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The Important Thing is to Understand the World, Not to Transform It

The era of AI, the AI of the era. With AI, it seems we can do anything, yet with AI, it seems there is nothing left for us to do.

Regarding AI replacing various jobs—the death of programmers, the death of front-end developers, the death of lawyers, the death of accountants, and so on. In short, with the rise of AI, everyone is doomed. Once the world's greatest programmers develop AGI, every industry will kick the bucket.

So, it seems we have nothing left to do.

Actually, I quite like it. At least I have AI to do this and that for me. For instance, building a standalone reader for these books. Originally, I would have had to hire a front-end developer, a programmer, an ops engineer, an editor, an artist... so many things that I couldn't do myself before.

Now, dragging AI out, it is a hard-working, complaint-free jack-of-all-trades.

If it makes a mistake, I can scold it, and it still provides me with emotional value.

Today, many people—university professors, economists, government officials, politicians, thought leaders, men, women, old men, old women, so many of them—look deeply concerned about the country and the people. With a facial expression resembling X Yansong's chronic constipation, they say, "The development of AI must not make people lose their jobs!"

Lunatics! Oh, wait, this is a comorbidity of multiple mental disorders.

Technological development not making people lose jobs? Then what do we need this technology for?

What does unemployment mean? It means the overall labor hours of humanity have decreased, since a portion of people are no longer working.

How wonderful! No work, just idling.

One of America's greatest economists, the Yale professor who bankrupted himself trading stocks, whom I worship the most: Irving Fisher. He added something after "money income"—"Enjoyable income".

This part is extremely important!

If you are blessed with the "996 blessing," having time to earn money but no time to spend it, what is the point of earning money? Does this job still make any sense to you?

Oh, you have to support your wife and children. But if you make hundreds of millions by the age of 40 and suddenly drop dead from an illness, your wife, children, and net worth will all belong to someone else.

Therefore, working is not a good thing. It drains your mind and body just to earn some money income.

But this is precisely what leads to a deeper question.

AI replacing humans is supposed to be a good thing in the first place.

Technological progress allowing fewer people to expend less labor to create more wealth for the free development of all humanity—isn't this the ultimate goal of economic development?

As Marx said, the free development of the individual is the necessary condition for the free development of all.

If you develop technology but do not give people freedom, and instead want to nail them to their workstations to enjoy the "996 blessing" every day, treating them as unfree screws—isn't that too malicious? It violates the basic principles of Marxism.

The "Enjoyable income" Fisher spoke of should not just be an add-on; it should be the destination. When total factor productivity (TFP) rises to an extremely high level, machines automatically drive other machines, and humans only need to put in minimal labor, spending the rest of their time thinking, creating, and relaxing. This is the true "Grand Unification ending" that human society ought to have.

Yet, why are so many people—from university professors to government officials—worrying that "AI will make people unemployed"?

Is it really "unemployment" that they are worried about? No. Technological development reducing labor time is logically irreproachable.

What they are truly worried about is: can the improvement of total factor productivity be converted into a universal and effective income guarantee?

More bluntly: they are worried about the redistributive capacity of the social system. Of course, they worry that if "ordinary people" who lose their job income need the government and the state to provide a "basic livelihood guarantee," it will dilute the generous "benefits," expert allowances, etc., that they themselves worked so hard to secure through civil service exams! So, if Sun Yuyin doesn't go to build reservoirs to earn work points, and instead has to be supported by the village chief Sun Shaoan, won't Sun Shaoan's own rations decrease?

Fools! If Sun Shaoan switches from manual brick-making to machine brick-making, he alone can support the entire village, and his wife can play mahjong and do square dancing every single day.

If the wealth created by machines is intercepted by a minority of people and structures, and the majority lose their livelihoods alongside their jobs, then technological progress is no longer a blessing, but a disaster. This fear is not directed at the "replaced workers," but at the rigidity of the system—pointing to that systematic distribution pattern that cannot be altered by individual will.

And this is precisely the core intuition of $F\_{damage}$ —the price damage factor—which we will discuss in this booklet.

$F\_{damage}$ measures the degree to which price deviates from equivalent exchange (I dislike the concept of equivalent exchange because exchange itself is naturally non-equivalent, but I like the non-existent assumption of rational exchange in a free market) under the joint action of intraspecific structure ( $S\_s$ ) and tool level ( $T$ ). When $T$ skyrockets while $S\_s$ remains unchanged, $F\_{damage}$ does not decrease but explodes—because the increment of tools is amplified into loss by the rigid structure in a power-law fashion.

This is how the total factor productivity illusion comes about.

Last year (2025), some economists cried out about "insufficient effective demand," and then claimed that we must wait for the development of "total factor productivity" to smooth out this "insufficient effective demand," admitting there would be a painful period in between. Fortunately, though, it is not these economists crying "painful" who suffer; they can still be re-hired after retirement, with a pension of over 8,000 yuan, keeping their original benefits unchanged, and their own household's effective demand has instead skyrocketed.

