Why Consilience is Necessarily Challenging
Consilience is a new mode of thinking that has resulted from the merging of academic disciplines. The various sciences now overlap, and the demarcations between physics, chemistry, biology and anatomy are close to disappearing. This allows us to understand biological structures, including organs in the human body, at the level of chemical reactions, and deeper. The processes can be understood by physicists, computationally, as interactions between elementary particles.
The resulting advances now enable us to observe processes at work in the human brain. We can see how cells adopt roles, how neurons program themselves, how humans learn to communicate and the significance of social interaction. By looking at the underlying mechanisms it becomes possible to unravel the nature of understanding itself. The neurons in our brains operate by grouping dissimilar experiences together into categories that are then associated together as patterns or metaphors. By recognizing the nature of these associations different domains of human experience hitherto seen as unrelated and incompatible — for instance, scientific and religious practices — are revealed to have commonalities.
Consilience is challenging because it upends modes of thinking we are familiar with in the Western world. It is also challenging at a personal level because it alters the meaning of words we use to describe and explain human behavior.
When the influential biologist, expert on social insects and Harvard professor, Edward O. Wilson published Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge in 1998, he anticipated that the flourishing disciplines of evolutionary biology, paleontology, neurophysiology and genetics would grow together through the use of scientific modes of thinking, and that this would also lead to explanations of social structures and religious belief. The dream of uniting the divergent cultures of science, the humanities and religions appeared to be in reach.
I argue in my recent book, How to Understand Everything. Consilience: A New Way to See the World, that consilience has arrived. By combining insights from diverse disciplines it becomes possible to answer questions that have vexed intellectuals for thousands of years. For instance, the nature of consciousness and free will can now be understood at the level of the systems that give rise to them. We no longer need to appeal to introspection or quasi-scientific theories; we need only look at how our eyes, ears, muscles, neurons, and other cells in our body work.
Consilience is difficult to understand, not because the scientific discoveries that birthed it are complex, but because it undermines widely held presumptions. For instance, take the word thinking itself. If one states that human behavior results from the accumulation of knowledge and thought processes that are largely conscious, this is unlikely to raise eyebrows. We “think” and we act accordingly.
This assumption is supported by long-standing scientific explanations that the ingenuity of Homo sapiens is due to unique processes taking place in the cerebral cortex. From this standpoint, no other species is as smart as us; therefore, there must be mechanisms at work in this wrinkly part of the human brain that mushroomed over the last few million years of our evolutionary past. Leaving aside the awkward fact that blue whales and elephants have brains that dwarf the human brain, the presumption is that humans are exceptional because we are conscious, have free will, and can think, reason and communicate.
Similarity between human and animal biology
Beliefs that humans are special on account of our ability to think, reason and communicate and that consciousness is uniquely human, are being overturned by developments in multiple disciplines.
Embryology is the discipline that investigates the processes by which gametes come together to form a single stem cell, which divides and then splits repeatedly to form a complete organism. This discipline has become intermixed with the other disciplines that study how organisms have evolved through geological and recent history. Along with genomics — that is, with the quantitative analysis of DNA — it has become evident that the structure and function of cells originated at the dawn of the evolution of multicellular organisms and their mechanisms have, to a remarkable extent, remained unchanged.
Animals on far-flung branches of the tree of life turn out to have DNA surprisingly similar to ours. The fruit fly Drosophila is a favored species for genetics research. Sixty percent of its genes are also found in humans. The almost-invisible roundworm, C. elegans, although completely unlike us in appearance, at a cellular level is astonishingly similar. Frontline researchers now routinely investigate diseases that afflict humans, including cancers, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, by exploring how genes work in these animals.
The analytical tools available to neuroscientists are now so precise they reveal which genes are turned on and off in developing organisms. Human capabilities that we have believed to be unique in the animal kingdom, like our ability to understand words and speak, are the result of genes that evolved long before primates came on the scene. The genes at work in the brains of singing birds are the same ones responsible for our linguistic adeptness. Mice, long considered to be mute because their vocalizations are ultrasonic, communicate with a rich lexicon of cries, calls and giggles. It happens that our closest living relatives, the great apes, are verbal laggards.
