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February 9, 2018 - June 2, 2019
And what is ‘sensitivity’? It means two things. Firstly, paying attention to my sensations, emotions and thoughts. Second, allowing these sensations, emotions and thoughts to influence me.
aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’.
socialism demands that I stop obsessing about me and my feelings and instead focus on what others are feeling and how my actions influence their experiences.
Whereas in liberal politics the voter knows best, and in liberal economics the customer is always right, in socialist politics the party knows best, and in socialist economics the trade union is always right.
A socialist true-believer will explain that the real value of music depends not on the experiences of the individual listener, but on the impact it has on the experiences of other people and of society as a whole.
According to evolutionary humanists, anyone arguing that all human experiences are equally valuable is either an imbecile or a coward. Such vulgarity and timidity will lead only to the degeneration and extinction of humankind, as human progress is impeded in the name of cultural relativism or social equality. If
Liberals were convinced that if individuals had maximum freedom to express themselves and follow their hearts, the world would enjoy unprecedented peace and prosperity.
evolutionary humanism struck from the right. Racists and fascists blamed both liberalism and socialism for subverting natural selection and causing the degeneration of humankind.
The socialists created a brave new religion for a brave new world. They promised salvation through technology and economics, thus establishing the first techno-religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse.
in the twenty-first century, humans will try to attain immortality, bliss and divinity.
To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul’, a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.
But the million-dollar question is not whether parrots and humans can act upon their inner desires – the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place. Why
This is of course false. I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.
If organisms indeed lack free will, it implies that we can manipulate and even control their desires using drugs, genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation.
The US military has recently initiated experiments on implanting computer chips in people’s brains, hoping to use this method to treat soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress
Some of those voices repeat society’s prejudices, some echo our personal history, and some articulate our genetic legacy. All of them together, says Sally, create an invisible story that shapes our conscious decisions in ways we seldom grasp. What
Science undermines not only the liberal belief in free will, but also the belief in individualism.
However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’. The human brain is composed of two hemispheres connected by a thick neural cable. Each
Crucially, the narrating self is duration-blind, giving no importance to the differing lengths of the two parts. So when it has a choice between the two, it prefers to repeat the long part, the one in which ‘the water was somewhat warmer’.
As shown in an experimennt by kehnmen where voulteers were asked to put their one hand in 14degree water for 60 sec and then their other han in 14 degree water for 60 sec and then another 30 sec in 15 degree water (where water was induced secretly.
Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’
Kahneman began investigating the experiencing self and the narrating self in the early 1990s when, together with Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto,
The narrating self doesn’t aggregate experiences – it averages them.
The peak end rule... Duration neglect
Most of our critical life choices – of partners, careers, residences and holidays – are taken by our narrating self.
We experience hunger differently when we fast during Ramadan, when we fast in preparation for a medical examination, and when we don’t eat because we have no money. The different meanings ascribed to our hunger by the narrating self create very different actual experiences.
It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.
The life sciences, however, undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms.
The first – that technological developments will make humans economically and militarily useless
As the masses lose their economic importance, will the moral argument alone be enough to protect human rights and liberties? Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?
When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.
more controversial figures in the world of classical music. Cope has written computer programs that compose concertos, chorales, symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence),
The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.20 Since we do not know what the job market will
At the beginning of this chapter we identified several practical threats to liberalism. The first is that humans might become militarily and economically useless. This is just a possibility, of course, not a prophecy.
For liberalism believes not just in the value of human beings – it also believes in individualism. The second threat facing liberalism is that while the system might still need humans in the future, it will not need individuals. Humans will continue to compose music, teach physics and invest money, but the system will understand these humans better than they understand themselves and will make most of the important decisions for them. The system will thereby deprive individuals of their authority and freedom.
The liberal belief in individualism is founded on the three important assumptions that we discussed earlier:
However, the life sciences challenge all three assumptions. According to them:
The Quantified Self movement argues that the self is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no chance of understanding them.
you happen to have clicked 300 Likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!
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.
So far we have looked at two of the three practical threats to liberalism: firstly, that humans will lose their value completely; secondly, that humans will still be valuable collectively, but will lose their individual authority, and instead be managed by external algorithms. The system will still need you to compose symphonies, teach history or write computer code, but it will know you better than you know yourself, and will therefore make most of the important decisions for you – and you will be perfectly happy with that. It won’t necessarily be a bad world; it will, however, be a
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The liberal solution for social inequality is to give equal value to different human experiences, instead of trying to create the same experiences for everyone.
As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm.
These new techno-religions can be divided into two main types: techno-humanism and data religion. Data
Technohumanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus – a much superior human model.
Seventy thousand years ago the Cognitive Revolution transformed the Sapiens mind, thereby turning an insignificant African ape into the ruler of the world. The improved Sapiens minds suddenly had access to the vast intersubjective realm, which enabled them to create gods and corporations, to build cities and empires, to invent writing and money, and eventually to split the atom and reach the moon. As far as we know, this earth-shattering revolution resulted from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brain. If so, says techno-humanism, maybe a few
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In addition to smelling and paying attention, we have also been losing our ability to dream. Many
Did the decline in our capacity to smell, pay attention and dream make our lives poorer and greyer?
For millions of years we were enhanced chimpanzees. In the future, we may become oversized ants.
We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were ‘good’. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.
