Last summer, digging around in an old Dropbox folder, I stumbled across a Kant quote I had used in a comprehensive exam back when I was a graduate student, almost three decades ago: “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” That quote, together with a conversation with Raaghav Pandya about a lovely, under-the-radar Bollywood film called Aankhon Dekhi, and a long-standing fondness for Borges’ short story Funes the Memorious, all came together, in my head, all at once. The end result was a rambling essay that I described as ‘a somewhat random associative rumination,’ acknowledging its shaggy origins.

At the same time, this essay had enough substance that it ended up becoming the first chapter of our joint project Hyperlinked.us. The essay itself (with appropriate self-awareness) ended up being titled “Kant, Borges, & AI go to Bollywood: Connections Nobody Asked For.”

The essay explored how LLMs embody the first half of Kant’s dictum (concept without percept: content-rich, context-poor, untethered from lived experience), while Borges’ Funes and the character Bauji in Aankhon Dekhi sit at the opposite pole (percept without concept, drowning in the flood of particulars). These were connections rattling around in my head, rent-free, that I needed to get out, on the page.

That was where this would have ended. As it typically does. A glimmering of an idea, an hour or so of work fleshing it out, thinking it through, sometimes (sadly not always) culminating in a blog post.

But not this time. Raaghav took that rambling blog post and turned it into an actual academic paper. He gave the concept-percept argument some theoretical discipline, extended it into a contemplative pedagogy frame (drawing on Vedanta and Buddhism, Maxine Greene, bell hooks, Oren Ergas, and others), and grounded the whole thing in two concrete classroom practices.

We submitted the resulting piece as a paper presentation to the AERA conference in LA. It was accepted and Raaghav presented it (since I could not go to the conference).

What I love most about this little arc is how it quietly re-enacts the argument of the paper itself. A blog post full of percept-heavy associations (an old Dropbox file, a conversation about a movie, a short story read in high school) needed Raaghav’s conceptual scaffolding to become something useful for pedagogy. Concepts without percepts are empty. Percepts without concepts are blind. Somewhere in between, if you are lucky and have a good collaborator, is where the teaching happens.

The two classroom practices are also worth a mention. One is mine: an activity I’ve been doing for years, where students are asked to find and photograph letterforms in the wild… in the architecture, the cracks in sidewalks, the shadows cast by railings, the signage of their everyday environments. The other is Raaghav’s: he takes his technology and engineering students to Korean War Veterans Park near the Brooklyn Bridge, asks them to pick an object (natural or mechanical), observe it slowly and nonjudgmentally, and journal their own shifting awareness as they do so. Both are small invitations to perceive before analyzing, to let the familiar world become freshly legible again.

Complete citation and links below:

Pandya, R., & Mishra, P. (2026). Awareness and the Limits of Abstraction: A Kantian Meditation on Pedagogy, AI, & Perception. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Conference, Los Angeles.

LINKS: Original essay on Hyperlinked.us | slides from the talk