Evolutionary Philosophy

The EvPhil Toolkit

7/3/2026

In January, David Sloan Wilson published a fascinating article in the online magazine This View of Life. It is called, "On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems" and it outlined a new way of looking at the world while also providing important tools from two scientific fields to really help with this view. The essay served as a short target article that has so far attracted over a dozen commentaries, and a couple of weeks ago my own commentary was added to this collection. I’m very excited about it as I argue for some basic tools from evolutionary philosophy to be added to David’s scientific tools, and I plan to use this to update / create a Wikipedia entry for evolutionary philosophy. (I still can’t believe it’s not on there already!) I highly encourage you to read David’s original article. Then check out the list of commentaries on the side of his article to see which ones might interest you. After that, you can read my article as well. As always, your feedback would be greatly appreciated to help this philosophy keep evolving. Thanks!

“Adding a Philosophical Toolkit to the New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems” by Ed Gibney, published June 16, 2026 in This View of Life.

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Review of “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins

6/19/2026

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With so much talk of AI flying about in the news these days, I thought it would be really helpful to look more deeply into the natural, rather than the artificial, version of intelligence. Neuroscientist and tech mogul Jeff Hawkins is a fascinating guy for this exploration via his book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. I first heard Hawkins discuss this idea on an episode of Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science Podcast about 5 years ago, but I finally read the book this Spring and really enjoyed it. As is usual for my book reviews, I’ll share quotes from each chapter and give some reflections along the way. These come from the Kindle version published in 2022 with a foreword by Richard Dawkins. Enjoy!

Foreword by Richard Dawkins

(p7) Don’t read this book at bedtime. Not that it’s frightening. It won’t give you nightmares. But it is so exhilarating, so stimulating, it’ll turn your mind into a whirling maelstrom of excitingly provocative ideas—you’ll want to rush out and tell someone rather than go to sleep.

What a first four sentences! That was very generous of Dawkins but he actually says little else in his short foreword other than give the briefest of summaries of what is to come. We can skip that though and let Hawkins speak for himself.

PART 1: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE BRAIN
Chapter 1 Old Brain—New Brain

(p16) For the past fifteen years, I have led a research team in Silicon Valley that studies a part of the brain called the neocortex. The neocortex occupies about 70 percent of the volume of a human brain and it is responsible for everything we associate with intelligence, from our senses of vision, touch, and hearing, to language in all its forms, to abstract thinking such as mathematics and philosophy.
(p22) I created the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI) in 2002.
(p23) after three years of running an institute, I decided the best way to achieve my goals was to lead my own research team.
(p23) several colleagues and I started Numenta. Numenta is an independent research company. Our primary goal is to develop a theory of how the neocortex works. Our secondary goal is to apply what we learn about brains to machine learning and machine intelligence.
(p27) there are several pea-size organs in the amygdala, an older part of the brain, that are responsible for different types of aggression, such as premeditated and impulsive aggression. The neocortex is surprisingly different. Although it occupies almost three-quarters of the brain’s volume and is responsible for a myriad of cognitive functions, it has no visually obvious divisions.
(p28) Nonetheless, the neocortex is still divided into several dozen areas, or regions, that perform different functions.
(p32) layers are only a rough guide to where a particular type of neuron might be found. It matters more what a neuron connects to and how it behaves. When you classify neurons by their connectivity, there are dozens of types.
(p32) Neurons in some layers make long-distance horizontal connections, but most of the connections are vertical. This means that information arriving in a region of the neocortex moves mostly up and down between the layers before being sent elsewhere.

So that’s a quick background on who Hawkins is and what he has been working on. He went into some more detail about his time in the tech world before this, but I missed highlighting any of that so I should mention here that he made a lot (a lot!) of money as the co-founder of Palm Computing where he co-created the wildly successful PalmPilot. He actually proposed a PhD where he would develop a theory of the neocortex but that was rejected as untenable so he went to work in tech, made his millions, and then went back to study what he was really interested in. Some may see that as the reckless folly of a dilettante, but it definitely provided a high level of resources and independence for his incredibly ambitious goals.

