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In exchange, they produce nothing of value. You can’t even graze animals on them, because they would eat and trample the grass. Poor peasants could not afford wasting precious land or time on lawns. The neat turf at the entrance to chateaux was accordingly a status symbol nobody could fake.
If you came to visit a duke and saw that his lawn was in bad shape, you knew he was in trouble.50
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.
because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.
How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf? Less than a hundred.
This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on a par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements.
Sapiens broke the barriers that had separated the globe into independent ecological zones. In the Anthropocene, the planet became for the first time a single ecological unit.
Large animals were the main victims because they were relatively few, and they bred slowly.
In most Semitic languages, ‘Eve’ means ‘snake’ or even ‘female snake’.
For example, humans in Europe and western Asia evolved the ability to digest cows’ milk, while cows lost their fear of humans, and today produce far more milk than their wild ancestors.
A young hunter who risked his life chasing a mammoth outshone all his competitors and won the hand of the local beauty; and we are now stuck with his macho genes.
found that the pigs soon rivalled primates in learning and playing simple computer games.
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.
For emotions are not a uniquely human quality – they are common to all mammals
An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions.
Humans are algorithms that produce not cups of tea, but copies of themselves (like
What we call sensations and emotions are in fact algorithms.
In the wild, piglets, calves and puppies that fail to bond with their mothers rarely survive for long.
(This is also why small human children are far more likely to become attached to dolls, blankets and smelly rags than to cutlery, stones or wooden blocks.)
We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved.
The United States is far mightier than Afghanistan; does this imply that American lives have greater intrinsic value than Afghan lives?
That’s why we say that humans are conscious beings and robots aren’t, and why it is a crime to make people work until they collapse from hunger and exhaustion, whereas making robots work until their batteries run out carries no moral opprobrium.
with more than 80 billion neurons connected into numerous intricate webs. When billions of neurons send billions of electric signals back and forth, subjective experiences emerge.
Even though the sending and receiving of each electric signal is a simple biochemical phenomenon, the interaction among all these signals creates something far more complex – the stream of consciousness.
The better we understand the brain, the more redundant the mind seems.
If something does indeed happen in the mind over and above what happens in the neural network – where the hell does it happen?
Such thinking had a deep influence even on Freudian psychology, which is why much of our psychological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering.
Consider, for example, the following Freudian argument: ‘Armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression. The army recruits young men just when their sexual drive is at its peak. The army limits the soldiers’ opportunities of actually having sex and releasing all that pressure, which consequently accumulates inside them. The army then redirects this pent-up pressure and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression.’ This is exactly how a steam engine works. You trap boiling steam inside a closed container. The steam builds up more and more pressure, until suddenly you
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Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain: can you pass for a straight man?
As Hans approached the correct number of taps the human became more and more tense, and when Hans tapped the right number, the tension reached its peak. Hans knew how to recognise this by the human’s body posture and the look on the human’s face.
Bees cooperate in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight.
In order to mount a revolution, numbers are never enough. Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses.
They prefer losing a dollar to looking like suckers.
Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic.
We refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn’t survive in the Stone Age.
primates have a natural morality, and that equality is a universal and timeless value.
long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks.
truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.
Yet to the best of our knowledge, cats are able to imagine only things that actually exist in the world, like mice.
Just as in present-day San Francisco John is employed by Google while Mary works for Microsoft, so in ancient Uruk one person was employed by the great god Enki while his neighbour worked for the goddess Inanna.
If the Sumerian gods remind us of present-day company brands, so the living-god pharaoh can be compared to modern personal brands such as Elvis Presley, Madonna or Justin Bieber.
So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you.
It’s ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors.
Antibiotics, unlike God, help even those who don’t help themselves.
All too often people confuse religion with superstition, spirituality, belief in supernatural powers or belief in gods.
Modern physicians blame disease on invisible germs, and voodoo priests blame disease on invisible spirits.
Satan didn’t know how to make his creation endure, hence in the world of matter everything rots and disintegrates.
Indeed, are happiness and misery mathematical entities that can be added or subtracted in the first place? Eating ice cream is enjoyable; finding true love is more enjoyable; do you think that if you just eat enough ice cream, the accumulated pleasure could ever equal the rapture of true love?
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other.
