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 Sec...

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