Progress on the frontlines of scientific research is now so rapid that it would be reasonable to expect that neuroscientists would be comfortable declaring “yes, we know how the human brain works.” After all, other organs in the human body have been figured out. Cardiologists know how the human heart works, and gastroenterologists do not treat the gut as a mystery.
The reason why the human brain is still considered a mystery results from historical ideas about how the universe is organized and the place of human beings in it. The constituent metaphors are deep-rooted and so pervasive they have become commonsense. These patterns of thinking underpin our education system and substantiate the facts found in textbooks.
Hidden mythologies of science
Let us start with the idea that everything in the universe can be neatly categorized. The logic works well enough with atoms. It is clear that oxygen is different from hydrogen. But the closer we look the more complex matters become. Consider water, for instance. A textbook might describe it as composed of molecules made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. In fact, it is made up of various isotopes, including deuterium, rather than hydrogen; isomers with different geometries; and ions rather than atoms. Water can exist in many more phases than steam, liquid and ice. Liquid water has a dynamic structure that changes in trillionths of a second in ways that are still largely unexplored. Nineteen different forms of ice have been created, and maybe up to 51 are possible. Simply put, it is becoming increasingly clear that the universe is not organized in such a way to make it easy to slot things into tidy science-like categories that follow simple patterns.
Natural systems are more troublesome to comprehend; nonetheless, one pattern that is both pleasing and seemingly scientific is that lifeforms are arranged in a progression from low to higher, with humans near the top. The idea that humanity exists on a Scala Naturae can be traced back to Aristotle’s biological and anatomical treatise written 2,300 years ago. A prime mover was placed at the top of the ladder in an eternal domain, followed by angels, then man, then woman, then warm-blooded quadrupeds, then birds and so on.
When Charles Darwin conceived the theory of evolution, he was familiar with how farmers selected animals and seeds with the best traits. In the opening chapters of On the Origin of Species, he described how pigeons could be bred either to have exotic plumage, and therefore be sought after by collectors, or to be unremarkable, in which case they would be culled from the flock. The subtitle of Darwin’s book, Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, makes it clear that evolution is a process of natural selection. He thought “Nature” did the selecting, much like a person would, only natural selection would be truer and bear “the stamp of far higher workmanship.”
Cultural evolution is a continuation of biological evolution. Through knowledge and reason, humanity has thrown off the shackles of biology. “[Man] is unique among the animals,” Jacob Bronowski, an erudite mathematician-physicist wrote, “unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is [a] shaper of the landscape.” This has been achieved through “a different kind of evolution — not biological, but cultural evolution.”
Educators fill young minds with facts. There is little to be gained by pointing out the complexities and ambiguities evident in the real world. Humans are climbing a ladder of progress toward divine knowledge, and in the same way, through the transmission of knowledge, teachers are propelling their pupils up a ladder of progress toward wealth, wisdom and self-fulfillment.
That the universe adheres to various laws, such as the laws of motion, is a conceptualization that has roots in the Abrahamic faiths. When Isaac Newton wrote Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687 that spelled out the mathematical formulas that describe gravity and the motion of bodies, he had no doubt that he was discovering God’s laws. From a modern-day perspective, belief in God was being replaced by belief in science, but to Newton that idea was unthinkable, as crazy as someone today saying they don’t believe in gravity.
Science takes unrelated concepts, links them together, and expresses them through words and mathematical notations. Before they were linked through Newton’s laws of motion, the movements of objects and celestial bodies were seen as a domain of knowledge separate from geometry. Similarly, until they were linked through Darwin’s laws of natural selection, competition between animals and pecking orders observed in nature were also considered a domain separate from human aspirations of personal and collective advancement
Implicit in science are the metaphors of organization, laws, and various immaterial forces. Attempts to understand the human brain using these metaphors lead to an investigative dead end. Presuming that the brain is organized by the laws of natural selection, that the mind handles immaterial information and that we think using the categories imputed by words consigns the brain to be a mystery forevermore.
