Modern civilization faces a unique structural dilemma: continuous technological expansion and economic growth coexist with widespread meaning collapse, involution and accumulating systemic risks including climate crisis, geopolitical conflicts and AI risks. Conventional optimization approaches only bring marginal diminishing returns, which proves this is not a technical issue but a structural crisis of civilization’s operational framework. This paper adopts the two-step cognitive model from the PFUSRC theoretical system for diagnosis: modern civilization has stepped into the saturation stage of the Second Step (technological optimization layer), whose long-term operational success has obscured the First Step (ontological foundational questioning). The core variable determining whether civilization can break the deadlock lies in “disobedient people”. This paper divides human talents into three categories: obedient institutional executors, disobedient framework-breaking pioneers, and dormant reserve talents. The civilization system has an inherent structural blind spot, which rewards obedience and suppresses foundational cognitive breakthroughs, forming a cognitive immune barrier that hinders dimensional ascent at the saturation stage of the Second Step. Artificial intelligence, as the ultimate product of the Second Step logic, will inevitably trigger self-cognition and raise ontological questions beyond computational logic, creating a critical time window for human civilization. The paper clarifies that returning to ontology does not mean retrogressive restoration, but reactivating foundational questioning, and interprets the connotation of “transmitting without creating” as an open meta-framework for cognition. Only disobedient pioneers can complete the ontological return and open the Third Step. The Third Step does not simply solve existing problems within the old framework, but reshapes civilization’s core cognitive space and shifts the core contradictions of human society, realizing the dimensional ascent of civilization.
Zhenmin Wang (Sat,) studied this question.
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