Josh Goldman’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

dream of unified learning.

I left this book after I struggled to understand it for 58 pages, particularly the unexplained jargon on the enlightenment. I did enjoy some of its fun facts though.

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six kingdoms—plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea.

Prokaryote

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the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics.

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the implications evolution has

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Static pattern slid into fluid process.

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the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences—

Naturally; as illustrated from cosmologists’ writing like stephen hawking going from the big bang to the domains of science becoming each other; subatomic physics into atomic physics into chemistry into biology into psychology, philosophy, morality etc

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his belief that all matter consists ultimately of water.

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the material basis of the world and the unity of nature.

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the spell of the Enchantment extends to other fields of science as well, and in the minds of a few it reaches beyond into the social sciences, and still further, as I will explain later, to touch the humanities.

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The idea of the unity of science

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tested in acid baths of experime...

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separate things.”

Like wave particle duality

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thermodynamicists who for decades have drawn ever closer to the temperature of absolute zero, when atoms cease all motion.

I wonder if heat is an inherent property of matter, which is like a congealed state of pure energy; separating heat from matter would be like trying to separate energy from light. Still, valuable lessons could be learned from observing matter’s behavior in its various energy levels, all the way down to as cold as possible

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Bose-Einstein condensate, a fundamental form of matter beyond the familiar gases, liquids, and solids, in which many atoms act as a single atom in one quantum state.

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It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage.

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I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves.

Hmmm

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Loaded word that I dont understand. Cf Jordan b peterson

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Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end.

Significance; does he mean purpose? Im not a fan of that word barring a context of a intentional creator

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Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end.

Put anothoer way, both are expressions of curiosity, efforts to understand everything

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satisfying religious

This brings to mind JB peterson’s concern, citing Kant, that religion provided morality. In his podcast season 1, episode like 10

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It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization

Civilization began after the subsiding of the recent ice age (11,000 years ago) and beginning of farming 10,000 years ago, as per asimov. I agree with the speculators that cosmological curiosity is older, as old as the human brain, 10 or 20 times older than towns.

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Enlightenment

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lawful material world,

Laplace and boundry conditions, as cited in stephen hawking

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attempted linkage

I.e explaining the science between the gaps. E.g. for neuroscience to explain the gap between biology and psychology

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resulting

?

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Consilience

Agreement <L. Jumping together

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“coherence”

To agree <L. Stick together

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:)

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The only way either to establish or to refute consilience is by methods developed in the natural sciences—

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The belief in the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning is not yet science.

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first principles

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Its best support is no more than an extrapolation of the consistent past success of the natural sciences. Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and humanities.

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modes of analysis, and standards of validation. The result is confusion, and confusion was correctly identified by Francis Bacon four centuries ago as the most fatal of errors, which “occurs wherever argument or inference passes from one world of experience to another.”

It sounds like Bacon refers to disagreement in terminology leading to confusion, just as exclusively english speakers and french speakers wold confuse each other

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concentric circles

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The ring closest to the intersection, where most real-world problems exist, is the one in which fundamental analysis is most needed.

?

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Consider this example.

Consider another example, already well mapped. Human waste isgoverned by environmental policy going bac to babylonian talmud ayn potkin bibosayhen bimos hachama and now its taken for granted by dint of ease of plumbing tech and infrastructure although im confident there are arcane laws on the books prescribing exactly how one should deal with their waste and their neighbors, in times of earlier plumbing technology and infrastructure. This conflates biology (pathology) environmental policy, ethics and i guess social science, although i only guess at what that field is.

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How wisely policy is chosen will depend on the ease with which the educated public, not just intellectuals and political leaders, can think around these and similar circuits, starting at any point and moving in any direction.

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Disciplinary boundaries within the natural sciences are disappearing, to be replaced by shifting hybrid domains in which consilience is implicit.

In fact the distinction between domains is only a matter of perspective; different problems are served by different such perspectives. E.g. X ray crystallography used to explain dna structure. Is it biology? physics? likewise our increasingly interdisciplinary scientific endeavors

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Given that human action comprises events of physical causation, why should the social sciences and humanities be impervious to consilience with the natural sciences?

Yup. Theyre aggregations of particles as laplace and hari seldon might claim.

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if ten thousand humanoid histories could be traced on ten thousand Earthlike planets, and from a comparative study of those histories empirical tests and principles evolved, historiography—the explanation of historical trends—would already be a natural science.

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The unification agenda does not sit well with a few professional philosophers. The subject I address they consider their own, to be expressed in their language, their framework of formal thought.

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synthesis,

As that synthesis between evolution and genetics mentioned in previous chapter

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the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science.

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overweening.

Undeserved

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clearer

As we continhue to observe nature, we will have seen more of nature. This point seems obvious, as this whole book is starting too. Whats the novelty of tgis book? is it entirelyto argue with the above mentioned and gainsaying philosophers, whom i frankly dont undderstand