PFUSRC-055FNFrom Numbers to Ontology: On the Establishment, Forgetting, and Empirical Traps of Humanity's First Science

This paper puts forward a core argument: numbers are not merely instrumental symbolic tools, but the minimal ontological scale of existence. Numerals in the ontological encoding of ancient civilizations carry scaling attributes of ontology, marking existential states and structural positions, while later secularized instrumentalized numbers only serve computational functions. Though they share the same origin, their essential functions diverge completely. With five layers of progressive evidence including primitive numerals 1–10 and 0, eight trigrams encoding, Hetu-Luoshu mathematical projection, twelvefold zodiac dynamic division and field ground state (void gaps), this paper verifies that ancient human civilization had formed a complete ontological science prior to the emergence of modern mathematics and physics. This system is not simple philosophical speculation or empirical technology, but an operable, inheritable and repeatable structural encoding system. The paper further proposes a four-stage evolution model of ontological science: establishment, forgetting, replacement and revival (or continuous degradation). Modern Western empirical science is not a single independent civilization product influenced only by Eastern culture, but a branch derived from the shared primitive ontological cognitive foundation of all human beings. Horizontal cross-civilization communication and vertical human cognitive homology are mutually compatible rather than contradictory. The study concludes that modern empirical science is trapped in a critical predicament: it achieves increasingly precise computational description of natural phenomena while losing ontological roots, unable to resolve core puzzles of dimension, entropy, artificial intelligence safety and human existential meaning. PFUSRC system is not merely a theoretical model, but an operable framework to realize dimensional transformation through the reconstruction of ontology.