如何面对“终极的免费午餐”？

《共生经济学》自序

如何面对“终极的免费午餐”？

How Should We Face the “Ultimate Free Lunch”?

一、从宇宙的馈赠，到文明的自问

在《时间简史》中，霍金转述宇宙暴胀模型创立者 Alan Guth 教授的一个观点：宇宙本身，或许是一场“终极的免费午餐”（Ultimate Free Lunch）。
这一说法并不是轻佻的比喻，而是一种宇宙尺度的提醒：宇宙的存在并不需要人类为前提，地球也并非为了人类而生成。

然而，当这一物理学隐喻落入人类社会，我们却被另一句格言统治了数百年——“天下没有免费的午餐”（There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch，TANSTAAFL）。

这两句话之间的张力，构成了当代文明最深刻的悖论。大自然源源不断提供负熵与能量，科技不断提升生产力与效率，但现实却是：生活成本不断上升，债务不断累积，生态不断透支，而个体的焦虑与不确定性并未随GDP增长而消退。

为什么在一个可能存在“终极免费午餐”的宇宙中，人类的午餐却越来越昂贵？为什么GDP持续增长，而幸福感与安全感却同步下降？

这本《共生经济学：从无效增长到生命效能的文明跃迁》，正是从这一问题出发。

当莎士比亚写下“生存还是毁灭，这是一个问题”，他未曾预料到，这句文学追问将在21世纪成为文明层面的现实问题。

人类第一次必须整体思考：增长是否仍然等同于进步？竞争是否仍然必然带来繁荣？文明是否仍然相信自身可以延续？

二、主流经济学的光荣与“失焦”

自亚当·斯密在《国富论》中系统讨论劳动、资本、税赋与国民财富以来，主流经济学始终围绕“理性经济人”（Homo Economicus）展开。

这一假设在工业文明中发挥了巨大作用。它推动分工协作、资本积累与全球贸易，使人类摆脱长期匮乏。

从 Petty、Quesnay、Ricardo、Mill 到 Marshall、Schumpeter、Kuznets、Keynes、Hayek 与 Friedman，经济学家们不断完善模型与工具，试图更精确地配置稀缺资源。

凯恩斯曾感叹，旧学说“已经深入到我们头脑中的每一个角落”。

然而进入21世纪，经济学逐渐出现一种“规模迷恋”：只要交易发生，只要货币流动，就被计入GDP并被视为繁荣。

这种会计逻辑无法区分：

能改善生命质量的增长

与透支未来换取当下的增长

当车祸、灾难、重复建设与低效官僚扩张都能增加GDP时，我们看到的不是繁荣，而是一种“无效增长”。

这种增长符合热力学第二定律中的熵增逻辑——规模扩大，却让系统更衰老。

主流经济学并非失效，而是失焦。以“增长”作为终极目标，却忽略了增长是否转化为生命效能。

三、共生经济学：从理性经济人到“仨自组织人”

正是在这一历史与现实交汇处，共生经济学（Symbionomics）逐渐成形。

它并不是要推翻主流经济学的成就，而是像相对论之于牛顿力学那样，重新界定其适用范围。主流经济学关注效率与规模，而共生经济学关注增长是否真正改善生命状态。

共生经济学的英文： Symbionomics一词，由“共生论”Symbiosism和经济学economics组合而来，由三部分构成，一是词头“Sym”，意为“在一起”（together），已经有“社会”（society）的意味；二是中间的“bio”，意为“生物”及“有品位的生活方式”（lifestyle）；三是后缀“nomics”，意为经世济民之学（economics），和合而成英文Symbionomics，来对译“共生经济学”。

共生经济学因此是一种将机械论、生物论、社会论与伦理论整合贯通的经济学视角，其核心关切只有一个：一切经济行为，是否真正服务于你、我、他身心灵的健康（All for You, Me and Others’ Health in Body, Mind and Soul）。

