Consilience

“Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science." 

Science, a child of philosophy, has grown up to become so powerful a discoverer of truth that it can replace much of its parents’ rather feeble attempts to figure out reality. 

“Consilience of causal explanation is the means by which the single mind can travel most swiftly and surely from one part of the communal mind to the other." 

If the humanities can learn to speak science, they can benefit from the precision of the scientific method. Wherever art, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences search for the truths of their fields, they can more easily find them scientifically, and then use those discoveries to empower their own works.

“The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences […] is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature?” 

Condorcet, while imprisoned during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, wrote a book, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (21), which outlines the Enlightenment’s goals for science and the humanities. It makes an early suggestion that the human mind isn’t separate from nature but part of its continuum, subject to its laws, and able to learn for itself the mysteries of reality. 

“Bacon wished to reform reasoning across all the branches of learning. Beware, he said, of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall. They are the real distorting prisms of human nature. Among them, idols of the tribe assume more order than exists in chaotic nature; those of the imprisoning cave, the idiosyncrasies of individual belief and passion; of the marketplace, the power of mere words to induce belief in nonexistent things; and of the theater, unquestioning acceptance of philosophical beliefs and misleading demonstrations. Stay clear of these idols, he urged, observe the world around you as it truly is, and reflect on the best means of transmitting reality as you have experienced it; put into it every fiber of your being." 

Ahead of his time, Bacon was a pioneer in the scientific method and one of the first to point out the foibles of human thinking. He noted the biases—tribalism, desires, false hopes—that bend the mind away from the truth and make accurate conclusions difficult to achieve. 

“The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution." 

People evolved to survive, to support and defend their tribes, and to reproduce. Anything beyond that drains energy from those main purposes. Thought, logic, and the careful pursuit of truth aren’t natural for humans and must be cultivated. A sign that our minds aren’t meant for such activities is that quantum mechanics and relativity, both powerfully useful in modern high-tech society, are nearly impossible to grasp intuitively and arduous to understand mathematically. 

“Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing." 

The Enlightenment, which comes down to us in the form of modern science, is a belief in the power of the human mind to discover the laws of nature and apply them to human life. Postmodernists observe the huge variety of human ideas, especially in politics and culture, and extrapolate that all forms of thought are a chaotic hodgepodge of disorder. Postmodernism also makes it hard for the humanities to embrace the discoveries of science and apply them to their respective disciplines. 

“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 scientific method is a way, not of enforcing some arbitrary set of cultural biases, but of removing bias altogether from thought and pursuing the truth, no matter where it leads. Its power lies precisely in its lack of wishful thinking, preferences, and prejudices; instead, science humbly and determinedly winnows all false leads to find the patterns that best explain the evidence. It is an approach freely available to all, from inquiring third-world students to huge research institutions. 

“Science, to put 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." 

The purpose of science is to learn how things work and why. With the results of science, humanity has grown stronger and more prosperous—and, it is hoped, wiser. 

“Quantum physics thus blends into chemical physics, which explains atomic bonding and chemical reactions, which form the foundation of molecular biology, which demystifies cell biology." 

Science first seeks to know things from the inside and how their constituent parts work. From there, scientists work out how those parts fit together to form larger assemblages, and how those larger elements make even larger groupings, until the entire thing is understood—from atoms to anatomy, from molecules to mountains, from quarks to quasars. 

“If brain and mind are at base biological phenomena, it follows that the biological sciences are essential to achieving coherence among all the branches of learning, from the humanities on down to the physical sciences." 

Biology stands at the center of the consilience project. To understand biologically the workings of the human mind is to grasp the fundamentals of every human enterprise, since the mind—and the brain that underlies it—are the essential workplace of art, science, philosophy, politics, sports, auto repair, and everything else in culture and society. This knowledge can enlarge and enhance every field; in that respect, mind and brain science are essentially useful to human activity. 

“Organisms and their assemblages are the most complex systems known. They are also self-assembling and adaptive. Living systems in general, by constructing themselves from molecule to cell to organism to ecosystem, surely display whatever deep laws of complexity and emergence lie within our reach.”

On the one hand, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to derive from a knowledge of particle physics the complexities of organic life. On the other hand, without that knowledge, advanced chemistry grinds to a halt, and many of the features of living things can’t fully be understood or productively managed. 

“There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides." 

Science can lay out the principles of the search for greater knowledge; the humanities can locate the areas of greatest interest. With their own expertise combined with the language of science, artists and their cohorts in literature, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology can pinpoint, explore, and define new regions where their knowledge and skills might advance productively. 

