Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there. 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.

So why use computers as a model for understanding the mind?

We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

true story.

Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.

Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Indeed, even today when US presidents take their oath of office, they put their hand on a bible. Similarly in many countries around the world, including the USA and the UK, witnesses in courts put their hand on a bible when swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors.

Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the powers that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied.

Yet even if Harris is right, and even if all humans cherish happiness, in practice it would be extremely difficult to use this insight to decide ethical disputes, particularly because we have no scientific definition or measurement of happiness.

It is customary to portray the history of modernity as a struggle between science and religion. In theory, both science and religion are interested above all in the truth, and because each upholds a different truth, they are doomed to clash. In fact, neither science nor religion cares that much about the truth, hence they can easily compromise, coexist and even cooperate.

humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.

Tayyip Erdoğan

Nowadays it is generally accepted that some version of free-market capitalism is a much more efficient way of ensuring long-term growth, hence greedy tycoons, rich farmers and freedom of expression are protected, but ecological habitats, social structures and traditional values that stand in the way of free-market capitalism are dismantled and destroyed.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse.

Too many politicians and voters believe that as long as the economy grows, scientists and engineers could always save us from doomsday.

Accordingly, the central religious revolution of modernity was not losing faith in God; rather, it was gaining faith in humanity.

the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate denounced the terrorists for their use of violence, but in the same breath denounced the magazine for ‘hurting the feelings of millions of Muslims across the world’.2 Note that the Syndicate did not blame the magazine for disobeying God’s will. That’s what we call progress.