Consilience

Abstract

Consilience is a concept coined in 1998 by E. O. Wilson in his book with that name. Having borrowed the term from the English scientist William Whewell, for whom it meant the increased certainty that a scientist feels when an explanation in one field of science gets support from developments in an unrelated field, Wilson extended it to mean instead the convergence between different areas of knowledge. His aim was the unification of the great realms of learning, more specifically the Two Cultures, through a web of cause-and-effect explanation. He hoped consiliently educated synthesizers would help solve urgent global problems. Wilson’s call for consilience legitimized interdisciplinarity and encouraged bold scientific collaborations and the sharing of tools across fields. While Wilson restricted himself to science and was ambivalent about technology, technology was in its own way attempting to unify knowledge, with artificial intelligence playing a major role. With the increase of computational power and proliferation of new strategies enabled by evolutionary algorithms and network research, innovative problem solving in one domain can quickly affect others. Big Data and machine analysis present new opportunities and challenges. Contentious issues include the relationship between explanation and understanding, facts and values, the nature and status of moral beliefs, and the meaning of consilience in a world of accelerating technology with superintelligence on the horizon.