The Elephant, the Mountain, and the Gate
We keep having the same argument about mind, intelligence, consciousness, and interiority. One camp performs humility by saying we know nothing. Another performs mastery by listing progress and calling it understanding. Both moves are rhetorically convenient, and both dodge the bill. The real problem is attribution drift. Partial models get laundered into total accounts, then frozen into operational commitments users pay for.
The blind monks and the elephant is the cleanest parable for this. Each monk touches something real. A trunk, a tusk, a flank, a tail. Each description is locally accurate. The failure is not partial contact. The failure is totalizing from partial contact, then treating that totalization as knowledge. Inside institutions, that is how commitments form quietly, through templates, checklists, procurement language, compliance narratives, and product UX that nudges deference. Defaults reward speed. Speed rewards certainty performance. Certainty performance increases drift.
So here is the standard. If you claim understanding, define what you mean. Say whether you mean prediction, explanation, intervention, unification, or translation across levels. State your scope. Name what would change your mind. Definitions are gates, not decorations. Treat attribution as disallowed by default unless criteria and disconfirmers are published. If you externalize the stakes, you owe the receipts. Competence is real. Standing is delegated authority plus liability.
This stops being philosophy the moment attribution talk becomes delegation defaults in products, policy, and procurement, because the cost of being wrong is paid by users, not by the speaker.
Now the both-and. We do have real, hard-won competence in slices. We can measure behavior. We can model learning in constrained settings. We can describe neural circuitry and dynamics at multiple scales. We can formalize parts of perception, decision-making, and language. We can map correlates and mechanisms in particular regimes. None of that is nothing. Partial models can be powerful without being total accounts.
The trouble starts when we smuggle the leap. Explaining what a system does is not the same thing as explaining what it is like to be that system. Function does not equal felt experience, even when the function is fully specified. I am not making a metaphysical claim here, I am setting an evidential bar for attribution. Third-person measures can support functional claims. They do not, by themselves, settle first-person feel. This is a governance default, not an ontological verdict. I am open to positive criteria. I am not open to vibes becoming defaults.
The mountains koan puts the same lesson in phases. First mountains are mountains. The world feels obvious. Then mountains are not mountains. The categories break, because reality is deeper than the labels. Then mountains are mountains again. You return, but you return with a different kind of seeing, one that has paid its tuition in confusion. We all want the return without the disorientation, because uncertainty is expensive. It costs comfort. It costs status. It costs the ability to sound decisive in public. That is why the gate has to be procedural.
If you want a simple diagnostic test, ask one question and mean it. What evidence would make you stop attributing, and will you publish it when it happens. If the answer is no, then what you have is not understanding. It is a one-way ratchet.
Fewer unowned harms. Fewer policy surprises. Fewer audits that end in blame because nobody can reconstruct why a default was set.
Socrates is the antidote, and he is frequently misunderstood. He was not celebrating ignorance. He was naming the danger of counterfeit knowledge. Better to admit you do not know than to think you know when you do not. Admitted uncertainty keeps inquiry alive. Pretended certainty kills it, because it replaces the work of definition and scope with posture. You will be called anti-progress for insisting on this bar. Pay it anyway.
Artifacts are cheap, judgment is scarce.
Per ignem, veritas.