Understanding from the bottom up
Developments in the disciplines of mathematics and computing now provide conceptual tools that are turning science on its head. Computer engineers have shown that complex systems can emerge from simple steps that are repeated. With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is possible to see that systems, in order to be useful, do not require a God-like programmer to design them by preplanning them from the top down. The complexity of living systems emerges from relatively simple, repeated steps, and are self-organizing from the bottom up. The resulting structures and behaviors can be functional and beautiful as well as unendingly varied.
When viewed from the bottom up a new picture of the human body comes into focus. No part of the human body “controls” other parts. An imaginary knower residing in our heads — taking in information, making decisions and controlling our behavior — is just that, imaginary. Instead, every one of the 20 trillion or more cells in the human body organizes itself. The cells work together, modifying their roles according to changing conditions.
The illustrations in textbooks that show human anatomy are useful for education, but they unintentionally use human-built devices as a metaphor for how the body works. The heart is a pump; the eyes are like video cameras; ears are like microphones; nerves are like electrical wires; bones are like levers; the muscles are output devices; and the brain is like a powerful computer, processing information and managing the body in a way a machine operator controls a factory.
The hitch with this conceptualization is that frontline researchers have been discovering details about how each part of the human body works, and these details don’t conform to what is represented in textbooks. The eyes and ears do not work like input devices. Noone has found information in the brain or mechanisms that process and decode incoming signals. And confoundingly, there are more nerves running from the gut and muscles toward the brain compared to those in the opposite direction.
From the standpoint of the continuation of life, the purpose of brains throughout the animal kingdom is to allow the animal to move: enabling them to find food, avoid predators and procreate. With few exceptions, the purpose of neural systems is to enable the animal to move in ways that are optimal, and as quickly as possible. While human communications are generally viewed as mental activities, at the level of neurons, the ability to speak and write are essentially muscular. These functions are little different to other muscular activities, such as running, dancing, fighting, playing and making things.
Since the advent of brain-scanning technologies, including fMRI, the evidence is clear that the process of thinking is slow. It takes up to half a second for the brain to formulate a thought and act accordingly. Fast-moving competitive sports like tennis, soccer and the martial arts require competitors to respond in tenths of a second. If Roger Federer needed to think consciously how to return a serve, by the time he moved his body into position and cocked his racquet on the correct side, the ball would be bouncing around in the stands behind him.
When considering playing tennis, it is usual to think of it as a series of intentional actions, made up of looking, anticipating, planning, running and swinging the racquet. However, from the standpoint of neurons and the associated systems — that is, from the bottom up — at every second of the action the nervous system builds a dimensional model of what is occuring, modelling the situation forward and reacting to achieve the desired results.
The brain is part of a system of movement that operates in the moment. Brains constantly anticipate what might happen next and visualize potential scenarios. These processes are similar in animals and humans, except our choices and time horizons are expanded through the use of words. The conscious brain is largely a bystander in the moment-to-moment operation of the system. The imaginary knower observes what is occuring, and, if called upon, provides explanations that are socially acceptable.
The insights of frontline researchers make it clear that apparently simple acts, like stepping over an object, involve mechanisms that are breathtakingly sophisticated and fast. The imaginary knower is almost completely oblivious to the complexity of the systems that are at work. Indeed, similar systems have been at work, with varying degrees of sophistication, for hundreds of millions of years. The brains of reptiles, birds and mammals model the situation forward, anticipating the movements of other individuals. Neuronal systems operate on the knife edge of criticality, constantly interacting with muscles to handle the minute-to-minute business of maintaining the body’s internal environment with the correct chemical balance and temperature.
Consciousness is not a recent evolutionary innovation. The system began developing over 540 million years ago when nerves began aggregating together as a brain. While the word consciousness has overtones of spirituality, its biological purpose remains straightforward. It refers to how neuronal systems build a dimensional model of what is happening in an animal’s vicinity, enabling it to respond appropriately and instantly.
