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| Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge | 
| Authors: Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  149 reviews
Sales Rank: 10462
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 067976867X
Dewey Decimal Number: 121
EAN: 9780679768678
ASIN: 067976867X
Publication Date: March 30, 1999
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| Customer Reviews:
 To dream the impossible dream (Man of La Mancha) December 2, 2006
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Edward Wilson's dream is to find the unity of knowledge: the final unification of physics, the reconstruction of living cells, the assembly of ecosystems, the co-evolution of genes and culture, the physical basis of mind and the deep origin of ethics and religion, all that (only that?) together reducible to the laws of physics, to a very simple causality law, like the universal law of action and reaction, but more sophisticated.
Does that implicate determinism in the sense I. Berlin stated: `law(s) enabling us to predict (or reconstruct) every detail in the lives of every single human being in the future, present and past.' (Laplace's demon)? No.
As Stephen Hawking said: `Even if we do achieve a complete unified theory, we shall not be able to make detailed predictions in any but the simplest situations.'
If the situations are not the simplest one, the degrees of freedom are infinite.
There are also other aspects to be considered in the search for a solution of Wilson's Super-Herculean task.
As J. von Neumann & H.H. Goldstine said: `a mathematical formulation necessarily represents only a theory of some phase (aspects) of reality, and not reality itself.'
Laws are about something (reality) and reality is made of matter (processes). While the fundamental building stones of matter are the same in the whole universe, those stones are organized everywhere differently: electrons, atoms, molecules, plants, DNA, the human body, the brain, natural selection, demographics, philosophy, arts, political systems, moral values ...
W. van Orman Quine defends physicalism as follows in an interview with Bryan Magee: `Processes (like emotions) in physical objects (people) are always accompanied by microphysical changes. In fact, they are those changes. Neurology is ultimately the place for explanations.'
For different complexes of matter there are different laws; e.g., what is the link between quantum mechanics and natural selection? Or, between gravitation and war?
To find a very simple causality (and a correspondent law) for all the processes in the universe should be a total impossible dream. On the contrary, the future is totally open.
As a brilliant biologist examining very complex systems, E.O. Wilson seems to be searching for an oversimplification.
N.B. The Cretan paradox has been resolved by Alfred Tarski.
A noble effort October 1, 2006
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
Some call it reductionism. Some call it holism. Isaac Asimov discussed it as a science fiction theory he called psychohistory in his Foundation series.
And Edward Wilson has chosen the term consilience by which he means to describe a theory which attempts to unify man's search for knowledge in the various fields of mathematics, physics, chemisty, biology, evolutionary psychology (and its related individual centered fields) and socibiology (and its related group centered fields).
It's a noble effort and his book is fairly successful at discussing some of the enlightenment visionaries who first posited such a unification and some of the major developments along the way.
However, the book does not merit a a complete five stars because it fails to join contemporary academic wisdom in concluding that to be a physically observed phenomenon, the event or occurence must have a physical cause.
In essence he fudges -- and three centuries later at that -- in the same way Descartes fudged when he tried to rationally posit the meeting ground of soul and substance. In this way, the "debate" as Wilson put it, between impiracism and transcendentalism has already been resolved in the lab if not the public consciousness.
It's amazing how the greatest of advancements almost always come with the questioning of previously thought unquestionable views. In this way, Darwin with evolution, Einstein with time, Godel with mathematical impiracism and most recently Dennett with consciousness itself all have made great strides by felling old misconceptions in favor of a more accurate view of reality.
Pity that this book did not live out of potential of its Harvard author to itself articulate such a view.
Control Freak September 17, 2006
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Consilience relates to "the dream of unified learning" and the belief in the unity of the sciences - that "the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws". Wilson declares, "The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities." Wilson believes in the Enlightenment and rejects religion and mysticism. Near the end of the book he states "But if the evidence contradicts empiricism in any part, universal consilience fails and the division between science and the humanities will remain permanent all the way to their foundations."
Consilience is the hybridization of the domains of the natural sciences and the humanities. "...I believe the enterprises of culture will eventually fall out into science, by which I mean the natural sciences, and the humanities, particularly the creative arts." This is a bold statement of determinism which negates the role of free will in influencing society and the arts. Wilson alludes to his case, rather than making it, in my opinion, yet he neglects to address some key ideas. As one reviewer has pointed out, he doesn't mention Godel's incompleteness theorem, which implies that all logical systems are by definition incomplete within the boundaries and rules of that system. Also, he does not mention Schroedinger's Wave Equation or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which have the philosophical implications that physics is not predictably reducible to cause and effect relationships at the most fundamental levels conceivable; fundamental particles do not necessarily obey predictable laws - their behaviors must be aggregated into statistical distributions of effects.