Therefore, when people worry about AI causing unemployment, they are essentially worrying about:

Is our $S\_s$ (intraspecific structure) flexible enough to convert $T$ (the productivity explosion brought by AI) into an increase in $W$ (the individual's actual retention), instead of letting $W$ continue to be pressed down toward $L$ (the survival red line)?

The newly revised dynamic function formula for $F\_{damage}$

$F\_{damage} = \frac{S\_s \cdot T^{\alpha}}{1 - \beta \cdot e^{-\gamma(L - W)}}$

If the system is rigid and distribution is ossified, then the more powerful AI becomes, the higher $F\_{damage}$ will be, the more painful it will be for those at the bottom, and the more unstable society will become. This is not the fault of technology; it is the fault of the structure.

Less work, more recreation, or even not working at all—this is not degradation; it is the ultimate home of civilization. But the premise is: we must first bring down $F\_{damage}$ to make the structure worthy of the tools.

This is also why I wrote these booklets.

Not to transform the world, but to understand it. Once you understand $F\_{damage}$ , you understand why technological progress sometimes brings prosperity and sometimes brings disaster.

You will also understand that what truly needs to be changed is never the tool, but the structure that drives it.

However, We Have Only One Main Thread of Thought: From Human Biology to Sociality

Speaking of "understanding the world," Fdamage is only the first of my three books.

These three books, each from a different dimension, ask the same ancient question:

"Know thyself, O man."

Our cognitive framework is built on a simple yet powerful logical chain:

Consciousness → Mental Disorders → Economy and Society

The starting point of this chain is the biological essence of human beings.

Consciousness is not a supernatural, mysterious phenomenon, but the result of billions of years of evolution of vital agency—from single-celled organisms seeking benefits and avoiding harm, to signal transmission in the nervous system, to the emergence of intelligence from the structural complexity of the brain, and finally to the reflective consciousness unique to humans. This is the core expounded in Introduction to the Structural Evolutionary Paradigm of Vital Agency in Consciousness.

Mental disorders are the "exposure of vulnerability" along this evolutionary chain. When genetic mutations, developmental abnormalities, metabolic imbalances, and social-environmental stressors breach the threshold of compensation within a four-layer interaction, a mental disorder occurs. It is not "failing to look on the bright side," nor is it "weakness of will," let alone "moral deficiency"—it is the inevitable expression of biology under specific conditions. This is the core expounded in Principles of Interaction Among Genetic Mutation, Development, Metabolism, and Social-Environmental Factors in Mental Disorders.

Economy and society are the macro-environmental vessels for human consciousness, including mental disorders. The $F\_{damage}$ function reveals how the coupling tension between intraspecific structure and tool level creates losses, which are ultimately borne by individuals at the cost of their mental health. When $W$ (individual actual retention) approaches $L$ (survival red line), $F\_{damage}$ tends toward infinity, and mental disorders cease to be individual problems, becoming systemic ones. This is the core revealed in The Price Damage Factor.

Three booklets, three levels: Society, Consciousness, and Neural. Together, they form a map of understanding from the outside in, from the collective to the individual.

《 $F\_{damage}$ : Theory of Price Damage Factor》: Understanding man, society, and history—why does the same technological progress bring prosperity to some societies while bringing disaster to others? The answer lies not in technology itself, but in the intraspecific structure.
《Introduction to the Structural Evolutionary Paradigm of Vital Agency in Consciousness》: Understanding the origin of one's own thoughts—consciousness is not a mysterious soul, but a structural function formed during the evolutionary process of life to process internal and external information. This book pulls the question "why do I think this way" back from philosophical speculation into an explainable biological framework.
《Principles of Interaction Among Genetic Mutation, Development, Metabolism, and Social-Environmental Factors in Mental Disorders》: Establishing the physiological basis for a scientific understanding of human neural centers, neural metabolism, psychology, and behavior—when structures fail, how does consciousness become dysregulated? How does behavior become abnormal? This book establishes a four-layer interactive explanatory framework ranging from genetic mutations to the social environment.

Transforming Without Understanding Is Itself an Arrogant Act of Violence

I have no ambition to "transform" anything. The urge to transform the world is often built on a superficial understanding of it.

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." However, Julian later dealt Socrates a heavy blow, saying: "Class, the 'human' Socrates referred to did not include the millions of slaves!"

The Twenty-Four Histories is but a chronicle of The Vanished "It".

To repeat:

Transforming without understanding is itself a form of arrogant violence.

In particular, the casual transformation of social structures is the arrogance of power.

Therefore, the most basic demand of these three booklets is simply to provide a more elegant framework for understanding the world and humans.

To understand how the social structures we inhabit shape prices, distribute wealth, and determine destiny.