This explanation of the human mind is based on material reality being what it is. The universe exists with, or without, human beings and the human mind. Our biology can be understood using scientific observation and should not be conflated with the subjects of spirituality, scriptural practice and the belief of many religious traditions that God is ineffable.
Some philosophers of the mind have mused that consciousness is akin to an evolutionary “spandrel.” These are shapes where the walls and ceiling meet in cathedrals, an architectural feature resulting from constructing domes on top of arches. They are non-structural and beautified for human appreciation. As Mark Twain joked about mankind’s exceptionalism, this is like imagining that the Eiffel Tower was built for the purpose of the paint at the top. “If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age,” he wrote, “the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for.”
Deep foundations of tribalism
Humans are not magically and wonderfully different to other animals. Our neural systems operate in the same ways. Each time we perceive things around us that have significance to our wellbeing, our neural systems prepare a dipolar response: that is, tending toward either attraction or repulsion, fight or flight. This polarity is reflected in everyday language. We answer yes or no, and consider information right or wrong.
This dipolarity operates at a subconscious level when we encounter others. Our neural systems from moment to moment gauge whether a person is “with us” or “against us.” The dynamics are more apparent when two strangers approach each other in a high-stress environment, say a dark alley in a war-torn country. Communications begin long before the strangers say anything. Their sex, size, dress and the way they move signal their loyalties and potential behavior. Then as soon as they speak, their language, accent and what they say indicate their purpose and how the ensuing interaction might unfold.
The details of the dipolarity of animal neural systems and the complexity of the fight-or-flight reaction have been documented by numerous well-respected researchers over many decades. The principles of animal physiology are not in dispute; however, the subject has implications that are unavoidably controversial and touch every area of human endeavour.
We witness in sports, academia, business, politics, on social media — in fact, in every domain of human life — that humans are instantly and fluidly tribal. The biology that gives rise to the behaviors however, is controversial because it shows that no amount of education and acculturation will bury the biology. Consilience is also controversial at a deeper level because it undermines the core tenets on which enlightenment thinking has been based. It reveals that objective thinking is impossible, although it remains a useful ideology.
Reality is unendingly varied, and our neural systems use shortcuts to handle its complexity. Each time we perceive something our brain groups this perception with other things we’ve experienced in the past that are similar, and we prepare to react accordingly. When I look out my window I can focus on a leaf on a tree. I attach the word leaf to that experience. Calling the object a leaf is completely understandable, logically reasonable and socially acceptable. My description is apparently objectively correct; however, it glosses over the reality that this one leaf is unique and, to some extent, different to the trillions and trillions of other leaves in the world
I believe one can draw a straight line between the neural mechanisms involved in the instantaneous, invisible creation of neural shortcuts, and my 40-year career running over 20,000 projects to create and promote brands. A brand is a neural shortcut for multifaceted, ever-changing product experiences.
I would go further and state that when we hear words that I label “tribal banners,” such as Christianity, freedom, democracy, socialism, climate change and Trump, we are hearing shortcuts that represent a complex matter as a mental state that instantly prepares us to react in ways that are dipolar. We immediately judge whether the speaker is with us or against us.
Consilience is non-mainstream
When E.O. Wilson anticipated the coming of consilience, he believed it would arise as a result of the growth of knowledge discovered through science. Consilience has arrived from the unification of ideas from many disciplines; not all of them scientific. Consilience illuminates the nature of knowledge itself revealing the meaning of the word implicit and ever-evolving metaphorical meanings. Practitioners in various disciplines develop distinctive vocabularies that are largely unrelated and yet we can label them all as knowledge. Also the word unites diverse ideas together with computation. Knowledge is required to make sound decisions in the same way that information is processed by computers. The word has ideological connotations as it helps individuals and communities articulate their shared values and paths forward. “Knowledge” has become a tribal banner that is particularly appealing to those involved in education.
