phenotype = (genotype + environment) * consciousness. Reflections on The consilience of knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

my afterthoughts on The consilience of knowledge, a book by Edward O. Wilson

Why Consilience?

The consilience of knowledge essentially means finding the principles which underlying two or more distinct branches of knowledge. People who subscribe to the idea that knowledge, in its many shapes and forms, is intimately connected, can be referred to as “consilientists”. We are often in awe by questions such as “what’s the fundamental question?” to ask in particularly field of knowledge such as math, or artificial intelligence. The unknowns behind such fundamental questions, along with their answers, would shed insight into how seemingly disparate fields like AI and, say, cuisine, are deep down interconnected. The intrisic value of asking fundamental questions, and gauging principles of knowledge rather than superficial forms of knowledge, is that while consilientists can’t know everything, they can know the things that help them understand most things.

Consilientists are lateral thinkers, meaning that they like to focus on the “big picture”, as in how a piece of knowledge fits with other knowledge, instead of compromising oneself to understanding thoroughly this piece of knowledge. To achieve consilience, it is required to know something about everything, and find a common principle that could explain most things. It is not being a polymath, i.e., knowing everything. It is being open to several ideas, and that ideas that seemingly contradict each other, may actually complement once we think deeply enough about them. For example, the empiricist vs. nativist debate in cognitive science (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-cognition/) . To me, while empiricism and nativism are advertised as opposing ideas, in the eyes of a consilient researcher, they’re complementary. This is because the bottom-up epistemological approach of empiricists is intricately tied to the top-down perception of the world advocated by nativists, as depicted below.

A depiction of inter-relation between induction and deduction. One can't process data without an a-priori model (theory-landeness). The model is data-dependent, and is part of an active loop of information exchange.

Another seemingly dichotomy is that of questions and answers. Problems are, in essence, solutions. This is because we can only ask questions for which we can have the answer, or we ask the questions based on the answer we can obtain. Consilientists questions can be of the form:

• Are two seemingly different ideas just two faces of the same coin?

• Are two ideas that are often pitted against each other complementary to each other, rather than contradictory?

There are different ways to achieve consilience, i.e., to search for an universal principle, or a theory of everything.

Prof. Edward O. Wilson mainly advocates for common principles through an empiricist/reductionist, excluding approaches such as rationalism or deduction. In the literature, empiricists and rationalists are commonly pitted against each other, on the assumption that acceptance of empiricism negates rationalism. But as argued in point 2 above, to my opinion, they not only are not against each other, they complement each other. Empiricist can explain how our mind can learn from external data, but can’t explain how we reason about math, simply because math doesn’t exist in the real world. Nativists can answer how we reason about math by arguing it is endowed by our genes after some random mutation in that marked the beginning of the Homo sapiens species, but this doesn’t mean that they can reject the relevance of learning from environmental cues. I’m personally critical of reductionism or empiricism (for a better take please read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity). The problem with reductionism is its lack of explanatory power for meaningful phenomena like universal cultural values, history of the emergence of nation-states, or love. At its core, reductionism aims at proposing as a theory of everything the interplay of molecules and fundamental forces, which equifinal outcome make them meaningless to explain any phenomena. The problem with empiricism is that one often shapes hypothesis and instruments of measurement based on the evidence one wants to collect.

In the book by Edward Wilson, he discussed the fundaments which tie the biological and the social sciences, of which can be succintly summarized as:

\[phenotype = genotype + environment\]

• phenotype encapsulates the physical, behavioral and emotional trait of an individual organism.
• gene refers to the selfish gene, or mutations, that are inherited from progenitors. Genetics is also what predisposes us to fight against each other, and our consciousness can either amplify this predisposition for war or tone it down.
• environment refers to the geographical constraints in which an organism lives and influences how a gene expresses, and thus how an organism develops. Epigenetic rules or epigenesis is heredity and environmental factors

The beauty of such equation rests in the infinite amount of knowledge which hides behind such abstract simplicity. Phenotype is regarded as an abstract term with which we describe the human or humans’ conditions, the subject of study of the social sciences.

I have some criticism of this equation, in that it doesn’t account for the uniqueness of human beings. The equation is ‘universal’ to all living beings, such as animals. One phenotypic trait is intelligence, with which from the equation we can argue that it is intimately endowed by the genes and environment. However, I don’t believe that animals have the same competence as us humans, and instead propose the following equation, which just slightly modifies the equation above:

\(phenotype = (genotype + environment) * consciousness\)

Marvelous! Consciousness, which itself is something which we don’t understand nor define, can explain the uniqueness of us human beings: we have more “consciousness” than non-human animals. The consciousness in this equation is an umbrella term to encapsulate many other terms: creativity, hypothesis making, mathematical wisdom, emotions, qualia, among others.

I personally add consciousness as an additional component to epigenetic rules which influences our phenotype. I placed it in the right hand side of the equation, instead of the left hand side, on the assumption that it is not a physical property. This is debatable nonetheless. Consciousness refers to our mental capacity (call it intelligence if you want) which can shake off the shackles of our genes and environment. Consciousness, or the capacity to stay conscious, is the central drive of humans to domesticate other species, nature itself and, through science and technology, pursue a meaningful life beyond what the selfish gene and environment dictate. Unlike animals, with a lower degree of consciousness (or hunekers as Douglas Hofstadter would call), then non-human animals are only able to act according to their epigenetic rules. Consciousness allowed us humans to alter drastically our environment, to the point of compromising our long-term survival. Soon, it would also allow us to modify our very that predisposes to a large extent our phenotype.

The equation essentially states the human condition (the phenotype) is the result of the human’s genome, environment in which he developed, everything moderated by consciousness. You may have seen the equation $phenotype = genotype + environment$. By adding the $\times consciousness$ portion, we illustrate the difference between us and the non-human animals. Namely, the condition of non-human animals, which may have a low-degree of consciousness, are mostly determined by their genes and environment. We, however, can influence both our genes and environment thanks to our consciousness another thought experiment is that the consciousness variable could be universal, as in, consciousness is the same “principle” for all humans, but it is personalized because of each human’s unique gene and environment.

Another interesting thought experiment derived from the equation is that the consciousness variable is perhaps universal, rather than localized to each individual. This entails the existence of a “collective consciousness”, and each individual is a personalization of such collective consciosness dependent on the particular characteristics of our randomly delegated genes and allocated environment.

Some comments on the comparisons between humans and non-humans

Another thread of thought spun from the equation delineates the human condition with the non-human condition. Namely, we are fundamentally distinct to non-human animals, despite several human beings stating otherwise. We argue that animals don’t display intelligent behavior in the sense of intelligence meant by ‘human intelligence’.

Perhaps we perceive intelligence in non-human animals because a particular trait of our consciousness (these mysterious mental machinations) is to story-tell, leading us to perceive higher intelligence in other non-human animals when there isn’t, because non-human animals are, in that regards, slave to their genes and environment.

A dolphin or dog that can seemingly count, a bonobo that can solve puzzles, a herd of elephants that supposedly organize a funeral or squid that can squirt to anger human spectators is perhaps not evidence of cognition or consciousness in non-human animals, at least at the same degree of their human counterparts, but rather behavior that’s pre encoded in their genes. What is impressive, in my opinion, is our brains’ capability to craft stories, stories which are causal interpretations of these natural events:

dolphin ‘counting’

octopus ‘opening jar’

elephants ‘mourning’