As a Whole: The Consilience of Consilience
Ch 1: The Ionian Enchantment
The opening chapter of this book starts by explaining Wilson’s view of the world. How we tend to see it or have been seeing it, and how he changed that perspective. He talks about how we tend to see knowledge as something separate. He explains the Linnaeus view (seeing something as part of something, or subdividing plants and animals – species, genera, family, orders, kingdoms). On the other hand he talks about the Ionian Enchantment. By this, he means “the belief in the unity of the sciences – a conviction, far deeper than mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.”
With this, Wilson introduces the main topic of this book, the unity of knowledge.
*Unification: liberation of the human mind.
Ch 2: The Great Branches of Learning
“The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship… Consilience is the key to unification.”
That’s pretty clear. We have been struggling with a problem for a long time and we haven’t found a solution. It’s not that there isn’t a solution “in the real world”, but it’s a matter of how we approach the subject. In this chapter, Wilson is proposing that there can be this unification of knowledge, between the sciences and humanities, and that we should called it Consilience. Philosophy is a great instrument that has helped humanity achieve better states of knowledge, and it’s in this process that we should start narrowing the gaps between this apparent division of knowledge.
Ch 3: The Enlightenment
This chapter is about The Enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural movement (one of the first ones to try to unify knowledge) that promoted reason and individualism, and challenged the knowledge grounded in tradition in search for the one acquired through the scientific method. This era ended with the death of Le Bon Condorcet. Wilson goes through this chapter explaining the reasons of the failure of this movement, which is an interesting development of events. It’s difficult to think that a movement with those solid ground can reach an end, but those are the consequences when we go to extremes.
Ch 4: The Natural Sciences
“Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled. The question it poses, of universal and orderly materialism, is the most important that can be asked in philosophy and religion.”
“Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived.”
“The descent to minutissima, the search for ultimate smallness in entities such as electrons, is a driving impulse of Western natural science. It is a kind of instinct. Human beings are obsessed with building blocks, forever pulling them apart and putting them back together again.”
This chapter is all about what we call the natural sciences and how this has helped us in our process of knowledge as well as shaped our perspective of knowledge. It’s very interesting how we, as humans, have built this instruments that help us achieve a better understanding of the world around us.
Ch 5: Ariadne’s Thread
“With the aid of the scientific method, we have gained an en- compassing view of the physical world far beyond the dreams of earlier generations. The great adventure is now beginning to turn inward, toward ourselves. In the last several decades the natural sciences have exanded to reach the borders of the social sciences and humanities. There the principle of consilient explanation guiding the advance must undergo its severest test. The physical sciences have been relatively easy; the social sciences and humanities will be the ultimate challenge.”
Natural sciences are easy to follow. We observe a pattern, we document it, make an experiment, and form a theory. But with other sciences or humanities it’s more hard to do that. it appears that the same method cannot be applied. Knowledge is not found in a straightforward way, but in a more labyrinthic way. That’s what this chapter is about.
Ch 6: The Mind
“Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge—the reality of the labyrinth—rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences. The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound: Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there.”
“Granted, the brain’s machinery remains forbiddingly alien and scientists have traced only a minute fraction of its circuitry.”
In this chapter, Wilson explains the importance of the mind in the creation of knowledge. He goes into the structure of the mind, neuroscience, types of neurons, receptors, and transmitters; memory, remembrance, emotions, our process of decision making, mood, creativity, insanity, free will, and artificial intelligence. Wilson also makes an emphasis on our limits on how the mind or brain works, and although we know the major anatomical functions, we haven’t fully understood what’s the power of the mind or how connections between neurons and parts of the brain work.
Ch 7: From Genes to Culture
"Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked. But the linkage is flexible, to a degree still mostly unmeasured. The linkage is also tortuous: Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself. The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of the existing culture available to it, with selections guided through the epigenetic rules inherited by the individual brain."