Wilson predicts that neuroscientists "will capture the physical basis of mental concepts through the mappings of neural activity patterns", yet he denies the possibility of a disembodied intelligence or the possibility of a meaningful intelligence without the context of a sustaining culture and a heritage of ideas from art and interpretation. He warns we must not imagine "ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage" - we must not surrender our genetic nature to "machine-aided ratiocination" (pg. 298). Enigmatic as his warning is, there is some inherent contradiction between it and his prediction. I occasionally found Wilson's prose to be verbose, quirky, and indirect.
Wilson justifiably rants about post-modernism trends in the humanities and contrasts various disciplines in the humanities with the `hard sciences'. He decries the lack of consistent terminologies that can span these domains. Wilson seems to expect that we can, through application of the ideas of consilience, unify science and the social sciences to the point where we should be able, through development and refinement of the theory of consilience, to develop scientific predictions of the course of human events - i.e. to forecast the course of the future, as in Asimov's `psychohistory.'
No treatment of such a broad area as consilience should omit discussion of Jung's theories that the unconscious mind has drives and experiences of which a person is unaware. Jung contended that all people share a deeper level of unconsciousness - the collective unconscious, which includes thought patterns and archetypes that are developed over centuries. The collective unconscious contains wisdom that guides all humanity. Campbell's ideas of mythology are related to this deep, collective unconscious. It seems to me Wilson should have cited Jung in making his case for the dependence of intelligence on culture, yet Wilson does not mention Carl Jung's ideas.
In the final chapter, "To What End?" Wilson ranges from the concepts of consilience into discussions of global warming, overpopulation, environmental ethics in making the case that we must preserve the world for further human development and cultural attainments. I think Consilience is a thought provoking book that challenges those in the humanities to develop a rigorous terminology to more consistently `anchor' their concepts with the physical sciences.
The Forest July 22, 2006
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
You might define a field of scientific investigation as the amount of material a very smart person can process working around 20 hours per week. By "process" I mean reading about the literature and doing new experiments, and I say 20 hours per week because most scientists spend more than half their time on administrative junk. Of course, in the days when scientists like N. Copernicus and I. Newton were in their prime, there was much less administration and much less knowledge, so one scientist could meaningfully contribute to multiple fields and still have time for hobbies (like practicing medicine). Nowadays a scientist might spend his entire career working on one small part of one small problem, with progress so incremental that it's only noticed by his immediate peers. That's a sign of real progress, because it means that many of the big problems have long ago been solved. But it also means that very few scientists have the luxury of looking at the big picture.
So what happens if the big picture is where all the answers are? What if there a few laws that stretch across disciplines, and our modern-day Isaac Newtons spend all their time working on the details? It's possible, and if it's true we would need an approach that spans the fragmented fields of science, and that's what E.O. Wilson calls Consilience.
The book is very well-written, and it provides an interesting survey of many different aspects of science and the humanities. The idea certainly makes sense in abstract, although I'm not really sure what the author is calling for in practice. I agree that it would be great if scientists were educated more broadly outside of their immediate disciplines, but I'm not sure how to do this without sacrificing some of the rigor that drives science forward. Maybe I missed something.
Wilson has often been criticized for his suggestion that the methods of science can be used to study the humanities. For some reason this really bothers people, and I don't understand why. All he's saying is that the scientific method is a great way to understand how things work, and there's no good reason to think that music or poetry are exceptions.
Last week there was an article in the journal Science describing the mathematical structure of musical chords. The author found that the chord sequences that people find attractive occupy clusters in a non-Euclidean geometric space. The math allowed him to detect patterns in the music of certain composers, and even certain styles of music. By all accounts a very exciting discovery, and one that deepens my appreciation of both music and mathematics. Why anyone would feel threatened by this is a mystery that should be studied with state-of-the-art neuroimaging methods.
 Complete Unity of Incomplete Parts July 18, 2006
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Considering the unbelievably wide range of the material in this book there is a very surprising lapse in it. Professor Wilson quotes the great mathematician Hilbert as saying "We must know, we will know" as if the statement is still viable. This is precisely the quote often used when describing Gödel's discovery of incompleteness in mathematics that demolished Hilbert's prediction. Wilson never mentions Gödel in this book. I don't know how widespread the effort is, but I do know that people in the University of Vienna are very interested in extending Gödel's result to other fields of knowledge. Imagine a future in which Wilson's dream of the complete unity of knowledge is achieved, but it is a unity of components each of which will be shown to be permanently incomplete.
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