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. 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: it is 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, termed framework thereafter. This view is in line of 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. A similar point that “whilst the universe is fundamentally chaotic, the subjective search for meaning is attainabl” is discussed in Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller.

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 between frameworks 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.

I - extension a: Cognition as the constructor of frameworks.

Given its definition, frameworks are constructed, maintained, and modified by cognitive processes. In this sectoin, I intend to investigate the substract through which cognition operates. Language is one of the substrates, for me, even the default substrate. Language includes spoken language, like English or Chinese, but also mathematical language and formal logic. Language is one of the most distinctive abilities of humans: we articulate ideas externally in conversation or internally as silent speech. The articulation itself is part of the cognitive process. The dependence of certain cognitive tasks on language becomes evident when language is disrupted. For example, performing mental arithmetic while pitching research idea is more difficult than performing either task alone.

Language is so important that it has been formalized as a framework for understanding reality. In this school of thought, if not being named, an object dissolves into indistinguishability. Following this framework, a “speaker” in a room is not different from a table or a wall until it is named as such. Physically, it is a matter occupying space. It becomes a speaker when we name it, during which it is defined as an object that emits sound, connected to electricity, designed for amplification. This viewpoint echoes thoughts in Tractatus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In brief, limits of language define the limits of meaning, thus human cognition.

I can see how language enables cognition leading to frameworks of the universe. Take the invention of infinity, $\infty$. The introduction of $\infty$ transformed “unboundedness” from an endless counting, therefore impossible process, into a conceptual object. $\infty$ enable the cognitive processes that led to multiverse hypotheses, which otherwise cannot be constructed by enumeration.

Modeling observation in mathematical language has made my life easier and givn rise to useful frameworks; in the mean time, this repeated process has made language the default substrate of my cognition. When confronted with two interpretations of an experimental result, I seek to model them with Orders, in other words, binary relation $\preceq$. We defined them as a set, and defined the relation for this set. The relation can be casulity (interpretation $A$ is the cause of intepretation $B$), or compatibility (interpretation $A$ encompass intepretation $B$). Across defined relations, I see this two intepretations as partially ordered sets, and my reasoning operates within this symbolic space.

The coupling between language and cognitin may explain why large language models can mimic human reasoning. If reasoning is scaffolded by language, then models that learned relationships between words can approximate patterns of reasoning. When solving a practical problem, say, designing a system that allows control of a ceiling fan without getting out of bed. The problem-solving process begins by identifying components, “switch,” “circuit,” “pull cord”, their function, then systems that can interact with them. This resembles how a language model retrieves contextually relevant tokens and recombines them according to learned relational patterns.

I - extension b: Substrates of human cognition

Rock climbing makes me realize that language is not the sole substract of cognition. When solving a dynamic boulder problem, I do not verbalize: “left hand to crimp, right hand match, and shift center of mass.” Instead, cognition takes the form of rhythm, pa pa boom, a temporal structure guiding movement. The reasoning is embodied. Timing and movement sequence are reasoned without language.

This realization update my understanding of human cognition. Many cognitive processes I had overlooked are not based on language. An exampole is the unease triggered by ugly dolls, such as those in the movie Annabelle. Their gaze, and color palette evoke my fear before.

The multi-substrate nature of human cognition distinguishes it from current large language model. What should I wear in 30°F weather? A language model given this prompt may leverage textual similarity which point a post “cloth recomendation for winter”. It recompose the text in the post as responses. A human, who has not read such post, may remember stepping outside on a 35°F morning, feeling the cold penetrate through a thin jacket. The decision is thus to add an extra layer.

Recognizing this multi-substrate structure has altered how I view figures in scientific articles. I once regarded text as the primary vehicle of reasoning and figures as coordinate- and color-dependent, redudant representation of the text. I now see that this judgment reflected my own bias in using language for reasoning. When I encounter a figure, I unconsciously translate the arts into sentences: “peak amplitude increases,” “variance decreases.” to reason about them. Doing so, I lose what the visual form uniquely offers, a substrate of cognition that operates through shape, color, and spatial organization.

Language, color, sound, and interoception, are all substrates of human cognition. In the era of AI, information flows overwhelmingly in semantic form. Language is efficient because a single word compresses vast experiential information into a discrete symbol. It enables abstraction, coordination, and rapid transmission across minds. When automatically reasoning through language,we risk attenuating visual, embodied, and auditory modes of reasoning.

It’s an interesting exercise to image other animal’s cognitive construct (i.e., framework). Bees perceive ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to humans. If I were a bee, I might see flowers showing ultraviolet patterns that guide my foraging route. Of course, I can never fully inhabit such cognition. Imagination is constrained by sensory experience.

I - extension c: Art and cognition

Color, sound, shape, and stroke naturally lead to the domain of art. what is art in relation to cognition? For me, art is a deliberate reduction of reality, a communicating perceived reality.

The reality unfolds in continuous time and across $\infty$ dimensions: electromagnetic radiation (light), mechanical waves (sound), thermal gradients (heat), chemical interactions (smell and taste). I denote $\infty$ dimensions because the number increase during human pursuit of frameworks. Art such as a 2D painting performs a dimension reduction.

Dimensional reduction alone does not define art; photography also reduces dimensions. A photograph primarily captures the distribution of light at a specific moment. A painting, or creative photograph also encodes how the artist experiences that light. Brushstroke, distortion, exaggeration, and color selection reveal the artist’s perceived world. Two painters observing the same landscape will produce different paintings because each reduces reality according to different cognitive priorities. The technique itself reflects the structure of the artist’s perception. In this sense, art is cognitive externalization.

I experiment cognitive process through drawing. I see the world as distributed dots, representing the perceived lighting and contrast. I use lines and curve expresses my perceived regularity in the external world, for example, the regular patten of the cat.

I - extension d: No ultimate framework, but levels of explanation

In the pursue of developing framework, numerous frameworks have been proposed, religion, physics, biology and many others. Each new framework expands perceived reality by reorganizing experience into a more structured form. A question arises: does this process have an endpoint? Is there an ultimate framework, after which further development becomes unnecessary? Or is the expansion of perceived reality unbounded, that is, $\infty$?

My position is the later, because human pursue framework development (obviously). This seems circular. If I were to give explanation, from a utilitarian perspective, framework reduces uncertainty, enables prediction, and increases control. From an existential perspective, framework provides philosophical alignment and meaning of life. These justifications invite further questioning: why value prediction?why do we need meaning? Each answer generates another “why”, or “how”. In other words, an ultimate answer for all questions does not exist.

Consider the following chain, why do humans have language? Within the framework of evolution, one answer is that language provides survival advantage. It links language to reproductive success. But the chain does not end. Why does better survival translate into existance of humans with language? Because organisms that persist reproduce. How can reproduction occur? You see, frameworks allow us to consolidate and make sense of our perceived reality. Some may satisfy at the level of biology where they use molecular mechanism to explain how reproduction occur; while others prefer more basic explanation such as atomic level.

“Basic” here refers to explanations that are compatible with, and do not contradict, broader domains of perceived reality. Atomic or physical explanations are considered basic because they integrate with a wide range of phenomena. Aas explanations become more basic, they often become less immediately meaningful or practical. Explaining human language can be explained by electron movement in the brain, practically uninformative. I believe that frameworks offer different levels of explanation.

Now the ultimum framework becomes the most basic framework. Does it exist? “God” sometimes is used an ultimate explanation, an effort to end the chain of “why” or “how”. Yet today, there is still discussion on why does God exist? You see, when a framework is developed for explaining reality, the framework expanded the perceived reality, and the framework it self becomes part of the reality, then the expanded reality and its relation with previous reality encourage human pursue of framework. In fact, I will discuss a framework, “xun hui” (循回), or cycles, strikingly interesting, \fity are a twisted cycle, as a powerful framework for understanding this recursive structure.

Part II Note

Part II (Meta-Framework: opposition and unity) will be published as a separate post.