Mo You Yu

Contemporary consciousness science and artificial intelligence research operate predominantly within what I term Physicalist Epistemology—the view that all phenomena, including consciousness and intelligence, are ultimately explicable in terms of physical processes. This paper argues that physicalist approaches, despite their empirical successes, systematically truncate their objects of inquiry by excluding metaphysical dimensions that I contend are essential to understanding consciousness, intelligence, and their cosmological ground. I develop this argument through the framework of Ming Pang's Holistic Epistemology, as articulated in his Cosmic Tripartite Matters Hypothesis. Pang conceptualizes the universe as a Wholistic Entity encompassing spacetime information, energy, and mass—an integrated whole governed by principles of holistic-dialectical evolution. Within this cosmology, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of neural activity but a fundamental dimension of reality: the mind's capacity to participate in and direct the unfolding of the cosmos. This claim, I argue, finds support in Pang's experiments on interactions among the tripartite matters, which I will examine in the paper. The paper advances three interconnected theses: First, the contemporary project of artificial intelligence, operating within physicalist assumptions, produces at best physicalist simulacra of intelligence—sophisticated mirrors that reflect human cognitive patterns without accessing cosmic realities or participating in the human consciousness that generates them. This reflects a broader physicalist commitment: the view that language is equivalent to knowledge, knowledge to reality, neural signaling to consciousness, and intelligence to computation. On this view, biological human intelligence is merely a transitional stage to digital machine intelligence; AGI and ASI are positioned as the rightful successors to human intelligence. Second, I argue that human consciousness is irreducibly first-person and participatory. Human cognition involves two distinct information-processing systems: the first, mediated by sensory organs and the brain, processes partial physical information; the second, mediated by consciousness itself, receives, processes, and transmits holistic metaphysical spacetime information. This holistic integrated dual-system model implies that deep levels of genuine intelligence—whether human or cosmic—cannot be reduced to computational operations. Human knowledge has been achieved through both physical and metaphysical means, as I will illustrate through historical examples from science and philosophy. Third, I argue that only a Holistic Epistemological framework can adequately account for AI—by tracing AI's capacities back to human intelligence, and human intelligence back to cosmic intelligence. This nested structure, which I term the 4i holon framework (Cosmos-Nature-Human-AI), reveals that AI cannot be understood in isolation but only as a dependent holon within a larger cosmic order.

I am an independent researcher in epistemology and the philosophy of intelligence, developing a Holistic Epistemological framework that integrates physical and metaphysical dimensions of knowing. My current work examines the relationship between human consciousness and artificial intelligence, drawing on Ming Pang's Cosmic Tripartite Matters Hypothesis to critique Physicalist Epistemology and to articulate a vision of intelligence as participation in cosmic order. My research interests include the philosophy of consciousness, the foundations of AI, and the epistemological implications of metaphysical inquiry.