Homo Deus

Author: Samuel Peterson

Date Published
2019-04-10 (ISO 8601)
74-04-10 (Post Bomb)

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari is the sequal to his excellent history of human kind Sapiens. Whereas Sapiens is an answer to the question of "how did we became who we are?", Homo Deus is an attempt to answer the question of "where are we going?"

A good half of the book is a recapitulation of the latter part of Sapiens. The focus of the book is on religion. Not religion in the more conventional sense of the word: Harari is prone to use language in an idiosyncratic way. The religion of focus is the dominant one of the 20^th century, humanism.

By humanism, Harari means the political, economic and moral philosophies that grew in the west during the enlightenment, and took hold during the industrial revolution. This definition leads to an interesting new spin on the events of the 20^th century; it was a protracted and bloody holy war between three competing sects: classical liberalism, communism and fascism. The result of this holy war was the decisive victory of classical liberalism, after many decades of appearing likely to lose it.

The historical summary above just covers the matter which is repeated from Sapiens. The thesis to Homo Deus is this: humanism is unlikely to weather the growing understanding ourselves as biological systems, and the growing capability of gaming such systems.

As is often the case when one goes a bit of the rails of convention, there are some parts of Homo Deus that are unclear. Other parts I simply disagree with. However, its overarching thesis is well defended, and seems almost certainly correct.

Man: The ape that won the lottery

We start off the book with a pretty good summary of the state of human-kind at the current moment. Humans are apes who have just recently made life for the most part not a desperate struggle against starvation, war and disease (which is basically the state of all life on earth).

Time will tell (so the book argues) whether this is because we're actually smart enough, collectively, to game the natural and social system, or whether we're just enjoying a brief moment when life is easy. In the absence of this ever looming menace, humans will be free to spend more time on various passion projects such as the attainment of immortality and happiness. Progress in these two areas presents a big challenge to the viability of humanism as a core belief.

For example, real progress toward happiness has not been made through economic progress and consumerism, both of which are hallmark humanist remedies to the malady of suffering. Our scientific understanding of human biology is beginning to shed light on why this is the case -- we are not designed for happiness, we are designed to chase it. In fact, the picture emerging from scientific inquiry is that unhappiness, along with other states of mind, is at its root a chemical state, which bears a very close resemblance to other mammals. It is beginning to be hard to argue with two very disruptive assertions:

• We are mechanisms
• In at least the realm of emotional states, we are no different than a wide array of other animals

This picture puts us into a bit of an ethical quandary. An argument for our treatment of animals in modern agriculture, for instance, is that the net result is better nutrition and well-being for humans, and therefore makes up for the vast amounts of suffering visited upon animals in the process. If the sacredness of the human animal is idea to be abandoned, a necessary question arises: have we all been complicit in a crime of far greater magnitude than anything that we humans have done to each other?

In the pursuit of happiness, or at least convenience, humans have also made a fair amount of machines to do all sorts of things. For starters, many of our repetitive tasks are being or have been taken up by automation. A future is conceivable where large classes of people are close to worthless from a cold monetary perspective.

In addition, machines are also making more of our decisions: telling us the best route to take on the road, telling us when to get off our butts and move around a bit, even finding potential mates. The supremacy of our own agency could shortly be called into question. The imminence of this potentiality is made quite plausible from the observation of Harari's that machines don't have to be perfect in order become our counselors: they just have to be better than us; a shockingly low bar for many, as any observer of human behavior knows.

If humans are to be a sacred animal, there must be something magical about them. an intangible whatsit. They must possess a soul. It's harder to believe in that now. It looks a lot like we're just an exceptionally intelligent and neurotic meat-sack.

What does this hold for the future?

An observation made in both Sapiens and Homo Deus is that human religion has tended to reflect some basic aspects of our current state. For instance, the religions of hunter-gatherers of pre-history appear to have been animistic ones, in which there is not necessarily an explicit or implicit hierarchy of life with humans at the top, which bears a reasonably accurate picture of the humans' place in such a system.

This picture is in stark contrast to religions typically found in agricultural civilizations. In such settings, the religious framework often has a hierarchy with god ruling over man who are masters over dumb beasts. Again, as a reflection of agricultural life (particularly early agricultural life), this more or less checks out. Human's are still at the mercy of natural elements, yet within the margins allowed by natural fortune, humans have done a lot to bend life to its desires.

One could argue as well that humans' relationship with nature changed due to the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The spiritual consequences of which was perhaps best summarized by Nietzsche: "God is Dead". Humanism makes a certain amount of sense when viewed as yet another readjustment of mythological constructs. At some point in the 19th or 20th century, too much about nature was discovered for a god of any supernatural agency to be believable. However, enough about biology was unknown for the notion of a soul to still be supportable. Thus the placing of humanity on a pedestal of supreme moral importance.

How will this mythological construct survive a situation where most of us are unemployed, supervised by an algorithmic nanny who tells us what to eat, when to sleep, what to study, and whom to mate with?

