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Brain as universe, neurons as stars; in their dance, consciousness awakens.

Our Milky Way harbors roughly 100 billion stars. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens, approximately 100 billion humans have walked this Earth. Within each human brain reside some 100 billion neurons; their bioelectrical discharges resemble the stellar light, and from this cosmic choreography, our consciousness springs forth.

From crude stone tools to primitive cuneiform, from early scripts to today's digital media¡ªknowledge accumulates, civilization endures. Aristotle distinguished three forms of knowledge: first comes experience, the know-how without the know-why. Second emerges techne practical wisdom that grasps both process and principle, born from experience yet transcending it through systematic understanding. Third stands pure knowledge, seemingly useless, existing for its own sake. This final category Aristotle named science.

If experience and technology enable human survival and reproduction, science emerges from our unique confrontation with mortality. We alone among Earth's creatures possess death-consciousness while other animals live without awareness of their finite nature, humans comprehend their mortality from childhood onward.

Why do we not merely survive knowing death awaits, but live with passionate intensity, profound commitment, and unwavering resolve? Because humanity has discovered something remarkable: a mode of existence that renders life meaningful despite or perhaps because of our inevitable return to dust.

Yung Wing, China's pioneering international student, surely discovered such a meaningful existence. Beyond his celebrated status as China's first overseas scholar, he holds another distinction: China's inaugural student of modern psychology. As early as 1847, Yung Wing enrolled at Monson Academy in Massachusetts, where he encountered psychology as a formal discipline¡ªthirty-two years before Wilhelm Wundt would establish psychology's first laboratory at Leipzig University.

Inspired by Yung Wing's vision, Sun Yat-sen architect of modern China positioned "psychological reconstruction" at the heart of his "Fundamentals of National Reconstruction," declaring: "National politics manifests collective psychology. Therefore, nation-building must begin with understanding the mind." Yung Wing also founded the Chinese Educational Mission, dispatching 120 young scholars to America across four cohorts between 1872 and 1875. Among these students was Guoan Tang , who would become the first president of Tsinghua College. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Tsinghua established one of China's earliest psychology departments in 1926 the seeds had been planted decades earlier.

From this foundation arose a golden age. Distinguished scholars like Yue Tang and Xiangeng Zhou gathered at Tsinghua, creating an intellectual constellation whose brilliance illuminated the entire university. Alongside countless other disciplines, psychology became woven into the very fabric of Tsinghua's identity. The establishment of our Department of Psychological and Cognitive Science on April 10, 2024, therefore represents not the addition of something new, but the surfacing of currents that have flowed beneath Tsinghua's surface for generations¡ªlike the hidden dragons of Chinese poetry that move through deep waters before revealing themselves. In the words of ancient wisdom: what lives deeply in the heart will eventually manifest in the world.

This brings to mind Allen Newell's profound counsel one of cognitive science and artificial intelligence's founding visionaries. His maxim guides us still: "One should choose a final project that will outlast you." Such work transcending our mortal span becomes our true mission, our means of transforming mortality's shadow into life's deepest purpose. This represents what philosophers call authentic existence finding meaning not despite our finite nature, but precisely because of it.

For Yung Wing, psychology offered a pathway to national renewal and intellectual awakening. For scholars like Yue Tang and Xiangeng Zhou, it represented the science of self-understanding in service to society. Today, we stand at an unprecedented evolutionary crossroads. Previously, we used ourselves as the measure of all things, seeking to comprehend our complex world through human-centered frameworks. Now we employ ourselves as templates for intelligence itself, engineering artificial general intelligence¡ªperhaps the first genuinely new form of mind since consciousness first emerged.

What forms might its inner experience take? Could it develop emotions, achieve consciousness? Here our inquiry shifts from technical to transcendent: How might we collaborate with such intelligence to enhance human flourishing strengthening our mental well-being, enriching our inner lives, transcending cognitive limitations? How might we venture together into the cosmic unknown, allowing our 100 billion neurons to resonate in harmony with 100 billion stars, creating new forms of brilliance across the universe?

Between our star-bright past and our boundless future lies this present moment. We honor history without being bound by it; we embrace tomorrow without fear. Our Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, established April 10, 2024, marks Tsinghua's renewed voyage toward that vast cosmic ocean of possibility. I am convinced this represents a mission worthy of our finest aspirations¡ªone that will outlive us all, passing like an eternal flame from generation to generation, its echoes reverberating across time itself.

Jia Liu

March 2025