Tag: science

Is Reality Fundamentally Analyzable or Opaque?

Imagine your childhood. You’re looking out a window in the early afternoon. You see the clouds in the sky, the passers-by and traffic down the street. You have no trouble differentiating a police car from an ambulance. A summary of this can be expressed in the philosophical quote, “your version of the world shows up for you, like a friend at the bus stop.”

All of this suffers from an invasion from two sides: clarity and opacity. Consider the last sentence of the preface from Frederich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (below):

Preface

I

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, we ourselves, to ourselves, and there is a good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves, — so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’;1 our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing — to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, — who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it — and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being — oh! and lose count … We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto2 ‘everyone is furthest from himself’ applies to us for ever, — we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves…

  1. Gospel according to Matthew 6.21.
  2. ‘Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste’ is a reversal of the common German saying, ‘Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste’ ‘Everyone is closest to himself’ i.e. ‘Charity begins at home’, cf. also Terence, Andria IV. 1.12.
Nietzsche, Frederich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 3-4.

Go back to our initial example of the childhood window. On one hand, our version of the world shows up for us. On the other, since “we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves”, we show up as an opaque version of ourselves. As he states at the beginning of the preface, we are unknown to ourselves. If asked, you would most likely not remember the point at which you could differentiate the police car from an ambulance. Imagine meeting a friend during that same period, and instead of thinking of the enjoyable conversation you will have, but the concern that all of these things are impermanent.

The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard teaches us that the reason we are opaque to ourselves is that the self is a synthesis waiting to be made. This synthesis would connect the momentary pleasures of time with friends and the impermanence of these things.

Consider the opacity built into science. Science claims that ultimately, there is a logical, mathematical way of understanding what you see while looking out the window. Contrast this with the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s assertion that history is an “argument without end.” It could be that scientific inquiry is also a quest without end.

What is the great takeaway from all of this? On Kierkegaard’s side, we face the opacity wall and on the materialist side, we still have the opacity of what we have yet to understand. With each discovery, we continue to see more that we do not yet understand.

Is There a Scheme of Things Underlying Everything?

In The Thibaults (the novel sequence for which Roger Martin du Gard won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature), a fundamental motif is the question of whether the universe is coherent. Roughly speaking, there are three competing schools of coherence—science, religion and art. Antoine Thibault discusses with the Abbé (French title for abbot):

Antoine did not seem to hear him. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “what it means to a youngster, when he’s turned loose, by gradual stages, on mathematics, physics, chemistry! Suddenly he discovers that he has all space, the universe, for his playground. And after that, religion strikes him as not only cramped, but false, illogical. Untrustworthy.”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 762.

The climax of this debate appears when Antoine says:

“…I talked just now about Universal Order and a Scheme of Things; but that was merely to talk like everyone else. Actually it seems to me that we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a kind of ‘personal’ destiny? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside, but join up with them, which do nothing more than in some way stimulate them.…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects. Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?…”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 768.

The topic of an underlying scheme of things is close to the central question of Western civilization. In Plato’s Republic, we have the allegory of the dark cave occupied by humanity. It looks at shadows dancing on the wall, projected by a fire. Liberating humanity requires leaving the cave and climbing to the surface of the earth, glimpsing the sun for the first time. From here, with the help of philosophy, humanity flies off and encounters the Logos and the Eidos. Mathematical truth crowns this journey.

Aristotle, Plato’s star pupil and later rival, takes this quest and focuses on the biological. The Athenian tradition invents theory, a pillar of Western tradition, culminating in modern science. Jerusalem’s competing tradition, the Judeo-Christian worldview, derives its scheme of things from divinity before biology and mathematics. Thus, the novel’s debate is ultimately the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem.

Poly-Awareness and the Year 1900

On the way to the year 1900, we encounter the comment, “In 1890 the stock exchanges of London, Paris, Berlin and New York controlled the economic progress of the whole world.” This marriage of geography and the financial world is very striking, culminating with:

The year 1900 was a wonderful one, when men were proud to be middle-class, and to be Europeans. The fate of the whole world was decided around green baize-covered tables in London, Paris or Berlin. Rubber trees from the Amazons were shipped to Malaya, the vast coal seams of the Upper Hwang-Ho were being exploited at the expense of the wretched labourers, and in the north of the Upper Vaal a mining city sprang up in a few short weeks. Mobilized by steam, the planet’s riches were being shifted ‘from one side of the world to the other’, to quote Le Bateau Ivre, on orders flashed by telegraph in two or three minutes. Decisions reached by boards of directors in London, Paris or Berlin affected the lives of millions of human beings who did not suspect that their right to happiness depended on quotations scribbled on blackboards in three noisy exchanges built like temples, in which raged the battles of unbridled financial ambition. Not a single detail escaped the notice of Europe’s financial capitals: they fixed the price of a tram ticket in Rio de Janeiro, and the working hours of a coolie in Hong Kong. So much power had never before been concentrated in so few hands within so small an area of the globe. It was the age of triumph of the European middle classes.

Charles Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes: A Political and Social History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Anchor Books, 1968, page ix.

Morazé adds the following sentence, “The Europe of 1900 knew nothing of the world catastrophes which were to come.” At the core of this is the rise of modern science and technology. Max Planck published the first paper that gave us quantum mechanics. David Hilbert, at the 1900 Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, presented a collection of 23 problems (later known as Hilbert’s problems). Mathematicians, including Grigori Perelman (famous for his contributions to Riemannian geometry), are still attempting to solve these problems.

Henry Adams, attending the Exposition Universelle (1900), observed the dynamo and wrote the chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in his book The Education of Henry Adams. He thinks of the dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.

Remember that in the world of 1900, in the background to all of this, we have the Boxer Rebellion in China, part of the Chinese century of humiliation (which angers them to this day).

The quest for meta-intelligent understanding (i.e., poly-awareness) involves comparing then and now and how they are connected.

