Under the Skin - Russell Brand and Yuval Noah Harari Flashcards
Discussion of how homo sapiens came to dominate the world, how our society is built on fiction and the creation of a class of useless people.
All large-scale human cooperation is based on shared fictions. This is most obvious in the realm of religion, where if everyone believes the same stories about a God, then they will build a church or they will wage jihad.
The fiction is effective in that human cooperation is possible. This is not necessarily to say that it is good or bad.
This does just not happen in religion, but also across political systems e.g. the nation state is a fictional story we have created. Nations have no physical or biological reality.
Money is the most successful story ever told because it is the only story that everyone believes. It becomes valuable because everyone has trust in money.
A lot of spiritual people don’t think of an afterlife necessarily as a post-anatomic or corporeal/bodily existence, but rather one which is super-material (superior to matter) or transcendent.
We don’t need to challenge or dismantle every story. Without believing in some common fictions you cannot have a functioning society. But we do need the ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality. This is a big problem for our species.
We rule the world because of our global networks of cooperation and they are all based on believing in fictional stories. In a way, we have an evolutionary pressure not to be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality.
The 2 most important stories are capitalism and humanism which for the last few generations have been in alliance. Now this alliance is breaking down.
Humanism: 1/ A rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.
2/ A Renaissance cultural movement which turned away from medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought.
The key way to differentiate between reality and fiction is to understand whether the entity can suffer. A human or an animal can suffer. They are real. A nation, a religion, or a political system or a corporation cannot suffer. Coca Cola cannot suffer. It is a story. Germany cannot suffer. It has no mind or consciousness.
We should be very careful that the stories we created serve us rather than us serving them.
Delineate - describe or portray something (precisely), describe, portray, represent
Keep making the effort to distinguish between fiction and reality - meditation is one way of doing this.
We have an inner propensity to narrativize: present or interpret (experience, events, etc.) in the form of a narrative. This helps us to demystify the world.
His books try to distinguish what is the reality of history and what are the narratives/the stories that we have been constructing.
When we look for meaning and identity, in 99% of the cases, what people want to hear is a story: what part do I have to play in this grand cosmic drama? What is my role in the great story of life and how do I fulfil it?
Homo sapiens is a storytelling ape but reality is not shaped like a story.
It doesn’t even matter what the story is, but just notice the shape: there is something wrong there.
The psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, used the concept of archetype in his theory of the human psyche. He believed that universal, mythic characters (e.g. Gods)—archetypes—reside within the collective unconscious of people the world over.
People tend to have 2 very different concepts of God and they tend to mix them together in a very confusing way.
First, there is God the MYSTERY. What is the meaning of life? What is reality? Where did the Big Bang and the laws of physics come from? We don’t know the answers and we say God. This God is really just a label to our own ignorance and limitations. The most distinctive feature about this God is that you know absolutely nothing about him. He is unknowable.
Second, we have the monotheistic God who has opinions about fashion, about food, sex, politics. This God we know everything about. He doesn’t like women to wear bikinis and he doesn’t like men to have sex. He doesn’t like masturbation. We know all of the details.
What is very problematic is how some people confuse the two. What begins as a mystery for humankind’s limitation in understanding suddenly becomes the God who has strong opinions about the smallest of details.
Because we don’t know the origin of the Big Bang, well homosexuality is wrong and you should not drive on the Sabbath or eat non-kosher food. There is absolutely no connection.
Humanism is the belief that the ultimate authority and meaning in the world comes from human feelings.
Very often we don’t know where our feelings have come from, and therefore we should not always act accordingly.
We do misdiagnose feelings often: think about the difference between love and desire.
Does the uncoupling of intelligence and consciousness mean the end of humanity?
Nobody knows what the job market will look like in 30 years. Who knows what to teach children in schools nowadays?
We are going to create a useless class of people. The massive investment in health, welfare and state education used to be because the people were necessary for the economy.
In the future, if the economy does not need you, there is no need to invest in your health or development.
Countries will soon realise that they do not need a large proportion of their workers any more.
Capitalism and humanism began by being in alliance. They needed each other.
What happens when they begin to divorce, when capitalism can perfectly function without humans?
With the rise of AI all decisions can be deferred to inorganic algorithms.
We will have greater faith in the algorithm because it can hold and compute more data at very high processing speeds.
The more realistic and frightening conclusion that one can draw from Homo Deus is not the Hollywood apocalypse where robots will kill us; rather, it’s the apocalypse of boredom where humans become useless and irrelevant.
What happens when AI begins to make better decisions than us? What relevance do humans have? How do we define ourselves without a job?
Are we just a temporary manifestation of our consciousness?
Homo sapiens are the serial killers of the ecosystem.
The basic reaction in the human mind is dissatisfaction. We are constantly craving more. We have no evidence that we are happier than anybody in the Stone Age.
History is divided into four parts:
The cognitive revolution: the point when humans are transformed from insignificant apes to the most powerful force on the planet. Until 70,000 years ago humans were just another kind of ape in East Africa without any special impact on the environment. Then by some change in the brain (nobody really knows how) we got this linguistic ability to start telling stories and creating fictions. This was the basis for cooperating in larger and larger numbers. This gave us a significant advantage as a species and is how we took over the world.
The agricultural revolution: When humans begin to learn how to control and manipulate a very small number of other species like cows, chickens, wheat and rice. Prior to this we were beholden to the seasons. We now had control over other species and ecosystems.
The unification of humanity: the third step was to create global cooperation networks.
The scientific revolution: the fourth stage is where we hack the laws of nature. We understand more deeply the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We are now very close to the point of having the divine abilities of creation and destruction.
