Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

by Edward O. Wilson

Reality, they propose, is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it.

Cf. jb peterson and value mapping based vision

ruling social groups.

Certainly norms affect value assignment when the mind constructs a value map for vision, as JB Peterson might say

deconstruction, a technique of literary criticism. Each author’s meaning is unique to himself, goes the underlying premise; nothing of his true intention or anything else connected to objective reality can be reliably assigned to it. His text is therefore open to fresh analysis and commentary issuing from the equally solipsistic world in the head of the reviewer.

Nor is it certain from Derrida’s ornately obscurantist prose that he himself knows what he means.

😘

perhaps less pernicious root metaphors of mental life

I think a machine is a good metaphor because it’s essentially an understood object, which is the goal that psychology pursued for the mind. This a nice abstraction. Moreover, it echoes the triumph of antivitalism. Moreover machines are turned to helpful ends, another effort of psychology for the mind

jargon-prone

Look who’s talking

how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?

Again, why not the compromise embodied in law? How does perspective affect the helpfulness of law

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Use of a capital after a colon; interesting; I wonder how this accords with the dusty oversized tomes; I wonder if the times even agree with themselves; maybe the choice was made for us by some popular publication like the KJ bible or Shakespeare or Alice in wonderland

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Ooh I like the sound of that but lemme think further on it

emotions played in potentially infinite patterns.

I bet a clinical psychologist could distill this infinity down to a handily small number

we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

As often the case for this book, idk what he’s talking about But on the chance that I do, I wonder here: If so, why often don’t we understand each other? Bec we protect ourselves from our true and imperfect nature by projecting sources of frustration into others, a result unwelcome for the victims

two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward.

🤔 Yes? 🤔

Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought.

what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces?

fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field.

As the talmud Avos says and from my students more than them all

imagined.

Sounds like platos cave too. also like lawrence krauss's prediction of people who might exist in the distant future after the universe expnds too much to observe beyond our own galaxy and lost from view is the cosmic background radiation and its implication of a nonstatic universe leaving them in the dark from understanding the true history of the universe

turn

The printing press? the author above wrote the christian monotheism implied universal principles for science vis a vis buddhist above page 33. Also there my note to the contrary citing copleston

Below 400 nanometers, butterflies find flowers and pinpoint pollen and nectar sources by the pattern of ultraviolet rays reflected off the petals. Where we see a plain yellow or white blossom, they see spots and concentric circles in light and dark. The patterns have evolved in plants to guide insect pollinators to the anthers and nectar pools.

wavelength below. The name ultra is an unfortunate historical quirk

No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics. Is this a paean to the god of science? No—to human ingenuity, to the capacity in all of us, freed at last in the modern era.

Many of their potential prey listen with ears tuned to the same frequencies as the bats. When they hear the telltale pulses, they dip and wheel in evasive maneuvers or else power-dive to the ground.

! Cool example of alternated evolution

They generate charged fields around their bodies with trunk muscle tissue that has been modified by evolution into organic batteries. The power is controlled by a neural switch. Each time the switch turns on the field, individual fish sense the resulting power with electroreceptors distributed over their bodies. Perturbations caused by nearby objects, which cast electric shadows over the receptors, allow them to judge size, shape, and movement. Thus continuously informed, the fish glide smoothly past obstacles in dark water,

They also communicate with one another by means of coded electrical bursts.

!

FROM THESE AND countless other examples can be drawn an informal rule of biological evolution important to the understanding of the human condition: If an organic sensor can be imagined that picks up any signal from the environment, there exists a species somewhere that possesses it.

physically handicapped?

Natural selection, defined as the differential survival and reproduction of different genetic forms,

It follows that each species lives in its own sensory world.

We have more than one sense. Moreover i wonder how bind we are to the electric field Sensed by the fish. Maybe we aintain a primigtive sense of it

indigestible

Howso?

how did natural selection prepare the mind for civilization before civilization existed?

Did it? civilization sees much misery across all classes

the peculiar nature of the natural sciences as a product of history.

Three preconditions, three strokes of luck in the evolutionary arena, led to the scientific revolution.

curi...

power to a...

seemingly developed beyond their survival needs.

Survival is helped by abstracting your person into a neurologically simulated abstract of the world together with abstractions of objects which are important and can have affects on your person e.g. an apple and a rattle snake. Then within the imaginary simulation, you can imagine approaching the two objects and which behavior is more helpful too survival

It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them.

Odd statement natural law is a set of patterns that yield predictibility in what way is this unnatural? our ability to abstract identified abstracted essences of thesse patterns whats bothering EOW about this

understand

Math in turn is an abstraction of whats in the world and how much of somethinh occured or if some relevant amount of it occured whats bothering EOW about this

We may even reasonably suppose that any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, if they possess nuclear power and can launch spacecraft, have discovered the same laws,

Why did Eow necessitate these two tsechnologies? which laws did they integrally teach us?

nearly impossible to visualize

Why is it hard to visualize? its properties maybe unfamiliar to our unaided observations-defined experience of the world but never the less the correct visualization of an electron is nkothing more than its effects; its gift of attaction and repulsion to other charges which in turn give the gift, or if you prefer a nonwillful synonym, imbue rigid positions of affected objects in specific orientations with respect to each othser, accumulating an aggragation of a specific cinfiguration, whether its a atom, molecule, (wind is innappropriate as thats caused by matter getting ennergized into motion) macromolecule, cell, tissue, orgnism, ocean, planet, galaxy, or universe

the search for ultimate smallness in entities such as electrons, is a driving impulse of Western natural science.

No. division into Small qnd like material is uninteresting. Cutting a crumb into smaller crubs isnt compelling. the reason why division could hold interesr is the promise of novelty, a new sustance like an atom of helium split into objects which are not helium

atoms.

They were right about chemical atoms. True atoms remain to be seen. Maybe the plank sizwe is the true atom on tht note, could a virtusl particle pair arise from less than a plank size of space? Could this be tested?

high-density ROMs (“read-only memories”),

observed flashes of light that mark the contact of oppositely charged reagent molecules,

to produce a stratified film of desired thickness and chemical properties. SAMs share some of the basic properties of membranes of living cells. Their construction suggests one possible step in the eventual assembly of simple artificial organisms. Although far from being alive, SAMs are simulacra of elemental pieces of life. Given enough such components assembled the right way, chemists may someday produce a passable living cell. THE

It is our nature to put all knowledge into context in order to tell a story, and to re-create the world by this means.

Cf JB Petedrson

in dividing root tip cells

My first microscope slide

I grant that scientists often fall in love with their own constructions. I know; I have. They may spend a lifetime vainly trying to shore them up.

first expressed in the 1320s by William of Occam.

Cf. Copleston that he wasnt the first but idk maybe popularized it or made best use of it maybe EOW is using here some recent historical evidence or maybe his fact checker failed this absolute statemnt

The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are

repeatability:

abstract

aesthetically most pleasing

whats tgis mean? Is it a metaphor?