Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, built his entire philosophy around one unsettling move: showing that any concept, pushed hard enough, dissolves into its dependence on other concepts. Nothing stands alone. Every 'thing' is actually a node in a web of relations. This is worth sitting with when you think about your relationship to your tools — particularly your AI tools. The danger isn't that they'll replace you. The danger is subtler: when a tool handles your reasoning load, you begin to mistake the tool's output for your own thinking. Nagarjuna would call this mistaking the dependent for the inherent — believing a capacity is yours because it appears when you reach for it, without noticing that it lives in the system, not in you. The practical test is simple and uncomfortable: take one type of cognitive work you currently offload to AI, and do it unassisted for a week. Not to prove something. To find out whether the capability still lives in you, or whether you've been renting it.

Name one cognitive task you've handed to AI in the last month — then honestly assess: if that tool disappeared today, would you still be capable, or would you discover a gap you didn't know was forming?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (नागार्जुन)