This book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE: Uniscience and the Modern World, by Robert Hanna, presents and defends a critical philosophy of science and digital technology, and a new and prescient philosophy of nature and human thinking.
It is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This thirty-seventh installment contains section 3.4.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. (Pascal, 1995: #110, p. 28)
If there is any science humankind really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in [the world] that is assigned to humankind, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be human. (Rem 20: 45)
Natural science will one day incorporate the science of humankind, just as the science of humankind will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science. (Marx, 1964: p. 70, translation modified slightly)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO KANT’S WORKS
0. Introduction: Science, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, and The Uniscience
0.0 How Uncritical and Unreformed Science Is Literally Killing The Modern World
0.2 The Uniscience and Pascal’s Dictum
Chapter 1. Natural Piety: A Kantian Critique of Science
1.0 Kantian Heavy-Duty Enlightenment and The Uniscience
1.1 Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid
1.2 Kant, Natural Piety, and The Limits of Science
1.3 From Kant’s Anti-Mechanism to Kantian Anti-Mechanism
1.4 In Defense of Natural Piety
1.5 Scientific Pietism and Scientific Naturalism
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
1.7 Sensible Science 1: Natural Science Without Natural Mechanism
1.8 Sensible Science 2: Natural Science Without Materialism/Physicalism
1.9 Sensible Science 3: Natural Science Without Scientism
1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
2.1 Wrestling with Modernity: 1900-1940
2.1.1 Six Sociocultural or Sociopolitical Developments
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
2.1.3 Architectural and Artistic Trends
2.2 The Historical Black Hole, The Mechanistic Mindset, and The Mechanistic Worldview: 1940-1980
2.2 The Emergence of Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy
2.2.3 The Two Images Problem and its Consequences
2.2.4 Modernism and Countercurrents in the Arts and Design
2.3.1 The Rise of Po-Mo Philosophy
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
2.4 From The Mechanistic Worldview to Neo-Organicism
2.4.0 Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1 Seven Arguments Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1.1 Logical and Mathematical Arguments
2.4.1.2 Physical and Metaphysical Arguments
2.4.1.3 Mentalistic and Agential Arguments
2.4.2 Beyond The Mechanistic Worldview: The Neo-Organicist Worldview
2.4.2.1 The Neo-Organist Thesis 1: Solving The Mind-Body Problem
2.4.2.2 Dynamic Systems Theory and The Dynamic World Picture
2.4.2.3 The Neo-Organicist Thesis 2: Solving The Free Will Problem
2.4.2.4 Dynamic Emergence, Life, Consciousness, and Free Agency
2.4.2.5 How The Mechanical Comes To Be From The Organic
3.1 A Dual-Content Nonideal Cognitive Semantics for Thought-Shapers
3.2 The Cognitive Dynamics of Thought-Shapers
3.3 Constrictive Thought-Shapers vs. Generative Thought-Shapers
3.4 Some Paradigmatic Classical Examples of Philosophical and Moral or Sociopolitical Constrictive Thought-Shapers, With Accompanying Diagrams
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
Chapter 5. Digital Technology Only Within The Limits of Human Dignity
00. Conclusion: The Point Is To Shape The World
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. A Neo-Organicist Turn in Formal Science: The Case of Mathematical Logic
Appendix 2. A Neo-Organicist Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and “Skolem’s Paradox”
Appendix 3. A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 4. Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 5. Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
3.4 Some Paradigmatic Classical Examples of Philosophical and Moral or Sociopolitical Constrictive Thought-Shapers, With Accompanying Diagrams
A paradigmatic classical example, drawn from philosophy, of a constrictive thought-shaper, is the doctrine of epistemic foundationalism. A necessary element of the doctrine is how the thought-shaping mental representation of an analogy, image, or picture of a well-constructed pyramid carries a highly convincing impact on belief that’s, to borrow a famous distinction from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, not said but rather only shown:
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said. (Wittgenstein, 1981: p. 79)
Since pyramids are constructed from the ground up, so too it’s shown by the thought-shaper, and then carried over directly into the corresponding shaped thought, that human knowledge must bottom out in cognitive items that provide sufficient support for every higher level of the pyramid. In this way, conforming itself to—i.e., “pre-installed” and “grooved” by—the thought-shaper, but expressing it in categorically different semantic content, the shaped thought of epistemic foundationalism then says that knowledge is grounded solely on some non-normative primitive facts, whether internal or external, that somehow fully justify corresponding foundational beliefs by means of causing, or otherwise strictly determining, those beliefs, thereby stop any vicious skeptical regress of inferential reasons for belief.
