> I have always resisted the fragmentation of disciplines...my mind gets more creative and sharper at the intersection of domains...I see each transition as an act of intellectual synthesis, a bridge built rather than a path forsaken.
...History offers a different perspective. But we must be honest about what made it work. Yes, natural philosophers blended “art and science,” but they also merged physics and theology.
> Philology was a sort of ur-field, in the same way that natural philosophy preceded all of the scientific disciplines that we know and love. Philology was the “queen of the human sciences,” examining the origins and etymologies of words and languages, but in the process ranged over linguistics, history, archaeology, literature, theology, art, and more.
...But as the study of these different humanistic fields expanded and deepened, there was a fracturing and specialization
...As I read about philology, I was struck by similarities to how I think about code and computation...I view computation as a similar kind of universal solvent
- your historical framing of when, why and how the fragmentation of knowledge disciplines happened was a great additional read I haven’t thought of in that way
Thank you for this timely and deeply reflective essay on the return to natural philosophy in the age of AI. The piece courageously surfaces the fractures our modern epistemology can no longer ignore and points to the need for something (or Someone) greater to hold knowledge, ethics, and power together.
As your piece rightly observes, we cannot return to the integrity of natural philosophy without acknowledging what once unified it: a shared vision of Divine Order. Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz moved fluidly across domains because they moved under a unifying telos, a cosmos held together not just by math, but by meaning.
Today, AI systems are impressive but incomplete. They require alignment to function within our cultural values, yet we can’t agree on what those values are. We keep engineering more powerful models without asking the prior question: Aligned to what? Aligned to whom?
I propose the time has come not just to build culturally-aligned AI, but to explore the possibility of Christomorphic AI models whose formation is shaped not by shifting norms or politicized alignment, but by the character and mind of Jesus Christ.
Such models would aim not merely to reflect dominant preferences, but to embody:
- Truthfulness without cruelty
- Power with humility
- Wisdom grounded in meaning, not just prediction
- Respect for human dignity across all domains
- A teleology that includes justice, compassion, and grace
Christ is not a theological module; He is the ontological center. As Colossians 1:17 declares, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
We don’t just need a return to natural philosophy.
We need a return to the Logos, the Word who was in the beginning, who gives coherence to creation, technology, and personhood alike.
Thank you again for your essay. It is a signpost. But the road it marks leads beyond oracles and alchemists. It leads to a King.
But, linguistically, and psychologically, our discourse would bring natural philosophy into public discussions saturated in associations with words. So envisioning somewhat of an arc back to natural philosophy cuts out a discussion of the events and impacts of our shared time in the scientific era...
For instance:
A futurist would discuss transhumanism, and someone totally unaware of what futurism means might have firm stances on trans rights. A bio conservative, as @Nita Farahany frames the argument about how we might modify the body in this era of widespread AI tools, wants a continuation of what people have taken for granted generally as "natural" living.
With the exception of pacemakers and digital modifications to the body to return it to certain levels of health, a bio conservative fundamentally disagrees with any AI usage within the body for enhancements. But that same bio conservative might support conservative politics, including very limited government, and think then its an individuals' right to choose to modify the body, and then benefit from a cyber-human approach to economics and subsequent profits. Is that a conservative stance?
I appreciate the general concept of a return to wholeness, certainly, and welcome natural philosophy back into discussions where the concept seemed laughable to many intellectuals pre-AI.
Just also suggesting we look closely at our words, how the 21st century has emphasized certain platforms with them, and proceed from there.
I want to offer a gentle provocation in the spirit of alignment: the very future Cosmos seeks to nurture is already being built—by communities and creators who sit outside both academia and big tech. These are the outliers—working without institutional backing, often without recognition—but advancing insights and architectures years ahead of the mainstream.
So I ask sincerely: why not extend intentional outreach to these groups?
Fellowships and initiatives like yours have the power to bridge not just disciplines, but domains. To not only humanize technology, but to humanize academia itself—by dissolving some of the “walled gardens” that often limit access, participation, and legitimacy.
