I just started reading Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, And when I say "just started" I mean I am 10 pages in. The basic idea, from what I've gathered in the pages I have read so far, is that the author believes eventually science will merge with social science and everything will be explained and made clear through a singular set of laws. Philosophy will cease to exist, because every aspect of human endeavor will play by the universal rules, and so become understandable, testable, and predictable. At the moment I haven't the slightest idea of how this might happen, but it appears by the length of his book that Wilson has come up with a solution. I was going to read more, but I suddenly felt more like writing and thinking. (Not that reading doesn't require thinking, but I mean pondering/thinking not analysing/thinking.)
I have been toying around with a similar idea (or maybe the same one?), although I never gave it a name, whereby every human action and decision no matter how ridiculous or surprising might be understood in a fundamental way if viewed through the active mechanism of evolutionary progress. It is the idea that no matter what we do, no matter how badly we want to be in control of who we are, at the heart of every action that we are capable of performing we will always find that we are doing what 3.5 million years of evolution is telling us to do. From that point of view, psychology would not be the study of why humans act and feel the way we do. We would already know that. The study would focus rather on figuring out how our actions and feelings are satisfying our (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek) prime directive of evolving.
Even the actions of the insane and mentally ill could be "understood" because if there is some physical ailment that interferes with their ability to function then it stands to reason that their judgement and decisions would be faulty because of it (and not a their own fault). But what would that do to our legal/justice system?
The question becomes if everyone always does what nature intended, then is everything hopeless? If everyone since the dawn of consciousness (and before it for that matter) is doing what evolution wants them to do, then you could argue that the reason we have not achieved things like world peace is because we were never meant to. That's as good an example as any. At first glance killing each other appears counter-evolutionary, but maybe there is a reason we have been fighting each other for centuries. One might argue that it has been our primary means of population control. Our instinct to take over what others have instead of live peacefully side by side could be interpreted to be a result of the fact that evolution has shown that in the long run it is more beneficial to have your neighbor dead than living next door with his 50 offspring and a dwindling supply of land and food.
A dog can learn to open a car door, but it can't speak English. A dog is limited by what it is. Maybe we are limited in the same way? We might learn some cool tricks and have some nifty ideas, but maybe we lack the ability to change the world we live in literally because we are human. I don't know, does that sound depressing? Who cares if it's depressing, what if it's true? Science and philosophy, thought and instinct all rolled into one smooth reality.
Like I said, I haven't read the book yet, so hopefully whatever Wilson has to say on the subject is encouraging and not defeatist. I am already confused! Any thoughts?
I have had this one on my book shelf for a while now, still haven't gotten around to reading it. I really like E.O. Wilson though, I've watched a few interviews with him.
ReplyDeleteThis is something that Sam Harris talks about a lot, and I think it's really important. The underlying idea is that, if you accept that humans are an entirely natural phenomena, then it directly follows that science is the language to understand them in. Even subjective feelings arise out of the functions of an objective brain, and thus submit to objective observation.To be human is to be another part of the universe, and we should try to understand ourselves in the same framework that we understand the rest of the natural world.
I think that what we will find as this science matures is that evolution has left us with many sub-optimal traits and tendencies (towards racism, sexism, violence, etc), and that we will never be able to outgrow these on a gut level. However, we can place ourselves in systems which tend to mitigate these traits and drive us toward better behavior. It's the old "flee from temptation" thinking ... once we know why we have tendencies, what they feel like and from whence they come, we can devise a more effective strategy for constructively dealing with them.
This is already what most laws and moral codes attempt to do, the difference is, once we understand morality and human happiness in a robust scientific framework, we can actually begin to get the answers right. Sam Harris also talks a lot about how, once we wrap in the philosophic / moralistic fields into science, we can start converging on common answers, and not have all these different "cultural takes" on morality. There will be just one morality, like there is one biology or one physics.
You'll have to post your impressions on the book as you get deeper in!