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Summary: Valid Claim but Vain Attempt
Review: I bought this book unsuspiciously, and read it with the mind of a student who is very attached to this subject -- for I studied philosophy and art together with engineering and science. The style is elegant and might impress the virgin reader. But any person with a minimum level of awareness will read through the flaws and become very annoyed by the numerous inconsistencies. The references, albeit looking diverse and accurate, are also misused in most cases, because they are used as quick justifications. Mr. Wilson is not knowledgeable enough to publish such an ambitious project: 'uniting knowledge'. This book can only be recommended as an introduction to the subject -- it does cover a great deal of topics, and the scientific descriptions are more relevant than the historic and artistic ones.
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Summary: Entheogens: Professional Listing
Review: "Consilience" has been selected for listing in "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy.
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Summary: For those who enjoy stretching and challenging their minds!
Review: A brilliant, and insightful argument for the unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience-the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of basic laws of physics that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Wilson argues that there is, intrinsically, only one class of explanation that unites the facts of all disciplines by consilience-the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect. This book shines forth with groundbreaking concepts; it is 'big bang' thinking at its best. It will appeal to all those who enjoy stretching and challenging their mind, and are seeking to think on the cutting-edge, Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder HRconsultant.com InfoCenter, author of Stern's Sourcefinder-The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources and Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder.
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Summary: a thought-prokoving but seriously flawed book
Review: "consilience' made me think and was interesting to read, but as i read it the flaws bothered me to an extent that i had a difficult time enjoying the book by the end. among the problems are: 1. wilson says his project is to unify human knowledge, but really what he wants to do is reexpress all disciplines in terms of biology and evolutionary theory. while i think this type of analysis has a lot to offer (and is already being explored by many fields), wilson's rejection of any approach that takes a different approach to any discipline is wrong. 2. wilson's criticism of philosophy, ethics, and post-modernism reveals his ignorance of the field. on post-modernism, he asserts that post-modernists deny the existence of the physical world. while there may be some who do, that is not what makes them post-modernist. wilson mistakes the post-modernists critique of interpretation for a criticism of what they interpret. post-modernists believe that there is no human-created theory that has not been affected by the biases of the creator. that does not mean that there is no objective world, only that it can be difficult or impossible to theorize accurately about it. on philosophy, he give's short shrift to the failure of logical positivism, which is a group of philosophers who essentially had the same program as wilson, the reduction of all philosophical problems to scientific methodology. however, the movement failed earlier in the century after the former positivists acknowledged that a purely empirical theory of philosophy was untenable. wilson attrubutes the school's demise to its preoccupation with linguistic analysis. but that criticism undermines wilson's theory that all disciplines can be better studied using science. why the program be extended to linguistics without being bogged down like the logical positivists? on ethics, wilson mistakenly believes that the main debate in the field is between "transcendentalists" or the "empiracists" (his terms, after criticizing academics in the humanities for making up different and confusing terminology, wilson apparently does not shy away from adopting terms and using them differently than they are usually used in the field). in other words, the issue whether ethics is human-created or from another source, like religion. while this is certainly an issue in ethics, for the most part modern ethics has avoided the issue by trying to construct ethical theories that are not based on religion or other external sources. the most confusing part of wilson's dicussion is when he says that "I suspect that almost all [ethicists] are transcententalists at heart..." (p. 240) nothing can be further from the truth. rawls, locke, kant, and others who wilson writes off as transcendentalists, really more closely fit his definition of "empiricists". in fact, rawls and locke are both solidly in the "social contract" school which overtly rejects any non-human sources of ethics. 3. wilson's criticism of the arts is also confusing. does he really mean to apply evolutionary theory to literary criticism? sure, the evolutionary origins of the creative instinct would be illuminating in some circumstances but how can it be used to discuss the role of evil in milton verses the role of evil in shakespeare? instead, the only knowledge that wilson seems interested in is the issue of the origin of that field. in my view, restricting all inquiry to that approach would only lead to an inpoverished view of human knowledge. 4. throughout the book, there are numerous annoying factual inaccuracies. on p. 184 he blames the social science's ignorance of hard science on the ignorance of its founders such as sigmund freud. but freud was trained as a biologist before he got into psychoanalysis on p. 244 he says that islam was spread mostly through violence and implies that the literal translation of the word islam as "submission" indicats a submission to military violence. in fact, islam spread through the mid-east both peacefully and militarily. submission refers to the followers submission to God not to any human authoritythat's all i have to say
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Summary: It may be a literary/philosophical milepost of our century.
