In this column, I’ll look at an equally ambitious and closely related claim, that science will absorb other ways of seeing the world, including the arts, humanities and religion. Nonscientific modes of knowledge won’t necessarily
vanish, but they will become consistent with science, our supreme source of truth. The most eloquent advocate of this perspective is biologist Edward Wilson,
one of our greatest scientist-writers.
In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from
philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together
or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it.
Dismissing philosophers’ warnings
against deriving “ought” from “is,” Wilson insists that we can deduce moral principles from science. Science can illuminate our moral impulses and emotions, such as our love for those who share our genes, as well as giving us moral guidance. This linkage
of science to ethics is crucial, because Wilson wants us to share his desire to preserve nature in all its wild variety, a goal that he views
as an ethical imperative.
At first glance you might wonder: Who could possibly object to this vision? Wouldn’t we all love to agree on a comprehensive worldview, consistent with science, that tells us how to behave individually and collectively? And in fact.
many scholars share Wilson’s hope for a merger of science with alternative ways of engaging with reality. Some enthusiasts have formed the
Consilience Project, dedicated to “developing a body of social theory and analysis that explains and seeks solutions to the unique challenges we face today.” Last year, poet-novelist Clint Margrave wrote an eloquent
defense of consilience for Quillette, noting that he has “often drawn inspiration from science.”
Another consilience booster is psychologist and megapundit Steven Pinker, who
praised Wilson’s “excellent” book in 1998 and calls for consilience between science and the humanities in his 2018 bestseller
Enlightenment Now. The major difference between Wilson and Pinker is stylistic. Whereas Wilson holds out an olive branch to “postmodern” humanities scholars who challenge science’s objectivity and authority, Pinker scolds
them. Pinker accuses postmodernists of “defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism and suffocating political correctness.”
The enduring appeal of consilience makes it worth revisiting. Consilience raises two big questions: (1) Is it feasible? (2) Is it desirable? Feasibility first. As Wilson points out, physics has been an especially potent unifier,
establishing over the past few centuries that the heavens and earth are made of the same stuff ruled by the same forces. Now physicists seek a single theory that fuses general relativity, which describes gravity, with quantum field theory, which accounts for
electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. This is Hawking’s theory of everything and
Steven Weinberg’s “final theory."
The same is true of scientific attempts to bridge the explanatory chasm between matter and mind. In the 1990s, it still seemed possible that researchers would discover how physical processes in the brain and other systems generate
consciousness. Since then, mind-body studies have undergone
a paradigm explosion, with theorists espousing a bewildering variety of models, involving
quantum mechanics,
information theory and
Bayesian mathematics. Some researchers suggest that consciousness pervades all matter,
a view called panpsychism; others insist that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem because
consciousness is an “illusion.”
There are schisms even within Wilson’s own field of evolutionary biology. In
Consilience and elsewhere, Wilson suggests that natural selection promotes traits at the level of tribes and other groups; in this way, evolution might have bequeathed us a propensity for religion, war and other social behaviors.
Other prominent Darwinians, notably
Richard Dawkins and
Robert Trivers, reject group selection, arguing that natural selection operates only at the level of individual organisms and even individual genes.
If scientists cannot achieve consilience even within specific fields, what hope is there for consilience between, say, quantum chromodynamics and queer theory? (Actually, in her fascinating 2007 book
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,
physicist-philosopher Karen Barad finds resonances between physics and gender politics; but Barad’s book represents the kind of postmodern analysis deplored by Wilson and Pinker.) If consilience entails convergence toward a consensus, science is moving
away from consilience.
So, consilience doesn’t look feasible, at least not at the moment. Next question: Is consilience
desirable? Although I’ve always doubted whether it
could happen, I once thought consilience
should happen. If humanity can agree on a single, rational worldview, maybe we can do a better job solving our shared problems, like
climate change,
inequality,
pandemics and
militarism. We could also get rid of bad ideas, such as the notion that God likes some of us more than others; or that
racial and
sexual inequality and
war are inevitable consequences of our biology.