But there’s a self-contradictory, self-undermining problem with epistemic foundationalism: non–normative primitive facts simply cannot normatively support, i.e., justify, beliefs. The non-normative, primitive, causal/strictly determining facts are just like the foundations of a pyramid: they are “below grade” and anchored in the earth, hence they causally hold up everything that’s built on top of them, but non-normative primitive causes are not normative reasons. This thought-shaper, depicting a pyramid supported by a stable, immovable, hidden, earthy base, is so powerfully effective in the creation of the corresponding shaped thought of epistemic foundationalism, that the legitimacy of the very idea of epistemic foundations is seldom questioned at all. The essentially non-conceptual topological dynamics of the thought-shaper pre-reflectively and non-self-consciously induces a certainty or conviction about the naturalness of epistemic foundationalism, whereas in fact it’s altogether incoherent and self-stultifying. Many contemporary philosophers, heavily influenced by what’s now called “The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy,” initiated by Wilfrid Sellars (Maher, 2012), have critically called attention to “The Myth of The Given”; but fewer, if any—since a highly-questionable core dogma of The Pittsburgh School is conceptualism (Hanna, 2022b)—have noted The Myth’s grounding in the dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics and cognitive dynamics of thought-shapers.
A closely-related paradigmatic classical constrictive thought-shaper plays a crucial role in the philosophy of physics, chemistry, and biology, and more generally in the metaphysics and/or ontology of the natural or physical world: the levels picture, which depicts the all-inclusive natural or physical world, aka the cosmos, as a vertical stack of layers or strata with strictly lawlike upwards and downwards arrows necessarily linking the layers. Thus shown, the levels picture of the cosmos, in its corresponding shaped thought, then says that the cosmos is strictly, solely, and wholly constituted by a bottom layer/stratum of fundamentally physical facts about fundamentally physical particles, forces, waves, or whatever, and also that every other higher layer or stratum (for example, chemical, biological, mental, social) is strictly, solely, and wholly determined by the bottom layer or stratum in the dual sense (i) that it’s literally made out of the stuff in the bottom layer (i.e., mereological identity), and (ii) that facts about the bottom layer necessitate all the facts about every other layer, and no fact about any higher layer or stratum can change without a strictly natural-law-governed or strictly logical-law-governed corresponding change in the facts about the bottom layer (i.e., either logical strong supervenience or natural/nomological strong supervenience[i]). Nevertheless, the self-contradictory, self-undermining problems about the levels picture of nature are (iii) that it’s impossible to explain why all the higher layers don’t metaphysically and/or ontologically collapse into the bottom layer (i.e., strict type-type reduction), but (iv) if the higher layers don’t collapse downwards, then none of the layers above the bottom layer has any efficacious causal powers of its own (i.e., epiphenomenalism). Just like epistemological foundationalism, the levels picture of nature is altogether incoherent and self-stultifying: contemporary physics (understood, for our purposes, as the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics) plus the levels picture purports to explain the cosmos, yet contemporary physics cannot itself explain contemporary physics, therefore contemporary physics plus the levels picture is inherently explanatorily incomplete (see also section 4.4 below, and Hanna, 2022a).
The “foundational” constrictive thought-shaper described above, whether in epistemic foundationalism or in the metaphysical and/or ontological levels picture of the cosmos, is a paradigmatic classical example of how the thought-shaping mentally represented picture (the sturdy and primitive foundation) pre-reflectively and non-self-consciously smuggles essentially non-conceptual false presuppositions into shaped philosophical thinking (“there must be Ur-facts that support everything”). But such constrictive thought-shapers are by no means restricted to philosophy. A paradigmatic classical example from social thinking and politics is the shaped thought of the outsider, obviously grounded on a constrictive thought-shaper that spatiotemporally dynamically separates an inner space (where “The We” or “The Us” lives) from an outer space (where “The They” or “The Other” lives). For example, the extremely powerful effect of constrictive thought-shaping and its spatiotemporal dynamics, when framed as “the inhabitants of inner space, The We versus the inhabitants of outer space, The Other,” which is then captured as a system of shaped thoughts in the form of bad, false, and wrong ideological beliefs, is brilliantly depicted in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction movie, District 9. More generally, identitarian, “populist,” and especially fascist or neo-fascist politicians can rally their voters by proclaiming that all the members of certain ethnic, foreign, or racial minority group are dirty, lazy, untrustworthy, etc. These adverse moral or sociopolitical beliefs then pre-reflectively attach themselves to every perception, memory, or forward-looking mental representation of every member of that group. Consequently, it very often happens that people belonging to some or another ethnic, foreign, or racial minority group are then systematically treated as if they were dirty, lazy, untrustworthy, etc. In such cases—which can be generalized to identity-based discrimination of all kinds—the constrictive thought-shaper “pre-installs” and “grooves” human thinking in the corresponding ideological shaped thought as a defamatory stereotype that essentially non-conceptually structures conceptual thinking about people, and thereby, by showing and not by saying, and almost always pre-reflectively, it cranks out[ii] highly inflammatory, bad, false, wrong, and indeed immoral emotional (i.e., desiderative, felt, and passionate) and practical content in human beliefs.
