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Loading... Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (original 1998; edition 1999)| 2,632 | 28 | 5,536 | 
(3.88) | 32 | Biologist Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge, that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws. Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are reappearing on the frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship.--From publisher description.… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover.
--Francis Bacon (1605)  | |
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| Dedication |
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I remember very well the first time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. | |
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In his 1941 classic Man on His Nature, the British neurobiologist Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as an enchanted loom, perpetually weaving a picture of the external world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe. The communal mind of literate societies – world culture – is an immensely larger loom. (Chap. 2, “The Great Branches of Learning”) [L]et us begin by simply walking away from Foucault and existential despair […] it's not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind [...] (Chap. 3, “The Enlightenment”) Scientific theories, however, are fundamentally different. They are constructed specifically to be blown apart if proved wrong, and if so destined, the sooner the better. “Make your mistakes quickly” is a rule in the practice of science. I grant that scientist often fall in love with their own constructions. I know; I have. They may spend a lifetime trying to shore them up. A few squander their prestige and academic political capital in the effort. In that case – as the economist Paul Samuelson once quipped – funeral by funeral, theory advances. (Chap.4 “The Natural Sciences”) Science, to be its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles. (Chap.4 “The Natural Sciences”) Someone has defined insanity as an inability to choose among false alternatives. In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen. (Chap.5 “Ariadne's Thread”) The loftier forms of such reflection and belief may seem at first to be the proper domain of philosophy, not science. But history shows that logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction. Much of the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant forward, consists of failed models of the brain. (Chap. 6 “The Mind”) Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago. But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from pole to pole, as to make us conclude first that life evolved, and second that the process took billions of years. (Chap. 7 "From Genes to Culture") [T]he undeniable truth is that each society creates culture and is created by it. Through constant grooming, decorating, exchange of gifts, sharing of food and fermented beverages, music, and storytelling, the symbolic communal life of the mind takes form, unifying the group into a dreamworld that masters the external realisty into which the group has been thrust, whether in forest, grassland, desert, ice field, or city, spinning from it the webs of moral consensus and ritual that bind each tribal member to the common fate. (Chap. 7 "From Genes to Culture") In fact, the great apes are completely silent most of the time. [...] Homo Sapiens, by contrast, can rightfully be called the babbling ape. Humans communicate vocally all the time; it is far easier to start them talking than to shut them up. (Chap. 7 "From Genes to Culture") The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have nowhere else to turn. (Chap. 9 "The Social Sciences") This is the picture of the origin of the arts that appears to be emerging. The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts. In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment.
These revelations, not disobedience to the gods, are what drove humankind from paradise. Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ larger. (page 6) | |
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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. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (9)
▾Book descriptions Biologist Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge, that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws. Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are reappearing on the frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship.--From publisher description. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
La grande avventura intellettuale dell'uomo e la possibilità di tornare all'idea affascinante dell'unità della conoscenza sono l'argomento del libro. L'autore spiega le ragioni del suo veemente antirelativismo e la necessità di abbattere la gerarchizzazione accademica di arti e scienze, individuando un piccolo numero di leggi naturali fondamentali che reggono di fatto ogni ramo della scienza.
(piopas) | |
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The term consilience is applied to many scenarios so it is not always crystal clear. The author suggests that extending our investigation into the natural world by connecting activities to their biological, neuroscientific fundamentals we could understand social sciences like even economics as emergent from principles that go as far down as the physical sciences.
The author’s definition of free will is my favoured one that ultimately the argument on its existence is pointless given the impossibility of reconciling the scale of degrees of freedom, sensitivity to natural phenomena. Those that state it does not exist have no realistic way to demonstrate as much.
The book initially does not indicate what the big picture choices of values could or should be. It is not tech positivist but rather science method-ist bridging to all areas of human activity. The idea is we should study all without limits in the key of biological sciences particularly looking at impact of heredity and adaptation.
In the first part of the book the author takes as a fundamental truth a certain kind of enlightened progress. The idea is that consilient knowledge would help humanity “advance”. The problem with this is the author does not address how some areas of study themselves can be pandora boxes for important risks. From dividing society to technological developments that increase existential risk. Though the author underlies the importance of ethics there is little dedicated to precautionary principle, particularly where in the bioscience we have already run into problems.
At the end of the book the author introduces the problematic balancing of the growth based economies of the world and the impact on environment. This end is a sudden twist to the plot becaus now we take into implicit consideration the values of sustainability of civilisation. This consideration and focus should have been a lens from the beginning of the book as it would reframe consilience and its potential controversies around the bigger risk of environmental collapse.
I am surprised that the author does not directly address how some new ideas, technology and knowledge can increase existential risks over the long term. Consilience between areas of knowledge is not exempt from this problem. Case in point the author describes economics with a glossy picture (very different from my own) and explains that connection to psychology and neuroscience can unlock a whole new world of possibilities. I would say that since publicatiom many neuroeconomics learnings are applied in an exploitative way. Who cares? But this is the sort of activity could drive tail risks way up…
Basically across most of the text what is good for the author is a kind of evolutionary transformation of knowledge. But in this area he does not consider the risks in some of his ideas and directions. And when we reach the drama of the final chapter and it presenting only the space for a narrow escape for humanity I wonder how he can reconcile that it would be thanks to consilience that humanity “survives”?
Basically the issue is scientific investigation according to whatever style or means is almost always a consequence of a political direction. It seems simplistic to think consilient knowledge would solve these problems alone.
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