I'M A FREELANCE ACADEMIC.  Not because I failed to become a tenured professor, but because I prefer to work this way. The traditional academic career trajectory simply cannot give me the freedom I need to pursue my peculiar research interests and ideas, which revolve around the vision of a new metamodern science for the 21st century.

Our first and foremost task as metamodern scientists is to ground ourselves again in a proper relationship with the world, to regain our grip on reality, to restore a wholesome and harmonious agent-arena relation. This requires deep change, not only in the kind of science we engage in, but in how we see science itself. Metamodern science is a profoundly philosophical project: there is no good science, and no good application of science, without the proper metaphysical backing.

I was originally trained as an experimental biologist, and ran a laboratory that studied the evolution of embryonic development in insects, while also learning to be a mathematical modeler and a philosopher of science. I’ve always been curious about the basic nature of life, and how it differs from nonliving matter: the dynamic organization of cells and organisms, how far we can capture it with formal models, and what this all means for open-ended evolutionary innovation.

These are big questions — among the biggest we can possibly ask — and they are absolutely central to our understanding of ourselves and our relationship as human beings to the world. And yet they remain curiously understudied and undervalued. Or maybe I should say: we are trying to study them using the wrong kinds of tools, and therefore fail to make proper sense of them. That’s why we tend to either declare them solved (although they clearly are not), or to ignore them altogether.

The reason is straightforward: these questions challenge one of modern science’s (and society’s) fundamental assumptions: that the world is one big mechanism — some kind of machine. This assumption is crucial if we are to maintain the illusion of a world we can predict, manipulate, and control at our discretion. However, it is not needed (nor actually desirable) for doing good science.

The machine view of the world is a double-edged sword if there ever was one. On the one hand, the mechanistic science it enables lays the foundation for our comfort, health, and safety by providing us with the best knowledge a limited human being could hope for. On the other hand, it is a view that is turning toxic as we now face the end of our brief historical interlude of carefree abundance.

The underlying problem is simple: the world is not a machine. It is not even like a machine.

In reality, we interfere with intricate and interwoven processes whose complex nature we do not even begin to understand. Whatever we do, we inevitably run into unanticipated and unwanted consequences of our actions. Take the uncontrolled release of genetically modified organisms into the environment, or the unbridled imposition of artificial “intelligence” on our society.

And yet, we continue to interfere like there is no tomorrow. In fact, our pace is accelerating exponentially, spiraling out of control, and many modernist thinkers applaud this as a good thing. Beating the competition is everything, even as we are engaged in a global race to the bottom.

By now, the side effects of modernity are threatening to overwhelm and overturn the progress we have worked so hard to achieve. Our illusion of safety and comfort is crumbling, our health and life expectancies declining, our future in jeopardy. Those who want to see can clearly see it.

The only response that modernism has to this dire state of affairs is to accelerate and push its way through the coming global crisis. Technology will save us all … somehow. We’ll conquer the galaxy, upload and immortalize our brains, and take charge of our own evolution. Or so the story goes.

This narrative is a trite and perilous myth, easy to see through, for it is exactly this kind of rosy-eyed attitude towards progress that got us into trouble in the first place. The party cannot last forever.

And so, we must heed the postmodern critique, for it is hard to dismiss. The modern worldview is idiosyncratically rooted in our peculiar historical circumstances, with all its inequalities, conflicts, and power games. Moreover, it is also built on shaky philosophical grounds. The machine view is not the only way to see the world. And as I’ve mentioned before, it is not even necessary for scientific practice or thinking.

We urgently have to recognize that reality as a whole is beyond our grasp and control, and we can only get limited access to it in a way that is framed by our minds, shaped by our biases, molded by our habits of thought. Hubris has obscured our limitations. It is time for some humility again.

Science and the knowledge it generates are human social constructs. They are situated in a particular historical and cultural context. There can be no longer any doubt about that.

Still, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to slide down the slippery slope of relativism. In our deluded post-factual world, everybody seems entitled to their opinion. There is no privileged way of knowing. Everything is just discourse and power relations. These are dangerous views. And they are not useful or justified.

Postmodernism is a self-defeating ideology, at its heart a performative contradiction: we cannot be certain that nothing is certain. Discourse and power, like everything else, are thoroughly grounded and embedded in reality. And we are an inextricable part of this reality. Our alienation is a myth.

And not a good myth either: it is a zombie narrative — itself a dead-end and a delusion to be overcome. The zombie is a metaphor for our crisis of meaning, but it shows us no way forward. The metamodern project deals with reconstruction after postmodern deconstruction.

But this much should also be crystal clear: there can be no return to absolute objectivity and certainty anymore. Postmodernism has barred our way back to a simpler past. We will deal with the complexities of our condition, or we will perish. The only way out is the way ahead.

To find this way, we urgently need to reorient ourselves, to (re)construct a science beyond the age of machines. This reconstruction will be radical, from the philosophical ground up. Nothing right now is quite the way it seems — or as it should be, for that matter.

And so, as metamodern scientists, we begin by asking: what is the map, and what is the territory? Because modernity’s biggest mistake was to mistake the former for the latter.

To reverse this, we have to remember that all our knowledge ultimately flows from our personal experience (and that of our peers and ancestors). Our philosophies, theories, laws, and models, in contrast, are only idealized abstractions. They are the product, not the foundation of our knowing.