Of course, we all use stereotypes all the time, in order to mediate, simplify, and speed-up various processes and routines of thinking. Seldom, if ever, do human thinkers encounter as situation that is bewilderingly novel. And evolutionary speaking, the habitual application of stereotypical representations of sets of past experiences to new situations is entirely natural and well-supported. Nevertheless, the cognitive problem of defamatory stereotypes in particular, and constrictive thought-shapersmore generally, occurs when and just insofar as thought-shapers frame conceptual content in corresponding shaped thoughts, in the form of bad, false, and wrong ideological beliefs, whose formats are habituated or routinized into intentional actions in a ways that are extremely difficult to dislodge or transform for the better, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Indeed, as has been empirically well-documented, such a confrontation by overwhelming contrary evidence even reliably produces a backfire effect, whereby existing entrenched bad, false, and wrong beliefs are “re-installed” and “re-grooved” even more fixedly and more intransigently (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010; Lewandowsky et al., 2012).
Again, we encounter here the built-in limitation of template-led intentional action: the application of a template to a given domain of content is meaningful or rational only insofar as the template matches that domain of content in its actual-world external context, and yields an appropriate response to it. But constrictive thought-shapers are always applied arbitrarily, haphazardly, and inappropriately, thereby producing salient mismatches between the shaped thought and the relevant domain of content in its actual world context, and therefore they yield bad, false, or wrong beliefs, whether theoretical, emotional, or practical. Yet, alarmingly and often even catastrophically or tragically, these bad, false, and wrong shaped thoughts persist as beliefs, and are highly resistant to modification or replacement, precisely because of the normally non-self-conscious character of all thought-shaping, which makes them almost invisible, together with the cognitive efficacy and impact that’s also characteristic of all thought-shapers, and above all together with another and indeed essential feature of all and only specifically constrictive thought-shapers that I’ll explore in section 3.5 below: their inherently mechanical, recursive character.
Over and above constrictive thought-shapers themselves, one vitally important contributing factor to the persistence of bad, false, and wrong beliefs, and to the re-entrenchment of these beliefs via the backfire effect, is the larger social-institutional environment of human thinking, and especially the impact of what (as I noted earlier) Maiese and I call “destructive, deforming social institutions” (Maiese and Hanna, 2019: esp. chs. 2-3)—for example, the social institutions of “structural” or “systemic” racism, fascism/neo-fascism, advanced capitalism, and the military-industrial-digital-complex and The Hyper State. In this connection, it’s crucial to remember that the theory of essentially embodied thought-shapers, and the theory of essentially mind-shaping and life-shaping in social institutions, are continuously related to one another.
But coming back to thought-shapers themselves again, and before I proceed to a discussion of the inherently mechanical, recursive of constrictive thought-shapers, here’s a table describing some paradigmatic classical philosophical constrictive thought-shapers and moral or sociopolitical constrictive thought-shapers, with accompanying diagrams. I’m not claiming that the diagrams I’ve provided are the only thought-shapers that could be used to capture the corresponding constrictively-shaped metaphysical, epistemic, moral, or sociopolitical thoughts, but rather simply that the diagrams I’ve provided are characteristic or typical examples of such constrictive thought-shaping; the reader is of course free to re-draw, refine, or revise the diagrams as appropriate or desired.
NOTES
[i] For explicit definitions of logical and natural/nomological strong supervience, see either sub-sub-section 2.4.2.4 above or section 3.6 below.
[ii] This mechanical metaphor provides a thought-shaping segue to my explanation of constrictive thought-shapers in terms of inherently mechanical, recursive processes and structures, in section 3.5.
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