On March 5, 2026, the 110th Tsinghua Lecture on History, Philosophy and Science of Science was successfully held. The theme of this lecture was "The Motive Force: Technology and Mind in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China". The speaker was He Yingtian, a "Shuimu Scholar" postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, whose main research interests include the history of Chinese knowledge, the history of technology, and the history of thought from the 16th to the 20th century.
The lecture began with the "maze-solving mouse" device designed by Claude Shannon in 1952. This device continuously optimizes its action strategies by memorizing paths, seemingly possessing learning ability, but its internal mechanism is not completely transparent. This raises an important question: when understanding complex systems, people can either "open the black box" by analyzing the internal structure or understand their behavior only through input-output relationships. Professor He pointed out that these two ways of understanding, "exposure" and "envelopment", actually correspond to the mind-body problem in modern philosophy and also provide an important perspective for understanding the concept of mind in modern technological society.
During the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China period, with the introduction of new technologies such as telegraph, photography, and wireless communication into China, people's understanding of "human beings" underwent changes. Technology made humans be regarded both as a physiological structure and an information processing system, thus intertwining the issue of the mind with technical media. Meanwhile, knowledge practices such as hypnosis, spiritualism, and parapsychology emerged globally. Unlike the long-term and gradual development in European and American countries, China faced the concentrated input of new knowledge and technologies during this period, making the relationship between technology and the mind present a more complex aspect. Centering on this historical context, Professor He introduced the transformation of concepts about the mind in modern China from the perspective of four technical media: "force, light, electricity, and information".
First, at the mechanical level. In the late 19th century, John Fryer's translation of *A Method to Prevent Mental Illness* introduced the concept of "mental force" into Chinese discourse. In fact, there was no such systematic concept of "mental force" in the original book. Fryer unified different concepts such as mental power and will into "mental force" and explained mental suggestion as an effect similar to mechanical waves. Under this understanding, thoughts are regarded as a transmissible force, and mental force can be trained like physical strength, with its growth even being quantifiable. This understanding reflects a typical mechanistic thinking: the mind is seen as a social resource that can be mobilized and calculated.
The second medium is optical technology. After photography was introduced to China in the late 19th century, it was interpreted by some spiritualism theories as a means to capture images of souls; X-rays were imagined to be able to see through the inside of the human body. Some spiritualism works even put forward the idea of observing mental activities through a "spectroscope": human thoughts and emotions can present as different light colors and be projected onto a screen for public observation. In spiritual practice, mental states are often corresponding to different colors in the solar spectrum. Practitioners judge their progress by recording changes in light colors, thus forming a practice of "spectral cultivation". Although such theories lack scientific basis, they reflect people's efforts to transform invisible mental activities into visible objects with the help of new technologies.
The third medium is the electrical framework. After the wired telegraph was introduced into China, people quickly drew an analogy between the nervous system and the telegraph network: nerves were regarded as "wires" inside the human body, and thoughts were thought to conduct through them like electric current. In this context, some spiritualism and psychological theories began to use electrical concepts to explain mental phenomena. Hypnotism was explained as current regulation and radio induction. With the development of physics, such explanations further turned to the microscopic level. After the discovery of electrons in 1897, some theories attempted to explain mental activities as electron movement, and even put forward the view that "electrons are the essence of life". Although these views were criticized by the scientific community at that time, they showed an obvious trend: theories of the mind are constantly reconstructed with the help of the latest scientific concepts.
Finally, from the perspective of informatics, Professor He discussed the practices of spirit writing and "碟仙" (disc spirit) that were popular during the Republic of China period. Traditional spirit writing is a ritual in which messages from deities are obtained through writing in a sand tray. In the 1930s, a new form known as "scientific spirit writing" became popular across China. Participants sit around a table, touch a dish lightly with their fingers, and默念 questions. Then the dish moves on a plate and points to different characters to form answers. Psychologists at that time explained this phenomenon, believing that the movement of the dish was not caused by ghosts or gods but by unconscious muscle movements. When participants enter a state similar to self-hypnosis, thoughts in the subconscious mind are expressed through subtle physical movements. This explanation does not attempt to reveal the internal structure of the subconscious but regards it as a "black box" where people only need to ask questions and read the answers through the movement of the dish. In this sense, it is closer to an input-output system in the sense of information theory, and the design of the 碟仙 (disc spirit) plate also echoes the changes in the way Chinese character information was processed during this period.
The above-mentioned technical view of the mind is closely related to major debates in the intellectual circles of the same period, such as the "Debate on Science and Outlook on Life" in the 1920s. In this debate, some scholars argued that the scientific law of causality could explain all social and psychological phenomena, while others emphasized human free will. By the 1930s, some thinkers began to try to reconcile the two: science reveals objective laws, but human practice still has initiative. From the perspective of cybernetics, while a system follows the laws of causality, it can still exhibit a certain degree of autonomous behavior at the overall level of the system.
At the end of the lecture, Professor He extended the discussion to contemporary artificial intelligence issues. Compared with the automatic devices of the mid-20th century, which contained only a small number of electronic components, today's artificial intelligence systems are composed of billions or even tens of billions of parameters. As the complexity of the system increases, it has become more difficult for humans to understand its internal mechanisms. In this case, the "black box" problem has emerged again. Therefore, from the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China to the intelligent era, people have always faced the same problem: technology has not completely dispelled the mystery of the mind, and the black box has always existed. What has changed is only the level and way in which humans understand and operate this black box.
During the question-and-answer session, the audience discussed several issues, including the universality of phenomena similar to spirit writing across different cultures, Japan's role in the dissemination of parapsychology in modern times, and how technological media shape the public's imagination of the mind. In fact, these phenomena are not unique to late Qing China but rather a recurring cultural structure in modern technological societies. When new technological media emerge, people often use them to reunderstand the relationship between the mind and the world.
Written by: Yu Xinya
Review: He Yingtian