Chapter 2 Vernon Mountcastle’s Big Idea

(p39) [In 1978, in an essay in The Mindful Brain,] Mountcastle proposed that the reason the regions look similar is that they are all doing the same thing. What makes them different is not their intrinsic function but what they are connected to.
(p39) I hope you can appreciate how unexpected and revolutionary Mountcastle’s proposal is. Darwin proposed that the diversity of life is due to one basic algorithm. Mountcastle proposed that the diversity of intelligence is also due to one basic algorithm.
(p40) what was Mountcastle’s proposal for the location of the cortical algorithm? He said that the fundamental unit of the neocortex, the unit of intelligence, was a “cortical column.”
(p40) there are roughly 150,000 cortical columns stacked side by side in a human neocortex.
(p41) Mountcastle pointed out that each column is further divided into several hundred “minicolumns.”
(p41) the major expansion of the modern human neocortex relative to our hominid ancestors occurred rapidly in evolutionary time, just a few million years. This is probably not enough time for multiple new complex capabilities to be discovered by evolution, but it is plenty of time for evolution to make more copies of the same thing.
(p42) there is [also] the argument of extreme flexibility. Humans can do many things for which there was no evolutionary pressure.
(p42) The fact that we can do these things tells us that the brain relies on a general-purpose method of learning.

I have to admit that this was news to me about the neocortex all looking so similar. Whenever I heard about the visual cortex, auditory cortex, or various regions like Broca’s area, I always thought there must be some slightly obvious differences between the structures. I just never dug deep enough to find this out. But I found Hawkins’ description really persuasive and it also makes sense given the plasticity of brains that are sometimes able to rewire themselves after senses are damaged.

Chapter 3 A Model of the World in Your Head

(p45) What the brain does may seem obvious to you. The brain gets inputs from its sensors, it processes those inputs, and then it acts.
(p46) From the moment I became interested in how the brain worked, I realized that thinking of the neocortex as an input-leads-to-output system would not be fruitful.
(p46) My brain, specifically my neocortex, was making multiple simultaneous predictions of what it was about to see, hear, and feel.
(p49) the neocortex is structured at birth to see, hear, and even learn language. But it is also true that the neocortex doesn’t know what it will see, what it will hear, and what specific languages it might learn.
(p50) The inputs to the brain are constantly changing. There are two reasons why. First, the world can change. … The second reason is because we move.
(p51) the brain learns a model of the world by observing how our sensory inputs change as we move.
(p53) Typically, the number of neurons that are active at the same time is small, maybe 2 percent.
(p54) Every thought you have is the activity of neurons. Everything you see, hear, or feel is also the activity of neurons.
(p54) When we learn something, the connections are strengthened, and when we forget something, the connections are weakened. This basic idea was proposed by Donald Hebb in the 1940s and today it is referred to as Hebbian learning.

This was more familiar. Neurons that fire together, wire together. And modern neuroscience now sees our brains as prediction machines. (See Clark and Seth, for example.)

Chapter 4 The Brain Reveals Its Secrets

(p56) A high school student can learn the principles of evolution, genetics, quantum mechanics, and relativity. Each of these scientific advances was preceded by confusing observations. But now, they seem straightforward and logical. Similarly, I always believed that the neocortex appeared complicated largely because we didn’t understand it, and that it would appear relatively simple in hindsight.
(p57) I want to describe several key moments when our understanding took a leap forward, when nature whispered in our ear telling us something we had overlooked. There are three such “aha” moments that I remember vividly.
(p57) Discovery Number One: The Neocortex Learns a Predictive Model of the World
(p58) Discovery Number Two: Predictions Occur Inside Neurons
(p60) Neurons have to figure out how much context is necessary to make the right prediction.
(p62) Oddly, less than 10 percent of the cell’s synapses are in the proximal area. The other 90 percent are too far away to cause a spike.
(p62) For many years, no one knew what 90 percent of the synapses in the neocortex did.
(p63) The big insight I had was that dendrite spikes are predictions.
(p64) This is a common observation about the neocortex: unexpected inputs cause a lot more activity than expected ones.
(p64) A prediction occurs when a neuron recognizes a pattern, creates a dendrite spike, and is primed to spike earlier than other neurons. With thousands of distal synapses, each neuron can recognize hundreds of patterns that predict when the neuron should become active. Prediction is built into the fabric of the neocortex, the neuron.
(p65) Discovery Number Three: The Secret of the Cortical Column Is Reference Frames
(p67) The movement-related signal we had been searching for, the signal we needed to predict the next input, was “location on the object.”
(p68) Creating reference frames and tracking locations is not a trivial task. I knew it would take several different types of neurons and multiple layers of cells to make these calculations.
(p71) The likelihood that a solution is correct increases exponentially with the number of constraints it satisfies.

