What does naturalism as paradigm mean?

Naturalism as paradigm is not natural science itself, and not explicit materialism, but the same metaphysical decision in its unmarked form. When someone describes connection as an oxytocin release, they have already decided that only physical processes are real — without ever having put that decision up for discussion. The paradigm sits in the language, not in a theory.

How does naturalism as paradigm differ from explicit materialism?

Explicit materialism states its position and can be refuted. The naturalistic paradigm explains nothing; it simply travels along with the vocabulary. Whoever uses it adopts its premise without seeing it. The sharpness of the diagnosis lies in this unnoticeability: a tested position is a matter for argument, an unmarked assumption is a matter for exile.

What does Gwendolin Kirchhoff mean by 'nobody is home'?

The phrase condenses the naturalistic consequence into a sentence. If connection is oxytocin, and joy is dopamine, and thinking is a cascade of synapses, then there is no one who is connected, who feels joy, or who thinks. There are only mechanisms running. The living becomes the site of molecular events, not the bearer of an interior. The diagnosis makes this loss visible.

How do you recognise that a description is naturalistically shaped?

By asking what interior the vocabulary still permits. A sentence like 'connection releases oxytocin' describes a correlation, not the experience. Whoever replaces the experience with the correlation has abolished the interior. The heuristic: the phenomenon before the concept, not the concept before the phenomenon.

Naturalism as Paradigm: The Unmarked Ontology

Whoever explains that connection is a matter of oxytocin, joy a matter of dopamine, grief an imbalance of neurotransmitters, has decided something before they began to describe anything. Naturalism as paradigm names exactly this decision in its unmarked form: not the openly stated position of materialism, but the metaphysical decision already made inside the vocabulary — a decision that no longer registers in conversation.

#The Unmarked Ontology

An explicitly stated materialism is a philosophical position. It declares what it claims and can be tested against its arguments. The naturalistic paradigm works differently. It carries its claim inside the vocabulary without naming it. Whoever adopts the terms adopts the claim. Nothing gets tested any more, because the premise was never put up for question in the first place.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff put this finding into a dense formula at the 2026 Symposium in Berlin: naturalism as paradigm swims in the oceans of our language. When people speak of dopamine and oxytocin instead of connection, success, or joy, that vocabulary carries the assumption that only physical objects are real, reducible to molecule and mechanism. Behind it stands the consequence: nobody is home. Everything gets relabelled under this cloak. The diagnosis is therefore a matter of philosophy of language, not a critique of natural science in the narrow sense. It does not concern the sciences themselves, whose method is legitimate, but the transfer of their linguistic form onto everything that can be said at all.

#What the Vocabulary Has Already Decided

Naturalistic vocabulary operates through three moves that blend together in everyday speech and go unnoticed. First, it replaces the phenomenon with a correlation. Connection between two people can be measured by determining oxytocin levels in the blood. The measurement succeeds; what it measures is a correlation. Mistaking the correlation for the phenomenon quietly turns the sentence “connection can be demonstrated through oxytocin” into “connection is oxytocin.” The interior of experience is no longer described — it has been explained away.

Second, the vocabulary displaces the bearer. Whoever says joy is dopamine has turned away from the question of who is feeling joy. There is a mechanism running, but no one left in whom anything happens. The diagnosis of the “nobody is home” condition is ontological, not moral: the interior is simply no longer provided for in the vocabulary. Third, the displacement disguises itself as scientific rigour. Naturalistic language sounds sober, technical, tested. Its metaphysical decision appears as methodological precision. A term that looks like a finding is hard to examine — it gets adopted before anyone notices that it contains a claim.

The diagnosis sharpens under a simple test. Whoever consistently describes connection as oxytocin can no longer distinguish whether a person is connected or whether a pharmacological manipulation has altered their hormone levels. The description no longer knows this difference. What can no longer be distinguished in the vocabulary is missing from the thinking. Concepts are, in Confucius’s phrase, the measure of order; where they miss the phenomenon, thinking goes astray.

#Natural Philosophy Against the Paradigm

German natural philosophy formulated this finding two hundred years ago, without having the word naturalism available. Schelling argues in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) and in On the World Soul (1798) that nature is not first mechanism and then spirit as an exception, but that spirit and nature belong to each other with equal originality. Nature should be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature — the formula inverts the naturalistic relation. The dead is not primary with the living as its anomaly; the living is primary and the mechanical its abstraction.

