Views from Crestmont Drive

Third post about Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

(first post; second post)

Chapter 4, “The Natural Sciences”, focuses on the nature of science and how scientists actually work.

The great divide among cultures on Planet Earth is not political, racial, or religious; it is the divide between the scientific and the prescientific. He evokes a comparison to “intelligent fish born in a deep, shadowed pool”, without the benefits of “the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences” —

Wondering and relentless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

A powerful analogy, one that has appeared in science fiction, which I will eventually explore and elaborate.

Wilson describes science, p45.8:

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 fortune turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived.

And later defines it, p53m; Science is

the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles.

He explores themes that appear in his later, more recently read, book, The Meaning of Human Existence, which I blogged about in several posts ending here: how we perceive only the tiniest sliver of available light, or of other electromagnetic signals, some of which are perceived by other species. Evolution explains why.

Science has five principles: repeatability; economy; mensuration; heuristics; consilience, p53b. The method of science is firstly reductionism, (which is what offends so many critics), but in the service of synthesis and integration, with the goal of universal laws.

Wilson has some insightful description into the nature of how scientists work, and what their work means. A scientist has to be compulsive, working 80 hours a week (taking into account routine academic responsibilities, teaching classes, et al, before doing actual research), and how ultimately research, and original discovery, is all that matters. It doesn’t matter how a scientist makes a discovery — in this sense it is an art form — it only matters that the claim is true and can be validated.

Then there is the question of whether scientists close in on an ultimate, objective, reality. Wilson describes the philosophies of positivism, in Europe, then pragmatism, in America, with the combination of logical positivism (p61-62), culminated in a 1939 conference at Harvard. Mathematics, they understood, is tautological: given premises, you can conclude anything. p63.2: “Pure mathematics is the science of all conceivable worlds, a logically closed system yet infinite in all directions allowed by starting premises.” (I perceive a SFnal element here.)

Logical positivism halted, because they could not agree on basic premises about fact v. concept, theory v. speculation. Wilson states:

Its failure, or put more generously, its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story.

And so what I realize in reading this almost 20-year-old book is that a couple key issues I’ve come to understand only recently are not in fact all that new. Wilson identifies two key points: that the mind was built for survival, and the key to perceiving reality is to take into account the biases of how the human mind was built for survival, not perception of reality.

Wilson returned to the themes in this book not only in The Meaning of Human Existence, in 2014, but also in The Social Conquest of Earth, in 2012, which I have but have not yet read. And several key themes in this current book echo issues in his earlier foundational books On Human Nature (1978) and Promethean Fire (1983), which I read back then, and has informed my thinking ever since.

Second post about Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

(first post)

Chapter 2, “The Great Branches of Learning”, seems a bit off the mark since it doesn’t address those branches directly.

Wilson says the Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries got it mostly right, and he defines ‘consilience’ quoting William Whewell: “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.”

He gives an example of how environmental policy, ethics, biology, and social science all meet at some common center, yet have separate methods and terminologies. Yet there’s nothing in principle that should separate them into inseparable disciplines.

He realizes he will be accused of reductionism, of ‘scientism’… to which he pleads guilty guilty guilty!

Philosophy, he suggests, has just two issues concerning science: the questions that science can’t answer, and the reasons it can’t answer them, p11.7

But he anticipates that cultural issues will eventually be enlightened by science, including the humanities, and the creative arts.

A big problem toward this goal is that universities have abandoned the idea of any kind of common understanding — there are fewer required courses, less and less presumed shared understanding, or general understanding of scientific issues. The same is true among lawmakers, pundits, the media 13.8. Yet he’s sure the long-term trend toward unification is inevitable.

Chapter 3, “The Enlightenment”, is much more interesting. I’ve read enough glosses on the history of science, of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, to have a general idea of how those ideas mattered, and who the general players were. Wilson’s take is to emphasize how the Enlightenment *failed*, which he illustrates with an account of the life of the Marquis de Condorcet (whom I’ve encountered in not one but two other books read this past year — those by Jordan Ellenberg and Chris Mooney).

Condorcet was a brilliant mathematician, who applied his ideas to political theories, but he took up politics, chose the wrong side, and was condemned to prison where he died. He believed in the Enlightenment idea of laws of physics and perhaps of society, thus the idea of a perfectible society.

Wilson suggests that the ideas of social perfection aligned to tyrants who attempted to enforce social perfect to the point of condemning and executing naysayers — including, collaterally, Condorcet. Followed by what became the French revolution, and then the many tyrants of the 20th century.

