I've started reading "Convergence" by Peter Watson, one of my favorite authors. It's theme is similar to "Consilience" by E.O. Wilson, and the idea that science converges toward a unified understanding of a topic is an old one. The term 'consilience' was coined in an 1840 book by William Whewell, who interestingly also coined the term 'scientist'. (Previously, people doing science referred to themselves as natural philosophers). Consilience was further elaborated by a very impressive early woman scientist, Mary Somerville.
Surprisingly, the concept of 'scientist' relates to 'consilience' in that there was controversy over whether scholars should be specialists or generalists. Somerville, along with many others, advocated for generalism, with the idea being that scientific discoveries occur when people make connections across fields. This happened, for example, when the idea of Conservation of Energy emerged from a combination of "the sciences of heat, optics, electricity, magnetism, food, and blood chemistry" (Watson, p. 16), and when the idea of Evolution by Natural Selection emerged from a combination of "deep space astronomy, deep-time geology, paleontology, anthropology, geography, and biology" (ibid.). Therefore, it was useful to think of a physicist not just as a person who studies physics, but as a person with more generalist knowledge and a unifying approach to understanding things: a scientist. In 2022, we have retained the term 'scientist' while changing the philosophy: scientists are becoming more and more specialized, to the point that many of us feel unable to judge the quality of research outside of our own subfields (and to some degree, outside of the subfield of our subfield). For example, I study social psychology, which is a subfield of psychology, and while I know a bit about other subfields like relationships and stereotyping, my main subfield within subfield is moral judgment and decision-making.
Consilience is the discovery that all of the various scientific disciplines yield consistent results. For example, the geological history of the earth is consistent with astronomy, in that the development of rocks on earth's layers is consistent with what we know about the types of rocks in our area of space. In turn, the geological stratification is consistent with the fossil record of prehistoric plants and animals and the evolution of more modern species. I may be missing something, but the people I've read about consilience imply it is surprising, as if it could be any other way. Somerville apparently conceived of the idea as a sort of proof of some form of divinity. The universe seems to have some force on it that makes our sciences converge on a single structure, rather than several. I hope I'm being fair to this idea, because I am about to attack it, and I would rather attack the real idea rather than a strawperson.
I don't think the world could work any other way. Each science studies a particular aspect of the world: psychology studies the human mind, physics studies matter, biology studies organisms, geology studies rocks. Some amount of consilience would be surprising, given these different topics. For example, if psychology operated too much like geology, there would be room for concern--the mind is quite unlike a rock. If we discovered that the striations of layers found in rock formations perfectly corresponded to the striations of layers in the brain, and that stimulating these rock striations like we can use electrical stimuli on the brain produced animal-like behaviors in rocks, this would be quite surprising. But we don't find that kind of consilience. Rather, we find a much more mundane form. All of the insights discovered in any particular scientific field are always consistent with the insights in another.
I think this kind of discovered consilience is a logical requirement. In practice, we specialize in a particular branch of science, and study a limited subset of the world. But whatever we discover about any part of the world has to be consistent with what we discover about the rest of it. Whatever properties rocks have have to be consistent with the history of how rocks developed, because they did develop, and they do have physical properties. Moreover, anything a rock touches, or that touches a rock, has to be able to interact with the rock in a way that makes sense. You couldn't have a separate physics for rocks and plants because they interact with each other. And you couldn't have a biology that doesn't accommodate bio-chemistry, because that's what biological things are made of. Similarly, you can't have a psychology that isn't consistent with the rest of science, or an economics that ignores the conservation of energy (at least, not a very functional one).
I think the best kind of argument against mine would be to say the universe doesn't have to make sense. There could be a universe that doesn't have a single history or a single kind of existence. Things might come and go from existence within it for no reason at all. I suppose, but then such a universe I think would preclude the long process necessary for the development of life with conscious awareness. If such a universe exists, it wouldn't have any beings in it to study it. Or maybe they could spontaneously form, but now we're in a very imaginary kind of world.
As always, I'm happy to hear counterarguments, or places where you think I've gone wrong.
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