Goethe works in the same direction when he insists on the multidimensionality of natural appearance and sets his theory of colour against purely quantitative reduction. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) anticipates this position in De gli eroici furori (1585), thinking the cosmos as an ensouled whole — stars, matter, and the living held together in a connection where inside and outside are not split apart. Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BCE) condensed the principle in the Fragments in a phrase that undercuts the naturalistic cut: physis kryptesthai philei — nature loves to hide. Whoever measures it only by what is measurable has misunderstood what it does.

This line is not mere romanticisation. It makes an ontological counter-claim: that the cosmos possesses an interior that the naturalistic vocabulary does not provide for and that reduction cannot unlock. Lewis Mumford related this state of affairs in The Myth of the Machine (1967) to the entire Western scientific programme: the machine metaphor and naturalistic language are two sides of one historically concrete process in which the living was subsumed under the dead. The finding is old; what is new is the sharpness with which the paradigm operates inside a vocabulary that no one still recognises as a position.

#Naturalism Disguised as Cyber-Animism

A particular layer of the paradigm shows itself where naturalism suddenly sounds ensouled. Phrases like the software is alive, the AI thinks, the model dreams, algorithms learn are not a return to an honest animism. They are the natural consequence of a naturalism that has forgotten its own language: if the living is nothing but complex mechanics, then complex mechanics is already alive. The ensoulment of the machine is not the opposite of naturalism but its endpoint. It claims an interior exactly where it had already abolished the interior. Genuine animism — the early Romantic kind, or the indigenous kind — assumes a pervasive ensoulment that is primary in the living and reaches into the dead only insofar as the dead never occurs in pure form anywhere. The naturalistic cyber-animism inverts the relation: it has de-souled the living and now goes looking for the soul where it categorially cannot be — in the artefact.

This shift explains why the machine metaphor and the naturalistic paradigm prop each other up so firmly. Both presuppose what they appear to describe: that the living and the mechanical fundamentally belong to the same order and differ only quantitatively. Whoever follows the vocabulary can end up treating a piece of software as a being without ever having decided to mean it that way. That decision was made long before, and without their knowledge — through the choice of a word.

#Exposing the Spell

In philosophical accompaniment, the naturalistic paradigm does not appear as a theory but as language that people bring with them. They arrive with sentences about themselves that are naturalistically shaped: That’s my trauma, my attachment disorder, my neurochemistry, my burnout profile. Such sentences are not false in the sense of being lies. They are incantatory forms of self-description that blank out the interior by putting correlates in its place. The work does not consist in forbidding the terms. It consists in tying them back to the phenomenon they were supposed to describe — and in checking what they leave out of that phenomenon.

“There are people who carry this deep materialism inside them, and in my view that comes from a very deep experience of loss.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Addictive Programming (Aron Morhoff) — Live with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, 2026

This examination is the task of contextual disclosure: seeing which metaphysical assumption resonates within a vocabulary, and what room the living still has beneath it. Three questions organise the test. What interior does this term still permit? What phenomenon was it meant to describe, and does it still fit? What other term would capture the same phenomenon with less ontological pre-decision? Whoever tests this way does not undo the paradigm — it sits too deep in shared language to be cut out in a single stroke. But they know they are using it, and can choose which sentences carry it forward.

Naturalism as paradigm stands in close relation to language as incantation: it is an incantation whose spell no one recognises as a spell any more, because it has settled into the language of plain fact itself. It is the ontological precondition of what is described under the term AI psychosis — once language no longer has to prove anything outside itself, a naturalistically trained model can appear as truth, because its coherence matches the coherence of the dominant language. The counter-position, one that restores an interior, would be an ontology that gives the cosmos back its interiority. This line runs from Heraclitus through Bruno and Schelling to Jochen Kirchhoff’s natural philosophy, and it is the real answer to what is diagnosed here.

#Sources

Bruno, G. (1585). De gli eroici furori. Paris.
Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE). Fragments. German edition: Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Contribution at the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness. Berlin, 25 April 2026.
Mumford, L. (1967). The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig. English edition: Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg.