Scientific and Philosophical Critiques of Descartes and Kant

Since the seventeenth century, the philosophy of the subject — initiated by Descartes' cogito, ergo sum and culminating in Kant's transcendental subject — has constituted the foundational metaphysics of modernity and technical rationality. While this paradigm catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and industrial civilization, its inherent subject-object dualism precipitated the deep modern crises of anthropocentrism, technological domination, and ecological alienation. This monograph argues that the fatal flaw of classical modern philosophy lies in an epistemological and ontological inversion: it mistakes the epistemic starting point of the subject for the ontic origin of the cosmos, and erroneously projects human transcendental cognitive structures onto the absolute ontological fabric of the universe. This "Ontological Inversion Syndrome" (OIS) pervades the full practice of modern science, economics, politics, and technological civilization. Drawing upon the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) and integrating contemporary cosmology, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, self-organization theory, evolutionary epistemology, and cognitive neuroscience, this work articulates a post-Kantian natural-evolutionary ontology. We demonstrate that consciousness is not the Archimedean foundation of reality but a higher-order emergent phenomenon arising from the long-range evolution of dissipative structures far from equilibrium; furthermore, human reason is not the legislator of nature but an advanced adaptive mechanism within the cosmos's open feedback networks at a particular evolutionary node. This book replaces the Principle of Subject Priority with the Principle of Cosmic Ontological Priority (PCOP), taking LYGC's Cosmic Genesis Chain (Dao begets One [Sun] → One begets Two [Earth] → Two begets Three [Moon] → Three begets ten thousand things → human consciousness) as its ontological framework, shifting the primary philosophical inquiry from the modernist "How does the subject know the world?" to "How does the cosmos generate the subject?" and "How does civilization couple with the natural feedback chain?" This shift dismantles the metaphysical residues of rationalism and transcendentalism and offers a "Natural Cybernetics" ontological paradigm for civilizational survival and ecological reconstruction in the AI era. At the practical level, this monograph proposes the Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model (3L-GFM), Desire Amplification Factor (DAF), Cosmic Constraint Function (CCF), Natural Civilization Index (NCI), and three tipping points (NTP/STP/TTP) as core quantitative tools, providing a complete dual philosophical-scientific framework for civilizational self-diagnosis and the Fourth Awakening.