Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new religion is 'information flow'. If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows that we should extend, deepen and spread the flow of information in the universe. According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn't the apex of creation or the precursor of some future Homo deus. Humans are merely the tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.In Homo Deus – the follow-up to his bestselling Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari recaps the sorry history of mankind, unmasks the reality of our meaningless present, and shares his vision for our irrelevant future. As with the previous book, I found Harari's misanthropy to be patience-straining and not necessarily supported by the “facts” he shares; yet once again, I found his writing to be engaging and interesting, and reading this book wasn't a waste of my time. I concluded that if I thought of Harari's work as philosophy – pure opinion based on what he sees as the truth rather than a straight historical or scientific work – then it's much more palatable. I marked so many passages as I went along (many more than shared here), so I'm going to let Harari do most of the talking in this review.
Once again, Harari's main thesis is that there's nothing very special about Sapiens; through chance and random mutations, we became the apex species on Earth. This time, however, he adds that all life is designed to process algorithms and our true strength as a species has always been our ability to collaborate in large groups to do this work; with religion (which doesn't necessarily mean “the worship of gods”) developing as a means to compel us to behave cooperatively. Consequently, anything we sense within ourselves that makes us believe we are superior to other lifeforms – that we have a “mind” or a “soul” – is pure delusion. Harari cites some fMRI studies (a field which is dismissed as the voodoo of neuroscience by many experts) which found no evidence for the mind as a physical object, and then proceeds as though the absence of proof is definitively the proof of absence:
Some scientists concede that consciousness is real and may actually have great moral and political value, but that it fulfills no biological function whatsoever. Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes...If this is true, it implies that all the pain and pleasure experienced by billions of creatures for millions of years is just mental pollution. This is certainly a thought worth thinking, even if it isn't true.Consider that last line closely: This is certainly a thought worth thinking, even if it isn't true. Harari also briefly goes over his anti-soul argument: since Sapiens evolved from earlier lifeforms, and the soul is supposed to have appeared suddenly in just our species, the soul itself couldn't have evolved from an earlier prototype (as in the evolution of the human eye from primitive light-sensing organs), and therefore, doesn't exist. He then extrapolates this “proof” to the conclusion that Sapiens don't have free will; even murderers are simply at the mercy of the chemical and electrical processes in their brains of which they aren't consciously aware:
Once we accept that there is no soul, and that humans have no inner essence called 'the self', it no longer makes sense to ask, 'How does the self choose its desires?' It's like asking a bachelor, 'How does your wife choose her clothes?' In reality, there is only a stream of consciousness, and desires arise and pass within this stream, but there is no permanent self who owns the desires, hence it is meaningless to ask whether I choose my desires deterministically, randomly or freely.Obviously, this has serious moral implications: in the early days of human civilisation, we followed a moral code in order to please the gods. Once we killed our gods – with the rise of liberalism – we still followed a moral code because we believed in the inherent dignity and value of individual humans. If we can now “prove” that we are special neither as a collective nor as individuals, where does that leave humanity?
What, then, is the meaning of life? Liberalism maintains that we shouldn't expect an external entity to provide us with some ready-made meaning. Rather, each individual voter, customer and viewer ought to use his or her free will in order to create meaning not just for his or her life but for the entire universe.So, we have neither minds nor souls, our emotions are chemical responses and our every action is predetermined by our internal wiring. The activities that we've always assumed could never be replicated by computers – writing beautiful music or besting a chess champion – have come to pass, and in the near future, everyone from taxi drivers to doctors will be replaced by microchips. What's the point in even keeping humans around? Harari proposes that it was the need for cannon fodder and salt miners that urged the ruling elite to extend the welfare state throughout the twentieth century, but if only the super rich will be able to afford the coming grasps at immortality – and since the masses who can't afford the biotechnical upgrades won't have any jobs anyway – average humans will soon be seen for exactly what they are:
The life sciences undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms. Every moment, the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. Then more flashes appear and fade, appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence. The narrating self tries to impose order on this chaos by spinning a never-ending story, in which every such experience has its place, and hence every experience has some lasting meaning. But, as convincing and tempting as it may be, this story is a fiction.
The great human projects of the twentieth century – overcoming famine, plague and war – aimed to safeguard a universal norm of abundance, health and peace for all people without exception. The new projects of the twenty-first century – gaining immortality, bliss and divinity – also hope to serve the whole of humankind. However, because these projects aim to surpass rather than safe-guarding the norm, they may well result in the creation of a new superhuman caste that will abandon its liberal roots and treat normal humans no better than nineteenth-century Europeans treated Africans.Putting aside worries about evil bankers and tech billionaires, if all of life is here simply to process logarithms, and we have now created computers that can outprocess even humans, should we be frightened for the future? Harari doesn't see us being blindsided by a robot uprising, but he does warn of us sleepwalking towards irrelevancy: with every Facebook like and Google search, each of us is adding to the massive database of the human experience, and once that is complete, there simply won't be a need for flesh and blood Sapiens.
In the high days of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.Here's my basic beef with this whole book: Harari repeatedly makes definitive statements based on sketchy proofs – “the only purpose to life is processing algorithms”, “the mind doesn't exist”, “there's no such thing as free will” – and then proceeds to build on these planks as though they are incontrovertible; remove one plank and the whole edifice falls. In the end, even Harari says that the future is unknowable and the purpose of Homo Deus is simply to give something to think about; and especially as we do seem to be sleepwalking towards something never seen before on Earth. And that's a worthwhile subject to read about.
After finishing this book, I went to Yuval Noah Harari's Wikipedia page to see what personal information I could find about him (I did already know that he's a History professor in Israel), and the three new-to-me facts that I found there all explain aspects of this book well enough to include here:
1) Animal Welfare: Harari is known for his comments on the treatment of domesticated animals and is a vegan. In both Sapiens and Homo Deus, there are long passages on the sorry lot of food animals that don't really seem to fit in with the other points he's making (except as "proof", I suppose, that we aren't the moral beings or good stewards we tend to think we are), and while these passages can be jarring, I can't blame an advocate for using every available platform to share his viewpoint.
2) Personal Life: Harari met his husband in 2002. Not that it matters, but I got the sense that Harari is gay from the not infrequent references to the injustice of religious types who would demonise "a couple of adult men who just want to have fun together". Despite the quote marks, I'm pulling that from memory to demonstrate the playful tone of these passages; and it's that tone that didn't seem to fit into the otherwise academic vibe of the book. Also, being gay (and especially in the Middle East) might influence Harari's views on gods/souls/organised religion; for good reason, but it's an influence worth noting all the same.
3) Meditation: He practises Vispassana meditation for two hours every day, and every year undertakes a meditation retreat of 30 days or longer, in silence and with no books or social media. He also regards meditation as a way to research. That is so fascinating to me -- that Harari would concentrate on breathing and mindfulness until insight comes to him -- that I wish he would write specifically on how this works for him. Is this merely focussing the processing of biological algorithms? How might the process have affected the results? Does this account for the logical leaps I couldn't follow?
As with anything on Wikipedia, these are only interesting facts if they're actually true; there must be some deeper truth to that statement.
