Gansheng Tan (g.tan@wustl.edu)

^1: By Eastern fantasy novels, I refer specifically to 修真小说 (xiūzhēn xiǎoshuō), literally “novels of cultivating truth.” These works depict characters who pursue physical and metaphysical refinement—training mind, body, and spirit to attain harmony with the Dao (道) and, often, immortality. In English, they are commonly known as cultivation novels. The broader genre includes several subcategories, such as 仙侠 (xiānxiá): “immortal hero” fiction, combining martial arts, Taoist philosophy, and transcendence.

I. Preface: reality in itself and perceived reality

Reality in itself is what exists independent of human minds. In Kant’s philosophy, this can be understood as the noumenal realm [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon]. What human experience, perceive, or describe using language, is reality as filtered, organized, and made meaningful through a framework of understanding.

Whether reality-in-itself truly exists, or whether it is even meaningful to discuss, remains a matter of debate, as by definition, we can never access it directly without interpretation. Here is my brief answer. I find it conceptually and practically valuable to assume it exists, even if the existence of reality-in-itself cannot be proven. The assumption of reality-in-itself motivates the creation of diverse, and ultimately more useful, models of the world. This view is in line of Utilitarianism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism]. It encourages transcending any single framework, prevents us from mistaking our current concepts for the world itself, and keeps inquiry open. Let’s consider behaviorism and cognitive neuroscience. At first glance, behavior appears closer to “reality-in-itself,” because it is directly observable. Yet behavior is never truly framework-free: even basic measures like accuracy depend on conceptual constructs such as numerosity (e.g., remembering 7 out of 10 items). Placing behavior as a model of what really happens in the brain (a concept), cognitive neuroscience emerged, providing easily understandable models that help not just understand what happened but also why it happened. On a personal level, exploring how different frameworks filter the ‘reality-in-itself’ is an intellectually stimulating exercise. Such a perspective provides me with coherence in philosophy and some sanity in being alive.

Looking backward, one of the most striking features of human history is our persistent drive to understand. The act of pursuing understanding justifies its meaning in human society (The real is rational, and the rational is real). Before telescopes, “stars” were little more than points of light in the night sky; before the introduction of electromagnetic radiation, light is manifestation of the sacred. The process of developing new frameworks and assigning new concepts to the phenomenon expanded the perceived reality, from singularity.

So far, multiple frameworks exist for reality. In traditional East Asian medicine, the experience of cold is explained in terms of imbalances between “hot” and “cold” qi. Thick yellow nasal mucus is interpreted as an excess of heat, whereas clear mucus results from cold dominance. In contrast, allopathic (Western) medicine describes the same symptoms in terms of inflammation and infection: increased cytokine activity, vascular permeability, and mucosal irritation produce observable signs such as mucus color and viscosity. In neuroscience, a trending view sees the brain as a computational system that works in a critical state. Sleep and wakefulness are described as shifts in the brain from subcritical to supercritical states, and vice versa. The same empirical observations can be interpreted through the synaptic homeostasis, where synaptic potentiation and global synaptic downscaling alternate in cycles.

In this essay, I share my current perceived reality and the metaphysical framework I rely on for building the perceived reality. The process of building and mapping betweenframeworks is useful for me as it helps me align philosophical views. The union and mapping between the frameworks allow me to understand what others believe and communicate concepts more effectively.

In summary, I assume that there is a reality-in-itself, and rules by which the reality manifests over time, space, relation, and many other dimensions. Humans pursue understanding by developing frameworks, or laws of physics, which expands the (perceived) reality.

II. Meta-Framework: opposition and unity