freediver
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Homo Deus is a book written by Yuval Noah Harari - kind of a sequel to Sapiens. He makes some interesting claims about what will happen to people in the next century. He claims that humans will try to attain immortality, bliss and divinity, as these are the logical consequences of the new religion of humanism, but also that achieving these goals will destroy humanism. He makes what I think are a lot of strawman arguments about humanism in the process, as well as the "true self". He sees algorithms as the new unifying theory of science, explaining genetics, biology, economics, psychology, sociology etc, all with the same language and theories.
Some of his ideas:
Our historical foes of war, famine and pestilence have been defeated. In the 21st century, humans will try to attain immortality, bliss and divinity. These goals reflect the traditional ideals of liberal humanism - the sanctity of human life and the primacy of individual experience. Yet actually achieving any of them is likely to be the undoing of liberal humanism. What will replace it?
What will happen to the job market if humans become economically useless?
What will happen to democracy if we gain control over human thought and achieve bliss?
How will we think about life if the wealthy become amortal and death is merely a technical problem to be solved one step at a time?
p328 Attributing free will to humans is at the centre of liberalism, but it is not a value statement or ethical judgement. It is a statement of fact that can be challenged. p344 the narrating self and the experiencing self - the peak-end rule.
Organisms - from viruses to people, are algorithms. Algorithms are not affected by the material they are made of. Thus, a machine that can think better than a person is a fundamentally a technical problem. Our job market has been saved from robots in the past because humans took up more cognitively intensive tasks as machines replace us at manual tasks. This trend may not continue as machines replace us at cognitive tasks also.
Humanism split into 3 main branches: liberalism (orthodox branch) - primacy of individual feelings socialism - primacy of others' feelings, spawned communism evolutionary humanism - there is an unambiguous hierarchy of human experiences, ie some are better than others - spawned Nazism, that is, Nazism is a branch of humanism
Wars from 1914 to 1989, including both world wars, were essentially 'religious wars' between these 3 sects of humanism (p 306). Liberal humanism won in the end, though at the time it did not seem likely, and it was forced to borrow heavily from the other two (universal education and healthcare). It won because of the ability of a society that embraces it to adapt to the new human reality. As a result of nearly losing in the 20th century, it is less conceited than it was a century ago. But the core package has changed very little. It sanctifies individual liberties, the customer, and the voter (p312). Today, there is no serious alternative.
nationalism - primacy of communal experiences in the form of separate national identities, fusion of humanism with tribalism
p317 Marx and Lenin shaped the world last century, but not any religious leaders (either conventional or new prophets), because of the careful thought they put into the new reality and the new problems that were emerging with it.
p320 Christianity was a creative force. Spread the notion that all people are equal before God, which changed human political structures, social hierarchies and gender relations. Jesus' focus on the meek and oppressed provided ammunition for revolutionaries. In the medieval period, Catholic church established Europe's most sophisticated administrative system and the first economic corporations (monasteries), which spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural methods. They were the most important learning centres and helped found Europe's first universities.
Harari anthropomorphises broad human institutions, such as religion, science, and modernity, and ascribes them with personal agendas such as the pursuit of power or social order. He occasionally reminds me of Jasin, making these claims without sufficient context.
He equates humanism and modernity with the primacy of human feelings. He omits any consideration of freedom of speech, which is a modern, humanist rule which renders human feelings irrelevant - no-one has the right to not be offended.
He equates the modern era with the science discovering ignorance and economics discarding the zero sum game.
He talks a lot about intersubjective realities - a major focus of Sapiens. He leaves open the question of causation. Are changing intersubjective realities the cause of, or the inevitable response to, advances in science, technology, economics etc. Or is it a tangled chicken and egg interaction? The emergence of intersubjective reality during the intellectual revolution about 70000 years ago is credited as the ultimate cause of man's rise, but from there it is unclear whether it continued to cause change or merely allowed us to cope with change.
In seeking to destroy the 'true self' he misdefines it. Here, mindfulness (or perhaps the Hindu take on it) may help. There may be a cacophony of voices in your head giving you different messages, but there is only one observer of those voices. That is the true self. Harari explores this concept in Sapiens, but not in Homo Deus.
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