The act of throwing a ball is more real than whatever law of gravitation you may use to calculate its trajectory. Your pain from bumping your toe is more real than Hume’s claim that cause and effect are just constant conjunction. Your self-awareness at that very moment is more real than whatever mechanistic worldview telling you that subjectivity and consciousness are an illusion. 

Metamodern science is radically empirical, and also radically pragmatic and perspectivist: humans simply cannot get a God’s eye view of the world. In fact, no limited intelligence can. Any knowledge we generate is utterly human knowledge, forged by our particular drives, needs, and capabilities. No other knowledge is attainable. No other knowledge, in fact, makes any sense to us at all.

Our knowledge may be biased, distorted, and forever incomplete. Yet, it is far from arbitrary. It arises transjectively, through interactions between the subject and its objects. It emerges through our active exploration of the world. Meaning and knowledge are created through our actions.

We impose our concepts on the world. We realize what is relevant for us. No other understanding is possible. This is not a bug, but a feature of how we get to know the world: scientific knowledge is what robustly enables us to act in coherent ways, to be at home in our universe.

And science is still by far the best guide we have to find our way around. But the world is a large and confusing place. Few of our problems are well-defined. And, unfortunately, cues to solve these problems are scarce, ambiguous, and often misleading. This is the true meaning of complexity.

Our knowledge of such a world will forever be tentative. The best we can hope for is for it to improve and adapt together with our explorations. What we can know is always imperfect. To know it all, to be in full control, therefore, ought not to be our aim.

Instead of a theory of everything, we want the best knowledge we can actually get. We want our piecewise approximations to reality to be adequate for human beings. But the machine view is blocking our view.

Because the world is so much more than a mere assemblage of cogs and gears, more than a bundle of algorithmic computations. We will always inhabit a small island of knowledge in a vast sea of the unknown.

Relevant phenomena occur at all scales and levels of organization. The laptop I am writing this on, my family with me in my house: these are much more real than a quark, or Pythagoras’ theorem, for that matter! If your worldview cannot account for that, then there is something wrong with your worldview, not with my family.

The postmodernists are right: there is a flaw in the modernist map and we’d better get a better one.

As metamodern scientists, in fact, we need a whole new stack of maps. A single perspective won’t do! Reality supports many accounts of itself. Our aim is not to combine all these maps into one. Instead, we strive to understand what each one is good for, and how the maps relate to each other.

The world is a multilayered place, and it is in constant flux. Nothing ever stays exactly the same. Metamodern science fully acknowledges this. Process and emergence are at its core. How did stars arise from the void? How did life originate from dead matter? How did mind arise in life?

We must face these fundamental questions, tackle them head on, not explain them away. We must avoid the temptation of mechanicist and panpsychist escapism: either your consciousness is an illusion, or rocks are conscious too! None of this makes any sense to the metamodern scientist. We want to understand how true consciousness emerges through evolution.

This requires us to embrace the full complexity of the life, neuro, and social sciences, transcending disciplinary boundaries. We must ask what makes organisms, and the ecological and social systems that contain them, so different from the lifeless world of mechanisms. We must focus on relations, and on context. We must reconsider our questions and our answers. Just taking things apart and studying their components in isolation no longer does the job.

Metamodern science focuses on dynamic organization: now things interact, not just what they are made of. It pushes its own boundaries, seeks out new differences that make a difference. What it does not do is impose artificial limits on our freedom to investigate. It welcomes the unknown, focuses on the question, not the answer.

At the same time, it despises relativism, whateverism, and woo. We need our new science to be more rigorous and solid than our old one! Our guide to reality must be firmly grounded, our maps useful guides through a territory that can be treacherous, even lethal, at times.

This is the challenge we set ourselves as metamodern scientists: to rebuild science from its very foundations, but not to rebuild it from scratch. Instead, we systematically separate wheat from chaff, resilient insight from fanciful delusion. We throw out the garbage to clean out our toolshed.

Mechanicism, reductionism, computationalism will not just be discarded. They are useful tools, after all, when used within their proper domain. What makes them dangerous and misleading is when they become a worldview, when our map turns into the territory. This is nothing-but-ism, and nothing-but-ism has no place in metamodern science.

The future lies in diversity, in pluralism. There are many ways to know the world. But some of those are better than others in our particular situation. Only some of them do the job. Our pluralism must be justified, not flabby. We only retain what works and discard the rest of our experiments — in theory as in practice.

This is how metamodern science reconstructs our knowledge of the world in a maximally robust way. This is how we regain our grip to face the oncoming storm. This is how we go beyond the age of machines: we embrace both modernist rigor and postmodern irony. We build, we explore, we engage in serious play, full well knowing that we will fail.

It is these failures that will teach us most. This is how we evolve our knowledge.

What results transcends our current view of the world as a machine. It breaks its dull and rigid order with a storm of creativity. The world is what it is: beyond comprehension through metaphor.

But if there is a metaphor we need, it is not that of the machine. Instead, the world is like a tropical rainforest: beautiful, mysterious, entangled, multilayered, noisy, ever-changing, and full of life. We must nurture and harvest such wild chaos, not manipulate and control it. The machine view is far too rigid and inflexible for this. If we do not transcend it soon, we will be stuck in our self-destructive materialist swamp forever. 

Metamodern science promises a way forward and out: an awe-inspiring and never-ending journey of discovery through experience that leads us into harmony with what is real and what is truly valuable to us. What are we waiting for? There are new windmills to be chased. Let’s be on our way!