Review: It is rare that an accomplished scientist is able to muster the philosophical acumen, the interdisciplinary prescience, and the literary music to put together such a tour-de-force as this. On top of it all, he retains enough of the piquancy of the modern idiom to make it click. This book may take its place among Wealth of Nations, Democracy in America, and other mind-changing dissertations as forks in the intellectual road of our planet. C. P. Snow's Two Cultures advanced this hypothesis -- that science and the humanities are diminished as long as they are insulated from each other -- but the latter's sound and common-sense presentation was just a lieder in the face of Wilson's symphony. "Literature" is what the critics of the next century make it; I predict they will be raving about this one.
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Summary: Readers, the point of the book is...
Review: Readers, the point of the book is not consilience for its own sake, it's the last chapter- "To What End". I have read quite a few of Wilson's other books including On Human Nature, Sociobiology (all of it), Biophilia, Naturalist, as well as others. I give him five stars because he says what I would like to say if I had the wisdom, eloquence, and status, but this time he says it better than ever. And it's not hard reading for those accostomed to large intensive doses of scientific nonfiction. By bringing together the scientific disciplines and humanities, the hope is that we might be able to step outside of our "norms of reaction" in order to behave in ways for which we are NOT programmed. To be able to realize not only why snakes and spiders seem creepy to us, but also when and why we are treating our fellow man and the planet like shit. That way maybe we can STOP. Don't forget the Professor Wilson's lilypads in a pond: On the first day there is only one. Every day the number doubles. On day 30 the pond is full. On which day was the pond half empty ?
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Summary: Insight beyond everyday perception
Review: Wilson has written one of the most courageous and thought-out books I have ever read. His ideas go beyond what we normally accept as reality. Each new concept made me stop and reconsider, think and explore, reject or accept, and finally, change my views or strengthen old ones. Each person who reads this book must come their their own realization of what it means. I encourage everyone to at least pick it up. Although many of Wilson's ideas are sketchy or at least unproven, the essentials of it are timeless and unshakable.
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Summary: Nature of Science
Review: I read Wilson's book last week and before writing my comments read what others have written here. This book clearly appeals to scientists and particularly to those who understand how science progresses. That is, a long as we manage to keep our civilization intact, scientific advances becomes permanent. Scientific revolutions, such as those that led from Newton's laws, the development of quantum mechanics and relativity, or the development of the theory of evolution and its modern synthesis arising from the discovery of DNA structure, do not destroy the best part of the previous scientific knowledge, but build on it, and cast it in a more understandable form. This is the fundamental premise on which Wilson contructs his argument. The brilliant breakthroughs, once made, become possessions of all who take the time to learn the background for understanding them, a task much less ardous than that confronting the researcher who makes the original discovery. I would suspect that many thoughtful readers would accuse Wilson of over-reaching, as concilience between fields such as biology and psychology and on to sociology is very difficult to achieve. However, advances are being made and many of them will be launching pads for further advances. The remarkable advances in computers make the human genome project possible, the measurement of trace quantities of chemicals build a chemical basis for psychology and so on. In the last chapter Wilson finally makes a passing mention of the downside of this quest for knowledge, a topic as old as the story of paradise and stealing the fire from the Gods by Prometheus. Nuclear weapons is one manifestation of this quest and cloning and gene manipulation some others. Wilson's has little to say about nuclear weapons and cloning, but mentions the risks of gene manipulation. In recognizing the risks in this and in environmental degradation, he casts human fate in getting through a bottleneck of increasing knowledge making us sufficiently wise to avoid the destruction of our possibilities for continued life. He must be optimistic in this regard, for otherwise, it would seem that, he would have to abandon his scientific quest. I am much more pessimistic regarding the fate of mankind.