And so, Hawkins argues that his theory of the neocortex as comprised of neurons that predict the world using distal synapses (a synaptic connection located at the far end of a neuron's dendrite, which can influence the neuron's activity by triggering action potentials) and reference frames (more on this in the coming chapters) is very likely to be true because of all the constraints it fits within. In other words, there is so much data that fits with this theory. I’m not expert enough to tell you if there are other data that confound this, but it seems pretty persuasive as presented.

Chapter 5 Maps in the Brain

(p74) [The] simple observation, that we perceive objects as being somewhere—not in our eyes and ears, but at some location out in the world—tells us that the brain must have neurons whose activity represents the location of every object that we perceive.
(p75) If the quantity of a needed resource, such as food, is increasing, then [bacteria] are more likely to keep moving in the same direction. If the quantity is decreasing, then they are more likely to turn and try a different direction. A bacterium doesn’t know where it is; it doesn’t have any way to represent its location in the world. It just goes forward and uses a simple rule for deciding when to turn.
(p75) Now consider the advantages afforded to an animal that knows where it is
(p76) Being able to navigate the world is so valuable that evolution discovered multiple methods for doing it.
(p76) In mammals, the old brain parts where these map-creating neurons exist are called the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.
(p77) [In the neocortex, there are] place cells: neurons that fire every time the rat is in a particular location
(p77) [and] grid cells, which fire at multiple locations in an environment.
(p80) The mapping mechanisms in the neocortex are not an exact copy of ones in the old brain. … It is as if nature stripped down the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex to a minimal form, made tens of thousands of copies, and arranged them side by side in cortical columns. That became the neocortex.
(p86) Not all of the cortical columns are modeling objects. What the rest of the columns are doing is the topic of the next chapter.

Fascinating. Now I understand why the London Cab driver’s hippocampus is the brain region that grows during their training.

Chapter 6 Concepts, Language, and High-Level Thinking

(p87) Vernon Mountcastle proposed that every column in the neocortex performs the same basic function. For this to be true, then, language and other high-level cognitive abilities are, at some fundamental level, the same as seeing, touching, and hearing.
(p88) Mountcastle didn’t propose what the common function is, and it is hard to imagine what it could be, so it is easy to ignore his proposal or reject it outright.
(p88) In more abstract terms, we can think of reference frames as a way to organize any kind of knowledge.
(p90) The hypothesis I explore in this chapter is that the brain arranges all knowledge using reference frames, and that thinking is a form of moving.
(p91) Reference frames are also the means for achieving goals. Just as a paper map allows you to figure out how to get from where you are to a desired new location, reference frames in the neocortex allow you to figure out the steps you should take to achieve more conceptual goals, such as solving an engineering problem or getting a promotion at work.
(p92) In the rest of this chapter, I will first describe a well-studied feature of the neocortex, its division into “what” regions and “where” regions. I use this discussion to show how cortical columns can perform markedly different functions by a simple change to their reference frames.
(p92) Your brain has two vision systems. If you follow the optic nerve as it travels from the eye to the neocortex, you will see that it leads to two parallel vision systems, called the what visual pathway and the where visual pathway.
(p93) There are what and where regions for seeing, touching, and hearing.
(p93) Cortical grid cells in what columns attach reference frames to objects. Cortical grid cells in where columns attach reference frames to your body.
(p95) How can cortical columns create models of things that we can’t sense?
(p95) The trick is that reference frames don’t have to be anchored to something physical.
(p95) The second trick is that reference frames for concepts do not have to have the same number or type of dimensions
(p102) Mathematicians manipulating equations, explorers traveling through a forest, and fingers touching coffee cups all need maplike reference frames to know where they are and what movements they need to perform to get where they want to be.
(p102) the politician imagines what will happen if they do these things. Their goal is to find a series of actions that will lead them to the desired result: enacting the new law.
(p108) Reference frames provide the substrate for learning the structure of the world, where things are, and how they move and change. Reference frames can do this not just for the physical objects that we can directly sense, but also for objects we cannot see or feel and even for concepts that have no physical form.

