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 forty-first installment contains section 3.8.
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
3.5 Thought-Shapers, Mechanism, and Neo-Organicism
3.6 Adverse Cognitive Effects of Mechanical, Constrictive Thought-Shapers
3.7 How Can We Acknowledge Organic Systems and Organic, Generative Thought-Shapers?
3.8 We Must Cultivate Our Global Garden
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
3.8 We Must Cultivate Our Global Garden
In the 19th century, Flaubert wrote brilliantly and scathingly about sentimental education, faintly and ironically echoing Kant’s concept of a moral catechism. But what all of us need to do here and now, during the long roll-out and even longer fall-out of the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic into the third decade of the 21st century, is to replace the inherently destructive and deforming current global system of mechanical, constrictive thought-drills, by designing and dynamically implementing a new and inherently constructive and enabling global system of organic, generative thought-skills. Such a new thought-system, communicated, disseminated, and inculcated by a correspondingly new global system of social institutions, would essentially consist in effectively priming, evoking, and sustaining the special organic meta-cognitive attitude or standpoint of creative piety that I described in section 3.7, in order not only to acknowledge, but also to enact, organic systems and organic, generative thought-shapers, and their corresponding shaped thoughts in the form of good, true, and right beliefs. Or to borrow Voltaire’s classical organic, generative thought-shaper and its corresponding shaped thought, the last sentence of Candide (Voltaire, 1981), and to repurpose it for the immediate and foreseeable future: Il faut cultiver notre jardin mondial—we must cultivate our global garden.
Ironically, and even tragically, there’s a popular 20th and 21st century neo-Hobbesian misinterpretation of “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” which says:
always stay focused on your own self-interest, i.e., always keep your eye on the main chance.
But in fact, fully in accordance with Voltaire’s radically enlightened, and realistically optimist, dignitarian humanism, and fully rejecting Leibniz’s faux-enlightened, scandalously unrealistically optimist, rationalistic theism, Voltaire was actually saying:
in a world filled with natural and moral evil, without an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God to do anything, much less everything, for us, it’s all up to humankind to cultivate/nurture everyone and everything, for ourselves. (Bregman, 2020; Hanna, 2020c, 2021c)
Updating that proto-existentialist Voltairean imperative to the third decade of the 21st century, I strongly believe that in a world dominated and pervaded by the mechanistic worldview and mechanical, constrictive thinking,
it’s all up to humankind to engage consistently, resolutely, and wholeheartedly in organic, generative thinking, and above all, in creative piety, for ourselves,
by globally acknowledging and enacting organic systems and organic, generative thought-shapers and their corresponding shaped thoughts in the form of good, true, and right beliefs, whether in the formal sciences, natural sciences, humanities, applied arts, fine arts, philosophy, morality, or sociopolitics.
For otherwise, if we fail to do this in the immediate and foreseeable future, then not only metaphorically but also quite literally, it’s The End of the World.
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