Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

"Consilience," as Edward O. Wilson defines it, is the quality of consistently operating according to a uniform set of scientific principles. The big question this book addresses is: Does everything that exists ultimately operate according to the same (as yet undiscovered, or at least incompletely discovered) set of scientific rules? Wilson roams widely among science and philosophy, lingering on our DNA, the interface between genes and culture, studies of brain functions, art, religion and ethics, finishing up with an impassioned plea to protect our ever more fragile and endangered natural world. A lot of it is deeply fascinating and enlightening (though brain science and genetics have both advanced by leaps and bounds since 1998 when this book was published). The heart of the book is where, I think, he goes way off the rails: exploring the question of whether the spiritual beliefs at the heart of most of the world's religions throughout history are aligned with real phenomena or only a figment of our evolutionary biology, he sets up as a straw man a religious vision that is only one among many in order to knock it down with an empiricist argument that, to me, was both compelling so far as it goes (I'm a great believer in the value of scientific research) and utterly unconvincing in refuting the notion of spiritual reality. If one believes, as I do, that the divine is immanent within every physical manifestation, spiritual realities and physical realities may be completely consilient. I also found his argument for retaining religious ritual as an empty but socially valuable practice repugnant. But I'm not sorry I read the book. It's thought provoking, and thoughts are good things to provoke.

Profound, masterful, unique. ( )

I've made the observation before that scientists - especially biologists - tend to make lousy philosophers, and it doesn't take long to see Professor E. O. Wilson - one of evolutionary biology's most prominent lights - places himself squarely in that camp. "No one should suppose," he asserts, "that objective truth is impossible to attain, even when the most committed philosophers urge us to acknowledge that incapacity. In particular it is too early for scientists, the foot soldiers of epistemology, to yield ground so vital to their mission. ... No intellectual vision is more important and daunting than that of objective truth based on scientific understanding."

On the other hand, and (as far as I can tell) without intending the irony with which the statement overflows, not long afterwards he says, "People are innate romantics, they desperately need myth and dogma."

None more so, it would seem, that philosophising evolutionary biologists. Wilson's Consilience is a long essay on objective truth that - per the above quotation, gratuitously misunderstands what epistemology even is, whilst at the same time failing to mention (except in passing) any of its most important contributors - the likes of Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Quine, Rorty or even dear old Popper. Instead, Wilson characterises objections to his extreme reductionism as "leftist" thought including - and I quote - "Afrocentrism, 'critical' (i.e., socialist) science, deep ecology, ecofeminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Latourian sociology of science and neo-Marxism." Horrified enough yet?

That's about the level of engagement you'll get, and the only concession - a self-styled "salute" to the postmodernists - is "their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects."

You could formulate a more patronising disposition, I suppose, but it would take some work.

What is extraordinary is that of all scientists, a biologist should be so insensitive to the contingency of knowledge, as this is the exact lesson evolutionary theory teaches: it's not the perfect solution that survives, but the most effective. There is no "ideal organism".

In support of his own case, Wilson refers at some length to the chimerical nature of consciousness (taking Daniel Dennett's not uncontroversial account more or less as read). But there is a direct analogy here: Dennett's model of "consciousness" stands in the same relation to the material brain as Wilson's "consilience" stands to the physical universe. Dennett says consciousness is an illusion - a trick of the mind, if you like (and rather wilfully double-parks the difficult question "a trick on whom?").

But by extension, could not consilience also be a trick of the mind? Things look like they're ordered, consistent, universal, *because that's how we're wired to see them*. Our evolutionary development (fully contingent and path-dependent, as even Wilson would agree) has built a sensory apparatus which filters the information in the world in a way which is ever-more effective (that's the clever trick of evolutionary development). If it is of adaptive benefit to apprehend "the world" as a consistent, coherent whole, then as long as that coherent whole accounts effectively for our physiologically meaningful experiences, then its relation to "the truth" is really beside the point.

When I run to catch a cricket ball on the boundary no part of my brain solves differential equations to catch it (I don't have nearly enough information to do that), and no immutable, unseen cosmic machine calculates those equations to plot its trajectory either. Our mathematical model is a clever proxy, and we shouldn't be blinded by its elegance or apparent accuracy (though, in point of fact, practically it isn't that accurate) into assuming it somehow reveals an ineffable truth. This isn't a new or especially controversial objection, by the way: this was one of David Hume's main insights - an Enlightenment piece of enlightenment, if you will. As a matter of logic, there must be alternate ways of describing the same phenomena, and if you allow yourself to implement different rules to solve the puzzle, the set of coherent alternative solutions is infinite.

So our self congratulation at the cleverness of the model we have arrived at (and, sure, it is very clever) shouldn't be overdone. It isn't the "truth" - it's an effective proxy, and there is a world of difference between the two. And there are uncomfortable consequences of taking the apparently harmless step of conflating them.

For one thing, "consilience" tends to dissuade inquiry: if we believe we have settled on an ineffable truth, then further discussion can only confuse and endanger our grip on it. It also gives us immutable grounds for arbitrating against those who hold an "incorrect" view. That is, to hold forth a theory which is inconsistent with the mainstream "consiliated" view is wasteful and given it has the potential to lead us *away* from the "true" path, may legitimately be suppressed.

You can see this style of reasoning being employed by two groups already: militant religious fundamentalists, and militant atheists. Neither is prepared to countenance the pluralistic, pragmatic (and blindingly obvious) view that there are not just many different *ways* of looking at the world but many different *reasons* for doing so, and each has its own satisfaction criteria. While these opposing fundamentalists go hammer and tongs against each other, their similarities are greater than their differences, and their greatest similarity is that neither fully comprehends, and as a consequence neither takes seriously, the challenge of the "postmodern" strands of thought against which they're aligned.

Hence, someone like Wilson can have the hubris to say things like: "Yet I think it is fair to say that enough is known to justify confidence in the principle of universal rational consilience across all the natural sciences"

Try telling that to Kurt Goedel or Bertrand Russell, let alone Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida. ( )

New York Times columnist David Brooks has chosen to discuss Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject – Neuroscience, saying that:




“…In Consilience Wilson makes the prediction that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that is actually happening with neuroscience: there’s a field of neural economics, neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields...."


The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david-brooks ( )

I'm in love with the premise of this book, which is that humanists, social scientists and natural scientists need to work harder to connect or unify knowledge, to recapture the mood of Enlightenment-era inquiry.

Too bad Wilson doesn't believe in his own premise. If this is unification of knowledge, it's the same kind of unification that Hitler pursued with the Sudenteland, not consilience but conquest. Wilson is intellectually lazy in his engagement with the humanities. There's nothing wrong with a reasoned critique of various trends in humanistic theory or scholarship, but Wilson doesn't bother to do much more than simply assert the validity not just of science but of a very particular set of intellectual projects within the sciences while throwing a few armchair, shop-worn dismissals at critical theory, humanistic knowledge and the like.

The obligation to literacy in other intellectual traditions besides one's own flows both ways, at least if consilience (and conciliation) are the goal. It's perfectly possible to override hermeneutics with cogntivism or evolutionary psychology, for example, but not just by fiat. Wilson sets his own declared cause back a few paces with this book, and what should be an exciting reading experience is instead an aggravating one. ( )