“Chance mutations are the raw material of evolution. Environmental challenge, deciding which mutants and their combinations will survive, is the necessity that molds us further from this protean genetic clay." 

Chance is only one part, and not all, of natural selection. The other, more important part is the severe discipline of the environment, which ruthlessly culls organic material and organisms that don’t comport with it. Only those living things that can survive the jolts and dangers of their surroundings can survive to reproduce, and those that last longer have more chances to do so. Any biochemicals that extend their survival will tend to be preserved over the generations. Chance, then, generates the variety of living possibilities; the environment makes the selections. 

“Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture. Culture helps to determine which of the prescribing genes survive and multiply from one generation to the next. Successful new genes alter the epigenetic rules of populations. The altered epigenetic rules change the direction and effectiveness of the channels of cultural acquisition." 

Inherent preferences influence human culture; cultures develop ways for people to express those preferences, ways that, themselves, subtly shape the human genome by creating social environments that some individuals navigate better than others. Thus, the human genome and human cultures evolve together. 

“It is comforting to say that war, being cultural in origin, can be avoided. Unfortunately, that bit of conventional wisdom is only a half truth. It is more nearly correct—and far more prudent—to say that war arises from both genes and culture and can best be avoided by a thorough understanding of the manner in which these two modes of heredity interact within different historical contexts." 

People sometimes assert that war can be avoided if everyone desires peace and loves each other. The problem is that people inherently want a lot more things than peace, and they’ve evolved to love their families and group members but fear and distrust outsiders. These various preferences manifest in a variety of often-conflicting cultural norms. Until the dense interconnections between deep human predilections and culture—tribalism, patriotism, glory, competition for resources—are fully understood, the chances of preventing war will be limited.

“Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex. They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences."

It's not possible to control people for research purposes the way physicists can control atoms in a vacuum or photons in a laser. The challenge is to extract from masses of data a recognizable social trend that other researchers can replicate. Into this complexity can be injected all kinds of biases, wishful thinking, political agendas, and unproven social theories. Social scientists have good statistical methods but have yet to establish stable and universal theories of culture and society. 

“With epigenetic rules, we see a rainbow in four basic colors and not in a continuum of light frequencies. We avoid mating with a sibling, speak in grammatically coherent sentences, smile at friends, and when alone fear strangers in first encounters." 

It’s become clear that people are products of their genetic makeup, with distinct universal principles guiding their preferences and the cultural norms channeling them. Humans aren’t arbitrary, self-made beings; they’re evolved organisms tuned to their worldly environment. 

“Gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." 

Some prehistoric artistic efforts became popular, and soon others tried to create similar works. The artists most rewarded by those early societies and cultures would likely have produced more offspring than less successful artists, so that future generations would tend to produce works more in keeping with cultural preferences. For tens of thousands of years, these preferences changed slowly, giving human genetics time to evolve subtle adaptations. Only lately has cultural change sped up to a rate much faster than can be adapted to by the human genome. 

“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."

The same intelligence that enables people to interact in complex ways also subjects them to the awareness of death and random misfortune, along with a resulting generalized anxiety. To some extent, people pay for their smarts with suffering. 

“No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet." 

Though different in purpose and process, science and the arts are not opposed, and thus they can benefit each other. Different perspectives are often perceived as threats, but science threatens no other field; instead, it offers its powers and discoveries for those fields to use.

“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology." 

People, long accustomed to believe in spirits that protect them from the dangers of a surrounding world they don’t fully understand, recently find themselves empowered with a scientific method that can provide them with explanations and workarounds for those old dangers. That the mind reels at these discoveries, and twists and bends with odd new ways of thinking brought about by science, should be no surprise, since science is an unexpected outgrowth the human mind that has appeared too suddenly to alter the mind’s genetic makeup. The result is that people often must struggle between the rigorous ways of science and the older, more alluring biases of tribal loyalties and arbitrary religious and social beliefs. 

“Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly humbling challenge, while religion must somehow find the way to incorporate the discoveries of science in order to retain credibility."

Science can’t “discover” how people should behave; it can, however, learn what people inherently want and test how those wants can be achieved harmoniously in society. Even more difficult is the challenge faced by religions, which must account for scientific findings that call into question some of their time-honored doctrines. 

“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."

The power of science is its ability to reduce natural phenomena to simple laws. These laws, to be valid, must work everywhere, including human behavior, in the sense that it is a result of biochemical activity in the brain. This means that all human endeavor, from science and the arts and humanities to the activities of everyday life, derives from brain processes that can be understood and this understanding put to wise use in every field.