I don’t think that Wilson implies that the scientific ideals of the Enlightenment — he considers Francis Bacon at length, and Descartes, and Newton — directly influenced those tyrants. But he does suggests that the Enlightenment ideals failed to satisfy issues about culture, in particular about human nature, and the failure to identify a basis for morality. At the same time, the idea of social perfection was seen by some as a trap, or an upset to the natural order: thus the beginning of stories about monsters, threats to the natural order that must be defeated. (A central SF theme, I think, especially about the ‘thriller’ genre.)

And then came the Romantic revolution, with emphasis more on naturalism and metaphysics, a trend Wilson follows all the way to the professional specificity of scientists, to the 20th century idea of artists to be unique rather than part of any tradition, to the late 20th century ideas of multi-culturalism, post-modernism, and deconstructionism.

Wilson identifies a central flaw of the Enlightenment scientists and intellectuals, who were deists:

The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional. Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless. Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty. In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything. There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation. And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence. It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

Later, Wilson considers post-modernist views all the way to Michel Foucault, and opines, “To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.” But at the end of this history, Wilson is optimistic:

Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

Here I will note that ideas that I’ve only become aware of in recent years — the idea of the human mind being optimized not for perception of reality, but for survival; the emphasis of *narrative*; and so on — are clearly identified in this 18 year old book. The ideas aren’t that new, though they have become clarified in recent years. In fact, Wilson describes how Francis Bacon, way back in the early 17th century, understood aspects of what we now call psychology — he used *stories* to put forth his ideas! (p26b). And he warned against various “idols of the mind”, 27t — idols of the mind, the marketplace — clear foreshadowing of the numerous mental biases identified by psychologists in the past couple decades.

Wilson concludes by granting that postmodernist ideas are like fireworks — most of them will burn out quickly, but a few might illuminate something interesting. And they cannot help but strengthen the traditional ideas they critique, which must endure that criticism. And if somehow they bring the whole grand scheme of modern science down — then we will start over. Because we must, we must understand.

So now, after reading Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence a bit over a year ago (last of five posts about it here), I’m returning nearly 20 years to one of his earlier, foundational I think, books: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, published in 1998, which I think I must have sampled a bit back then, but which for some reason never got around to reading through. (The cover of my first edition does not have any of the texts above or below those two lines that frame the title and author in this just-grabbed-from-Amazon cover image.)

(In general, I am sifting through my library of several hundred nonfiction books on everything from cosmology to evolution to mind to complexity theory to religion to the future of humanity in space, volumes accumulated over the past 40 years, culling them down to the essential volumes that relate [not necessarily support] to the framework of my ‘provisional conclusions’, digging up long ago compiled notes about some of them, and reading for the first time some of those I’ve yet to closely visit.)

I’m now only about a third of the way through this book, but I think I’ll begin compiling summary, and quotes, as I go. Wilson included his idea of a ‘consilience’ between science and the humanities in The Meaning of Human Existence, and so I proceed with some apprehension in this earlier book that there is no new grand insight to be discovered, only detailed justification. So far I’ve found that, yes, but also elegant, insightful writing, and detailed examinations of the historical and scientific backgrounds that support his thesis.

The first chapter is brief, autobiographical. Wilson grew up in Alabama, a Southern Baptist, enamored of critters in the woods, especially ants, frogs, and snakes, and how the 18th century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus had come up with a classification scheme (still used, of course) for all life. Then in college his mentor gave him a book on evolution by Ernst Mayr — his 1942 book Systematics and Origin of Species [Amazon — everything is on the internet!] — and it was to Wilson a revelation, an epiphany. Suddenly everything made sense in new way. He’d experienced what he calls an “Ionian Enchantment”, the notion, going back to the early Greek philosopher Thales, that the world is orderly, and can be understood.

And Wilson found himself “released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion.” He’d been raised a Baptist, had been born again, had read the Bible twice.

But now at college, steroid-driven into moods of adolescent rebellion, I chose to doubt. I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago…

But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken?

He drifts away from the church, yet:

I also retained a small measure of common sense. 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 of new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.

Here in this paragraph he displays more wisdom than any number of authors of crude atheistic critiques of religion (as I described them a couple posts ago), who think pointing out the lack of evidence for implausible supernatural claims should persuade people to abandon their faiths. It doesn’t work that way.

He concludes this introductory, autobiographical, chapter, with an evocation of Daedalus, and quotes Eddington: “Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax on our wings”.

Subsequent chapters include a fascinating history of The Enlightenment, and how it failed, and much insight into how science, and scientists, works.