Edward Wilson finishes his book with a wonderful chapter that induces the reader to understand the fact that we are part of an environment, and we have reason, but that doesn't mean that everything will turn out to be alright.

We are not programmed to be perfect, we can make mistakes. And it's absolutely understandable that we make mistakes. There are things that work, others that won't. And the responsibility as conscious species is that we have to estimate and see if we're creating instead of constructing.

While reading this chapter, I have to admit I came to question certain facts about my economic perspectives. Until what extent are we free? Who speaks for the species that can't communicate? What is the borderline of our capacity to transform nature?

Thanks to Consilience, I can't stop thinking about how important it is for us to understand the fundamental rules of the world. It is incredibly valuable and beautiful.

We are parts of a species anyway. A part of history. With brains capable of reasoning and feeling.

Wilson ends with a wonderful phrase:
"... And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing."

In order to prove the theory of Consilience, we must understand that there is no such thing as other rules out of the regime of this universe. That is the difference between Transcendentalism and Empiricism. Transcendentalism asserts that there are inherent moral rules (whether coming from god or not), and Empiricism asserts that moral rules are a result of human behavior.

The independence of moral values from humanity asserts that there's some knowledge or mind outside ours. And that is why, if proven, Transcendentalism can disprove the theory of Consilience.

Though it is a difficult conversation that is still in the arms of philosophy, we can't discard the fact that our mind is the one that perceives knowledge and that is the only way we can understand moral values. Even, Michael Polanyi quotes:


“So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centers of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world; and all that has gone before, the striving of myriad centers that have taken the risks of living and believing, seem to have all been pursuing, along rival lines, the aim now achieved by us up to this point. They are all akin to us, for all these centers - those which led up to our own existence and the far more numerous others which produced different lines of which many are extinct - may be seen engaged in the same endeavor towards ultimate liberation. We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centers by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation." That is why we believe in gods.

We try to explain things, but with that we use our mind, the circuits. Further understanding of the mind will certainly help a lot understand this magnificent aspect of philosophy and our own visualization as species.

Diego, Ana Isabel, Pablito y yo leimos el capítulo 5 y 6 de Don Quijote en el Jardin Ayau. Descubrí lo importante y magnífico que es Don Quijote. También la cantidad de libros que desconocemos que tenía nuestro personaje principal.

Don Quijote, siendo una persona íntegra y fiel a su Dulcinea había sido apaleado por unos hombres que se había encontrado en el camino, a los cuales les había mencionado de la belleza de su señora, pero nadie le hizo caso  y esto había enfadado a Don Quijote.

Aun así, se encontró a un conocido suyo el cual le mencionó quien era el: "el hidalgo de Quijana"...

"Yo sé quién soy —respondió don Quijote—; y sé que puedo ser no sólo los que he dicho, sino todos los Doce Pares de Francia, y aun todos los Nueve de la Fama, pues a todas las hazañas que ellos todos juntos y cada uno por sí hicieron, se aventajarán las mías."

Llevó pues el labrador a Don Quijote a su casa, en donde el ama, el barbero y el cura decidieron quemar una gran cantidad de los libros del caballero. Y los que no quemaron, los escondieron.

En el dialogo con Amable, el hizo una pregunta muy relevante para el libro. Si Don Quijote estaba siguiendo a ciegas su propósito (un nivel de idealismo a donde no se puede más), será seguir uno su propósito algo que equivale a locura?

Ah, yo prefiero que se me seque el cerebro como a Don Quijote y seguir eso que amo a que no se me seque el cerebro y vivir una vida de "cuerdo".

Tambien, elegí a la señora de mis ideales, mi Dulcinea, y ella se llama música.

The name of the chapter caught me from the very beginning.
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science."
I can't help thinking in how imagination and wonderment is implicit in all scientific or artistic discovery. It isn't like we only have reason in one side to think of science or just emotion when we think on creating music. We're creative, by nature.

