When you mishear a lyric and sing the wrong words for years, something philosophically strange is happening: you've created a private world that runs perfectly smoothly on a mistake. The Indian logician Dignāga, writing in the 5th century, argued that most of what we take as knowledge is actually a construction — the mind doesn't passively receive data, it actively fabricates categories and fits experience into them, then forgets it did the fabricating. The misheard lyric is a small, harmless version of something that happens constantly in how we understand people, institutions, and even ourselves. The fabrication feels exactly like perception. What makes this practically urgent is that the correction — hearing the real lyric — often feels like a loss, not a gain. We resist it. That resistance is worth noticing, because it shows up in much higher-stakes places than song lyrics.

In the last week, when did something you 'knew' turn out to be a construction you'd made — and what was your first instinct: update it, or defend it?

Drawing from Buddhist Epistemology (Yogācāra-Dignāga school) — Dignāga