在这一视角下，人不再只是单向度的理性经济人，而是同时具有三重角色的“仨自组织人”（Triple Self-Organizing Human）：

作为政治自组织人，他关心制度与公共秩序；

作为经济自组织人，他参与生产与交换；

作为文化自组织人，他承担意义生成与价值传承。

这三种角色在真实生活中始终交织存在，而非彼此割裂。

当制度迫使人们在“企业利润”“社会责任”“个人幸福”之间反复摇摆时，问题不在个体或共同体（TRUST），而在结构。

“仨自组织人”假设，正是将组织行为的利益、道义与秩序诉求在源头整合，使之不再分离。

由此，共生权范式得以提出，GDE价值参量体系得以建立，理性经济人向共生组织人的转变成为可能。

四、GDE：从GDP规模到生命效能

为了使这一视角具备制度可操作性，本书在第二编中提出 GDE（Gross Development of Ecology / Gross Domestic Efficiency，生態发展总值／国民效能总值）作为新的价值参量。

其基本结构可表示为：

GDE = Σ (GDPᵢ × ηᵢ)

其中 η 为效能系数，综合反映：

对资源与能源效率的影响

对社会福祉与生活确定性的影响

对生态承载力与未来的影响

进一步可得：

R = GDE / GDP

R 值即文明含金量指标。

当 R ＞ 1，表示增长具有高生命效能；当 R ＜ 1，则意味着规模虽扩张，但生命质量被稀释。

并非所有GDP都是平权的。开放专利推动新能源普及，是典型的熵减增长；通过增加社会交易成本获取利润，则属于熵增增长。

在这一意义上，技术创新与制度创新真正的价值，不在规模，而在是否将昂贵的稀缺品转化为普惠的生活条件。

这正是“终极免费午餐”在人类社会中的现实形态。

五、从智慧之爱到爱之智慧

如果说共生经济学是经济学层面的再锚定，那么爱之智慧（Amorsophia, Wisdom of Love）则是哲学层面的转向。

传统Philosophy意为“智慧之爱”，强调认知与真理；

Amorsophia则意味着“爱之智慧”，强调关系与责任。

在人类长期以Subject自居、将他者与自然视为Object加以支配的历史中，主客二元对立释放出巨大生产力，也积累了深刻危机。

交互主体共生（Intersubjective Symbiosism）因此成为新的文明价值标准。它并不否认主体性，而是承认多主体之间的互动与共襄生长。

国家之间、人与自然之间、技术与生活之间，都不再是单向支配关系，而是共生关系。

当共生经济学这一价值标准引入制度与技术层面，让工程师与哲学家重新拥抱时，便自然形成：

LIFE（生命形态）—AI（智能形态）—TRUST（组织形态）交互共生的一体化考量与规范。

最后，从互联网（Net）到物联网（IoT），再到愛之智慧孞態场/网（AM，Amorsophia MindsField/Network），从CPU、GPU、TPU到具备“奖／抑／通机制”的MPU，人类必将尝试构建一种能够支撑生命效能优先的新型文明——生活方式创新与再选择的基础设施。

六、文明的尺度与本书的结构

在宇宙尺度上，也许存在终极免费午餐；

在文明尺度上，人类必须为自己的生活方式负责。

本书并不提供简单答案，而是试图提供一把新的刻度尺：

第一编：揭示无效增长与结构性失衡的根源；

第二编：建立GDE与共生权的价值参量体系；

第三编：探讨LIFE-AI-TRUST交互共生时代的制度与基础设施。

如果我们能够让生产回归生活，让生活呈现生态，让生态激励生命，那么“终极免费午餐”，便不再只是宇宙学隐喻，马斯克奥特曼预言AI带来的“全民基本收入”（UBI），也不再是冗余意识形态（某某主义）话术的产物，而可能成为人类文明自觉的结果。

因此，在一个并不需要人类的宇宙中，人类及地球众生灵，如何有尊严、有意义地生存，这正是共生经济学试图回答的问题。

钱 宏Archer Hong Qian

2023年10月10日初稿

2026年2月21日修订于Richmond, BC, Canada

Preface

How Should We Face the “Ultimate Free Lunch”?

I. From the Universe’s Gift to Civilization’s Self-Questioning

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking relays a view from Professor Alan Guth, the founder of the inflationary model in cosmology: the universe itself may be an “Ultimate Free Lunch.” (Ultimate Free Lunch). This is not a flippant metaphor, but a reminder at a cosmic scale: the existence of the universe does not require humanity as a precondition, and the Earth was not generated for the sake of human beings.