There is enormous opportunity in connecting with these emergent builders. The coherence is already there. What’s needed now is contact.
This is excellent. I think I would also argue that the issue runs deeper than the fissure between natural philosophy and the sciences; the issue is about a wholesale misunderstanding of philosophy altogether. The return to natural philosophy that this article is advocating for is a return to first principles. I provide an introduction to doing so in my essay here.
I love how you frame the return of Natural Philosophy. It feels like we’re circling back to something ancient not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. The split between “is” and “ought” worked as long as our tools stayed smaller than our understanding. AI breaks that spell. Suddenly we’re back in a world where power outruns meaning, and capability outpaces coherence.
The irony is sharp. We engineered our way out of metaphysics, only to build machines that force us to confront metaphysical questions again. Not because we want to, but because avoiding them is no longer an option.
Your point about the glue is the heart of the matter. The old unity had God as its center. The modern world has nothing equivalent, just fragmented “expertise” drifting without a north star. And if we don’t decide what holds the whole together, the tools will decide for us through the values we encode by accident.
Maybe the real task isn’t to return to Natural Philosophy, but to rebuild it. To create a framework where technical mastery and ethical authorship aren’t separate domains but one act. If AI is our modern alchemy, then coherence is the stone we haven’t forged yet.
Right now the danger isn’t that machines will think for us, but that we’ll stop thinking for ourselves.
natural philosophy however does not emerge from institutions —it emerges usually from outliers who are ignored by institutions—historically speaking. How can we tell if Cosmos Institute is doing more than just establishing the role of the institution itself? sincere question.
Historically, you’re right, natural philosophy rarely begins inside institutions. It usually starts with outliers whose ideas are too strange, too early, or too disruptive to fit existing frameworks.
So how do we tell if Cosmos Institute is just building another institution, or actually doing something different?
A few signals matter:
1. They’re not only publishing essays, they’re building pipelines.
Cosmos is already launching labs, funding independent researchers, and supporting “philosopher-builders” who combine technical skill with real moral and conceptual depth. That’s not the usual institutional pattern of protecting an identity. It’s closer to creating infrastructure for outliers to operate.
2. Their model requires human curation, not bureaucratic conformity.
What they’re trying to create only works if unconventional thinkers stay unconventional. If they drift into standard academic incentives, the project collapses by design.
3. They’re explicitly aware of the risk you mention.
Their own writing frames the Institute as a counterweight to institutional stagnation, not another branch of it. Whether they succeed depends on maintaining that self-awareness.
But your skepticism is justified. Institutions have a long history of absorbing the very outliers they claim to champion. The only real test will be whether Cosmos continues to generate work that couldn’t have emerged from traditional structures at all.
In other words, the moment Cosmos becomes “normal,” it stops being Cosmos.
Peter—thank you again for engaging with such thoughtfulness. I want to emphasize that I only offer this reflection as a fan of Cosmos Institute. I resonate deeply with the mission, I admire the vision, and I’m genuinely a fan of the content you’ve helped shape—there’s real integrity in what’s emerging.
That said, I’m still not seeing any sign that Cosmos is curious about actual outliers.
When I look at the programs, fellowships, and public signals, I see a continuation of institutional form: residencies, academic-style curation, and attention placed on thinkers who, while talented and thoughtful, are still coming from within traditional academic lineages.
And here’s the rub: there are already builders—operating outside of academia and tech—who are years ahead in the exact spaces Cosmos seeks to explore. Architectures that unify game theory, pluralistic reasoning, computation, and cognition already exist. Not as blueprints, but as living systems. And yet, there’s no visible curiosity toward these developments. Now, this is likely more of an administrative result---but maybe that is because Cosmos's current outreach looks the same as any other academic institution with grants or residencies.
Cosmos rightly positions itself as wanting to explore the “sweet spot” between academic disciplines. But that pursuit, when contained within the same frameworks that exclude or overlook outliers, risks becoming a simulation of academic pluralism—no?
