Dear friends,

The IAM Research Forum is a new recurring space for our scholarly community. As things progress, these sessions will serve as opportunities for our scholars to present their work, share updates from working groups, and discuss projects moving towards publication.

In this session, Gregg Henriques presents Natural Philosophy 2.0: a proposal for reviving natural philosophy as a unifying framework capable of integrating modern science, mind, meaning, and value into a coherent worldview.

Dr. Henriques argues that while modern science provides an increasingly sophisticated cosmology, it still fails to offer a fully integrated worldview — particularly when it comes to mind, consciousness, value, and lived human experience. To address this, he introduces a directional framing (down / back / up / over, with out-and-in) for situating empirical science, emergence, evolutionary history, psychology, and meaning-making within a single orienting structure.

The discussion ranges across emergence and downward causation, big history and “combogenesis,” the problem of psychology, critical realism, information-processing revolutions, and how a renewed natural philosophy might help bridge the Enlightenment gap between objective knowledge and subjective life.

The second half of the session opens into an extended Q&A, where IAM scholars discuss the proposal in real time — pressing on questions of emergence and downward causation, critical realism, big history and combogenesis, the “problem of psychology,” information-processing revolutions, and how these ideas translate into lived understanding.

Discussion contributors include: Bonnitta Roy, Lawrence Cahoone, Mark Edwards, Michael Mascolo, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Robb Smith, and Tyler Volk.

Timestamps

00:01:51 What Is Natural Philosophy 2.0?

00:03:07 The Core Orienting Frame: Down / Back / Up / Over

00:05:30 Natural Philosophy 1.0 and the Rise of Modern Science

00:08:18 Science and Philosophy Split Apart: What Was Lost

00:11:00 Why “Natural Philosophy” Is Re-Emerging Today

00:15:21 Core Claim: Science Gives Us a Cosmology, Not a Worldview

00:18:51 The Enlightenment Gap: Mind, Value, and Meaning

00:22:41 Q&A: Do the Social Sciences Already Situate Us in the Social World? (Mark Edwards)

00:33:41 The Problem of Psychology and Ontological Ambiguity

00:36:35 Q&A: Critical Realism: What’s Already Solved, What Still Isn’t? (Nick Hedlund)

00:44:58 Methodological Origins of Natural Philosophy 2.0

00:50:22 “Combogenesis” as a More Specific Alternative to Emergence

01:06:20 Clarifying What Counts as Emergence

01:11:25 Q&A: What Is the Right Unit of Analysis for Mediated Mind? (Mark Edwards)

01:16:33 Information-Processing Revolutions as a Driver of Causal Emergence (Brendan Graham Dempsey)

01:36:46 Humility, Participation, and Grounding the Framework in Lived Experience (Bonnitta Roy)

01:46:22 Closing Reflections