Yet once this physical metaphor enters human society, we find ourselves governed for centuries by a very different maxim: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (TANSTAAFL).

The tension between these two sentences forms one of the deepest paradoxes of contemporary civilization. Nature continuously offers negentropy and energy; technology continuously raises productivity and efficiency. And yet reality looks like this: the cost of living keeps rising, debt keeps accumulating, ecology keeps being overdrawn, while individual anxiety and uncertainty do not recede with GDP growth.

Why is it that in a universe where an “ultimate free lunch” may exist, human lunch becomes ever more expensive? Why does GDP keep rising while happiness and security decline in tandem?

This book, Symbionomics: From Ineffective Growth to a Civilizational Leap Toward Life Efficiency, begins from precisely this question.

When Shakespeare wrote, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” he could not have foreseen that this literary inquiry would become, in the twenty-first century, a civilizational one.

For the first time, humanity must think as a whole: Is growth still equivalent to progress? Does competition still necessarily bring prosperity? Does civilization still believe it can continue?

II. The Glory of Mainstream Economics—and Its “Loss of Focus”

Since Adam Smith systematically discussed labor, capital, taxation, and national wealth in The Wealth of Nations, mainstream economics has revolved around “Homo Economicus,” the “rational economic man.”

This assumption played an immense role in industrial civilization. It drove specialization and coordination, capital accumulation, and global trade, enabling humanity to escape long-term scarcity.

From Petty, Quesnay, Ricardo, and Mill to Marshall, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman, economists have continually refined models and tools in an attempt to allocate scarce resources more precisely.

Keynes once lamented that old doctrines “have ramified into every corner of our minds.”

But entering the twenty-first century, economics gradually developed a kind of “scale obsession”: as long as transactions occur, as long as money circulates, they are counted into GDP and treated as prosperity.

This accounting logic cannot distinguish between:

• growth that improves the quality of life, and

• growth that mortgages the future in exchange for the present.

When car crashes, disasters, repetitive construction, and the expansion of inefficient bureaucracies can all increase GDP, what we are seeing is not prosperity but a form of “ineffective growth.”

Such growth conforms to an entropy-increasing logic under the second law of thermodynamics: the scale expands, yet the system becomes older and more depleted.

Mainstream economics has not failed; it has lost its focus. It treats “growth” as the ultimate goal while overlooking whether growth is transformed into life efficiency.

III. Symbionomics: From “Rational Economic Man” to the “Triple Self-Organizing Human”

It is precisely at this junction of history and reality that Symbionomics gradually takes shape.

It is not meant to overthrow the achievements of mainstream economics, but—like relativity in relation to Newtonian mechanics—to redefine its applicable domain. Mainstream economics concentrates on efficiency and scale; Symbionomics asks whether growth truly improves the state of life.

The English term Symbionomics is formed by combining Symbiosism (the theory of symbiosis / symbiosism) and economics. It has three components: the prefix “Sym,” meaning “together” (together), already carrying the sense of “society”; the middle “bio,” meaning “life” and also “a tasteful lifestyle”; and the suffix “nomics,” meaning economics as the art of statecraft and people’s well-being (economics). Together they form Symbionomics, as the English rendering of “共生经济学.”

Symbionomics is therefore an economic perspective that integrates and connects mechanism, biology, society, and ethics. Its core concern is only this: whether all economic behavior truly serves the health of you, me, and others in body, mind, and soul (All for You, Me and Others’ Health in Body, Mind and Soul).

Under this perspective, the human being is no longer a one-dimensional “rational economic man,” but a “Triple Self-Organizing Human,” simultaneously bearing three intertwined roles:

As a political self-organizing person, one cares about institutions and public order;
as an economic self-organizing person, one participates in production and exchange;
as a cultural self-organizing person, one undertakes meaning-making and the inheritance of values.

These three roles are always interwoven in real life rather than split apart.

