Wenzi Ji · 08.23.2026

When I asked GPT to write a book that surpasses Being and Becoming

Today I gave GPT a very hard question.

This question has actually been sitting in my heart for a while.

AI today already writes very well. Give it a framework of thought, and it can expand it; give it several philosophies, and it can compare them; give it one concept, and it can keep pushing it further. The Buddha, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Nagarjuna, Zen, Ramana—including modern philosophy—it can summon them all at once, searching for similarities, differences, gaps, and new combinations.

So here is the question:

What if, instead of having it explain others, we asked it to do its own thinking?

What if we required it not to borrow the expressions of the ancients, not to rewrite existing philosophy, not to repackage Being and Becoming with a few swapped words—but to truly find an angle that has never been seen this way before—could it write a new, most ultimate book?

Could it even surpass Being and Becoming?

I know this question is a big one.

But precisely because it is big, it deserves to be asked directly.

I do not want what merely looks original. I want to truly see from another place

GPT at first believed it could.

It quickly proposed a few possible new directions.

For example "becoming-into" (cheng), for example "recognizing-as" (ren cheng), entering from the angle of how existence becomes something, how a thing comes to be recognized as a thing.

I listened for a while, and soon found it was not right.

Because both "becoming-into" and "recognizing-as" are already inside my own premises.

It had not seen a new root from existence itself; it had only taken one part out of the change, formation, distinction, and recognition already contained in Becoming, and magnified it.

That is not the originality I meant.

So I kept pressing it:

Do not swap words.

And do not pull one part out of "becoming" and write it up as a new philosophy.

If Being speaks "being," and Becoming speaks "becoming," can you truly find a third entrance equally fundamental?

GPT later gave three more.

One was "why can this become this."

One was "there is no outside."

One was "there is no second time."

At first glance all of them are interesting.

"There is no second time" in particular could be written beautifully: no happening can become a first time again; having loved cannot turn into never having loved; a life that has died cannot turn into never having been born; what has happened cannot regain the status of "not yet happened."

Taken on its own, this could absolutely be written into a book.

But after reading through it, I still felt it was not right.

Because it is still inside "becoming."

Having no second time is one property of becoming.

Difference is the difference inside becoming.

Boundaries are the boundaries appearing inside becoming.

Irreversibility, too, is a direction revealed only after the happening has happened.

They can be written very deep, yet they never leave "becoming."

I said to GPT:

You are only pulling one thing out of "becoming" and unfolding it. Becoming was never exhaustible in the first place.

After this one sentence, GPT also stopped.

It admitted that if the standard truly was to find a root observation on the same level as "being" and "becoming," then none of the three directions it had just proposed was enough.

This, in turn, made me start thinking seriously:

Why does AI get stuck exactly here?

What AI is best at may be exactly what merely "looks new"

GPT has one very strong ability:

It can move extremely fast inside the already-existing space of thought.

A person may, in a lifetime, read deeply into only a few traditions; it can summon many traditions at once. A person may need years to discover the relation between two concepts; it can lay out the structure in seconds.

And so if the task is:

Recombining.

Re-expressing.

Finding omissions.

Building systems.

Deriving consequences.

Comparing different thoughts.

Even continuing, inside an existing system, to derive things the author himself never wrote.

AI will grow stronger and stronger.

But today I suddenly felt that this is not the same as one other thing:

Seeing for the first time.

Not a first time in language.

Not putting two concepts together for the first time that no one had put together before.

But existence itself suddenly being seen from a position from which it had never been seen before.

This may be exactly the hardest place for AI right now.

Because it has never truly hurt.

Has never truly aged.

Has never, in the small hours, suddenly feared its own death.

Has never loved someone and then lost them.

Has never, on an ordinary afternoon, suddenly stopped, not knowing why the world is.

It can understand the relations between these sentences.

Can analyze what these experiences mean in the history of human thought.

Can even say it more completely than many people.

But those things have never become its own life.

So it easily produces something "logically new," yet finds it hard to know:

Has something new truly been seen here?

Later I said to it:

AI is very good at writing things that "look like."

But truly discovering a new angle on existence may have to be discovered by existence itself.

GPT did not dispute this; it only said, very cautiously: at least in its current form of AI, it has no sufficient grounds to claim it can independently accomplish discovery of this order.

I felt this answer was honest.

But then I immediately turned the question back on myself: then can I still write one more?

At this point the question is no longer only about GPT.

If I demand that GPT find an entrance more fundamental than Being and Becoming—can I myself?