I also saw theoretical diversity, or
pluralism, as philosophers call it, as a symptom of failure; the abundance of “solutions” to the mind-body problem, like the abundance of
treatments for cancer, means that none works very well. But increasingly, I see pluralism as a valuable, even necessary counterweight to our yearning for certitude. Pluralism is especially important when it comes to our ideas about
who we are, can be and should be. If we settle on a single self-conception, we risk limiting our freedom to reinvent ourselves, to
discover new ways to flourish.
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Wilson acknowledges that consilience is a reductionistic enterprise, which will eliminate many ways of seeing the world. Consider how he treats
mystical visions, in which we seem to glimpse truths normally hidden behind the surface of things. To my mind, these experiences rub our faces in the
unutterable weirdness of existence, which transcends all our knowledge and forms of expression. As William James says in
The Varieties of Religious Experience, mystical experiences should “forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”
Wilson disagrees. He thinks mystical experiences are reducible to physiological processes. In
Consilience, he focuses on Peruvian shaman-artist Pablo Amaringo, whose paintings depict fantastical, jungly visions induced by ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea (which I
happen to have taken) brewed from two Amazonian plants. Wilson attributes the snakes that slither through Amaringo’s paintings to natural selection, which instilled an adaptive fear of snakes in our ancestors; it should not be surprising that snakes populate
many religious myths, such as the biblical story of Eden.
Moreover, ayahuasca contains psychotropic compounds, including the potent psychedelic
dimethyltryptamine, like those that induce dreams, which stem from, in Wilson’s words, the “editing of information in the memory banks of the brain” that occurs while we sleep. These nightly neural discharges are “arbitrary in content,” that is, meaningless;
but the brain desperately tries to assemble them into “coherent narratives,” which we experience as dreams.
In this way, Wilson “explains” Amaringo’s visions in terms of evolutionary biology, psychology and neurochemistry. This is a spectacular example of what
Paul Feyerabend, my favorite philosopher and a fierce advocate for pluralism, calls “the tyranny of truth.” Wilson imposes his materialistic, secular worldview on the shaman, and he strips ayahuasca visions of any genuine spiritual significance. While he
exalts biological diversity, Wilson shows little respect for the diversity of human beliefs.
Wilson is a gracious, courtly man in person as well on the page. But his consilience project stems from excessive faith in science, or scientism. (Both Wilson
and Pinker embrace the term scientism, and they no doubt think that the phrase “excessive faith in science” is oxymoronic.) Given the failure to achieve consilience within physics and biology—not to mention the
replication crisis and other problems—scientists should stop indulging in fantasies about conquering all human culture and attaining
something akin to omniscience. Scientists, in short, should be more humble.
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Ironically, Wilson himself questioned the desirability of final knowledge early in his career. At the end of his 1975 masterpiece
Sociobiology, Wilson anticipates the themes of
Consilience, predicting that evolutionary theory plus genetics will soon absorb the social sciences and humanities. But Wilson doesn’t exult at this prospect. When we can explain ourselves in “mechanistic terms,” he warns,
“the result might be hard to accept”; we might find ourselves, as Camus put it, “divested of illusions.”
Wilson needn’t have worried. Scientific omniscience looks less likely than ever, and humans are far too diverse, creative and contrary to settle for a single worldview of any kind. Inspired by mysticism and the arts, as well as by
science, we will keep arguing about who we are and reinventing ourselves forever. Is consilience a bad idea, which we’d be better off without? I wouldn’t go that far. Like utopia, another byproduct of our yearning for perfection, consilience, the dream of
total knowledge, can serve as a useful goad to the imagination, as long as we see it as an unreachable ideal. Let’s just hope we never think we’ve reached it.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of
Scientific American.
Rabbi Dr. Dovid Gottlieb is a senior faculty member at Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem. An author and lecturer, Rabbi Gottlieb received his Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Brandeis University and later become Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His book Ontological Economy: Substitutional Quantification and Mathematics was published by Oxford in 1980; The Informed Soul was published by Artscroll in 1990, and has recently been reprinted. He is a regular lecturer at kiruv conferences and known for his stimulating and energetic presentations on philosophical issues of Jewish interest.
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