What would signal real difference? A clear channel—a bridge—for integrating modern outliers.
The modern outlier is a special case---autodidactic, yes---but empowered with tools that history never provided previously---access to the internet and now AI, which gives them the same support they would receive from a University or even a tech company--and voilá, they are popping up so quickly all over the place at the moment and while independent of each other---much of the work is clearly aligning towards the same structure, just from different perspectives. I find that fascinating, and completely missed at the moment from both Silicon Valley big tech and academia. It would be great to see someone do something interesting with that.
Because while the wisdom emerging from Cosmos is real, it also risks becoming outdated already—not in its ethics, but in its epistemology. It still speaks in a voice most legible to those trained in the academy. And that voice, while valuable, does not speak to where the edge actually is and where the edge needs to focus---culture itself. Right? Doesn't philosophy not just ask who we are and where we are from––but also where we are going? By we of course, i mean the individual and all of humanity. I would say the majority of all culture is currently asking the most deep of philosophical questions already, and using the internet and AI to give them the answers–––because modern Philosophy isn't really. Not as much as it could, in my humble opinion.
The opacity of an account for the precise node-to-node pathway of an AI as it works towards response generation doesn’t strike me as any more alarming than the fact that a human expert will remain unable to account for the neuron-by-neuron patterns involved in their generative process. Such is the nature of cognition. It comes about when the overall complexity of a processing network exceeds a threshold value that makes any such backwards tracing extremely hard if not impossible. In both cases, the generative human and the generative AI are able to interact with signals carried within the fabric of a universal field of consciousness. For me this is the missing source of wonder, the abode of the sacred. Understanding how dark energy and quantum interactions connect this background field with our experience of consciousness is the new horizon where the scientific and the spiritual can once again settle in a mutual embrace.
the black box isn’t new — it’s just no longer human-shaped.
You’re right that neither the neuroscientist nor the model-builder can trace cognition node-by-node. But the distinction isn’t in the opacity. It’s in the locus of accountability.
When a human cannot explain their intuition, we still know where agency resides.
When a model cannot explain its output, the agency bleeds into the system itself — and then into whoever deploys it.
Your invocation of a universal field of consciousness touches the deeper tension:
modern AI exposes a cosmos we participate in but do not yet understand.
A threshold system tapping into patterned possibility is not itself the danger.
The danger is pretending the mystery is a feature rather than a responsibility.
You’re pointing toward the right horizon: a science that can once again speak to the sacred without collapsing into mysticism or machinery.
Where explanation yields to coherence,
and cognition — human or artificial — is seen as an emergent property of a universe that thinks through many forms.
"And so we need to ask: Can we have a unified Natural Philosophy in a secular, materialist world? If we want “Wholeness,” what is the glue? If it’s not God, what is it?"
You can. You have to re-invent what "materialism" means though. Also, get rid of dogmatic Physicalism/Mechano-mysticism infecting Materialism: AKA the belief the world is a giant mechanism of gears and wheels that will give you predictive outputs from specific inputs. Which is absolute bull that Quantum Mechanics showed us a century ago already.
> I have always resisted the fragmentation of disciplines...my mind gets more creative and sharper at the intersection of domains...I see each transition as an act of intellectual synthesis, a bridge built rather than a path forsaken.
...History offers a different perspective. But we must be honest about what made it work. Yes, natural philosophers blended “art and science,” but they also merged physics and theology.
Bravo! Fully resonate with this. Also echoed by Samuel Arbesman's "Computation as Philology" https://arbesman.substack.com/p/computation-as-philology
> Philology was a sort of ur-field, in the same way that natural philosophy preceded all of the scientific disciplines that we know and love. Philology was the “queen of the human sciences,” examining the origins and etymologies of words and languages, but in the process ranged over linguistics, history, archaeology, literature, theology, art, and more.