Wow. That is a bit mind-blowing but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Each incremental step along the way is easy to see and offers advantages. The body makes do with what it already has, extending this into new functions. And our embodied minds allow us to make models of the world, both physical and abstract. Now we have everything in place for Hawkins’ big idea.

Chapter 7 The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence

(p111) Today, the most common way of thinking about the neocortex is like a flowchart. Information from the senses is processed step-by-step as it passes from one region of the neocortex to the next.
(p111) It is presumed that a similar process—going from simple features to complex features to complete objects—is also occurring with touch and hearing.
(p111) This view of the neocortex as a hierarchy of feature detectors has been the dominant theory for fifty years.
(p115) Our proposal of reference frames in cortical columns suggests a different way of thinking about how the neocortex works. It says that all cortical columns, even in low-level sensory regions, are capable of learning and recognizing complete objects.
(p117) Knowledge of something is distributed in thousands of columns, but these are a small subset of all the columns.
(p118) Complex systems work best when knowledge and actions are distributed among many, but not too many, elements. Everything in the brain works this way.
(p118) each column is a complete sensory-motor system, [which distributes the workload] just as each water department worker is able to independently fix some portion of the water infrastructure.
(p119) Scientists have long assumed that the varied inputs to the neocortex must converge onto a single place in the brain where something like a coffee cup is perceived. This assumption is part of the hierarchy of features theory. However, the connections in the neocortex don’t look like this.
(p119) we have proposed an answer: columns vote. Your perception is the consensus the columns reach by voting.
(p122) We propose that [the] cells with long-distance connections are voting.
(p122) cells that represent what object is being sensed can vote and will project broadly.
(p123) If you could look down on the neocortex, you would see a stable pattern of activity in one layer of cells. The stability would span large areas, covering thousands of columns. These are the voting neurons. The activity of the cells in other layers would be rapidly changing on a column-by-column basis. What we perceive is based on the stable voting neurons.
(p125) The voting layer wants to reach a consensus—it does not permit two objects to be active simultaneously—so it picks one possibility over the other. [This is why you] can perceive faces or a vase [in the famous illusion], but not both at the same time.
(p131) The Thousand Brains Theory is [currently] a framework; it is like finishing the puzzle’s border and knowing what the overall picture looks like. As I write, we have filled in some parts of the interior of the puzzle, whereas many other parts are not done.

I have to say, this has revolutionized the way I think about my conscious self and what is humming along in the unconscious background waiting to bubble up when enough “votes” come together to sway my perceptions and predictions. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective and it makes sense as a robust design full of redundancies. It is not dissimilar to the way bees form a superorganism, which can act as a whole based on information gathered by individuals who dance more or less vigorously the more or less certain they are of the value of what they have found. And it fits with Lynn Margulis’ theory of symbiosis where life is not composed of individuals competing to the death with one another, but is instead composed of groups of groups of groups all the way up and down the chain of life, able to emerge as higher-level entities wherever a group has managed to evolve effective cooperation towards flourishing. Hawkins’ description of the neocortex sounds like that to me—countless individual neurons shaped by millions of years of evolution to come together and enable what we experience as a complex single self.

