Immortal Curiosity

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is an inviting, informative work on several topics, primarily attempting to present what Wilson terms the “consilient world view”. He reviews a number of human investigations and endeavours, presenting how they variously show evidence for the effectiveness of consilience or have failed to utilize it, to their benefit or detriment, respectively. In addition, he present proposals for the inclusion of consilience in studies that have entirely or mostly neglected it, taking into account their current milieu.

One issue that became moderately annoying in this text is Wilson’s tendency to provide an overabundance of detail, leading to discussions within particular fields that I feel could have been entirely left out or summarized to the text’s benefit. In the end, while it does not feel overly taxing and is not that long of a work when one takes its subject into account, it could have had a much more unified and focused approach.

Assorted quotations and notes:

• Chapter 2-
  • After describing the development of the Enlightenment thinkers, he continues by claiming that their propositions and assumptions are borne out well and that they are not to be blamed for the fragmentary state of philosophy thereafter.
  • Consilience, introduced by William Whewell in 1840, is a “jumping-together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanations.
• Chapter 4-
  • pg 52f, useful and elegant descriptions of theory and science.
    • “Scientific theories are a product of imagination– informed imagination. They reach beyond their grasp to predict the existence of previously unsuspected phenomena.”
    • “Science […] is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses that knowledge into testable laws and principles.”
• Chapter 6-
  • “Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge […] rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences.”
• pg 98, on evolutionary progress:
  • “If we mean by progress the advance towards a preset goal, such as that composed by intention in the human mind, then evolution by natural selection, which has no preset goals, is not progress. But if we mean the production through time of increasingly complex and controlling organisms and societies […] then evolutionary progress is an obvious reality.”
• pg 110
  • “The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity.”
• pg 116ff
  • Descriptions of subjective experience in physical terms, countering cases of people possessive of physical explanations but lacking subjective experience. Mindscript example.
  • “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, C.P. Snow, 1959
• pg 127f, “gene-culture coevolution”:
  • “to genetic evolution the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution, and, second, that the two forms of evolution are linked”
  • “Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely-tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondig precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species.”
• pg 232
  • An interesting description of man’s place in, and view of, the world using primal imagery.
• pg 262
  • “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”
• pg 264
  • “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative.”
• pg 266
  • “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.”
• pg 269
  • “The most important questions in this endeavour for the liberal arts are the meaning and purpose of all our idiosyncratic frenetic activity: What are we, Where do we come from, How shall we decide where to go?“
• pg 273
  • ‘volitional evolution’, genetic manipulation by science affecting heredity, consciously enacted by individuals and groups.
• pg 276
  • genetic tinkering combined with marriage produces the dilemma of how much alteration is moral.
• pg 277
  • To what end should human genius direct itself? Without beginning to answer this, the formulation of an environmental ethic is difficult or impossible.