Abstract: Classical cognitive frameworks have long regarded the irreversibility of time, the law of entropy increase, and the ordered evolution of life as objective laws of the universe. Taking difference as primary as the absolute foundation, this paper proposes that the sole primordial fact of the universe is difference itself. This difference necessarily polarizes into two extremes: the absolutely static and lifeless real (the cosmic noumenon) and the virtual as a dynamic phenomenon (the observer's underlying tendency). These two are not independent entities but two manifestations of the same difference—neither real nor virtual exists alone; they define each other. On this basis, the fundamental understanding of the universe, time, entropy, life, and consciousness is thoroughly reconstructed. The core arguments are as follows: The cosmic noumenon is a complete, static, fixed four-dimensional spacetime structure, eternally still, without motion, evolution, order, or laws. All order, laws, the direction of time, and the experience of entropy increase are experiential contents projected by the dynamic phenomenon of the observer's underlying tendency onto living carriers. The irreversibility of time is not flow but the manifestation of the directionality inherent in the observer's tendency in the carrier's experience. Entropy increase is the differential experience of the carrier located in a section of the sequence where the order manifestation is weaker. Life is not an observing subject but the physical configuration necessary for the observer experience to generate the illusion of "self." Consciousness itself is the illusion of "there being an experiencer" produced by the focusing of experience in a carrier. The evolution of life and the progress of technology are the continuous process of the same observer phenomenon manifesting with increasing precision on carriers of different complexity. This framework unifies the ultimate questions of time, entropy increase, biological negentropy, the nature of consciousness, the unidirectionality of technology, and spiritual phenomena, forming a fully self-consistent and original cognitive system. Keywords: ontology of difference; real–virtual polarity; observer's underlying tendency; four-dimensional spacetime; pure sequence; entropy increase; consciousness as illusion; carrier
Shuangning Zhang (Sat,) studied this question.