Sung Chung

This paper reconsiders the familiar assumption that time belongs to the primary nature of the universe. While time has long been treated as a basic structure of reality, this paper argues that time may instead be a secondary interpretive tool constructed by human beings in order to organize sequential transformation, repeated events, and differences in process. In this view, what human beings have measured, quantified, and temporalized is not the universe itself but a translated version of it. Measurement is not a direct possession of the whole; it is a localized extraction of certain aspects of the whole into a form that can be compared, repeated, and shared. Time is therefore not rejected as useless, but its ontological status is lowered. It may be an effective instrument of organization without being the primary reality of the universe. On this basis, the paper distinguishes the measured world from the perceived world, reexamines the status of time in relation to relativity, separates change from transition, and proposes a shift from time-centered interpretation to transition-centered interpretation. The central claim is simple: time may not be the nature of the universe, but rather a local instrument of agreement through which human beings have translated and stabilized portions of reality.

The scientific relationship among self, mind and brain is still not clearly known. Self’s subjective experience of perception and cognition of words, feelings, thoughts etc. is supported by the integrity of human brain. Consequently, neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicists and philosophers have been investigating to find the scientific relationship between mind and brain, consciousness and quantum physics. Recent experimental evidence suggests that the neural correlate of consciousness is located in certain parts of the cortico-thalamic system. But it is not known specifically which parts of the human brain are involved in the human cognitive activity. In this study, the author proposed a tree-pattern architecture of the cerebral neural substrate in cognitive understanding of words, feelings, and thoughts on the basis of the author’s hypothesis of the ultron-logotron theory to explain the neural correlate of consciousness.

River water pollution by wastewater can cause significant negative impact on the aquatic sustainability. Hence, accurate modeling of this complicated system and its cost-effective treatment and reuse decision is very important because this optimization process is related to economic expenditure, societal health, and environmental deterioration. In order to optimize this complex system, we may consider three treatment or reuse options such as microscreening filtration, nitrification, and fertilization-oriented irrigation on top of two existing options such as settling and biological oxidation. The objective of this environmental optimization is to minimize the economic expenditure of life cycle costs while satisfying the public health standard in terms of groundwater quality and the environmental standard in terms of river water quality. Particularly, this study improves existing optimization model by pinpointing the critical deficit location of dissolved oxygen sag curve by using analytic differentiation. Also, the proposed formulation considers more practical constraints such as maximal size of irrigation area and minimal amount of filtration treatment process. The results obtained by using an evolutionary algorithm, named a parameter-setting-free harmony search algorithm, show that the proposed model successfully finds optimal solutions while conveniently locating the critical deficit point.

A scientific relationship between the Eastern Confucian philosophy and quantum physics is not clearly known in science and philosophy because of lack of concrete data that would substantially enable us to clearly explain it. Recent findings and discoveries in quantum physics and other relevant science, and the Eastern Confucian philosophy are reviewed in this study. The review of Confucian philosophy, quantum physics and personal experiences of precognitive dreams of the author and others reveal considerable parallels between Confucian philosophy and quantum physics from the ontological perspective.