...But as the study of these different humanistic fields expanded and deepened, there was a fracturing and specialization
...As I read about philology, I was struck by similarities to how I think about code and computation...I view computation as a similar kind of universal solvent
Great read - thank you!
I’ve been thinking about this for a while too, and wrote the revival of the polymaths https://open.substack.com/pub/adamcohenhillel/p/the-revival-of-the-polymaths?r=1t34il&utm_medium=ios
- your historical framing of when, why and how the fragmentation of knowledge disciplines happened was a great additional read I haven’t thought of in that way
Brilliant! Now my head hurts from thinking! :)
Thank you for this timely and deeply reflective essay on the return to natural philosophy in the age of AI. The piece courageously surfaces the fractures our modern epistemology can no longer ignore and points to the need for something (or Someone) greater to hold knowledge, ethics, and power together.
As your piece rightly observes, we cannot return to the integrity of natural philosophy without acknowledging what once unified it: a shared vision of Divine Order. Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz moved fluidly across domains because they moved under a unifying telos, a cosmos held together not just by math, but by meaning.
Today, AI systems are impressive but incomplete. They require alignment to function within our cultural values, yet we can’t agree on what those values are. We keep engineering more powerful models without asking the prior question: Aligned to what? Aligned to whom?
I propose the time has come not just to build culturally-aligned AI, but to explore the possibility of Christomorphic AI models whose formation is shaped not by shifting norms or politicized alignment, but by the character and mind of Jesus Christ.
Such models would aim not merely to reflect dominant preferences, but to embody:
- Truthfulness without cruelty
- Power with humility
- Wisdom grounded in meaning, not just prediction
- Respect for human dignity across all domains
- A teleology that includes justice, compassion, and grace
Christ is not a theological module; He is the ontological center. As Colossians 1:17 declares, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
We don’t just need a return to natural philosophy.
We need a return to the Logos, the Word who was in the beginning, who gives coherence to creation, technology, and personhood alike.
Thank you again for your essay. It is a signpost. But the road it marks leads beyond oracles and alchemists. It leads to a King.
But, linguistically, and psychologically, our discourse would bring natural philosophy into public discussions saturated in associations with words. So envisioning somewhat of an arc back to natural philosophy cuts out a discussion of the events and impacts of our shared time in the scientific era...
For instance:
A futurist would discuss transhumanism, and someone totally unaware of what futurism means might have firm stances on trans rights. A bio conservative, as @Nita Farahany frames the argument about how we might modify the body in this era of widespread AI tools, wants a continuation of what people have taken for granted generally as "natural" living.
With the exception of pacemakers and digital modifications to the body to return it to certain levels of health, a bio conservative fundamentally disagrees with any AI usage within the body for enhancements. But that same bio conservative might support conservative politics, including very limited government, and think then its an individuals' right to choose to modify the body, and then benefit from a cyber-human approach to economics and subsequent profits. Is that a conservative stance?
I appreciate the general concept of a return to wholeness, certainly, and welcome natural philosophy back into discussions where the concept seemed laughable to many intellectuals pre-AI.
Just also suggesting we look closely at our words, how the 21st century has emphasized certain platforms with them, and proceed from there.
I want to offer a gentle provocation in the spirit of alignment: the very future Cosmos seeks to nurture is already being built—by communities and creators who sit outside both academia and big tech. These are the outliers—working without institutional backing, often without recognition—but advancing insights and architectures years ahead of the mainstream.
So I ask sincerely: why not extend intentional outreach to these groups?
Fellowships and initiatives like yours have the power to bridge not just disciplines, but domains. To not only humanize technology, but to humanize academia itself—by dissolving some of the “walled gardens” that often limit access, participation, and legitimacy.
There is enormous opportunity in connecting with these emergent builders. The coherence is already there. What’s needed now is contact.
