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February 9, 2018 - June 2, 2019
so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves?
Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030.4 In
Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.
In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.
Success breeds ambition,
Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently quite tolerant of death.
The second big project on the human agenda will probably be to find the key to happiness.
The average American thus uses sixty times more energy than the average Stone Age hunter-gatherer. Is the average American sixty times happier? We may well be sceptical about such rosy views.
On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations.
The bad news is that pleasant sensations quickly subside and sooner or later turn into unpleasant ones.
Perhaps the key to happiness is neither the race nor the gold medal, but rather combining the right doses of excitement and tranquillity; but most of us tend to jump all the way from stress to boredom and back, remaining as discontented with one as with the other.
increasing numbers of schoolchildren take stimulants such as Ritalin. In 2011, 3.5 million American children were taking medications for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). In the UK the number rose from 92,000 in 1997 to 786,000 in
Today, for the first time in history, at least some people think it would be more efficient to change the pupils’ biochemistry.
The biochemical pursuit of happiness is also the number one cause of crime in the world. In
55 per cent of inmates in the UK reported that they committed their crimes in connection with either consuming or trading drugs. A 2001 report found that 62 per cent of Australian convicts were under the influence of drugs when committing the crime for which they were
second great project of the twenty-first century – to ensure global happiness – will involve re-engineering Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure.
The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. Biological engineering starts with the insight
bioengineers will take the old Sapiens body, and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs.
the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
No clear line separates healing from upgrading.
Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.
This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped thousands of generations ago continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer necessary for survival and reproduction in the present.
according to Christianity, God gave an eternal soul only to humans. Since
The gods safeguarded and multiplied farm production, and in exchange humans had to share the produce with the gods.
all agricultural religions – Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism included – found ways to justify human superiority and the exploitation of animals (if not for meat, then for milk and muscle power).
The Agricultural Revolution was thus both an economic and a religious revolution. New kinds of economic relations emerged together with new kinds of religious beliefs that justified the brutal exploitation of animals.
The farm thus became the prototype of new societies, complete with puffed-up masters, inferior races fit for exploitation, wild beasts ripe for extermination, and a great God above that gives His blessing to the entire arrangement.
Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods. While theists worship theos (Greek for ‘god’), humanists worship humans.
Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities.
why do we need the conscious experience of memory over and above the physical event of the two neurons connecting?
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. This is certainly a thought worth thinking, even if it isn’t true. But it is quite amazing to realise that as of 2016, this is the best theory of consciousness that contemporary science has to offer us.
Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers.
Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions. These emotions, as we saw earlier, are in fact sophisticated algorithms that reflect the social mechanisms of ancient hunter-gatherer bands. If 30,000 years ago I helped you hunt a wild chicken and you then kept almost all the chicken to yourself, offering me just one wing, I did not say to myself: ‘Better one wing than nothing at all.’ Instead my evolutionary algorithms kicked in, adrenaline and testosterone flooded my system, my blood boiled, and I stamped my
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Ex. Ultimate game where one person offers some amount from 100 doller to another person ........... And person can reject or accept the amount... If second person rejects the amount nobody gets anything
‘imagined orders’ because they assume that there are only two types of realities: objective realities and subjective realities.
However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans.
3 realities
1. Objective - gravity
2. Subjective - pain in my arm, happiness
3. Intersubjective (imagined order )
That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. With hindsight, going on crusade in the hope of reaching Paradise sounds like utter madness.
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.
broke the data-processing limitations of the human brain. Writing and money made it possible to start collecting taxes from hundreds of thousands of people, to organise complex bureaucracies and to establish vast kingdoms.
you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you.
upgrade humans, overcome old age and find the key to happiness, won’t people care less about fictional gods, nations and corporations,
Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.
Credit is the economic manifestation of trust. Nowadays,
For thousands of years people had little faith in future growth not because they were stupid, but because it contradicts our gut feelings, our evolutionary heritage and the way the world works. Most natural systems exist in equilibrium, and most survival struggles are a zero-sum game in which one can prosper only at the expense of another.
Why there was no credit
The traditional view of the world as a pie of a fixed size presupposes that there are only two kinds of resources in the world: raw materials and energy. But in truth there are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge.
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.
We trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to revolutionise production yet again, and to open whole new sections in our ever-expanding supermarkets.
True, the therapist’s bookshelf sags under the weight of Freud’s and Jung’s writings and the 1,000-pages-long Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Knowledge = Experiences × Sensitivity. If
experience is not made of atoms, electromagnetic waves, proteins or numbers. Rather, an experience is a subjective phenomenon made up of three main ingredients: sensations, emotions and thoughts.
