The Manifesto of Contingent Naturalism

A Structural Synthesis of Non-Teleological Reality

Preamble: On Epistemic Austerity, and the Habit of Smuggling Intent

Let us begin with a restraint which the age seldom practices: before we propose a “meaning” for the whole, we ought to ask whether we have any warrant to do so. It is a common, almost hereditary presumption—tutored by clergy, flattered by poets, and weaponized by factions—that the universe must be about something, headed somewhere, governed by an intention that resembles our own. Yet the human mind, formed under predation and scarcity, is notoriously disposed to detect agency where none exists. A sound in the brush; a streak of bad luck; a storm arriving at a convenient hour—these invite the old reflex: someone meant this. The reflex is ancient. The cosmos is under no obligation to honor it.

What I call Contingent Naturalism is what remains after we refuse that reflex its imperial privileges. It treats reality as an indifferent sequence of processes—variation, constraint, amplification, failure—out of which stable forms appear not by foresight but because some arrangements persist longer than others. You can call this selection, filtration, drift, stability basins; the vocabulary changes, the point does not. The world keeps its counsel. It does not “want.”

Now, an addendum—minimal, and strictly policed—must be stated plainly, lest we confuse austerity with a crude materialist arrogance. Experience is the given. The “physical world,” as we speak of it in ordinary life, is not delivered to us unmediated; it is a public model assembled through measurement, coordination, and a shared practice of prediction. Physics is a triumph of structural description: it captures stable relations with astounding power. But it is still a map—sometimes the best map humanity has ever drawn—rather than a direct sight of “things as they are in themselves.”

This is not an escape hatch into mysticism, nor a proclamation of a universal mind, nor a license to decorate ignorance with metaphysical lace. It is a constraint against overreach: do not mistake interface for substrate; do not demand purpose from mechanism; and where evidence ends, label speculation honestly, as one would label a bottle that contains something uncertain.

I. Experience First; Models Second (and Why the “Hard Problem” Keeps Getting Re-Invented)

The so-called hard problem of consciousness persists, in large measure, because we attempt an impossible conjuring trick: we try to derive the one thing we actually have—experience—from entities that are defined only within a theoretical structure built inside experience. The circularity is usually hidden by technical language, which is precisely why language requires discipline here.

We can state the boundary condition without drama: every datum—electrode traces, photon counts, fMRI images, detector readouts—arrives as experience. This is not spirituality; it is the ordinary fact that any evidence, however “objective,” must be encountered by a subject.

From this, a sober distinction follows. In scientific practice, “matter,” “fields,” “particles,” and the rest are not delivered as metaphysical furniture; they are compact, shareable descriptions of regularities—relations, symmetries, invariants, constraints—whose merit is predictive success and public coordination. They are powerful precisely because they compress.

Where, then, does the explanatory debt land?

• If you begin by positing non-experiential primitives as fundamental (inert matter as metaphysically basic) and then declare that experience “emerges,” you owe more than a ceremonial phrase. “Information,” “complexity,” “integration,” and similar tokens do not pay the bill unless they specify a lawful bridge rather than a relabeling. Otherwise one quietly slides into a covert dualism: the words change, the gap remains.
• If you accept dualism outright—mind and matter as distinct substances—you inherit an even older debt: an intelligible account of interaction, measurement, and coupling that does not collapse into magic or mere stipulation.

Contingent Naturalism does not claim to have solved consciousness by decree. It claims something narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: frameworks that define reality in terms that exclude experience and then demand that experience appear as a late miracle are manufacturing their own crisis.

What this manifesto refuses to claim is equally important. We do not require a cosmic mind, a teleological substrate, or a grand metaphysical personality behind appearances. Such systems may be entertained as speculative overlays if one insists, but they are not part of the austere core. The core remains: public science describes structure; direct access is experiential; confusion between the two breeds pseudo-problems and dogmatic certainty.

II. Ontology, With the Sentimentality Removed: Process, Contingency, and Persistent Forms

Contingent Naturalism makes one metaphysical refusal and one operational commitment.

The refusal: we do not presume an intrinsic purpose, plan, or destiny hidden beneath events. Teleology is not admitted as an explanatory primitive. It is, more often than not, the mind’s preference for stories masquerading as ontology.

The commitment: explanations must be mechanistic, constraint-respecting, and publicly checkable where possible. If a claim cannot be checked, it may still be contemplated, but it must not be paraded as knowledge.

From this follows a picture of reality that is cold only to those who confuse comfort with truth. Patterns arise where variance meets constraint; certain arrangements persist; persistence invites the illusion of design. The world does not “optimize” in the manner of an engineer. It simply permits some configurations to last and others to vanish.

Contingency, therefore, is default. Much of what exists is not necessary; it is path-dependent—history fossilized into structure. Accident becomes scaffold; scaffold becomes “nature”; and later minds, looking back, call it “meant.”

Indifference is not nihilism unless one requires a cosmic parent to authorize meaning. Meaning is made locally—in organisms and societies that can model, care, choose, and suffer. The universe supplies no moral certificate; it supplies constraints.

III. Evolution: Not an Engineer’s Blueprint, but the Long Record of Retention

Anyone who has looked closely at biology should feel a certain embarrassment on behalf of the “designer” metaphors. Life is not an elegant plan executed cleanly; it is bricolage—patchwork under pressure.

