An historical investigation of how philosophy and science grew apart is important. Until recently, I was trying to find a way of dealing with the split between philosophy and science by expanding the scientific center of gravity until it could encompass philosophy. I was thinking along the lines of E. O. Wilson's program of Consilience as described in his recent book with that name. For Wilson, Consilience is a way to unite all of human knowledge under the umbrella of science. I was thinking in terms of one snake eating another, science eating philosophy. A Mobius strip metaphor is better than my brutal snake metaphor.

However, I recently discovered that Wittgenstein had already (in the period of 1929-1950) found a way to step right OFF OF the Mobius strip of philosophy and science as we have conceived it. Wittgenstein's method of stepping out of the "metaphysics and neuroscience Mobius system" starts from the perspective of the key insight of Solipsism. If everything that any person knows must come by way of personal experience, then every scientific or metaphysical theory must eventually filter into our thoughts by way of personal experiences. But Wittgenstein was not really interested in this snake-eating-snake type of "filtering". Wittgenstein "jumped out of the system" by trusting in our ability to correctly understand the human condition from the inside perspective of personal experience. I think Wittgenstein imagined that a logic-based type of analysis of personal experience "from the inside" would provide a needed redevelopment and refinement of the subjects usually claimed by metaphysicians. Wittgenstein often described his new program as therapy for the ills of metaphysics. It now occurs to me that Wilson's program of consilience through science and Wittgenstein's therapy program for philosophy might themselves be two distinct centers of intellectual gravitation that have already formed on the META-Mobius strip which is intended to fix the split between philosophy and science that exists "at another level" on the ORIGINAL metaphysics and neuroscience Mobius strip. If this is the case, then I fear that any attempted "solution" to the split between philosophy and science must itself become infected with the same kind of dualistic disease we are trying to cure! If so, then do we first need to find a way to unite Wilson's and Wittgenstein's programs? I begin to fear that there may be a strange Godelian restriction in effect, a Catch-22, by which we can only unite philosophy and science with a tool that is more powerful than either science or philosophy alone, a tool which already has the type of power I imagine would exist in a system that already contains the united powers of both science and philosophy. In trying to unite science and philosophy are we dealing with one of those baffling boundaries of emergence similar to the creation of life from non-life?

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