Let’s bring the outside in.
https://open.substack.com/pub/romeviharo/p/so-an-academic-a-silicon-valley-cto?r=3zkhb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is excellent. I think I would also argue that the issue runs deeper than the fissure between natural philosophy and the sciences; the issue is about a wholesale misunderstanding of philosophy altogether. The return to natural philosophy that this article is advocating for is a return to first principles. I provide an introduction to doing so in my essay here.
https://open.substack.com/pub/firstprinciplesforlife/p/the-true-meaning-of-philosophy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4sqtit
I love how you frame the return of Natural Philosophy. It feels like we’re circling back to something ancient not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. The split between “is” and “ought” worked as long as our tools stayed smaller than our understanding. AI breaks that spell. Suddenly we’re back in a world where power outruns meaning, and capability outpaces coherence.
The irony is sharp. We engineered our way out of metaphysics, only to build machines that force us to confront metaphysical questions again. Not because we want to, but because avoiding them is no longer an option.
Your point about the glue is the heart of the matter. The old unity had God as its center. The modern world has nothing equivalent, just fragmented “expertise” drifting without a north star. And if we don’t decide what holds the whole together, the tools will decide for us through the values we encode by accident.
Maybe the real task isn’t to return to Natural Philosophy, but to rebuild it. To create a framework where technical mastery and ethical authorship aren’t separate domains but one act. If AI is our modern alchemy, then coherence is the stone we haven’t forged yet.
Right now the danger isn’t that machines will think for us, but that we’ll stop thinking for ourselves.
natural philosophy however does not emerge from institutions —it emerges usually from outliers who are ignored by institutions—historically speaking. How can we tell if Cosmos Institute is doing more than just establishing the role of the institution itself? sincere question.
I’m not sure, but I will give it a try…
Historically, you’re right, natural philosophy rarely begins inside institutions. It usually starts with outliers whose ideas are too strange, too early, or too disruptive to fit existing frameworks.
So how do we tell if Cosmos Institute is just building another institution, or actually doing something different?
A few signals matter:
1. They’re not only publishing essays, they’re building pipelines.
Cosmos is already launching labs, funding independent researchers, and supporting “philosopher-builders” who combine technical skill with real moral and conceptual depth. That’s not the usual institutional pattern of protecting an identity. It’s closer to creating infrastructure for outliers to operate.
2. Their model requires human curation, not bureaucratic conformity.
What they’re trying to create only works if unconventional thinkers stay unconventional. If they drift into standard academic incentives, the project collapses by design.
3. They’re explicitly aware of the risk you mention.
Their own writing frames the Institute as a counterweight to institutional stagnation, not another branch of it. Whether they succeed depends on maintaining that self-awareness.
But your skepticism is justified. Institutions have a long history of absorbing the very outliers they claim to champion. The only real test will be whether Cosmos continues to generate work that couldn’t have emerged from traditional structures at all.
In other words, the moment Cosmos becomes “normal,” it stops being Cosmos.
Peter—thank you again for engaging with such thoughtfulness. I want to emphasize that I only offer this reflection as a fan of Cosmos Institute. I resonate deeply with the mission, I admire the vision, and I’m genuinely a fan of the content you’ve helped shape—there’s real integrity in what’s emerging.
That said, I’m still not seeing any sign that Cosmos is curious about actual outliers.
When I look at the programs, fellowships, and public signals, I see a continuation of institutional form: residencies, academic-style curation, and attention placed on thinkers who, while talented and thoughtful, are still coming from within traditional academic lineages.
And here’s the rub: there are already builders—operating outside of academia and tech—who are years ahead in the exact spaces Cosmos seeks to explore. Architectures that unify game theory, pluralistic reasoning, computation, and cognition already exist. Not as blueprints, but as living systems. And yet, there’s no visible curiosity toward these developments. Now, this is likely more of an administrative result---but maybe that is because Cosmos's current outreach looks the same as any other academic institution with grants or residencies.
Cosmos rightly positions itself as wanting to explore the “sweet spot” between academic disciplines. But that pursuit, when contained within the same frameworks that exclude or overlook outliers, risks becoming a simulation of academic pluralism—no?
What would signal real difference? A clear channel—a bridge—for integrating modern outliers.