Science-Watching: From Ignition to Energy

[from Science & Technology Review July/August 2025 Research Highlights, by Noah Pflueger-Peters]

Achieving ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) proved that harnessing the power of the Sun in a laboratory may be possible. The Sun’s extreme temperatures and pressures cause light elements to fuse together to create heavier ones, releasing enormous energy and sustaining conditions for more thermonuclear reactions. NIF replicates these conditions with inertial confinement fusion, in which lasers compress and heat a target capsule filled with deuterium and tritium (DT), “heavy” isotopes of hydrogen that contain extra neutrons. When the isotopes fuse, they create helium and a neutron, and the lost mass is converted into inertial fusion energy (IFE), which can be harnessed for energy production.

Nuclear fusion produces significantly more energy than either nuclear fission or burning fossil fuels for equivalent amounts of fuel. Since the input materials for fusion energy are plentiful on Earth, an IFE power plant could produce safe, abundant, power grid-compatible energy without highly radioactive byproducts.

Although significant work remains to harness fusion energy, pursuing the development and deployment of IFE is crucial for the nation’s energy security, enabling the United States to shape implementation worldwide, avoid technological surprises from adversaries, and influence technical leadership in other energy-intensive technologies such as AI, machine learning (ML), and supercomputing.

IFE research stretches back to the early days of Lawrence Livermore, and today the Laboratory is fostering the overall fusion ecosystem. Livermore’s unique capabilities, expertise, and connections will be critical to laying the technical, logistical, and legal groundwork to make IFE possible. “IFE is a grand scientific and engineering challenge, something that is so incredibly difficult and high-risk and takes enormous expertise,” says Tammy Ma, Livermore’s IFE Institutional Initiative lead. “This challenge makes it the right kind of problem for national laboratories to pursue.”

This artist’s rendering shows the concept for an inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant design, with a cutaway to show the plant’s target chamber in the center. Livermore researchers are laying the groundwork for private fusion companies to build similar designs. (Illustration by Eric Smith.)

Designing for Viability

NIF is the only facility to date to demonstrate the ignition and burning plasma conditions that are prerequisites for IFE, but it is an experimental facility for stockpile stewardship research, not a power plant. To be commercially viable and produce the energy to offset costs and meet demands (baseload power), IFE plants will need to generate more than 30 times the energy they deliver to the fusion target on every shot while firing 10 or more shots per second, compared to NIF’s rate of one or two shots per day.

The Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) study, conducted between 2008 and 2013, aimed to build directly on technology developed for NIF to achieve IFE and took a systematic approach to this requirement by developing the Integrated Process Model (IPM). (See S&TR, April/May 2009 [archived PDF], pp. 6-15.)

IPM is a technoeconomic model of an IFE power plant with detailed technical and cost breakdowns and interdependencies of key systems and subsystems. “The work done under LIFE was fantastic,” says Ma. “IPM lays out engineering and physics requirements for the entire system to test out different scenarios and see the impact. Now, we not only get to expand on all that but also leverage 15 years of new data from NIF, better codes, and high-performance computing (HPC), as well as new work in AI, ML, advanced manufacturing, diagnostics, and nonproliferation across the Laboratory.”

IPM describes an IFE power plant that requires a solid-state laser driver system to “pump” lasers with optical energy using laser diodes instead of flashlamps as at NIF. The plant will also need to fabricate and fill target capsules onsite and send them into its target chamber at a high enough frequency to produce baseload power. “We will have to repeatedly inject targets into the chamber, so the targets must be able to withstand and survive that process,” explains Ma. “Then, the lasers will track the moving targets, and when one gets to the center of the chamber, they would fire on the centered target, repeating 10 to 20 times per second.”

The facility would convert fusion energy into heat and then electricity via steam turbines, sending most of the electricity to the power grid and recycling the rest to power operations on subsequent shots. Neutrons from the reaction would produce tritium needed for the DT fuel by bombarding lithium isotopes in a “breeding blanket” material lining its target chamber. By closing both the power and fuel cycles, IFE plants are expected to be self-sustaining.

Thanks in part to IFE STARFIRE (IFE Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion Innovation and Reactor Engineering), a Department of Energy (DOE)-funded multi-institutional IFE research and development hub, researchers across the Laboratory are working to meet the new system’s demands. IPM can help identify key challenges, test the viability of new designs, and direct future research. “Many technical models and cost models exist for IFE, but very few, if any, pair systems and cost models together at the same depth as IPM,” says Mackenzie Nelson, a technoeconomic systems analyst in the Computational Engineering Division. “This type of tool offers such an advantage because we can assess design choices from both a technical and economic standpoint and create blueprints for what an IFE plant could look like.”

(left to right) Livermore researchers Bassem El Dasher, Claudio Santiago, and Mackenzie Nelson discuss a 3D model of a proposed IFE power plant design alongside the Integrated Process Model (IPM). IPM has more than 270 potential user inputs that researchers and collaborators can use to assess different IFE design choices to see the technical and cost impact on the entire design.

Operational Demands

NIF’s target capsules are extremely precise, fragile, and can take weeks to fabricate, fill, and position. Researchers are trying to reconcile that factor with the estimated demand of more than 800,000 capsules per day produced at less than $0.50 each to achieve IFE plant viability. To do this, they are examining optimal target designs for IFE and exploring advanced manufacturing methods such as microfluidics, volumetric additive manufacturing, and two-photon polymerization. (See S&TR, April/May 2025 [archived PDF], pp. 16-19.) Additional projects involve developing diagnostic instruments that can collect, analyze, and combine data with other diagnostics at the 10 to 20 shot per second frequency and use it to improve lasers in real time.

Fusion energy systems such as IFE are also a regulatory challenge, as they generate high-energy neutrons capable of breeding plutonium or uranium-233 and rely on large quantities of tritium. “Pure fusion energy systems do not require fissile material, but there are still ways to misuse these technologies that pose proliferation risk,” says Yana Feldman, the associate program leader for international safeguards. Bad actors may only need small amounts of tritium to make nuclear weapons, and some breeding blanket designs may inadvertently produce traces of plutonium that may be diverted for military purposes.

Nuclear fission reactors are regulated through international agreements and export control rules, and the independent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verifies that nuclear material and facilities are only being used for peaceful purposes. Neither treaties nor the IAEA address fusion energy, and no consensus has been reached on whether fusion energy systems need an international verification program. Verification methods for safeguarding tritium are also far less developed than for plutonium and uranium and focus more on contamination and transfers than analytical accounting for discrepancies. The precise scale of allowable tritium unaccounted for without posing proliferation risk is also unclear.