Variation arises by ordinary means: copying errors, recombination, damage, drift. Selection does not aim; it differentially retains. Traits spread because they are compatible with survival and reproduction in local conditions, not because they were appointed.

This is why “good enough” is so often the signature of life. Systems persist with fragilities, redundancies, and awkward compromises because evolution cannot start from scratch; it must work with what already exists. It is a historian of constraints, not an architect of ideals.

Function, therefore, does not imply foresight. A trait can be exquisitely fitted and still be the afterimage of accidents stabilized by time.

IV. The Mind as Interface: Useful Distortions, and the Political Afterlife of Cognitive Errors

The brain is not built to deliver metaphysical truth. It is built for survival, action, and coordination—especially coordination under conflict. That fact alone should sober anyone who wants to turn intuition into cosmology.

Perception is fitness-weighted compression. We see a world of medium-sized objects, stable “selves,” simple causes, and social narratives because those compressions support navigation and prediction. That they feel obvious does not make them fundamental.

The agency error is the clearest example. In a predator-filled environment, it is safer to over-attribute agency than to under-attribute it. In a lawful cosmos, that same bias breeds gods, fate, curses, and cosmic intention—often nothing more than pattern-overfitting reinforced by fear and group ritual.

Here is where Chomsky’s lesson bites: once these cognitive habits enter language and institutions, they become instruments. People learn to treat comforting abstractions—nation, destiny, purity, sacred mission—as if they were features of reality rather than tools of coordination and control. The mind’s shortcuts become a politics.

Model confusion is the root disease: we mistake representational convenience for ontological revelation. We treat survival categories—object, self, purpose, justice-as-cosmic—as if they were written into the fabric of being.

V. Linguistic Hygiene: Do Not Let Grammar Dictate Metaphysics

Language is a social technology before it is a philosophical instrument. It evolved for coordination, not ultimate description. So we must be suspicious of what it seduces us into claiming.

Words like “sacred,” “divine,” and “objective purpose” often function as signals—badges of belonging, levers of compliance—rather than references to publicly testable entities. They move crowds even when they point to nothing.

And the question “Why?” is a frequent smuggling operation. It pretends to request mechanism but often demands intention. Under epistemic austerity, the stable question is “How?”—how does it work, what constraints govern it, what follows if we change inputs. The universe does not owe intention any more than a prime number owes a personality.

Do not treat grammar as metaphysics. The fact that we can say “X exists for Y” does not prove that reality is composed of goal-bearing agents. It proves only that human sentences like to pretend they are.

VI. Ethics Without Elsewhere: Moral Life as Social Engineering Under Constraint

If the universe is indifferent, morality is not delivered from beyond. It is built within social systems that must manage vulnerability, scarcity, conflict, and forecasting error.

Ethics, then, is design under constraint. We do not “discover” commandments in physics. We negotiate norms, test consequences, revise institutions, and enforce limits on power. A workable morality is a set of stabilizing techniques—imperfect, corrigible, and accountable.

But we must not cheat. The value anchor must be stated, not smuggled. This manifesto chooses an anchor explicitly:

Minimize avoidable suffering and systemic harm, while enabling stable cooperation and individual flourishing under reciprocal vulnerability.

You may choose a different anchor—honor, purity, obedience, conquest. You may even prefer it. But then you own its consequences, and you cannot pretend the universe commanded it.

Harm should be operationalized with convergent evidence—physiology, psychology, sociology, lived outcomes, statistics—while remembering that “consensus” is a tool, not a deity. The safeguards are not optional: transparency, plural metrics, constraints on concentrated power, error-correction, and humility about tradeoffs. Without safeguards, “science” becomes a priesthood with better instruments.

And we should retire cosmic categories like “evil” as metaphysical substances. Replace them with causal analysis and outcomes. We restrict actions not because the universe forbids them, but because they reliably degrade well-being, autonomy, trust, and long-run stability.

VII. Human Novelty: Rare, Not Chosen; Valuable, Not Central

Reject anthropocentrism without denying the unusual. Somewhere in the cascade, a local system emerged that can model itself, argue about truth, and revise behavior in light of imagined futures. This is not proof of destiny. It is a contingent feedback loop; it matters to us because we are inside it.

Awe is permissible without servitude. Wonder, at its best, is accurate scale-recognition: a response to complexity, rarity, and fragility—not a confession of cosmic supervision.

Meaning is not found like a buried artifact; it is made, under constraints: love, loss, suffering, cooperation, curiosity. In an indifferent universe, meaning is not arbitrary—it is a craft practiced by finite beings who can still choose.

Closing: The Razor (Not a Commandment, a Discipline)

Use this framework as a discipline rather than a faith.

Discard—or downgrade to explicitly labeled speculation—any proposition that requires magic, fate, cosmic intention, or metaphysical certainty beyond evidence.

Treat as cognitive bias, until shown otherwise, any claim that confuses interface with substrate, grammar with ontology, or comfort with truth.

Seek mechanism. Accept contingency. Build meaning locally. And let the cosmos remain what it appears to be when we stop flattering ourselves: silent; lawful where it is lawful; noisy where it is noisy; and under no obligation to resemble our wishes.