This Thousand Brains theory, with its innumerable copies of the same neuronal mechanisms, also seems to ask tough questions for people proffering some versions of evolutionary psychology and mental modularity. And it may be hard to square with the theory that we have specialized mental immune systems in our brains. But those are questions for another day. For now, let’s quickly look at the rest of this book and how Hawkins himself applies his idea.

PART 2: MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

(P136) From here on in the book, I am going to describe a future that is different than what most people, indeed most experts, are expecting. First, I describe a future of artificial intelligence that runs counter to what most of the leaders of AI are currently thinking, and then, in Part 3, I describe the future of humanity in a way you probably have never considered.

Okay, this sounds very interesting.

Chapter 8 Why There Is No “I” in AI

(p139) the biggest reason that today’s AI systems are not considered intelligent is they can only do one thing, whereas humans can do many things. In other words, AI systems are not flexible. Any individual human, such as you or me, can learn to play Go, to farm, to write software, to fly a plane, and to play music.
(p141) I know it sounds like it should be easy, but no one could figure out how a computer could know something as simple as what a ball is. This problem is called knowledge representation. Some AI scientists concluded that knowledge representation was not only a big problem for AI, it was the only problem.
(p143) Deep learning networks work well, but not because they solved the knowledge representation problem. They work well because they avoided it completely, relying on statistics and lots of data instead.
(p143) they don’t possess knowledge and, therefore, are not on the path to having the ability of a five-year-old child.
(p145) Truly intelligent machines, AGI, will learn models of the world using maplike reference frames just like the neocortex. I see this as inevitable. I don’t believe there is another way to create truly intelligent machines.
(p146) Today we are building dedicated AI systems that are the best at whatever task they are designed to do. But in the future, most intelligent machines will be universal: more like humans, capable of learning practically anything.
(p148) Due to dramatic reductions in cost and size, general-purpose computers became one of the largest and most economically important technologies of the last century. I believe that general-purpose AI will similarly dominate machine intelligence in the latter part of the twenty-first century.
(p149) My proposal for what qualifies as intelligent is based on the brain. Each of the four attributes in the following list is something we know that the brain does and that I believe an intelligent machine must do too.
(p150) 1. Learning Continuously
(p150) 2. Learning via Movement
(p151) 3. Many Models
(p152) 4. Using Reference Frames to Store Knowledge
(p153) Once AI researchers understand the essential role of movement and reference frames for creating AGI, the separation between artificial intelligence and robotics will disappear completely.

This makes so much sense to me and is largely absent from the AI discussions in the news today. As far as I can tell, the world is being fooled by overconfident tech bros with their smooth-talking machines whose actual capabilities are being hidden inside a black box. And so much money and energy are being sunk into this that it is distorting the environment and the economy while accelerating the enshittification of everything on the Internet. It’s so frustrating.

Chapter 9 When Machines Are Conscious

(p156) Since there isn’t even an agreement on what the word “consciousness” means, it is best to not worry about it.
(p158) our sense of awareness, what many people would call being conscious, requires that we form moment-to-moment memories of our actions. Consciousness also requires that we form moment-to-moment memories of our thoughts.
(p162) I don’t have an explanation for why pain hurts, or why it feels the way it does and not like something else. This doesn’t bother me in any deep way.
(p164) Fears and emotions are created by neurons in the old brain when they release hormones and other chemicals into the body. The neocortex may help the old brain decide when to release these chemicals, but without the old brain we would not sense fear or sadness. Fear of death and sorrow for loss are not required ingredients for a machine to be conscious or intelligent.
(p166) At some point in the future, we will accept that any system that learns a model of the world, continuously remembers the states of that model, and recalls the remembered states will be conscious. There will be remaining unanswered questions, but consciousness will no longer be talked about as “the hard problem.” It won’t even be considered a problem.

Ugh. Hawkins starts by admitting we don’t have an agreed upon definition of consciousness but then he goes on to craft a very narrow definition of it and blithely dismiss the hard problem. He’s out of his depth here and there’s no need to harp on it. But I would say that “fear of death and sorrow for loss” may not be required for Hawkins’ very limited definitions of consciousness and intelligence, but I believe they are absolutely required for wisdom and the kind of sentience that matters.

