Consilience

Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts. Input and self-assembly, rather than an independent entity in the brain - the "ghost in the machine" in the philosopher Gilbert Ryle's famous derogation - constitute the mind. The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution, as I noted earlier. That is, natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment. The effort to do so has only begun. No one should suppose that objective truth is impossible to attain, even when the most committed philosophers urge us to acknowledge that incapacity. In particular it is too early for scientists, the foot soldiers of epistemology, to yield ground so vital to their mission.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson