consilience
Best Thing: Reviewers often praise "Consilience" for its ambitious scope and the way it connects different fields of knowledge, providing a comprehensive view of how various disciplines can converge to enhance our understanding of the world. Worst Thing: Conversely, some reviewers criticize the book for being overly dense and complex, making it difficult for casual readers to engage with its ideas fully.
Kindle Highlights: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Highlights
conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. — location: 112 ^ref-26684
We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? — location: 148 ^ref-4217
When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here. — location: 155 ^ref-18000
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. — location: 162 ^ref-1550
The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. — location: 169 ^ref-51420
Yes!
social sciences will continue to split within each of its disciplines, a process already rancorously begun, with one part folding into or becoming continuous with biology, the other fusing with the humanities. — location: 233 ^ref-57706
Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare? — location: 254 ^ref-57396
conviction that culture is governed by laws as exact as those of physics. — location: 381 ^ref-64314
“The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences,” he declared, “is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature?” — location: 384 ^ref-3824
Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. — location: 787 ^ref-320
Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing. — location: 788 ^ref-61372
To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong. — location: 844 ^ref-13058
The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science. — location: 1043 ^ref-12517
so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists. — location: 1095 ^ref-17899
dissect a phenomenon into its elements, in this case cell into organelles and molecules, is consilience by reduction. To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with knowledge gained by reduction how nature assembled it in the first place, is consilience by synthesis. — location: 1301 ^ref-20408
Some biochemists believe that to achieve that final step, each energy contribution in turn must be calculated with an accuracy still beyond the grasp of the physical sciences. — location: 1613 ^ref-60703
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems. — location: 1635 ^ref-25421
do general organizing principles exist that allow a living organism to be reconstituted in full without recourse to brute force simulation of all its molecules and atoms? — location: 1822 ^ref-2364
The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound: Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there. — location: 1832 ^ref-49769
For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge. — location: 1841 ^ref-52885
human nature: genius animated with animal craftiness and emotion, combining the passion of politics and art with rationality, to create a new instrument of survival. — location: 2028 ^ref-53699
What is lacking is a sufficient grasp of the emergent, holistic properties of the neuron circuits, and of cognition, the way the circuits process information to create perception and knowledge. — location: 2079 ^ref-9963
For example, a particular taste might be partly classified by the combined activity of nerve cells responding to different degrees of sweetness, saltiness, and sourness. — location: 2087 ^ref-12341
Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of vast numbers of such coding networks. — location: 2090 ^ref-34685
Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios. — location: 2098 ^ref-27485
There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity. — location: 2101 ^ref-28942
I link, therefore I am. — location: 2112 ^ref-14067
Short-term memory is the ready state of the conscious mind. It composes all of the current and remembered parts of the virtual scenarios. It can handle only about seven words or other symbols simultaneously. The brain takes about one second to scan these symbols fully, and it forgets most of the information within thirty seconds. Long-term memory takes much longer to acquire, but it has an almost unlimited capacity, and a large fraction of it is retained for life. By spreading activation, the conscious mind summons information from the store of long-term memory and holds it for a brief interval in short-term memory. During this time it processes the information, at a rate of about one symbol per 25 milliseconds, while scenarios arising from the information compete for dominance. — location: 2114 ^ref-8878
What is emotion? It is the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity. — location: 2154 ^ref-9682
All the evidence from the brain sciences points in the opposite direction, to a waiting coffin-bound hell of the wakened dead, where the remembered and imagined world decays until chaos mercifully grants oblivion. — location: 2165 ^ref-31694
It is the specialized part of the mind that creates and sorts scenarios, the means by which the future is guessed and courses of action chosen. — location: 2167 ^ref-56428
The persistent form and intensity of emotions is called mood. — location: 2204 ^ref-28407
hard problem is more elusive: how physical processes in the brain addressed in the easy problems give rise to subjective feeling. — location: 2219 ^ref-16134
science explains feeling, while art transmits it. — location: 2237 ^ref-56422
science and art is the transmission of information, and in one sense the respective modes of transmission in science and art can be made logically equivalent. — location: 2251 ^ref-60799
culture is the total way of life of a discrete society—its religion, myths, art, technology, sports, and all the other systematic knowledge transmitted across generations. In — location: 2477 ^ref-29831
“Culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns, and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and the products of behavior.” — location: 2479 ^ref-46389
There are sixty-seven universals in the list: age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control, and weaving. — location: 2812 ^ref-22233
different teams of researchers, matches between genes and epigenetic rules are even rarer. — location: 2961 ^ref-35990