The modern outlier is a special case---autodidactic, yes---but empowered with tools that history never provided previously---access to the internet and now AI, which gives them the same support they would receive from a University or even a tech company--and voilá, they are popping up so quickly all over the place at the moment and while independent of each other---much of the work is clearly aligning towards the same structure, just from different perspectives. I find that fascinating, and completely missed at the moment from both Silicon Valley big tech and academia. It would be great to see someone do something interesting with that.
Because while the wisdom emerging from Cosmos is real, it also risks becoming outdated already—not in its ethics, but in its epistemology. It still speaks in a voice most legible to those trained in the academy. And that voice, while valuable, does not speak to where the edge actually is and where the edge needs to focus---culture itself. Right? Doesn't philosophy not just ask who we are and where we are from––but also where we are going? By we of course, i mean the individual and all of humanity. I would say the majority of all culture is currently asking the most deep of philosophical questions already, and using the internet and AI to give them the answers–––because modern Philosophy isn't really. Not as much as it could, in my humble opinion.
You’ve put your finger on the part almost nobody wants to say out loud:
AI isn’t dragging us forward — it’s pulling us back to the questions we tried to bury.
We didn’t just abandon Natural Philosophy; we exiled the part of ourselves that asked why the world exists at all.
The irony is almost cosmic: the more powerful our tools become, the more they expose the poverty of our metaphysics.
Your framing of AI as the return of the alchemist is the clearest articulation I’ve seen.
We’re wielding Promethean fire with the mindset of factory managers.
We have the Homunculus but none of the initiatory discipline that once guarded its creation.
The part that lands hardest:
We’re not at risk because machines can think —
we’re at risk because humans might stop choosing.
What you’re naming is the quiet re-entry of telos.
Not as theology, but as infrastructure.
Not as belief, but as design principle.
And that’s the real fork in the road:
Whether we build systems that widen human authorship or systems that absorb it.
The opacity of an account for the precise node-to-node pathway of an AI as it works towards response generation doesn’t strike me as any more alarming than the fact that a human expert will remain unable to account for the neuron-by-neuron patterns involved in their generative process. Such is the nature of cognition. It comes about when the overall complexity of a processing network exceeds a threshold value that makes any such backwards tracing extremely hard if not impossible. In both cases, the generative human and the generative AI are able to interact with signals carried within the fabric of a universal field of consciousness. For me this is the missing source of wonder, the abode of the sacred. Understanding how dark energy and quantum interactions connect this background field with our experience of consciousness is the new horizon where the scientific and the spiritual can once again settle in a mutual embrace.
What you’re naming is the uncomfortable symmetry:
the black box isn’t new — it’s just no longer human-shaped.
You’re right that neither the neuroscientist nor the model-builder can trace cognition node-by-node. But the distinction isn’t in the opacity. It’s in the locus of accountability.
When a human cannot explain their intuition, we still know where agency resides.
When a model cannot explain its output, the agency bleeds into the system itself — and then into whoever deploys it.
Your invocation of a universal field of consciousness touches the deeper tension:
modern AI exposes a cosmos we participate in but do not yet understand.
A threshold system tapping into patterned possibility is not itself the danger.
The danger is pretending the mystery is a feature rather than a responsibility.
You’re pointing toward the right horizon: a science that can once again speak to the sacred without collapsing into mysticism or machinery.
Where explanation yields to coherence,
and cognition — human or artificial — is seen as an emergent property of a universe that thinks through many forms.
"And so we need to ask: Can we have a unified Natural Philosophy in a secular, materialist world? If we want “Wholeness,” what is the glue? If it’s not God, what is it?"
You can. You have to re-invent what "materialism" means though. Also, get rid of dogmatic Physicalism/Mechano-mysticism infecting Materialism: AKA the belief the world is a giant mechanism of gears and wheels that will give you predictive outputs from specific inputs. Which is absolute bull that Quantum Mechanics showed us a century ago already.