If the conviction behind humanist values crumbles under the weight of scientific and technological advancement, what would replace it? After discounting the long-term viability of fundamentalist Islam or Christianity, Harari proposes two religious ideologies. The first is what he calls techno-humanism, the belief that human life and experience can be improved through augmentation and tinkering into something truly divine, which was basically the ideological goal of the Nazis (or evolutionary humanists, as he describes them): to transform man into a super-being. The second ideology proposed is datism, the idea that human life isn't sacred, per-se, but the processing of information is; this ideology implies that should we create some collective entity, or AI that outstrips our own abilities in the realm of data processing, then that thing's existence would hold a greater value than our own.

What are my thoughts on all this?

I think the challenges that science and technology pose to some basic features of our mores and values are put forward very well. What's less convincing are his suggestions about what might take the place of humanism, which is admittedly a much harder task.

Another thing you may have noticed from the synopsis above is the cavalier way in which some shaky assertions made. If you said "but... but... it's not that simple. Old religions are still believed... and I'm not sure you really can call liberal humanism a religion in the same sense..." and so on, you'd not be alone. Harari will occasionally acknowledge complicating truths that muddy up his narrative, dismiss it, and then carry on. For me this was most notable when he discounted the potency of the more militant sects of Islam. Specifically, he stated that both Islam and Christianity were no longer driving forces in global culture, a point which he made by asking the questions What was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? and what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions such as Islam and Christianity in the twentieth century?. On to his point:

Having mulled over these two questions, from where do you think the big changes of the twentieth century will emerge: from the Islamic State, or Google? Yes, the Islamic State knows how to put videos on YouTube, but leaving aside the industry of torture, what new inventions have emerged from Syria or Iraq lately?

I found this to be an unfounded dismissal of a serious social malady currently afflicting the world. A religion does not need to be a technological innovator in order to be a relevant political force, it just needs to know how to adapt to new innovations. For all the social backwardness of both the Islamic State (and Iran, for that matter) they have shown a disturbing talent in using modern technology to foment enthusiasm for their cause -- a cause which has also proven to be as resilient as a hydra.

In general, Harari's main problem in this book is over-simplification. For instance, Christianity was very influential in western societies even through the industrial revolution and the enlightenment. Missionary zeal was a large part of the Imperial drive of western powers int the 19th and 20th centuries long after humanist ideas had taken hold. I'd say the most the enlightenment did to moderate Christianity's influence on the west, was to make a Catholic think twice about killing a fellow christian just for being a protestant or vice-versa. It took a long time for Nietzsche's post-mortem of god to take hold. Furthermore, the real killer of god in the west may well have been WW1 and WW2 rather than science.

Toward the end of the book, Harari delves into some rather strange claims, particularly his description of datism. In the last chapter The Data Religion, Harari states

Datism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. This may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, but in fact has already conquered most of the scientific establishment(emphasis my own)

I'm married to a scientist, my brother and cousin are physicists, and I have at least a graduate degree in mathematics. I'd like to think that I'm not completely isolated from the scientific establishment, and I haven't heard a word to suggest anything like this. Maybe I'm just oblivious.

To justify that datism is taking hold, Harari points to the bizarre things people do on social media, like posting pictures of what they're about to eat. The suggestion is that people are spontaneously spewing out this stuff because they feel compelled to release their activities into a sort of sea of information for some kind of moral or existential cause. I don't buy it one bit. It seems to me that the behaviors people exhibit on social media is more likely a fad which will be ridiculed in ten years' time, than a new ideology exerting itself.

Now the other proposed ideological shift suggested, techno-humanism, seems much more easy to believe. People will probably make incremental enhancements to themselves, and these enhancements will change values and behaviours in unpredictable ways, much like what birth control pills, computers, the internet and smart phones have already done. This idea, however, says little that is not already obvious.

If the reader finds the questions and topics above worth reading about, then I have another recommendation which would complement this work nicely. It is by another Israeli by the name of David Deutsch called Beginning of Infinity, which is about epistemology. This is a wonderfully thought-provoking Book, indeed my attention has been turned to it several times every year since I read it some 8 years ago. It too has a rather expansive view about the human past and future, and I think it has the scaffolding for an ethic or ideology which is much more satisfactory than Datism. Simply put: People are special because they create explanatory knowledge, which is a thing of potentially cosmic significance. Like Harari, David Deutsch uses words idiosyncratically, so "people" and "explanatory knowledge" have their own peculiar definitions, which he covers in the book. As this is not a review of Beginning of Infinity I'll leave the summary at that. It is very apparent that I need to write about Beginning of Infinity in greater detail in the future.

A post-edit thought

While proof-reading this post (shocking that I actually proof-read these, given the number of blemishes that invariably survive) a fun thought occurred to me: What is the real danger to humanism if the truths it rests on are called into question anyway? People are very capable of double-think. Religion is truly undermined by rotting away its practice not its theological underpinnings. Well, if religious practice is a sort of common experience that binds people together, then I'll claim that the church of ABC, CBS, and NBC held this country together in the 20^the century, and the great splintering caused by the internet and cable television is going to be the real death of the modern nation-state as we know it.

cheers.