The consilient approach will help us interpret how creative works are composed and why the brain of the artist is predisposed to select certain images as aesthetic or certain narratives as compelling. In one study of brain activity cited in Consilience, there was a sharp peak, almost a spike, in arousal associated with certain redundancies. It happens that this amount of order about 20 percent repetition of elements typifies a whole range of symbols and designs in art, from most of the Asiatic ideographic languages to typical frieze design. This kind of study could illuminate a great deal of the creative arts not a complete understanding of individual genius, but an understanding, at a deeper level, of why some art has universal value. Critics have objected that certain phenomena are not entirely mechanical, that spirit is metaphysical.
Some philosophers still think that the mind, while having some physical basis, is ineffable.
Of course, the social sciences and humanities are filled with people who see science and culture as qualitatively different. You argue that the difference is quantitative, not qualitative that art is simply a far more complex realm than biology. I believe that the two are connected by a continuous skein of causal explanation, and that we can trace that connection all the way, though the realm of art will prove much more complicated and less tractable. That's why the complexity theorists are embarked on an exciting adventure. In Consilience, I pose the question of whether or not they will find the means to finesse the connections between the sciences and the humanities, or whether, aided by the rapid approach of petacrunchers, we can just do all these things with brute-force simulation.