Fusion systems can be designed for proliferation resistance, but not having an existing design remains a challenge.

International security analyst Anne-Marie Riitsaar and her colleagues are exploring these complexities and starting conversations with international fusion experts and private industry to raise awareness. Riitsaar also plans to collaborate with the IPM team to map tritium diversion vulnerabilities and identify high-risk points where researchers could incorporate surveillance methods into plant designs to detect and prevent potential misuse. “People sometimes ask me why I’m thinking about fusion energy regulations and proliferation risks at this point, but it’s not too early,” says Riitsaar. “Reaching a multinational consensus on regulating sensitive technologies takes considerable time and effort.”

The National Ignition Facility is an experimental facility and not a power plant, so a commercial IFE plant design has vastly different requirements—many of which are being studied by Livermore researchers and their collaborators.

NIFViable IFE plant (estimated)
Repetition rateOne shot per day10 to 20 shots per second
Energy gain4.13 times (as of April 2025)30 times (minimum), 50 times to 100 times (ideal)
How lasers gain energyFlashlampsDiode pumping
Target fabrication and fuel fillingFabricated offsite over several weeks and filled manually in 1 to 5 daysMass-manufactured and filled in a target factory within the facility
Target deliveryPositioned manually within the Target ChamberShot into the plant’s target chamber approximately 10 to 20 times per second
Laser alignmentComputationally in real time, taking up to 8 hoursIn real time
Power cycleOpen, requiring outside energy sourcesClosed, applying reused energy to power laser and ancillary plant operations
Fuel cycle (tritium)Produced offsiteBred onsite

The Laser Driven Fusion Integration Research and Science Test Facility (LD-FIRST) is a proposed blueprint for a proof-of-concept IFE facility that will test all the key IFE subsystems in an integrated fashion. A public-private partnership will likely be necessary to build the facility and will help the IFE community address the main subset of risks and the technological challenges of building a commercial plant.

Converging on a Solution

The team seeks to make IPM as accurate and comprehensive as possible by meeting with subject matter experts across the Laboratory to incorporate the latest research. “We’re trying to evolve the model so it has the same level of high detail across every single functional area to tell us where we can focus research and help us find optimized solutions that we could propose to industry,” says Nelson.

Computer scientist Claudio Santiago and his colleagues also modernized IPM by porting its framework from Microsoft Excel to Python in December 2024, making it compatible with AI, ML, design optimization, and HPC to further inform designs. “Once we think about all the forcing functions such as minimum shot yield and materials requirements pinning us in from every direction, we end up with an optimized solution space. As we sharpen the pencil more with these tools, that optimized solution box gets smaller until eventually we’ve converged on a point design,” says IFE lead systems engineer Justin Galbraith. Galbraith and his team’s point design is called the Laser Driven Fusion Integration Research and Science Test Facility, or LD-FIRST, a proof-of-concept physics demonstration facility for IFE. “That point design, we anticipate, will serve as the foundation for a future public-private partnership that would facilitate building and realizing a physical facility to focus the IFE community in pursuit of fusion power on the grid,” says Galbraith.

Livermore is leading the charge in IFE, helping the United States develop a technological roadmap, growing and coordinating science and technology efforts within the Laboratory, and fostering partnerships across the fusion industry, academia, and government.

Ma chaired DOE’s “Basic Research Needs for IFE” workshop and report in 2022 and co-chairs the subcommittee providing recommendations on the nation’s fusion activities through DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. She and her team travel often to Washington, D.C., working with DOE and legislators to expand fusion energy research and advocacy in the nation. Livermore also leads a “Collaboratory” with other DOE national laboratories to connect research project leads and facilitate public-private partnerships. The Collaboratory has hosted multiple events with industry, and the Laboratory has partnered with three private companies who aim to design pilot IFE plants.

Meanwhile, Galbraith and other IFE leaders have served as technical advisors for engineering design teams at Texas A&M University and given them IFE-relevant problems to solve, including advanced chamber and blanket design. Galbraith is working with Nelson to develop the IFE plant design portion of a high-energy-density science summer school program, which Nelson is leading in 2025 at the University of California at San Diego, and they have developed IFE curriculum that has been deployed at six universities starting in spring 2025. “We’re hoping we can get a group of students really excited about fusion and start to build up the next generation of engineers and scientists that will make fusion a reality,” says Galbraith. The team has led IFE strategic planning exercises at the Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore will stand up a new fusion institute—named “LIFT,” for Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology—a research and development center that will coordinate and centralize institutional fusion energy research.

Harnessing IFE will be a massive undertaking, but Livermore’s broad and deep expertise, facilities, and capabilities put the Laboratory in a unique position to lead and play an impactful role. “If we can set it up correctly, IFE will be a big piece of the Laboratory’s long-term vision,” says Ma. “IFE plays off of our history and all of our strengths, and it is critical for long-term national security.”

Being at Home in the World/Universe

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided an introduction to the problem of being at home when he wrote:

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world’, or rather: “There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.”

Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 369.

Remy C. Kwant, in his essay “Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology”, commented:

For, according to him, the original lies buried in a dimension of darkness in such a way that it cannot be brought to light. Our existence is interwoven with the world, is a dialogue with the world. This dialogue reaches its most profound point there where the first and most original meaning arises, a meaning that is pre-conscious and pre-personal. Whatever is in our consciousness, whatever comes to light, becomes lucid, originates also in this darkness. As we have seen, man is able to obtain a measure of knowledge regarding this dark depth. He is able to divine something about the mysterious dialogue between the body-subject and the world. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, an absolute illumination of the phenomenal field is in principle impossible. All man can do is to erect some pointers in a darkness which resists full illumination.

Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 390-391.

We sense that the interaction between ourselves and the world at every level may not be explainable. Therefore, we seek emotional or psychological shelter. The three levels of shelter are:

  1. hearth and home
  2. a sense of belonging
  3. gods

Think of the song, “A House Is Not a Home”, sung by Dionne Warwick. “A chair is still a chair / Even though there’s no one sitting there … But a room is not a house
/ And a house is not a home” depicts the human longing for shelter via hearth and home. The French philosopher Bruno Latour referred to this as a “parliament of things.”

Consider “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, as well as the novel (and later film) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both of these cover the deep issue of shelter.

Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (German: Bauen Wohnen Denken) states:

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:

  1.   What is it to dwell?
  2.   How does building belong to dwelling?
I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Albert Hofstadter), Harper & Row, 1975, pages 145-146.

Stuart Kauffman comes at this from a different angle:

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Did Neanderthal, Homo habilis, or Homo erectus ask? Around which fire in the past 3 million years of hominid evolution did these questions first arise? Who knows.

Somewhere along our path, paradise has been lost, lost to the Western mind, and in the spreading world civilization, lost to our collective mind. John Milton must have been the last superb poet of Western civilization who could have sought to justify the ways of God to man in those early years foreshadowing the modern era. Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science. Once, a scant few centuries ago, we of the West believed ourselves the chosen of God, made in his image, keeping his word in a creation wrought by his love for us. Now, only 400 years later, we find ourselves on a tiny planet, on the edge of a humdrum galaxy among billions like it scattered across vast megaparsecs, around the curvature of space-time back to the Big Bang. We are but accidents, we’re told. Purpose and value are ours alone to make. Without Satan and God, the universe now appears the neutral home of matter, dark and light, and is utterly indifferent. We bustle, but are no longer at home in the ancient sense.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, page 4.

Kauffman comes to grips with this problem with the final line above. He continues:


In this new view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, bricolage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing,” in Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which selection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on is head with his blind watchmaker.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 25-26.

Kauffman wants to complete the Darwinian revolution by adding self-organization and complexity to natural selection. In his vision, this will begin to produce a holistic picture of who we are. This will perhaps allow us to feel “We are all at home in the universe, poised to sanctify by our best, brief, only stay.” [page 30.]

Zooming out from this, we can see a meta-intelligent sense in which science believes it can convert mysteries into problems using math. In contrast to this, philosophers believe the opposite, that the problems are becoming more mysterious.

Looking Back to Look Forward

Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

The brilliant baseball player and coach Satchel Paige seems to disagree with Churchill when he said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft (French: Apologie pour l’histoire), wrote that history is obviously a backward-looking discipline, but warns against the obsession with origins.

Edward Bellamy’s utopian time travel novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, is another example of this thought. His protagonist has a prophetic dream in 1888 of the United States in the year 2000. The book critiques the 19th-century U.S. through the lens of the future.

Alain Badiou looks back from the Neolithic period to today, describing it as a “time of crisis.”

…everybody thinks there is a crisis. Is philosophy capable of seizing hold of this crisis, while maintaining its fundamental aims? That is obviously my position I certainly recognize that humanity is in crisis, which I take to be the final spasm of the whole Neolithic period, the period of classes, of private property, of the power of the state, of technology, and so on. This started in Egypt and China six or seven thousand years ago and now this ends up in what is after all a very difficult situation to control. It is the outcome of everything that this gigantic period has swept along with it. This includes the status of truths, which today are perhaps a bit domesticated by an uncontrollable situation of predation and destruction.

After all, technology is tributary to science; everything is supposed to be mediated by information, even aesthetics; love has become calculable because you can calculate scientifically the person who best matches with you. All this indeed is at the origin of a gigantic crisis in philosophy. My own position is that we can be in a position of active resistance to what is happening, while holding onto the original categories of philosophy. A form of resistance that nevertheless consists in dramatically changing into something else. We should not hope to reform the world such as it is: I think this is completely impossible. Of course, one can try to do the best one can, but little by little everyone recognizes that the world we live in is catastrophic. And that is certainly true. It is catastrophic because it is the end—and here we should think big—of several millennia. It is not just the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is the end of the world of social classes, of inequalities, of state power, of the subservience to science and technology, of private property colonizing everything, of senseless and criminal wars.

Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 26-27.

Badiou argues that the world has always been threatened by catastrophe and philosophy is its reaction.

Let us recall that Socrates and Plato were people who already intervened at the end of the Greek city. They too found themselves in a world threatened by catastrophe: they did not live in a stable and established world at all. That ends with Alexander the Great, who brings order to all this in the form of an imperial creation, and finally with the Romans and their monster of a state the likes of which had never been seen before. The Greek city and Greek democracy thus ended in the imperialism of ancient Rome. Thus, we may also find inspiration in Plato in this last regard. Plato is the first complete philosopher, but he already lives in a time of crisis. Of course, Athens was very famous and celebrated, but at the same time it was already corrupted and fragile. During Plato’s own lifetime, not to mention Aristotle, Macedonian imperialism is already present. Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s first tutor; he was a prototype of the corrupted and, moreover, the inventor of academic philosophy!

Similarly, if we take the greatest philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Hegel—we again find the same type of figure. Hegel is obviously the philosopher caught up in the French Revolution and its fundamental transformations; Descartes, for his part, is caught up in the emergence of modern science. All these philosophers are caught up in considerable shakeups of their time, in the fact that an old society is on the verge of dying and the question of what is going to appear that is new. We too find ourselves in the same situation: we must continue along these lines, by taking inspiration from what those philosophers did. Thus, they considered that the moment had come to work on a renewed systematicity of philosophy, because the conditions had changed. So, based on the conditions as they existed, it was time to propose an innovative way out of the existing constraints, an individual and collective liberation. From this point of view, we can find inspiration in the great classical philosophical tradition: we need not reject it, nor claim that all this is finished and find solace in an insurmountable nihilism, nor adopt the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics going back all the way to Plato. All this is pointless, and finally becomes incorporated into the disorder of the world. On the contrary, we must hold onto the fact that philosophy has always been particularly useful, possible, and necessary in situations of grave crisis for the collective, and from there pursue the work of our great predecessors.

Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 29-30.

Contrast “What was the Neolithic world that led to the unleashing of technology?” (Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, page 25) and “Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.” (The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”). Perhaps we can conclude that wisdom is knowing when the past is useful in understanding the future.

Why Is Technological History So Misleading?

We are conditioned to think of technological history in a very binary way. For thousands of years before motorized transportation, we think of horses and wind-powered ships. We also sense that if we brought great historical minds from before the industrial revolution to a modern city, most likely they would be stunned by the technology surrounding them. Think of a world of medical science before anesthesia and germ theory.