Some chapters before, Wilson claimed in how arts and documented work made culture evolve faster. In this chapter, he wrote "gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." and there is, culture documented through the years making our artistic works evolve more and more.

Also, the origins of our artistic brain is theorized as a mechanism that started off by putting meaning to things we didn't understand in our surroundings. We have an aesthetic instinct, and I would dare to say that it is also a search for human seal in things. We like to see our genes printed throughout nature. And also, we have idealized beauty characteristics that come from our instinctual search for fertility and powerful genes.

Between instinct and reason, there's tradition. AH, Hayek. I remembered him all throughout this chapter. I'll explain further.

The Social Sciences goes through how complex societies are, and how the researchers in this field haven't acquired a good amount of knowledge, because they separate biology and psychology from human behavior. This is an incredible misunderstanding of human nature. After all, we're part of all this complex system called universe.

But the fact is, that society isn't either a purely deterministic system or a full culture product. It is an interaction of epigenetic rules and an evolving culture. (See Hayek hidden here somewhere?)

And it is amazing, how natural sciences have grown to reach social matters. Biology or psychology for instance, have found characteristics applicable to the society. These are proofs of consilience.

Then, he gets to the prediction topic. For this, he says that math can be made in order to measure certain things in society. Is that something that can be done? I'm of the people that think that society is far too complex... but what if? Would it be helpful?

For this, I'll claim (with help from Wilson) that in order to understand the complexity of society, we have to also understand the environment and our mind. For that, we should claim consilience.

There are some imperatives in our human nature such as categories of choice or rational calculation. Wilson even quoted our friend Daniel Khaneman (Thinking fast and Slow) on how we make irrational choices according to our heuristics and how we tend to make certain decisions according to time and avoiding risk.

This chapter talks about the different methods of thinking that are introduced in the preface. Is the mental process in which our language conjunctions happen associative or pure memory?

Pinker describes the two different theories: Chomsky and Halle's, and Rumelhart and McClelland's. Chomsky and Halle talk about how our mind is full of memorized rules, while Rumelhart and McClelland talk about how our mind is a network of associations. This is a debate that brings the matter to a more profound field: philosophy. The two schools of thinking: empiricism and rationalism. Chomsky and Halle's theory would be the rational, therefore, etc. (As my friend Euclid would say.)

Pinker mentions that the way language works, is a combination these two methods of thinking:

"Prince and I have proposed a hybrid in which Chomsky and Halle are basically right about regular inflection and Rumelhart and McClelland are basically right about irregular inflection. Our proposal is simply the traditional words-and-rules theory with a twist. Regular verbs are computed by a rule that combines a symbol for a verb stem with a symbol for the suffix. Irregular verbs are pairs of words retrieve from the mental dictionary, a part of memory. Here is the twist: Memory is not a list of unrelated slots, like RAM in a computer, but is associative, a bit like the Rumelhart-McClelland pattern associator memory. Not only are words linked to words, but bits of words are linked to bits of words."

Statistics, may be unreliable. Maybe we have a small number of samples or the incorrect number of samples. This type of information may blind the researcher. In order to make a good research, many different types of samples must be taken, according to the need. For this, we jump to conclusions.

But, we also fall in one of the things that are in our human nature: we're pattern seekers. Patterns make us feel safe, and make us feel that we can predict things. That comfort of finding patterns, where there aren't has fooled lots of people.

We tend to have answers to questions we really don't know the answer to. We tend to make connections, really abstract, with what we think we know.

Kahneman divides the types of existent questions as heuristic questions and target questions. The target questions are those that are complicated and require further and deep thinking. Heuristic questions are those that are answered more simply and that are correlated with our instant memories and responses. That is, System 1.

System 1 tends to make us feel overconfident. For this, I will say that some tend to stop learning. That comfort of being able to answer questions without considering alternatives, nor pushing to a further limit, is one thing that our mind tends to do. We can overcome this habit though.

