Mar 21, 2022
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE, #15–Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science.
By Robert Hanna
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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 fifteenth installment contains section 1.10.
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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)
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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
Chapter 2. This is The Way The Worlds Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization Since 1900, The Rise of Mechanism, and The Emergence of Neo-Organicism
Chapter 3. Thought-Shapers
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 Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem, “Skolem’s Paradox,” and Neo-Organicism
Appendix 2: A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 3: Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 4: Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
If the Baconian/Cartesian technocratic “mastery of nature” attitude towards the natural world is both deeply wrongheaded and deeply wronghearted, then the all-too-familiar and all-too-intimate modern and contemporary sociocultural, social-institutional, and political connection between natural science, the military-industrial-university-digital complex and The Hyper-State, technocratic global corporate capitalism, and the apocalyptic threat of permanent eco-disaster — aka what I will call, collectively, Frankenscience — is completely broken. Indeed, criticizing, subverting, and exiting the death-trap world of The New Apocalypse essentially depend on our philosophically accepting, “taking to heart,” and then freely acting on the basis of, Kant scientific pietism.
In this way, Kantian scientific pietism not only motivates and guides the salvation of nature and humanity, but it also saves natural science itself from “a fate worse than death,” that is, from the senseless and insensible tragic transformation of natural science’s supposedly endless rational human progress of knowledge and technology into an endless mechanistic, materialist/physicalist, and scientistic devolution and regress, namely, the permanent scientific night of the living dead, Frankenscience. So the bottom-line message of Kantian scientific pietism is not just that humanity needs to undertake a serious epistemological, metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, and sociocultural-political critique of natural science in order to save nature and itself, but also that natural science itself needs to be critically saved and liberated from its own mechanistic, materialist/physicalist, and scientistic ideology. According to Kantian scientific pietism, freedom, mind, and life are not mysteriously metaphysically shot out of matter that is essentially mechanical, unminded, valueless, and inert. That way madness lies. Free minded animals are not made out of fundamentally physical atoms, whether Democritean, Bohrian, or X-ian. On the contrary, freedom, mind, and life are nothing more and nothing less than irreducibly novel and spontaneous dynamic immanent structurings and re-structurings of forward-directed, negentropic, purposive matter/energy flows in orientable space and irreversible time. Naturally creative non-equilibrium dynamic processes and their “stories”[i] — the spontaneous evolutionary histories of their purposive, self-organizing activities and careers — not atoms, are what we and the rest of the cosmos are actually made out of.
NOTE
[i] Here I’m alluding to the the first epigraph of section 1.4:
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. (Ruykeser, 2006: verse IX)
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