“…epigenetic rules comprise the full range of inherited regularities of development in anatomy, physiology, cognition, and behavior. They are the algorithms of growth and differentiation that create a fully functioning organism.” (page 163)
This chapter is about the relation or link between genes and culture. Are we determined by one of them? By both? How can these two views coexist in our perception of what makes us be certain way? An important feature of this chapter is the concept of epigenetic rules. These are the “inherited regularities”, traits that we have developed through evolution by the influence of culture. It relates with Thinking, Fast and Slow in the way that we have a certain predisposition to act when facing a situation and we don’t think it too much but do it more instinct guided. I also see the role of epigenetic rules as a very similar function of the limbic system, which we have developed through evolution in order to react and survive when a situation of stress or threat challenges us. The basic element of culture is the meme.
Ch 8: The Fitness of Human Nature
“What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture.”
This chapter goes into more deepness about the gene-culture coevolution. It explains the basic categories of sociobiology’s evolutionary principles, the creation of epigenetic rules, problems that arise from this evolution and how we have solved it through culture (incest for example), two kinds of epigenetic rules (narrow and broad), and again about how we modify our genes through culture.
Ch 9: The Social Sciences
“People expect from the social sciences—anthropology, sociol- ogy, economics, and political science—the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future. They want the power to predict, not the preordained unfolding of events, which does not exist, but what will happen if society selects one course of action over another.”
In this chapter, Wilson explains how social sciences are viewed and what is expected from them, specifically the predictability part. He makes the distinction between the approach of natural sciences and social sciences, as well as the gap between these two. In this line of thought, he goes into economics, which he thinks is the best social science to reduce the gap between natural and social sciences. He explains some mainstream economics (Classical Era, Marginalist Era, and Era of Model Building). Also he explains the four qualities of good theories (pasimoy, generality, consilience, and predictiveness.)
Ch 10: The Arts and Their Interpretation
In many respects, the most interesting challenge to consilient explanation is the transit from science to the arts. By the latter I mean the creative arts, the personal productions of literature, visual arts, drama, music, and dance marked by those qualities which for lack of better words (and better words may never be coined) we call the true and beautiful…
Reflection leads us to two questions about the arts: where they come from, in both history and personal experience, and how their essential qualities of truth and beauty are to be described through ordinary language. These matters are the central concern of interpretation, the scholarly analysis and criticism of the arts.” (page 229)
How can we unite science and arts? Can anyone do art and what does that mean? Where does our ability to create art comes from? Is it from the coevolution of genes and culture and thus, epigenetic rules? Or is it only from our environment? Or only from genes? Can I be as creative as you and how is it different? What is the role of art and creation in our society?
Some of these questions are explored in this chapter.
Ch 11: Ethics and Religion
“Centuries of debate on the origin of ethics come town to this: Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions. The distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers. The choice between the assumptions makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct of moral reasoning.
The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea of chaos, immovable, as different as life and death, matter and the void. Which is correct cannot be learned by pure logic; for the present only a leap of faith will take you from one to the other. But the true answer will eventually be reached by the accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every level intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences.“ (page 260)
“That said, I will of course try to be plain about my own position: I am an empiricist. On religion I lean toward deism but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics. The existence of a cosmologi- cal God who created the universe (as envisioned by deism) is possible, and may eventually be settled, perhaps by forms of material evidence not yet imagined. Or the matter may be forever beyond human reach. In contrast, and of far greater importance to humanity, the existence of a biological God, one who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism) is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences.” (page 263)
Ch 12: To What End?
“I have argued that there is intrinsically only one class of explanation. It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.
For centuries consilience has been the mother's milk of the natural sciences. Now it is wholly accepted by the brain sciences and evolutionary biology, the disciplines best poised to serve in turn as bridges to the social sciences and humanities. There is abundant evidence to support and none absolutely to refute the proposition that consilient explanations are congenial to the entirety of the great branches of learning.
The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.”
“I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we will also arrive at an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant emergent animals, defined genetically by our unique origins, blessed by our newfound biological genius, and secure in our homeland if we wish to make it so. What does it all mean? This is what it all means. To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.”