What Is Writing For? A Reflection on Purpose and Epistemology
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Gansheng Tan1 1Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA (g.tan@wustl.edu)
Blog posts
2025
Dilemma in Modern Neuroscience: The Uncertainty Principle Revisited
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Gansheng Tan1 1Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA (g.tan@wustl.edu)
2024
The perception of human society (updated)
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Background
Years ago, I claimed that the world was running irrationally. I was 95% wrong. I want to update my thoughts on this point as I have been dwelling in the field of medicine and neuroscience for 4 years. We, humans, perceive nature through senses and cognition. I define cognition as the ability to reason, abstract, and communicate (information transfer). Scientifically, at least based on the literature to date, cognition is grounded on our sensations. For example, we like to make visual analogies to explain a concept, such as sphere-atom, river-time, and numerous 2D illustrations in scientific publications.
Universal law in mind
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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.
2022
Existence and perception
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Prelude
We perceive the world through vision, sensation, sound, smell, taste. Mechanistically, the receptor of the cells senses the environment and transduce the signals/molecules/electrical activities to the brain. A fundamental problem of defining existence in the world is: how do we define the existence that can not beb sensed. I find a less intimidating way to formulate the question: if the signal from cell receptor takes a certain period to reach our brain, can we tell if the stimuli occurs at the present time.
2021
An practical guide of statistical analyses in Neuroscience studies (for beginners)
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Introduction
This notebook aims to provide statistical functions, build dataFrame, and perform statistical analyses. The conditions/groups are push/pull+ healthy/lf-patients/hf-patients/sham-patients + before/after-TMS The hypotheses tested are:
- difference between healthy subjects and patients (includng lf/hf/sham-TMS) in push/pull epochs()
- the regression between CMMN properties (including components-SPMIs and graph properties) and FMA
- clustering analyses on CMMN properties (UE-brunnstrom clusters)
- ANOVA and MANOVA and post-hoc analyses (details are missed)
2019
Les Aveux fidèles
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Introduction
On aimerait tous savoir parler plusieurs langues, par contre le problème est que quand j’ai envie de faire un bilan, toutes les langues que j’ai apprises paraissent manquer quelque choses pour qu’elles soient parfaites. Et bien, grace au principe du rasoir d’Ockham, j’écrirai comme je parle à moi-même, peu n’import quelle langue. D’un côté, cela demandera moins d’effort; de l’autre, cela me permettra exprimer mes réflexions brutes sans qu’ils soient partiellement cachées à cause de la honte ou alors la peur qu’on me juge.