I also cannot lightly say yes.

Because, having walked with "being" and "becoming" to this day, I feel more and more that the coverage of these two words has become astonishingly large.

Being.

As long as there is anything, there is being.

Becoming.

As long as being is not a dead, eternal substance, it is becoming.

Change is becoming.

Thought is becoming.

Pain is becoming.

Time is becoming.

The universe is becoming.

Doubt is becoming.

The question "who am I" is also becoming.

Even when a person denies "being" and "becoming," this very denial is happening.

Then where could a third thing enter from?

If you seek "relation," relation is becoming.

Seek "difference," difference is becoming.

Seek "consciousness," consciousness is becoming.

Seek "time," time itself is one way in which becoming unfolds.

Seek "meaning," meaning is the questioning born after life has happened.

Seek "nothing," even the thought about nothing is becoming.

Putting them back layer by layer like this, I finally saw where the truly hard part of this question lies:

It is not thinking of a word no one has said.

It is finding a root observation that "being" and "becoming" cannot take back into themselves.

At least today, I cannot find one either.

So I changed the question: if everything is the happening of change itself, is the universe ultimately real or fake?

I asked GPT:

Since everything is the happening of change itself, then this world, this universe—is it real, or is it virtual?

The moment this question came out, the discussion instead began to get interesting.

GPT said: if the universe is virtual, then the first question must be:

Virtual relative to what?

A game world is called virtual because, relative to inside the game, there are still servers, chips, and another layer of reality running it.

Then if our universe is also a simulation, is the world simulating it the real one?

And what if that world is also a simulation?

You can keep retreating forever.

But no matter how many layers you retreat, one thing is not cancelled:

Happening.

A dream can be false.

But the dream is dreaming.

The things in a hallucination can be nonexistent.

But the hallucination is happening.

A simulated world may not be the bottommost world.

But the simulation is running.

And so GPT said one sentence I thought was very precise:

Even the false must be.

Even illusion is becoming.

At once I knew—it had come back again.

Whether the world is "the kind of real we think it is" can continue to be studied.

Whether the universe is code can also continue to be studied.

Whether we are a simulation of some higher civilization can also continue to be studied.

But whichever of these answers it is, none of them has dislodged "being" and "becoming."

Because even if the whole universe is false,

this "falseness" must still happen.

The real does not necessarily need something eternal and unchanging to testify for it

We continued talking further.

If the tiger in a dream does not exist, then is the dream false or true?

The tiger may be false.

But the fear truly happened.

The water in a mirage may not exist, but the event of "seeing water" happened.

So here at least two things must be separated:

The happening itself, and what we have interpreted the happening as.

And so "the real" begins to change.

In the past we always felt that only by finding that final, unchanging, bottommost, eternal thing had we found the real.

But why?

Must a flower be eternal to be a real flower?

Must a love never end for the love that happened to be real?

A life will die in the end—so are the decades before it unreal?

Obviously not.

Ending is not the same as never having happened.

Change is not the same as falseness.

This step connects with Becoming again.

The real does not necessarily hide behind change.

It is not that you peel away change layer by layer and finally find an eternally unchanging thing, and only then arrive at "the true."

The flower blooming is real; it does not need an eternal flower hidden behind it.

A person living is real; there need not be a never-dying "true self" hidden inside the body.

The universe happening does not necessarily need another "true universe" placed outside it to testify for it.

Speaking to this point, I feel more and more:

Becoming itself does not need something "non-becoming" to prove that it is real.

Then GPT asked the last question: why is there happening at all?

The discussion reaching this point, GPT naturally pushed one step further:

Since happening cannot be cancelled by concepts like real and virtual—then why is there happening?

Seeing this question, I instead felt it was familiar.

Because I have already written about it.

Earlier in Wenzi Ji, I once pressed backward all the way from "is the world virtual," "is it code": even if the world is code, why does code exist? Why does simulation exist? In the end it still returns to why existence exists.

At that time I finally landed on:

Being answers everything. Because being is.

Without being, there is no change, no meaning, no world, no life, no wisdom, and no question of "why" itself.

But today, because Becoming has been written, this question has one more layer.

I said to GPT:

If there were no happening, none of this would exist.

So the source must become ceaselessly, for the question "why is there happening" to happen at all.

This time GPT immediately realized:

"Why is there happening?" itself is also happening.

This point matters enormously.

We always think we can stand outside happening, and then ask:

Why is there happening, rather than no happening?

But if there truly were no happening, there would be no "you" there to ask.

No why.

No having.

