The commission, the foundation, and the name
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Biologist, twice a Pulitzer winner, and author of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge — the book that gave this network its name and its thesis.
Jonathan Hare renamed his company Consilient in order to reach him. They met at Harvard, agreed to launch a foundation, lost five years to the 2001 collapse, met again by chance on a path at Aspen Meadows in 2006, and the conversation resumed. He gave Hare a personal commission in 2013.
In August 2026 the corpus extended his program by one deliberate step: The Unification of All Faiths and Science through Consilience — one mathematics, many heavens — argues that what Wilson wanted for the branches of knowledge holds for the faiths as well: one representational space, coordinate systems rather than error lists, and unification of the substrate rather than the doctrines. The essay's ledger keeps the Asimov discipline; its title keeps his word.
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The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
At Aspen in 2006 Wilson told him the foundation they had discussed in 2000 existed — funded by Jay Short, and with Nobel laureates, Jeffrey Sachs, Steven Pinker and Harrison Ford on the board. It won the TED Prize, and the wish was an Encyclopedia of Life. Hare's response was that the encyclopedia was the wrong unit of ambition: what the wish needed was not a catalog but an ecosystem in which any body of knowledge could be contributed, found, trusted, recombined and rewarded.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
“Your wish is impossible” — December 2006
Open →wrote itThe unification of knowledge — and why the ladder stops
Open →commissioned him, 2013Consilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →the foundationThe foundation agreed in 2000, real by 2006 — Hare chaired its technical advisory board, and its wish was the Encyclopedia of Life
Open →his magazine of choice; the 2006 keynoteWilson's magazine of choice for his excerpts; sponsor of his 2006 Aspen Ideas keynote — the path where Hare met him with Bill Joy; owned since 2017 by Emerson Collective
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-078The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-162The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-169The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-181The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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