Also, in this chapter Khaneman quotes to another psychologist, who said that based in our likes and dislikes we form our beliefs of the world. This is a huge mistake, for this is not taking reality as it is.

"Your beliefs, and even your emotional attitude, may change (at least a little) when you learn that the risk of an activity you disliked is smaller than you thought. However, the information about lower risks will also change your view of the benefits (for the better) even if nothing was said about benefits in the information you received."

This is the final chapter of the first part of the book. At the end, Kahneman introduces us to the characteristics of System 1:

Characteristics of System 1

• Generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
  

• Can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
  

• Executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
  

• Creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory

• Links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
  

• Distinguishes the surprising from the normal

• Infers and invents causes and intentions

• Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt

• Is biased to believe and confirm

• Exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)

• Focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence(WYSIATI)
  

• Generates a limited set of basic assessments

• Represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate

• Matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)

• Computes more than intended (mental shotgun)

• Sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
  

• Is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)

• Overweights low probabilities

• Shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)

• Responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)

• Frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another

Leimos los primeros cuatro capítulos de Don Quijote para empezar nuestros dialogos sobre la obra de Cervantes.

Tuvimos como visita a Amable Sanchez, Sussete España, Karen Parada, Giancarlo Ibarguen y Carla Hesse. Fue una experiencia extraordinaria, Amable nos introdujo perfectamente a Don Quijote.

Es sumamente interesante. El dialogo no pasó del primer párrafo, pero eso es algo absolutamente positivo. Me hizo aprender que realmente, se puede aprender muchísimo de unas cuantas palabras.

Una de las preguntas que Amable hizo en el dialogo fueron como "¿Cómo nace un genio? ¿Cómo se crea un genio?". AH, no creo que se pueda crear... ¿Qué es un genio? primero que nada.

Amable nos introdujo a orígenes de palabras, tales como hidalgo (quienes por cierto, llevaban una vida diferente a la de otros ciudadanos: no tenian que pagar todos los impuestos y podían portar armas).

Primero que nada Cervantes nos introduce al escenario. "El mundo es el escenario" mencionó Sanchez. Cervantes nunca menciona específicamente donde había nacido Don Quijote. "¡Nació en la cabeza de Cervantes!", dijo Amable, con un tono que realmente me emocionó.

Don Quijote hasta ahora, me ha parecido una persona que hace las cosas porque las ama y porque las aprecia por lo que son. Don Quijote se preocupa por hacer bien lo que se propuso. Aunque la gente lo tome como un loco, cosa que pasa con muchos genios, el se mantiene íntegro a su sueño y deseo. 

"What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture"

We have millions of years of evolution as human beings, and our epigenetic rules have also been changing with this evolution. It is amazing how that "open input" that we have in our rules so we can modify voluntarily, by learning new things.

Wilson introduces in this chapter also some behavioral genes that are really "primitive" in our nature: kin selection, parental investment, mating strategy, status, territorial expansion and defense. For this, please let me post a video of Life.... talking about primates. You will see the correlation:

Here we can see some political issues happening with our familiar gene-sharers: the other primates! Here, I also see a notion of private property going on. (But communal at the same time)...

But, also, there are some influential cultural facts in our interactions (in some other primates is also present actually). Curiously, we rely in a epigenetic rule "have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of our life". Interesting, though, because it is not something that we think about. Though there are some symptoms such as the Electra, we grow and, unaware of this taboo, we don't feel attracted to those who were near us for the first 30 months of our lives, according to Wilson. How did this epigenetic rule evolve?

At the end of the chapter, Wilson suggests and explanation of what rational choice is: It "is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules. It is these rules and this hierarchy of their relative strengths by which human beings have successfully survived and reproduced for hundreds of millennia. The incest avoidance case may illustrate the manner in which the coevolution of genes and culture has woven not just a part but all of the rich fabric of  human social behavior."

I have to ask myself: What does happen then, we assented cultures which are self-destructive? What about taboos as homosexuality?