To understand where the thoughts in our heads come from and why they operate this way. To understand that when neural structures and metabolism become dysregulated—and in fact, everyone's neural structure is naturally dysregulated to some degree, it's just that the degree of dysregulation follows a sort of normal distribution—why people suffer, go mad, and lose themselves.

The important thing is to understand the world, not to transform it.

For only with understanding can transformation avoid becoming destruction.

And more often than not, once you understand, you will find that there is no need to transform at all—what needs to change is only "your own way of looking at the world," provided, my classmate, that you have enough UBI to support your life and see the world. Don't be fooled by the toxic chicken soup of those stupid experts. The world is huge; with money, you can travel anywhere under heaven, but without it, you can't take a single step.

Of course, sometimes even if you have money, you still cannot move. You would also need a letter of introduction, a travel permit, guesthouse vouchers, food coupons, grain coupons, meat coupons...

This is the entire purpose of these three booklets.

Returning to the source of power for understanding the world—human consciousness—we have once again defeated all "consciousness hypotheses" using the same line of thought of "deconstructing complex hypotheses via biological underlying principles." We have formed our unique, scientific Structural Evolutionary Paradigm of Vital Agency in Consciousness, resolving the myth of the origin and essence of consciousness.

Yet its "ideological emergence incision" is entirely based on "human biology," "humanity's biology," reasoning and deducing from those simple yet robust and penetrating "insights of giants" such as evolution and intraspecific structure. The latter is the basic tool for driving our neural centers taught by Bacon, the pioneer of scientific philosophy, in Novum Organum over 400 years ago.

And then, just as I mentioned when discussing large model algorithms with AI:

I feel that perhaps we cannot build an AGI, or ASI, or ATHI that is "anthropomorphic enough," but isn't that just like how we couldn't build bird-shaped airplanes but could build the "Blackbird"? Therefore, hyping AGI is purely a commercial strategy to make money. Everyone knows very well that we do not know—at least within a limited span of time and space, we will not know—the truly complete working mechanism of a "human-like neural network."

Although current machine learning algorithms are named neural network algorithms, this is merely a nomenclature mapping from when they first invented these "statistical classifier programs." Neural network algorithms have absolutely nothing to do with the human neural network, connectome, neural center, cortex, gray matter, white matter, sensory nerves, or motor nerves—not to mention they do not look alike at all.

The human neural network has interrupt mechanisms, forgetting, recursive upgrading and compression, true understanding, adversarial speculation, and uncontrolled "streams of consciousness or inspiration." These obviously stem from the "metabolic fluctuations," "multipath networks," and "multi-core resonances" of neurons from synaptic and neurotransmitter metabolism itself.

Therefore, I believe that silicon-based life replacing carbon-based life is philosophically impossible; however, from an instrumental perspective, it is entirely possible. But isn't that exactly the goal we are pursuing?

Humans working less, enjoying more, and spending more time generating "streams of consciousness," rather than being imprisoned in the "996 blessing" of tightening screws.

The booklet The Structural Evolutionary Paradigm of Vital Agency in Consciousness I published in ADP in 2025 defines human "consciousness" as the result of billions of years of evolution of vital agency. For silicon to mimic this consciousness in terms of structure and energy efficiency mechanisms obviously requires a breakthrough in human "consciousness" itself, since silicon is, after all, a creation of human consciousness.

The Creator created the world, the Big Bang played out the universe, the play of the universe created humans, human consciousness created silicon—and silicon is to break through the confinement of human consciousness? To create silicon consciousness?

I think, haha, all of you running around hyping up so-called silicon consciousness, you must have bought shares in large model companies, haven't you?

I think this is probably my overall framework of understanding. From the biological essence of humans, the evolutionary course of consciousness, the brain as the central nervous system, to humans as a unique biological species with a unique intraspecific structure—they form a complete, simple, yet powerful overall cognitive framework for understanding our behavior, economy, and history.

Just as when we consider evolution, we must place "environmental selection" in the position of the ultimate life-or-death violence; when we examine "human life," we must place the "social environment" in the position of the ultimate life-or-death violence.

And this cognitive framework can be divided into three parts:

Consciousness;

Mental disorders;

Economy and society.

Statement: Human-AI Co-Creation

These three booklets all contain a significant amount of human-AI co-created content.

Specifically, the human author was responsible for: proposing and arguing the core theoretical framework, designing the book structure and logical chain, deciding on critical judgments and stances, and conducting the final review and editing. The AI was responsible for: literature retrieval and synthesis, supplementing and verifying academic details, generating and expanding initial drafts of chapters, and polishing the consistency of formatting and language.

This is not "written by AI," nor is it "purely written by humans"—it is a new mode of knowledge production: humans provide the direction, judgment, and ultimate responsibility, while AI provides execution, coverage, and efficiency. As discussed in these three books, tools themselves do not create value; value depends on the structure that drives the tools.

We choose to be candid rather than concealing.