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Summary: A commendable program, but some specific issues to discuss
Review: Here are some thoughts which are intended to be helpful, if at times not agreeing with Wilson's specific positions. I am sympathetic to the general program, but I feel that current "paradigms" often cause Wilson to miss some opportunities. I also feel that, as a scientist Wilson tends to assume to be "real" the objects of science, and thus fail to see the limits of scientific inquiry. 1. The argument on free-will needs some work. As it stands, I would expect most philosophers to reject it on the basis that it seems to imply that we are "free" if it's impossible for us to know that we are not free. I think we can do better than this, and I offer a paragraph from a paper on "time" that I am working on. "...Philosophers have hypothesized constraints on human freedom inferred from our position as creatures within a lawlike, natural world. In the face of these proposed constraints our experience presents us with a puzzling anomaly. Apart from the familiar constraints posed by our physical environment, we generally judge ourselves to be "free." The deterministic constraints proposed by philosophers are not directly experienced. Of course, few philosophers have been convinced by this kind of naive empiricism, and have been quick to propose various arguments intended to show that, even if not experienced, deterministic constraints might still be real. It would seem that some such argument is needed. For, without it, how could the proposed deterministic constraints merit the term "constraint" in the first place? "...The metaphysics of time is involved in this debate because one of the familiar arguments proposed to justify deterministic constraints is based on an assumed picture of time. According to this view deterministic constraints occur because they are the necessary temporal antecedents of our actions. It is reasoned that, even if not experienced, these necessary temporal antecedents might be theoretically justified as constraints on the basis of their analogy to the more familiar constraints on freedom posed by our experienced, physical environment. Because of our accustomed relational picture of time it's easy for us to picture our immediate temporal antecedents as part of our "environment." However, on the basis of the arguments from J.J.C. Smart and A. Newman, it becomes clear that this imagined temporal analogy is a deeply flawed notion. ...." 2. I agree that G. E. Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy argument is flawed, but the challenge is to find in the sociobiology of the human species a convincing explanation of moral "facts." Many philosophers would reject Wilson's (and Pinker's) attempts at such an explanation because the resulting theories of morality distort our moral intuitions in one or more ways. I am thinking here of the "calculations" that humans undoubtedly do in "prisoner's" dilemmas etc.to commit seemingly altruistic acts. If this kind of "calculation theory" is an example of the kind of "is/ought" link that science can provide, no wonder Moore thought that the "autonomy" of ethics needed some protection. Moral facts will no doubt be altered by the eventual successful science of ethics, but current naturalistic theories do too much damage to our moral intuitions. 3. In this regard, I would like you to consider a paradigm which is so deeply entrenched that it is hardly ever discussed, but I think it may be key to an ultimate breakthrough toward a consilient science of ethics. That entrenched paradigm is the assumed bifurcation of human dispositions into beliefs and desires. If you think about it, it is impossible to conceive of either category without elements of the other. In the manner of Kant we might say that desires without beliefs are blind, and beliefs without desires are empty. Both are incapable of verification. 4. If we were to take desires as being intrinsic to the belief-structures evolved by humans, then the "public" nature of the beliefs comprising those structures might begin to explain in a fundamental way the "impartiality" between similar individuals that characterizes our moral intuitions. This "impartiality" is simply built-in to the "public" nature of the objects of beliefs. 5. Once this step were taken, the fact of human nature requiring complex explanation would be those numerous, even predominant, occasions when our actions fall short of the "impartial" moral norm. The ancient Greeks viewed this problem of "incontinence" (akrasia, or "weak-will") to be the main moral problem. Not "how is morality possible", but rather, "how is viciousness possible?" 6. Finally, I want to say a word about what John McDowell has called "bald naturalism". One problem with naturalism is that its adherents might view their scientific picture of the world as the ONLY picture (or the only REAL picture). Kant is perhaps a good antidote to this kind of thinking. I support naturalism much as I support the advancement of scientific knowledge. But this must not be confused with metaphysical advancement. I think Wilson might show a little more tolerance for the work of David Chalmers (theory of Consciousness) if he could come to see the scientific world-view as one among several, none of which can claim complete objectivity.
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Summary: Wilson's brand of positivism as a personal mythology
Review: This book is one of a genre in which scientists speculate and reminisce to a lay audience. There are some parts of the book I agree with. Like his observations about the fractured state of knowledge in the academic world. But there's nothing that's new, except for the way he puts it together as his personal mythology. He dismisses many things he has no experience with, like shamanism, dreams, and psychoanalysis. His best insights are lifted from other, deeper thinkers. I suppose you could read the book as an example of how a practicing scientist picks and chooses from the universe of ideas to put together his own view of the world. I feel Wilson's thesis suffers from two serious mistakes. These are the same mistakes made by most practitioners of hard sciences. First, he is a strict positivist who believes that scientific knowledge is Truth. And that this Truth is final, static, and absolute. In addition, he wants to conclude that what is not formally knowable, what does not lend itself to scientific description, is not an equally valid area of knowledge. Where a good positivist philosopher would say "I will focus on what is scientifically knowable because it is all that I can talk about", Wilson says "I will focus on what is scientifically knowable because it is all that is true."
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