Let’s modify this binary view of human history. David F. Noble gives us a more accurate view:

Augustine, the chief author of Christian orthodoxy, wrote in The City of God, “there have been discovered and perfected, by the natural genius of man, innumerable arts and skills which minister not only to the necessities of life but also to human enjoyment.” Augustine recognized the “astonishing achievements” that had taken place in cloth-making, navigation, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, medicine, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, and food preparation; in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; as well as in language, writing, music, theater, painting, and sculpture. But he emphasized again that “in saying this, of course, I am thinking only of the nature of the human mind as a glory of this mortal life, not of faith and the way of truth that leads to eternal life… And, remember, all these favors taken together are but the fragmentary solace allowed us in a life condemned to misery.”5

5 St. Augustine, The City of God (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 526, 527.

David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, Penguin Books, 1999 (originally 1997), pages 11-12.

Note that Augustine wrote The City of God in 426 AD, meaning that even 1600 years ago, they had already made colossal advances. The prejudice that we have, given our scientific training, is utterly misleading. Rather than being blinded by Biblical explanations of how the world came to be, Augustine lauded these scientific advancements. We think of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, rather than, “Let there be light.”

There are various levels of empirical and artisanal knowledge. In cooking, we rarely worry about molecules that make up ingredients. All these daily life pillars Augustine lists cannot be overlooked, even as we unlock the submicroscopic world of quantum mechanics.

Monomania and the West

There have been all kinds of “voices” in the history of Western civilization. Perhaps the loudest voice is that of monomaniacs, who always claim that behind the appearance of the many is the one. If we illustrate the West, and at its roots, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem, we see the origins of this monomania. Plato’s realm of ideas was supposed to explain everything encountered in our daily lives. His main student and rival, Aristotle, has his own competing explanation, based in biology instead of mathematics.

These monomanias in their modern counterpart in ideologies. In communism, the key to have everything is class and the resulting class struggles. Nazism revolves around race and racial conflict.

In our own era, the era of scientism, we have the idea of god replaced with Stephen Hawking’s “mind of god,” Leon Lederman’s The God Particle and KAKU Michio’s The God Equation. In the 2009 film, Angels & Demons, there’s a senior Vatican official, played by Ewan McGregor, who is absolutely outraged by the blasphemous phrase, “the god particle.”

Currently, the monomania impetus continues full-force. For example, Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT tells us that reality is the cosmos and not chaos, because all of reality together is a computer. His MIT colleague, Max Tegmark, argues in his books that the world is not explained by mathematics, but rather is mathematics. Perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking is given to us by the essay “Everything Is Computation” by Joscha Bach:

These days we see a tremendous number of significant scientific news stories, and it’s hard to say which has the highest significance. Climate models indicate that we are past crucial tipping points and irrevocably headed for a new, difficult age for our civilization. Mark van Raamsdonk expands on the work of Brian Swingle and Juan Maldacena and demonstrates how we can abolish the idea of spacetime in favor of a discrete tensor network, thus opening the way for a unified theory of physics. Bruce Conklin, George Church, and others have given us CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that holds promise for simple and ubiquitous gene editing. “Deep learning” starts to tell us how hierarchies of interconnected feature detectors can autonomously form a model of the world, learn to solve problems, and recognize speech, images, and video.

It is perhaps equally important to notice where we lack progress: Sociology fails to teach us how societies work; philosophy seems to have become infertile; the economic sciences seem ill-equipped to inform our economic and fiscal policies; psychology does not encompass the logic of our psyche; and neuroscience tells us where things happen in the brain but largely not what they are.

In my view, the 20th century’s most important addition to understanding the world is not positivist science, computer technology, spaceflight, or the foundational theories of physics.

It is the notion of computation. Computation, at its core, and as informally described as possible, is simple: Every observation yields a set of discernible differences.

These we call information. If the observation corresponds to a system that can change its state, we can describe those state changes. If we identify regularity in those state changes, we are looking at a computational system. If the regularity is completely described, we call this system an algorithm. Once a system can perform conditional state transitions and revisit earlier states, it becomes almost impossible to stop it from performing arbitrary computation. In the infinite case that is, if we allow it to make an unbounded number of state transitions and use unbounded storage for the states—it becomes a Turing machine, or a Lambda calculus, or a Post machine, or one of the many other mutually equivalent formalisms that capture universal computation.

Computational terms rephrase the idea of “causality,” something that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Causality is the transition from one state in a computational system to the next. They also replace the concept of “mechanism” in mechanistic, or naturalistic, philosophy. Computationalism is the new mechanism, and unlike its predecessor, it is not fraught with misleading intuitions of moving parts.

Computation is different from mathematics. Mathematics turns out to be the domain of formal languages and is mostly undecidable, which is just another word for saying “uncomputable” (since decision making and proving are alternative words for computation, too). All our explorations into mathematics are computational ones, though. To compute means to actually do all the work, to move from one state to the next.

Computation changes our idea of knowledge: Instead of justified true belief, knowledge describes a local minimum in capturing regularities between observables. Knowledge is almost never static but progresses on a gradient through a state space of possible worldviews. We will no longer aspire to teach our children the truth, because, like us, they will never stop changing their minds. We will teach them how to productively change their minds, how to explore the never-ending land of insight.

A growing number of physicists understands that the universe is not mathematical but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: They still seem confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.

Everything is computation.

Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments, John Brockman (editor), Harper Perennial, 2017, pages 228-230.

Friedrich Nietzsche rebelled against this type of thinking the most profoundly. If scientism represents the modern, then Nietzsche was the prophet of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” is not about a creator or divinity, but rather finality itself. There is no final explanation.

China to Sustain Top-Down, Debt-Fueled Investment in Major Projects and Security Capacities, Ex-Official Says

Dong Yu, now at Tsinghua, says via state media that Beijing-decreed, central govt bond-backed construction will continue into the next five years.

[from the Center for China & Globalization’s Pekingology]

by Zichen Wang, 10 August, 2025

The key concept in today’s newsletter is 国家重大战略实施和重点领域安全能力建设, in abbreviation in Chinese as 两重 liǎng zhòng.