Chapter 10 The Future of Machine Intelligence

(p168) older parts of the human brain control the basic functions of life. They create our emotions, our desires to survive and procreate, and our innate behaviors. When creating intelligent machines, there is no reason we should replicate all the functions of the human brain. The new brain, the neocortex, is the organ of intelligence, so intelligent machines need something equivalent to it. When it comes to the rest of the brain, we can choose which parts we want and which parts we don’t.
(p168) Intelligence is the ability of a system to learn a model of the world. However, the resulting model by itself is valueless, emotionless, and has no goals. Goals and values are provided by whatever system is using the model.
(p169) The recipe for designing an intelligent machine can be broken into three parts: embodiment, parts of the old brain, and the neocortex.
(p174) The neocortex must be attached to something that already has sensors and already has behaviors. It does not create completely new behaviors; it learns how to string together existing ones in new and useful ways.

This seems accurate but I would be more careful with the words being used. Hawkins seems to think we can disaggregate “intelligent behavior” into “behavior” (driven by emotions) and “intelligence” (guided by the neocortex) and somehow arrive at a component of intelligence all on its own without any emotions. But without goals and values, how exactly is something going to be intelligent? The simple dictionary definition of intelligence is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”. Lacking all motivation, an agent will not “acquire” or “apply” anything. In that case, the agent is merely a dumb tool that something else with intelligence can use. Any actions that AI agents take were given to it by some human, wittingly or unwittingly. In his solo podcast lecture titled “What is Intelligence?”, the intelligence researcher Scott Barry Kaufman made a specific point of introducing the roll of motivation to his new theory of personal intelligence (start watching at 41:29 for more). He did this for humans because different levels of motivation cause real differences in the perceived intelligence of one person compared to another. But if we imagine removing all motivation—something that is impossible for a living person, but is absolutely the case for AI systems—then all of the real intelligence goes away as well. The implications of this are actually close to what Hawkins says next.

Chapter 11 The Existential Risks of Machine Intelligence

(p186) It is one thing for bad people to use intelligent machines to do bad things; it is something else if the intelligent machines are themselves bad actors and decide on their own to wipe out humanity. I am going to focus only on the latter possibility, the existential threats of AI.
(p187) arguments are being made without any understanding of what intelligence is. They feel wildly speculative, based on incorrect notions not just of what is technically possible, but what it means to be intelligent.
(p191) The goal-misalignment threat depends on two improbabilities: first, although the intelligent machine accepts our first request, it ignores subsequent requests, and, second, the intelligent machine is capable of commandeering sufficient resources to prevent all human efforts to stop it.
(p192) Intelligent machines will not develop misaligned goals unless we go to great lengths to endow them with that ability.
(p192) We don’t let a single human, or even a small number of humans, control the world’s resources. We need to be similarly careful with machines.

Agreed. And note that the “we” in these prescriptions are human beings with actual motivations, intelligence, and moral responsibility. Don’t forget that whenever Silicon Valley executives try to fob off their liability onto some kind of “conscious AI”.

PART 3: HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

(p197) How we act in the coming years will determine whether our sudden rise leads to a sudden collapse—or, alternately, if we exit this period of rapid change on a sustainable trajectory. These are the themes I discuss in the remaining chapters of the book.

This last section of the book is the most speculative from Hawkins so I’ll go through it quickly.

Chapter 12 False Beliefs

(p200) everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain.
(p201) it doesn’t feel as if we are living in a simulation. It feels as if we are looking directly at the world, touching it, smelling it, and feeling it.
(p207) Believing the Earth is flat does not cause you to act in a way that spreads your belief to other people. Viral models of the world prescribe behaviors that spread the model from brain to brain in increasing numbers.
(p210) There is only one way, that we know of, to discern falsehoods from truths, one way to see if our model of the world has errors. That method is to actively seek evidence that contradicts our beliefs.
(p210) Actively looking for evidence to disprove our beliefs is the scientific method.