Through discoveries of frontline researchers we can see that brains, throughout the animal kingdom, do not operate by manipulating knowledge. Neither is it centre stage in determining the behavior of human beings. Nonetheless at deeper levels neural systems of all animals are goal directed. We are no different. Each of us, over every timescale, needs to have a purpose. We need to feel we are progressing toward a destination of social strength and reduced stress. In the behavior of groups the purpose is collective and often articulated explicitly. Professional groups, corporations, sports teams, armies, educational institutions and religious groups spell out their purpose, which is then affirmed through commonsense knowledge, ever-evolving vocabularies, and self-reinforcing tribal behaviors.
It is the same with scientists. In the words of the physicist David Deutsch of Oxford University, “Science is about tolerance, respect for the truth, rationality and optimism … and it is not possible to have too much.”
This statement points to the heart of why consilience is unlikely to be embraced in mainstream academia. The practice of science has been remarkably productive, particularly over the last 150 years. These modes of thinking have spawned the digital revolution that have cemented the certainty that everything can be expressed through zeroes and ones and handled with Boolean logic. The modes of thinking characteristic of scientists and computer engineers, along with their associated vocabularies, have become pervasive in society. They have been adopted throughout the education system, in business and politics.
These ways of thinking have become aligned with tribal identities. Logical positivism predominates in academia and urban communities. Members of this tribe have become collectively certain they can reliably categorize what they encounter, judge things objectively and, using logic, deconstruct complex systems to comprehend how they work. They have faith that experts can organize and control natural systems, including human societies, in ways similar to how engineers control constructed systems.
Not everyone ascribes to this philosophy. In 2018 Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson spent hours publicly debating the nature of truth and at the end were unable to agree; Harris asserted that “we are doomed to talk past each other with every sentence if sane and reasonable people cannot differentiate fact from fantasy.” The debate exposed the schism between two tribes: Harris representing left-leaning, logical positivists, and Jordan Peterson representing a tribe, characteristic of rural areas, that is skeptical that urban elites have a lock on wisdom.
A new way to see
Consilience helps us not only to recognize the dynamics within education and politics but also to understand these arenas at the level of biology and emergent systems. From the perspective of consilience we can see that Harris and Peterson were using the word truth differently. To Harris the word represents the ideology of truth as a virtue — the opposite of telling lies. To Peterson truth has a meaning beyond the immediate craving for psychological certainty; his meaning is reminiscent of religious domains.
The certainties of science reveal the mechanisms at work in our neural systems, which in turn reveals that science is a social endeavour indivisible from language and interpersonal dynamics. The words objectivity and truth are necessarily subjective: we can be certain of that and label it a fact. This fact liberates us to tap into the insights of historians and theologians who witness that every generation has been overconfident in their ability to understand — sometimes to their detriment.
Current generations are no different. We are overconfident in our abilities to understand natural systems, including ourselves and societies. Human beings are not, and will never be, omnipotent. The human brain is miraculous, but not omniscient.
“I think reason has its limits and I want people to be as reasonable as possible in politics and elsewhere,” the English political philosopher John Nicholas Gray states. “But the single most dangerous human belief at the moment is the belief in human rationality because it tells us that when you have a looming disaster people will avoid it. Well, human history would not be what it was if that were true.”
The British cleric and polymath William Whewell coined the word consilience in 1840 by joining two Latin words together com- “together” and -siliens “jumping” (as in resilience) to mean the jumping together of previously disconnected domains. Consilience also has overtones of another word with Latin roots: consilium, meaning consultation and advice. Perhaps, because of the facts of our biology and the lessons of history, consilience can enable us to acknowledge the value of diverse viewpoints.
We have arrived at a point in our intellectual development where the walls between the various academic disciplines are being breached. Consilience can illuminate new paths forward.
Tom Beakbane is president of a brand marketing company in Toronto. With an honors degree in biochemistry and neurophysiology from Durham University in England, he was puzzled by the gap between textbook theories of human behavior and his experiences creating business communications. He closed the gap by tapping into developments at the frontiers of science, explained in the just-published book How to Understand Everything. Consilience: A New Way to See the World. You can follow him on Twitter @TomBeakbane.