In English, it is translated officially as the implementation of major national strategies and building up security capacity in key areas, hereinafter referred to as “Two Major Undertakings.”

The concept first appeared in official policy documents in the Chinese Premier’s Report on the Work of the Government [archived PDF] in March 2024.

To systematically address funding shortages facing some major projects for building a great country and advancing national rejuvenation, it is proposed that, starting this year and over each of the next several years, ultra-long special treasury bonds be issued. These bonds will be used to implement major national strategies and build up security capacity in key areas. One trillion yuan of such bonds will be issued in 2024.

By the end of the year, the yuan tag, despite being approved by the national legislature, had changed by 300 billion. The People’s Daily newspaper reported in December 2024.

As of now, the 700 billion yuan in ultra-long-term special treasury bonds allocated for the “two major undertakings” has been distributed in three batches to specific projects.

In 2025, the following year, the Report on the Work of the Government [archived PDF] says,

A total of 1.3 trillion yuan of ultra-long special treasury bonds will be issued, 300 billion yuan more than last year.

735 billion yuan will be earmarked in the central government budget for investment. We will put ultra-long special treasury bonds to good use, increase ultra-long-term loans and other types of financing support, and strengthen top-down organization and coordination to ensure greater support for the implementation of major national strategies and security capacity building in key areas.

A simultaneous Finance Ministry budget plan [archived PDF] rounds up the overall central government spending for the Two Major Undertakings to 800 billion yuan in 2025.

In yuan terms, the much-touted new government subsidies to households pale in comparison with the two major undertakings.

Also from the 2025 Report on the Work of the Government [archived PDF]:

Ultra-long special treasury bonds totaling 300 billion yuan will be issued to support consumer goods trade-in programs. This represents an increase of 150 billion yuan over the previous year.

This week, China announced this week that the phased free preschool education policy will cover all children in their final year of kindergartens, saving families 20 billion yuan. Childcare subsidies unveiled in July amount to 90 billion yuan. 

As Joe Biden repeated over the years,

Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.

The National Development and Reform Commission said last month:

In 2025, a total of 800 billion yuan has been allocated for the “two major undertakings,” supporting 1,459 projects in key areas such as ecological restoration in the Yangtze River Basin, major transportation infrastructure along the Yangtze River, the New Western Land–Sea Corridor, high-standard farmland, major water conservancy projects, urban underground pipeline networks, the “Three-North” shelterbelt program, and the renovation of hospital wards.

Now that the 2025 money has been spent by July and China is drawing up its next Five-Year Plan for 2026-2030, will there be more such projects in the future?

In a column for the state-run China News Service this week, Dong Yu, previously Deputy Director-General of the Second Economic Bureau of the Office of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission and, before that, an official at China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), pointedly said,

In the next step, during the formulation and implementation of the 15th Five-Year Plan, the “two major undertakings” will continue to occupy an important place, be organically incorporated into the new five-year plan, and form close alignment and sustained momentum with major national strategies, major plans, major projects, and key initiatives…

…Such a major strategy will be pursued with persistence—it will not remain rhetorical, nor will it be reversed abruptly.

He did not cite a source of information in his article.

Continuing with his lecturing style, Dong, now Executive Vice Director of China Institute for Development Planning, Tsinghua University, rebuked some unspecified market analysis that had observed the investments just were a one-time boost shot.

Some market institutions once analyzed that when China’s economy was facing short-term difficulties and challenges, the launch of the “two major undertakings” was mainly aimed at expanding investment in the short term to stabilize growth. Such a view clearly lacks a professional understanding of the decision-making intentions and logic, fails to properly grasp the relationship between the short term and the medium-to-long term, as well as between objectives and means, and inverts the proper order of priorities—a misconception that needs to be pointed out and corrected.

Dong also highlighted what he said was the unusual nature of the “strategic move,” including that central government debts fueled the investments, and they were selected “top-down,” rather than primarily relying on local government proposal or input.

The two undertakings were formally submitted for deliberation at the 2024 National People’s Congress after the central leadership made its decision and arrangements…

The central authorities have shown firm determination in this work, adopting the ultra-long-term special treasury bond—a macro policy tool that has rarely been used. Compared with several past issuances of special treasury bonds, the funding arrangement for the “two major undertakings” spans a longer cycle, has a broader scope of application, and will continue to advance in the next stage. It can be said that the scale and intensity are unprecedented. In 2024, a total of 700 billion yuan in ultra-long-term special treasury bonds was allocated, and in 2025, the figure is 800 billion yuan, all of which have now been fully disbursed.

The organization of the “two major undertakings” construction is top-down, completely different from the past practice in the investment sector where projects were determined through bottom-up applications. The purpose is to facilitate the smoother downward transmission of the needs of major national strategies. Relevant [central] government departments, by identifying shortcomings and weaknesses, specifying key areas, and refining project requirements, have ensured that the project list is no longer a collection of fragmented local items. Instead, projects are planned in an integrated manner by category and sector, with strengthened guidance for key regions, more targeted measures, and clearer standards.

Although an exhaustive list of the 1,459 projects does not appear to be available to the public, the “security capacity” build-up in the two major undertakings should be understood in broad terms, and Dong claims the investments put China on a sounder footing globally now that Donald Trump rules America again.

In recent years, the central authorities have emphasized security awareness and bottom-line thinking in development planning, a shift closely related to changes in the international situation. The closer China’s economy becomes intertwined with the global economy, the more comprehensive its considerations must be regarding issues such as food security, energy security, industrial security, and ecological security. The second “undertaking” in the “two major undertakings”—the strengthening of security capabilities in key areas—is precisely a forward-looking arrangement. The dramatic changes in the international environment since the beginning of 2025 have further underscored and confirmed the necessity of enhancing security capabilities, fully demonstrating that the central authorities’ thinking and deployment have been prescient and ahead of the curve.

Dong’s article via China News Service is fully translated below.