Yeah, okay, but there’s a lot of philosophy out there dedicated to this. It’s great that Hawkins recognizes this is an issue that we need to address, but this chapter was very shallow.

Chapter 13 The Existential Risks of Human Intelligence

(p216) Life is based on a very simple idea: genes make as many copies of themselves as possible.
(p216) However, what is good for genes is not always good for individuals.
(p217) So why aren’t we collectively lowering the population? Because the old brain is still in charge.
(p218) The simple and clever solution is to make sure every woman has the ability to control her own fertility and is empowered to exercise that option if she wants to.
(p222) two common false beliefs that are existential threats are denying the danger of climate change and belief in an afterlife.
(p225) Each of us has an old brain that causes us to behave in ways that are detrimental to our species’ long-term survival. Are we doomed? Is there any way out of this dilemma? In the remaining chapters, I describe our options.

You won’t get any arguments from me about educating women and the dangers of climate change and imaginary afterlives. Like a good engineer, Hawkins lays out clear problems that he wants to solve.

Chapter 14 Merging Brains and Machines

(p226) There are two widely discussed proposals for how humans could combine brains and computers to prevent our death and extinction. One is uploading our brains into computers, and the other is merging our brains with computers.
(p232) “Uploading your brain” is a misleading phrase. What you have really done is split yourself into two people.
(p234) Similar to the “upload your brain” scenario, there are extreme technical challenges that have to be overcome to merge with a computer.

So, neither of these looks very promising any time soon. If that’s the case…

Chapter 15 Estate Planning for Humanity

(p237) Up until now, I have been discussing intelligence in both biological and machine form. From here on I want to shift the focus to knowledge. Knowledge is just the name for what we have learned about the world.
(p237) In this and in the final chapter, I explore the idea that knowledge is worthy of preservation and propagation, even if that means doing so independently of humans.
(p239) Estate planning is something you do during your life that benefits the future, not yourself.
(p241) I am going to discuss these ideas further by describing three scenarios we might use to communicate with the future.
(p241) Message in a Bottle
(p242) Leave the Lights On
(p249) Wiki Earth

Sure, this seems like a good idea as humanity gets closer to extinction. But we don’t feel that pressure yet. So, for the same reason that 25-year-olds rarely have wills, this is unlikely to happen.

Chapter 16 Genes Versus Knowledge

(p255) In this final chapter, I discuss three methods we might pursue to prevent our demise. The first method may or may not work without modifying our genes, the second is based on gene modification, and the third abandons biology altogether.
(p255) Become a Multi-planet Species
(p257) For humans to live on Mars on a permanent basis requires intelligent machines to help us.
(p261) Environmentalism is not about preserving nature, but about the choices we make. As a rule, environmentalists make choices that benefit future humans.
(p261) do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of selfish genes? Or do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and the desire to understand the world?
(p262) Modify Our Genes
(p263) imagine we learn how to modify our genes to eliminate aggressive behavior and make a person more altruistic. Should we allow this?
(p265) Leaving Darwin’s Orbit
(p265) The ultimate way to free our intelligence from the grip of our old brain and our biology is to create machines that are intelligent like us, but not dependent upon us.
(p270) I want to make the case for knowledge over genes. There is a fundamental difference between the two, a difference that makes preserving and spreading knowledge, in my opinion, a more worthy goal than preserving and spreading our genes.
(p270) Genes are just molecules that replicate.
(p270) Knowledge is different. Knowledge has both a direction and an end goal.
(p270) There is a direction to knowledge. Knowledge of gravity can go from no knowledge, to Newton’s, to Einstein’s, but it can’t go in the opposite direction.
(p271) In addition to a direction, knowledge has an end goal.
(p271) There are plenty of other things we don’t understand: What is time? How did life originate? How common is intelligent life? Answering these questions is a goal, and history suggests we can achieve it.