When institutions force people to swing repeatedly among “corporate profit,” “social responsibility,” and “personal well-being,” the problem lies not in individuals or in communities (TRUST), but in structure.

The “Triple Self-Organizing Human” assumption is precisely an attempt to integrate—at the source—the demands of interest, morality, and order in organizational behavior, so that they are no longer separated.

From this, a paradigm of Symbiotic Rights can be proposed, a GDE value-parameter system can be established, and the transformation from the rational economic man toward the symbiotic organizational human becomes possible.

IV. GDE: From GDP Scale to Life Efficiency

To make this perspective institutionally operable, this book introduces in Part II GDE—Gross Development of Ecology / Gross Domestic Efficiency (生態发展总值／国民效能总值)—as a new core value parameter.

Its basic structure can be expressed as:

GDE = Σ (GDPᵢ × ηᵢ)

where η is an efficiency coefficient that comprehensively reflects:

• its impact on resource and energy efficiency,

• its impact on social well-being and life certainty,

• its impact on ecological carrying capacity and the future.

From this we further obtain:

R = GDE / GDP

R is the indicator of a civilization’s “gold content.”

When R > 1, growth has high life efficiency; when R < 1, scale may expand but life quality is diluted.

Not all GDP is equal. Opening patents to accelerate the diffusion of new energy is a classic case of entropy reduction; extracting profit by increasing social transaction costs belongs to entropy increase.

In this sense, the true value of technological and institutional innovation does not lie in scale, but in whether it can transform expensive scarcity into universally accessible living conditions.

This is the real-world form of the “ultimate free lunch” within human society.

V. From the Love of Wisdom to the Wisdom of Love

If Symbionomics is a re-anchoring at the level of economics, then Amorsophia (Wisdom of Love) is a turn at the level of philosophy.

Traditional Philosophy means “the love of wisdom,” emphasizing cognition and truth.
Amorsophia, by contrast, means “the wisdom of love,” emphasizing relationship and responsibility.

Across humanity’s long history of treating itself as Subject and treating others and nature as Object to be dominated and manipulated, the subject–object dualism released immense productive power—yet it also accumulated profound crises.

Intersubjective Symbiosism therefore becomes a new civilizational value standard. It does not deny subjectivity; rather, it acknowledges the interaction and co-flourishing among multiple subjects.

Between nations, between humans and nature, and between technology and life, the relationship is no longer one-way domination, but symbiosis.

When this value standard is brought into institutions and technology—when engineers and philosophers embrace one another again—it naturally yields an integrated consideration and normative framework of:

LIFE (life form) — AI (intelligent form) — TRUST (organizational form) in intersubjective symbiosis.

Finally, from the Internet (Net) to the Internet of Things (IoT), and then to the Amorsophia MindsField/Network (AM, 愛之智慧孞態场/网); from CPU, GPU, TPU to MPU equipped with “reward / restraint / circulation mechanisms” (奖／抑／通机制), humanity will inevitably attempt to construct a new kind of civilization that can sustain “life efficiency first”—an infrastructure for the innovation and re-selection of ways of life.

VI. The Scale of Civilization and the Structure of This Book

At a cosmic scale, an ultimate free lunch may exist; at a civilizational scale, humanity must take responsibility for its own way of life.

This book does not offer simple answers. It attempts to provide a new ruler—a new measuring scale:

Part I: revealing the roots of ineffective growth and structural imbalance;
Part II: establishing the value-parameter system of GDE and Symbiotic Rights;
Part III: exploring institutions and infrastructures for the era of LIFE–AI–TRUST intersymbiosis.

If we can let production return to life, let life manifest ecology, and let ecology invigorate life, then the “ultimate free lunch” will no longer be merely a cosmological metaphor; the “universal basic income” (UBI) predicted by Musk and Altman, too, will no longer be the product of redundant ideological rhetoric (some “-ism”), but may become the result of civilizational self-awareness.

Therefore, in a universe that does not require humanity, how humans—and all earthly living beings—may live with dignity and meaning: this is the question Symbionomics seeks to answer.

Hong Qian (Archer Hong Qian)
First drafted on October 10, 2023
Revised on February 21, 2026, in Richmond, BC, Canada