What is Natural Philosophy?
Here are some of its enduring characteristics . . .
Its first hallmark is to take nature as its topic: not science but the world itself. . . . Science and natural philosophy have the same subject matter, but not the same powers and methods.
A second characteristic . . . is to question the present agenda or the established methods in particular sciences.
Natural philosophy tries to distinguish what scientists have discovered about nature from their interpretation of these discoveries. [interpretations are more often biased] . . . The cost for relying on [preconceptions] is an unacknowledged blindness: the progress of science requires that they be occasionally identified, resisted, overturned, and replaced.
Natural philosophy can be useful in the early stages of change, but later you need new data.
We deal with problems that are both basic and general. We do so, however, without depending on metaphysical ideas outside or above science.
When we reenvision science (or religion) there are problems with introducing ideas beyond the realm of the testable. No untrammeled speculation (nothing supernatural). The goal is to discuss foundational matters without relying on foundational doctrines (or dogma in the religious context). Natural philosophy isn't science, but it can change science. (It isn't revelation, but it can shape revelation.) Expectations shape the path.
Natural philosophy is different from the detailed daily science of a field. Daily science can gradually force change of fundamental assumptions and frameworks.
Philosophical or theological discourse can point to new possibilities, even though they can't establish validity.
Such a change may be motivated by the hope that it will throuw surprising and revealing light on well-established facts and suggest a shift of direction: a new way of looking at the familiar, offering a path into the unfamiliar.
That experiment changes theory implies that speculating on theory is worthwhile so long as it could effect experiment. (Theological speculation is useful when it influences how we practice religion.)
Meta-discourse is more often interdisciplinary and able to question field specific orthodoxies. (Science and religion can help each other ask better questions, even when they can't give each other answers.)
Reform is the typical mode of change. Revolution is the limiting case of extreme change. (I can contribute to revolution through persistent reform.)
Institutions and ideologies that foster criticism and revision allow more constant social change:
An institutional and ideological ordering of social life can have, in superior degree, the attribute of laying itself open to criticism and revision.
Some conditions for freedom and for adaptable societies:
Practical progress requires freedom to experiment and to recombine not just things but also people, practices, and ideas. Moral emancipation demands that we be able to relate to another as the context and role-transcending individuals that we now all hope to be, rather than as placeholders in some grinding scheme of hierarchical order and pre-established division in society. Neither of these two sets of requirements is likely to be satisfied unless we succeed in building societies and cultures that facilitate their own reconstruction, weakening the power of the past to define the future and diminishing the extent to which crisis must serve as midwife to change.
(Are you creating the need for crisis?)
Having an ideology or institution that can be fixed is more important than having one that is right. "Corrigibility supersedes finality." We can be fully committed to an organization that values correction even if it is sometimes wrong. (When an organization ceases to allow for substantial change, how should we relate to it?)
We can engage in such an order, even single-mindedly and whole-heartedly, without surrendering to it. In the midst of our ordinary business, we can keep the last word to ourselves rather than giving it to the regime. In this way, the social world that we inhabit becomes less of a place of exile and torment; it no longer separates us from ourselves by exacting surrender as the price of engagement and isolation as the price of transcendence.
(If Mormonism is correctable, I can belong and be independent. The false dichotomy of blind faith vs. rebellion is broken.)
An institutional and ideological framework of social life that is endowed with this power to facilitate its own remaking enjoys an evolutionary advantage over the rivals.
(God is not dead, but fundamentalism will always die. Dogma will eventually change to something more substantial, or it will also die.) Our available choices evolve as our institutions and ideologies evolve.
Natural philosophy should revisit fundamentals, connect fields, discuss big picture ideas, not just details.
Popular science is where natural philosophy is currently done.
The popularizing books have become a secret form of the vanished genre, a crypto natural philosophy.
In this respect, the arbiter of science is practical success: success at guiding intervention and at correcting perception.
(The arbiter of Mormonism should be the same. "By their fruits . . .")
Its assumptions about the workings of nature can be both parsimonious and accommodating because they are likely to be compatible with a range of different conceptions of how part of nature is organized.
(With orthopraxy as judge, orthodoxy can be accommodating.)
There is
always more than one consistent view of reality.
Science can't avoid assumptions, so assumptions need to be explicit and evaluated explicitly. The bigger your claims, the more significant your assumptions are likely to be. Most scientists will not recognize their assumptions. (Most receivers of revelation will not recognize the assumptions that color their interpretation of the revelation.)
. . . a major scientific system represents . . . a frozen natural philosophy, just as an established institutional and ideological regime amounts to a frozen politics. . . . it becomes . . . entrenched against challenge.
(Correlation is at the same time a useful aid for diffusing knowledge and a frozen theology, entrenched against change.)
We need antidotes to our biases: "Natural philosophy . . . can provide an antidote to metaphysical bias, when such bias is disguised as empirical truth."
Natural philosophy can confront disparate fields and methodologies. Major changes in thought will also change practice. (Applying scientific methods to religion and vice versa can check our biases. Religious and scientific methods will not replace each other, they will remove unreal roadblocks that resulted from institutionalization.)
The point will rarely be to replace the procedures of one science with those of another; it will more often be to remove the impediments that a methodological prejudice imposes on a substantive reorientation.
Analogy can start you on new ways of thinking.
We desire speculative ideas with real consequences, not just detached analysis of science. (Mormon Transhumanism is not simply speculative theology. We practice theology to help us act, and right theology is vindicated by its fruits.)
Its proposals grow in interest if . . . they express physical intuitions and anticipate pathways of empirical inquiry.
But speculations, even vindicated, are foreshadowing, not the final word.
[Speculation] can help draw around the canon of established science a larger penumbra of untapped intellectual opportunity.
Math is a tool, not the judge of right and wrong.
If mathematics were everything that those who believe in its premonitory powers make it out to be, natural philosophy would be both less useful and less dangerous than it is.
Making One