中央这一先手棋很不寻常

This Strategic First Move by the Central Authorities Is Highly Unusual

by Dong Yu, Executive Vice President, Institute for China Development Planning, Tsinghua University

The issuance of ultra-long-term special treasury bonds to support the implementation of major national strategies and the building of security capacities in key areas (hereinafter referred to as the “two major undertakings”) has become one of the hottest topics in China’s economy in recent years. Any observation of China’s present and future economic trajectory must include research and analysis of these two undertakings. More than a year has passed since the initiative was launched, making it both necessary and timely to evaluate its effectiveness, understand its operating mechanisms, and look ahead to its prospects.

The “Two Major Undertakings” Are by No Means Ordinary Policy Measures

In terms of decision-making background and process, as well as policy intensity and scope, the launch and implementation of the two major undertakings stand out from other policies. They represent a top-level design initiative.

Understanding a policy starts with its background. From the sequence of events leading to the proposal, this was a proactive, historic choice. The two undertakings were formally submitted for deliberation at the 2024 National People’s Congress after the central leadership made its decision and arrangements. The timing was significant: the 20th Communist Party of China National Congress had laid out a series of major long- and medium-term strategic initiatives that needed concrete engineering projects to push forward. China was midway through two Five-Year Plans, yet strategic advancement could not wait. The central leadership thus introduced the two major undertakings as a groundbreaking initiative.

Strategically, the undertakings directly address the needs of advancing long-term objectives. From the outset, they have been aimed squarely at the goals of Chinese modernization. By breaking down these goals into specific tasks and identifying the most difficult bottlenecks, the undertakings found their points of focus. Some of these tasks might take decades for other countries to achieve, but China has chosen not to delay—tackling them head-on at the starting stage of the new journey toward modernization. This model is uniquely Chinese and has been proven by history to be a key factor in China’s remarkable development successes.

The undertakings are also highly forward-looking—a “first move” by the central leadership. In recent years, national development planning has placed greater emphasis on security and on guarding the bottom line, in response to changes in the international environment. The closer China’s economy is linked to the global economy, the more comprehensive its considerations must be on food security, energy security, industrial security, and ecological security, and other issues. The second “major” in the initiative—security capacity building in key areas—is an arrangement made in anticipation of future challenges. The sharp changes in the international environment since 2025 have only highlighted and validated the necessity of strengthening security capacities, demonstrating that the central leadership’s thinking and arrangements were ahead of the curve.

The undertakings also have a strong overall and systemic quality, constituting a key move in macroeconomic governance. They focus on areas of outstanding importance to economic and social development and have a high degree of relevance to the overall development landscape. The policy toolkit they employ integrates investment, fiscal, science and technology, education, social, and ecological policies. This comprehensive package embodies the use of systems thinking to drive development and will significantly impact all aspects of the economy and society.

A Manifestation of Central Will

Extraordinary measures are for extraordinary tasks. The strategic objectives of Chinese modernization are long-term undertakings, and the two major undertakings provide the foundational support through systematic design and substantial funding.

The central leadership has committed to this initiative by adopting the rarely used macroeconomic tool of ultra-long-term special treasury bonds. Compared with previous special bond issuances, the funding for the two undertakings spans a longer cycle and serves a wider range of purposes, with plans for continued implementation. In both scale and intensity, this is unprecedented: 700 billion yuan in 2024 and 800 billion yuan in 2025, all of which has already been allocated.

In terms of priorities, it vividly reflects the principle of “concentrating resources to accomplish major undertakings.” The focus areas include urban–rural integration, regional coordination, high-quality population development, food security, energy and resource security, ecological security, and self-reliance and strength in science and technology—all crucial to building a strong nation and achieving national rejuvenation. These require coordinated planning and advancement. In just over a year, the high-level requirements have been translated into batches of concrete projects, reflecting the efficiency of implementation.

Project selection is guided by the principle that only the central government can resolve these issues. Some involve urgent development bottlenecks with significant obstacles that cannot be overcome by conventional means, such as scientific and technological breakthroughs, high-standard farmland construction, and upgrading the quality of higher education. Others are long-desired but previously unachievable projects that lack local willingness or capacity to implement, such as major cross-regional infrastructure, cross-basin wastewater treatment, and urban underground utility upgrades.

The organization of the “two major undertakings” construction is top-down, completely different from the past practice in the investment sector where projects were determined through bottom-up applications. The purpose is to facilitate the smoother downward transmission of the needs of major national strategies. Relevant [central] government departments, by identifying shortcomings and weaknesses, specifying key areas, and refining project requirements, have ensured that the project list is no longer a collection of fragmented local items. Instead, projects are planned in an integrated manner by category and sector, with strengthened guidance for key regions, more targeted measures, and clearer standards.

A Combination of “Hard” and “Soft” Measures

From the start, the undertakings were designed not only to fund “hard” engineering projects but also to include comprehensive arrangements for “soft” institutional and policy measures—an important innovation.

The emphasis on soft measures is pragmatic. Given the high importance and public nature of the projects, long-term mechanisms must be designed to ensure smooth progress during construction and sustainable operation thereafter. This includes drafting specialized plans to provide strategic guidance, introducing targeted policies to improve funding efficiency, and innovating institutional arrangements to safeguard implementation.

The implementation process is thus also a process of improving the investment and financing system, updating project management approaches, and enhancing investment effectiveness. In some sectors, soft-measure experiments have had positive impacts, creating healthy interaction with hard investments.

For example, the healthy operation of urban underground pipelines depends on sound maintenance mechanisms. Some local governments have attracted long-term institutional funds into major pipeline projects through debt or equity investment plans, stabilizing private sector returns via operational rights, government subsidies, and tax incentives. Others have introduced province-wide upstream–downstream gas price linkage, set reasonable water supply return rates based on market profits, and advanced the marketization of gas and water prices—reducing losses for public utilities and encouraging private investment.

Similarly, in the quality undergraduate expansion program, mechanisms play a guiding role: schools effectively implementing expansion plans receive increased support, while those performing poorly see reduced support; universities without expanded undergraduate admission plans are generally excluded from special bond funding. Disciplines and programs are adjusted dynamically to align talent training with economic and societal needs.

Directly Relevant to Everyone

The nature of the undertakings is not determined by project size but by their strategic objectives and significance. As long as they align with major national strategies, they are included—whether as large standalone projects, such as high-speed rail along the Yangtze River, or as “project packages,” such as Yangtze River wastewater treatment composed of multiple treatment facilities. This flexible, problem-oriented approach allows better alignment with public needs.

