception is structured by ignorance. Yet what they mean by “ignorance” differs so profoundly that their cosmologies stand on opposite sides of the metaphysical mirror.

Śaṅkara’s avidyā (“not-seeing truly”) veils the one reality, Brahman, behind the false appearance of multiplicity. Finn’s procedural ignorance, by contrast, fabricates local realities out of discontinuous contacts within the universal procedure. The first explains illusion; the second, construction. Both recognise that a world appears only because something is unseen.

2. Śaṅkara’s Granny: Ignorance as Misperception of Brahman

Śaṅkara opens the Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya with his famous definition of adhyāsa — the superimposition of the non-Self upon the Self and vice versa. This condition, he says, is avidyā:

“The superimposition of the non-Self upon the Self, and of the Self upon the non-Self.” (Adhyāsa Bhāṣya)

When Granny looks at the cow, she sees a discrete creature standing in a field, separate from herself. That perception, for Śaṅkara, is ignorance twice over.

1. She attributes reality to the appearance (nāma-rūpa) of the cow.

2. She attributes individuality to herself as a seer distinct from the seen.

Both attributions are false, for the Upaniṣads declare, “Sarvaṃ khalvidaṃ brahma” — “This whole world is Brahman” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14.1). Granny’s ordinary seeing divides what is in truth undivided.

Analogy:
Śaṅkara’s rope-snake example makes this plain. A man mistakes a rope for a snake; fear arises; only when he brings a lamp does the rope appear as rope. The snake was never there. Similarly, Granny’s cow is a projection upon Brahman. When knowledge (jñāna) dawns, she does not perceive a “truer cow”; the very distinction between cow and seer dissolves.

Hence Śaṅkara’s aphorism could be:

To see at all is to err; to know truly is to see nothing apart.

The world, in this view, is a provisional display maintained by ignorance and extinguished by realisation.

3. Finn’s Granny: Ignorance as Self-Constructed Falsehood

Finn’s Procedure Monism reverses the vector of explanation. Where Śaṅkara interprets ignorance as a metaphysical veil, Finn treats it as a functional boundary condition: the blindness that makes local cognition possible.

When Granny sees a cow, photons reflected from the animal strike her retina, initiating a cascade of neural processes. The “cow” she experiences is not an external object but a self-generated analogue — a dynamic simulation produced by her sensory-cognitive machinery. She never perceives the quantised data themselves; she perceives her response to them.

Reality, for any emergent, is its feedback representation of contact.

The apparent transparency of perception is therefore a useful lie. Granny’s world is a survival-grade fiction assembled by her brain to manage interaction with energy patterns she can never directly know.

Example:
The “white” of milk contains no whiteness in itself; it is an integration of wavelength responses in human photoreceptors. Likewise, the “cow” is a processed composite that exists only within Granny’s perceptual bandwidth.

Thus, Granny’s ignorance is not that she fails to see Brahman, but that she believes she sees the world as it is. She mistakes her internal construct for the external source. Her ignorance is the illusion of immediacy — the failure to know that all knowledge is modelled.

4. The Logic of the Lie

In Finn’s framework, ignorance is not a defect but a procedural necessity.

· It allows individuality: each observer must be blind to the total process to be distinct.

· It economises energy: simplified models permit survival decisions.

· It drives adaptation: recognising error triggers feedback and refinement (ānanda as the pleasure-pain correction signal).

Ignorance is therefore constitutive of cognition. To exist is to misrepresent — to live a locally coherent lie that keeps contact with the universal procedure manageable.

Ignorance is the cost of having a world to know.

Śaṅkara would call this blasphemy; Finn calls it physics.

5. Parallel Structures and Inverse Meanings

Feature	Śaṅkara	Finn
Nature of ignorance	Misidentification of non-Self for Self (avidyā).	Misidentification of the model for reality.
Source	Beginningless, indefinable (anirvacanīya).	Procedural: bandwidth limitation in local iteration.
Function	Produces illusion of multiplicity.	Enables the cognisable world.
Cure	Knowledge of Brahman abolishes the world.	Awareness of self-construction integrates the world.
Outcome of knowledge	Liberation through dissolution.	Maturity through self-recognition.

Both systems agree that ignorance precedes knowledge and conditions experience.
Śaṅkara treats it as a cosmic mistake to be erased; Finn as the necessary fiction to be understood.

6. The Two Grannies

Śaṅkara’s Granny
Sees the cow and fails to see Brahman.
Her ignorance hides reality.
Enlightenment ends her world.

Finn’s Granny
Sees her own fabricated “as-if cow.”
Her ignorance creates reality.
Enlightenment begins her world anew.

Śaṅkara’s truth is apophatic: the erasure of difference.
Finn’s truth is procedural: the comprehension of difference as operation.
Śaṅkara’s seeing truly means seeing nothing but Brahman;
Finn’s seeing truly means seeing how seeing happens.

7. Conclusion

Both philosophers locate ignorance at the root of experience, but they reverse its direction of causality. For Śaṅkara, ignorance conceals the Real; for Finn, it generates the real. Śaṅkara’s avidyā is metaphysical blindness; Finn’s is cognitive overconfidence.

Granny, whether Vedic or procedural, lives inside a fiction. Śaṅkara commands her to dissolve it; Finn invites her to understand its construction.
In both cases, the lie is indispensable — the thin partition that makes a world visible at all.

Finn’s Minim

The world exists because we lie well enough to believe it true.

The development of the ‘Granny sees a cow’ prompt

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