Updates (July 2025)

I reviewed what I have written in this post and found that many of the reasoning is missing. For example, I did not establish the necessity or the need to find such a universal law, neither do I convincingly reached the conclusion that finding the universal law requires transcending humanity. As of now, I think what I refer to as universal law is the law that exists (ontology) and can not be understood by humans (epistemology) in this post. Although this definition rescue the arguement that we need transcending humanity, this definition makes it less compelling. Most importantly, such a law is inherently unknowable and its pursuit is self-contradictory.

A year has passed and I have been contemplating why transcending humanity came to my mind at the first place. I started to realize that if some universal law lies beyond the expressive power of current human language, then only a form of conceptual or cognitive transcendence can reveal it. For example, despite generative, language can only handle finite strings, whereas the reality might require uncountable descriptions. In addition, natural words evolved from human experience, therefore can not describe unexperienced truth. In this case, human understanding are bounded in our experience. Following this thread, a way to gain better understanding is to develop language that is derived from experience. For example, we are leveraging the power of mathematical logic, including deduction to induction to make prediction in theoretical physics. However, it begs a question, why do we need to gain such understanding. The question ‘why’ can be answered at different levels, such as to guide technological development at the mechanistic or functional level, to better survive in time and space at the evolutionary level, to know to unknown at the metaphysical or philosophical level.

To better contextualize the reasoning in this post, allow me clarify the goal. Once we transcend our current conceptual or cognitive ability, the new understanding coming along with become part of the human knowledge. Therefore, the pursue is ‘transcendence’ is endless, and I should not advocate transcendence for the sake of transcendence.

Why do humans need to find the universal law (time-space for example)?

We are living in a complex world. Finding universal law often requires taking countless factors into account, which inevitably exceed human’s capacity to represent constructs in mind. For example, human’s spatial ability are three-dimensional. The Coordonnées cartésiennes is how we use to communicate the spatial property of an entity.
if a universal law existed, I am interested in if the the universal law requires that human transcends mind’s ability to represent existence.

How to define the universal law

A law that has 100% eternal validity. A law that can be applied onto every entity of the universe given certain conditions. The need for a universal law is not as appealing as its existence because its application also requires the measure of countless variables. However, the pursuit of finding the universal law meets the human nature of curiosity. Importantly, in the process of finding the universal law, I expect the evolution of the human mind. The evolution of the human mind is one of the many important reasons why humans choose to live.

The universal law can not be part of human knowledge

This statement is provocative and sad. But this statement made a few assumptions. First, the universal law exists. Besides, the universal law requires transcending. Assuming the proportion of construct that can be represented by human mind is limited, the communication of transcending law would fail if the current science require experimental prove because the number of controlled factors is limited. Note that the number of construct can be infinite. Read the following session to understand why communication of law that is not related to what we have seem would be problematic.

Visual input and law discovery

Now we can appreciate the reductionism in the probability framework. In a deterministic word where we have limited measure, probability is our best tool for building human knowledge. The reason is that it reduces the complexity and relies on countable samples. In addition, most of human knowledge if not all is communicating through visual input. An accepted construct usually accompanies the visualization or imagination of it. Most of the time, we interpret the law with mental manipulation of virtual imaginary objects. That being said, construct that is not related to seened objects or propositional term is hard to be communicated. For example, space-time without lines and grid. Propositional item such as language is generative, which shows its capacity to represent every potential law. However, the evolution of the language of its generation subject to same communication cap. How can a language be understood if it represents an existence that can not be sensed.

Hope

We should not abandon the hope to explore law near to the universal law, which can be a reason to live. Besides probability, the representation through visual activation is far from fully explored. Let’s talk some neuroscience. If a conctruct requires the activation of neuron related to seen objects, we should have the tools to modulate visual pathway to facilitate knowledge communication. Remember we as biological creature, have the possibility to develop more senses. If the surviving pressure for finding an universal law, we might get to understand the universal law faster.

Additional note on the practical word where we live

Assuming transcending humanity gets us closer to the universal law, we should be alert that people in the academia tend to leverage neuroscience knowledge to maximize benefits. An examples would be people are decicated to making eye-catching figures to improve the impact of their work or improve the possibility to get published. This is concerning because the action as a result of the temptation of success in academia system and society feeds stunning visulization to general knowledge and push the nature away from people’s attention. A potential fix for the current society would be promotong a guideline that represents knowledge in an efficient way, such as spatial representation with minimal contrast. This approach is similar to strike a balance between a overfitting and underfitting model.

Critiques should be sent to g.tan@wustl.edu