As projects break ground and enter operation, their benefits to people’s livelihoods will become increasingly evident. Observers should not see the undertakings as distant from daily life; they will bring tangible improvements to everyone’s quality of life.

For example:

  • Urban underground pipelines: Upgrades to gas, water, and heating systems will greatly improve safety and resilience. Renovation of old gas pipelines is nearing completion, reducing accident rates by over 30%. Eliminating hidden risks in unseen places increases residents’ sense of security.
  • Food security: Gradually converting all permanent basic farmland into high-standard farmland will stabilize grain output and enhance food safety. Higher standards mean safer products, so people will eat with greater confidence.
  • Yangtze River protection: Building or upgrading over 60,000 kilometers of sewage pipelines in the Yangtze Economic Belt will greatly improve the river’s ecological environment and resolve long-standing public concerns.
  • Transportation: Creating the shortest Shanghai–Chengdu high-speed rail corridor (approx. 1,900 km) will connect the Yangtze River Delta, the middle Yangtze region, and the Chengdu–Chongqing area more quickly, cutting travel time nearly in half and boosting east–west connectivity.
  • Ecological security: Implementing the “Three-North” shelterbelt project over 130 million mu (93 million hectares), with good survival rates for trees, shrubs, and grasses, will safeguard northern ecological security and create new income opportunities.
  • Higher education: “Double First-Class” universities will see markedly improved conditions, with over 500,000 new standard dorm beds. Quality undergraduate enrollment will rise by 16,000 in 2024 and over 20,000 in 2025, giving more students access to quality education and ensuring basic living needs for those from low-income families.
A Bold Stroke in the History of Development

The two major undertakings are a major decision by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, aimed at the overall strategy of building a strong country and achieving national rejuvenation. They play an irreplaceable role in advancing Chinese modernization.

They are not short-term measures but focus on medium- to long-term development. Some market institutions once analyzed that when China’s economy was facing short-term difficulties and challenges, the launch of the “two major undertakings” was mainly aimed at expanding investment in the short term to stabilize growth. Such a view clearly lacks a professional understanding of the decision-making intentions and logic, fails to properly grasp the relationship between the short term and the medium-to-long term, as well as between objectives and means, and inverts the proper order of priorities — a misconception that needs to be pointed out and corrected.

Since implementation began, the undertakings have provided important support for economic stability. Although their starting point was not short-term growth, the resulting investment has boosted employment and consumption, helping to expand domestic demand and stabilize growth. In the next step, during the formulation and implementation of the 15th Five-Year Plan, the “two major undertakings” will continue to occupy an important place, be organically incorporated into the new five-year plan, and form close alignment and sustained momentum with major national strategies, major plans, major projects, and key initiatives.

They will also bolster the country’s core competitiveness. As foundational support for Chinese modernization, they will strengthen factor security and resolve long-term bottlenecks, with far-reaching significance for shaping China’s development prospects. In an era of intensifying major-power competition, they will provide stable expectations and significantly enhance China’s capacity to manage international uncertainty. Such a major strategy will be pursued with persistence—it will not remain rhetorical, nor will it be reversed abruptly.

Though implementation has only recently begun, the undertakings’ historic role will continue to grow over time. In the future, looking back, they will surely stand as an important part of the “China story” and leave a bold stroke in the history of the People’s Republic’s development.

What Do We Mean by “Spheres of Existence”?

The classic Hollywood film, How Green Was My Valley, is set in a Welsh coal-mining community over a hundred years ago. The spiritual head of the community, played by Walter Pidgeon, is walking along a hillside with a young boy who was traumatized after being injured in an accident. After some small talk, Pidgeon’s character tells the boy that prayer will help him heal. He explains that this isn’t mumbling in a church; what he means by prayer is the deepest possible communication with oneself, thus existentializing it.

This whole dimension derives from the existence-watchers Pascal and Kierkegaard. For example, Kierkegaard writes, “My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies.” (Quoted from “Truth Is Subjectivity”, a section in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.) Note that when you watch a very gifted scientific analyst, like Robert Lawrence Kuhn, whose PBS series Closer to Truth, represents the opposite of Kierkegaard’s inwardness.

In “Realms and Domains: Levels and Confusion”, we presented realms and domains as ways of shaping knowledge. Kierkegaard utilizes the word “sphere” to communicate a similar concept. Think of the term in geometry or as a “sphere of influence” in geopolitics.

Kierkegaard tells us, “There are thus three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.” Let’s explain these three spheres. By “aesthetic,” he means the pursuit of wine, women and song as a life. The European academic song, “Gaudeamus igitur” embodies this philosophy. In the Eugene O’Neill play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of the characters exclaims, “In vino veritas!” (Latin: in wine, there is truth.)

By ethical, Kierkegaard is not describing a great concern for morality. He means, rather, the sense of camaraderie felt by someone for their fellows. A strong example of this occurs in the film, The Third Man. Trevor Howard plays a conscientious Royal Military Police officer, whose mission is to catch the elusive criminal played by Orson Welles. Howard’s officer’s entire existence is characterized by his desire to protect the public and his men. One could says this protectiveness is his bottom line.

To understand what Kierkegaard means by the religious, we quote, “Existence constitutes the highest interest of the existing individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality. What reality is, cannot be expressed in the language of abstraction.” In The Third Man, the criminal’s girlfriend embodies the religious sphere. Her every task in daily life can be described by the previous quote.

Kierkegaard also has a very penetrating analysis of humor and irony, given his spheres of existence. Think of a comedian like Woody Allen, who has the intelligence to glimpse the profundity of existence but this wavelength makes him intensely anxious, provoking humor. These jokes are escapist, attempting to flee the tension of existence.

Finally, there are existence-watchers like the great American author Walker Percy. In his masterpiece, The Moviegoer, he depicts a current world so fragmented, adrift and soul-crushing that the protagonist tries to find his salvation in going to movies. He sees the experience of viewing the movie as being part of a congregation. Kierkegaard writes, “In our age it is believed that knowledge settles everything, and that if a man only acquires a knowledge of the truth, the more briefly and the more quickly the better, he is helped. But to exist and to know are two very different things.”