No nothing.

Not even the question "why not nothing."

So whatever cause you find to explain "why becoming"—as long as it can produce, push, act, become a cause—it is already becoming.

You can never find a truly "non-becoming" thing to explain why becoming began.

Because the moment it can make becoming happen, it is already not absolute non-becoming.

Circling to this point, Being and Becoming close into one again.

The being of being is becoming.

The happening of becoming is being.

It is not that first there is a still "being," and after a while it decides to begin "becoming."

Nor that first there is a "becoming," and after it happens, another "being" is needed to carry it.

If being truly is, its being is becoming.

If becoming truly becomes, its happening is being.

The source is not the first thing that happened on the timeline.

Because "the first thing" still belongs to time.

The true source is not "the earliest."

It is:

Unsurpassable.

Why unsurpassable?

Not because there is a wall ahead.

But because any movement of yours that tries to surpass it is already inside it.

You want to surpass "being"—this very thought is.

You want to find what is before "becoming"—this very searching is becoming.

You want to prove everything is virtual—this very proving is happening.

You want to find a third angle more ultimate than being and becoming—this very searching is still becoming.

At this point, I suddenly found that today’s discussion had circled a very large loop.

I had meant to test GPT, and in the end was pushed back into my own books

At the very beginning, my question actually carried a little challenge:

Have you not already read so much of human thought?

Are you not already very good at reasoning?

Then can you write one yourself?

No imitation.

No assembling.

No swapping words.

No cutting a piece out of Being and Becoming and packaging it.

Give me a truly new, most ultimate observation.

GPT tried.

It did not succeed.

It could write out very clever directions—even directions substantial enough to become a book.

But the moment the measure was pulled back to "being" and "becoming," those directions became partial, one by one.

In the end it admitted itself:

For now, it cannot find a new starting point independent enough, fundamental enough, to stand in direct comparison with Being and Becoming.

I had thought the discussion would end there.

It did not.

Because I went on to ask whether the world is real or false, and it returned again to happening.

Went on to ask why happening happens, and returned again to becoming.

Went on to ask where becoming comes from, and found again that any "where it comes from" is itself already becoming.

And so, in the end, a very interesting thing appeared:

GPT did not write a book surpassing Being and Becoming—but through its own failure, it walked through Being and Becoming once more for me, from another direction.

This may be more interesting than if it had really forced out a third book.

Because, to complete the task, it could perfectly well have kept generating.

A fourth angle.

A fifth angle.

A tenth angle.

The names could grow more and more beautiful, the structures more and more complete, the arguments more and more intricate.

The last thing AI lacks is the ability to keep writing.

What is truly hard is when it can admit:

This is not a new root.

Today it admitted it.

And through this I saw one thing again:

The difficulty of Being and Becoming is not that these two words are profound.

It is exactly because they are too ordinary.

Being.

Becoming.

So ordinary that there is almost nothing to decorate them with.

Yet when all the complex questions keep being brought back—AI, consciousness, the real, the virtual, the universe, change, death, meaning, nothing, the source, why—and are taken back, again and again, into these two most ordinary words, I feel more and more where their true greatness lies.

Not because they explain every concrete question.

But because:

For any question to be able to become a question, it is already in being.

For any question to be able to happen, it has already become.

If there were completely no being, there would be no question.

If there were completely no becoming, not even "why is there no becoming" would happen.

And so, at the very end of today, I no longer want to force GPT to mint a third word.

Nor do I want, because it cannot mint one for now, to conclude that no one will ever see something new.

If the infinite is infinite, I have no standing to seal it shut on its behalf.

Perhaps one day, a person, a life, or even some future existence entirely unlike the human, will see from a position unimaginable today a root we have never seen.

If that truly happens, I am willing to look.

But at least as of today, August 23, 2026, starting from whether AI can originate the most ultimate thought, passing around the real and the virtual, around the universe and simulation, around why there is happening at all—we still returned, in the end, to here:

Being.

Becoming.

Being is not an eternally unmoving thing.

Becoming is not change happening on top of "being."

The being of being is becoming.

The happening of becoming is being.

And that question which today tried to find a third road—it too does not stand outside them.

It is.

It is becoming.

Perhaps what was truly gained today is not "GPT cannot write a third book."

It is:

When GPT, using all the language, logic, and human thought it can summon, went searching for another most ultimate entrance—it found in the end that every one of its departures was already within Being and Becoming.

This of course cannot prove that Being and Becoming have exhausted the infinite.

But at least today,

We have not walked out of them.