The Gravity of Cognition

His insight: “the death of free will.”

Lian Yusheng has no interest in Buddhist or Daoist mysticism. At his core, he is a student of complex systems and behavioral economics.

He sees through the essence of modern society: people today have no real freedom at all. What news they read each day, what they buy, even what makes them angry, is all precisely calculated by the super-algorithms lurking behind their phones. People willingly trade their privacy and desires for quick-hit “dopamine pacifiers,” eventually becoming “biological batteries” on corporate balance sheets. To him, the world is a chain of causal code that can be predicted with pinpoint accuracy.