Oofa. First of all, environmentalists don’t just care about future humans. Many of us care about life in general, where humans are deeply enmeshed and interconnected. (See my magazine article “When the Human in Humanism Isn’t Enough”.) Then, it seems like Hawkins stopped reading evolutionary biology after discovering Dawkins’ selfish genes. But there are many stories out there focusing on the role that cooperation has played in the evolution of life through its major transitions (c.f.: Prosocial, Survival of the Nicest, or Mutual Aid). So, we probably don’t need to take such drastic measures as genetic modification (whose outcomes are unknowable) in order to improve society. And finally, as for knowledge having a direction and a goal, this is just at odds with the fundamentals of epistemology. Truth may be a goal, but it seems unlikely we’ll ever know we have it. That is why knowledge can go (and has gone) in lots of different directions as new observations roll in. As the future unfolds, I think we ought to keep valuing the genetic codes of life that have got us this far. They took billions of years to develop and there is a lot of intelligence built in them that we are very unlikely to have fully grasped (seeing as how we have no other examples yet of how life proceeds).

That’s all for now. As a quick summary, I thought the first third of this book was filled with great science. It is a potential tour de force for understanding our minds and grappling with the confusing situations that AI research and hype are currently bringing upon us. After that, the rest of the book could use some better philosophy. I actually wrote something to help with that which was just published so I’ll share that next week.

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Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (5/5)

12/17/2025

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Finally, I’ve reached the end of my detailed review for this 466-page book. As a reminder, Sapiens is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

The first four parts of my review (1, 2, 3, 4) have largely coincided with this structure, except for when it made more sense for a transition chapter or two to be moved to its following part. That is the case here too since the final two chapters of Part Four and the brief Afterward all focus on the future of humanity, as opposed to the focus on the past that the first 18 chapters had. This is where Harari indulges in quite a bit of speculation and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is where I have the biggest disagreements with him. I think it’s important to cover these, though, because of the vast popularity of this book and because, as evidenced by the many others that have come in its wake, Harari has become a bit of an oracle for a certain segment of society. As before, I’ll offer my critique of this by noting important quotes from the 2014 eBook and then reacting to each chapter after I have presented it.

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Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Chapter 19 And They Lived Happily Ever After

(p. 421) The last 500 years have witnessed a breathtaking series of revolutions. The earth has been united into a single ecological and historical sphere.
(p. 421) But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a newfound contentment?
(p. 421) If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science, and industry?
(p. 422) Most current ideologies and political programs are based on rather flimsy ideas concerning the real source of human happiness. Nationalists believe that political self-determination is essential for our happiness. Communists postulate that everyone would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Capitalists maintain that only the free market can ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by creating economic growth and material abundance and by teaching people to be self-reliant and enterprising. What would happen if serious research were to disprove these hypotheses?
(p. 422) so far historians have avoided raising these questions – not to mention answering them. They have researched the history of just about everything —politics, society, economics, gender, diseases, sexuality, food, clothing—yet they have seldom stopped to ask how these influence human happiness.
(p. 422) In one common view, human capabilities have increased throughout history. Since humans generally use their capabilities to alleviate miseries and fulfil aspirations, it follows that we must be happier than our medieval ancestors, and they must have been happier than Stone Age hunter-gatherers. But this progressive account is unconvincing.
(p. 423) Evolution molded our minds and bodies to the life of hunter-gatherers. The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives
(p. 423) Nothing in the comfortable lives of the urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt.
(p. 425) Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity. And perhaps our less well-to-do ancestors found much contentment in community, religion, and a bond with nature.
(p. 425) The first step is to define what is to be measured. The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. Happiness, according to this view, is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment
(p. 428) the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health, or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
(p. 432) correlate the answers people give [happiness researchers] with biochemical and genetic factors. Their findings are shocking. Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution.
(p. 433) Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm.
(p. 434) Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.
(p. 434) if we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance
(p. 435) Take, for example, the French Revolution. The revolutionaries were busy: they executed the king, gave lands to the peasants, declared the rights of man, abolished noble privileges, and waged war against the whole of Europe. Yet none of that changed French biochemistry
(p. 436) we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.
(p. 436) Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?
(p. 437) [other] findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
(p. 438) Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, if they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion.
(p. 438) As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.
(p. 438) Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. … no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade, or building a new cathedral.
(p. 439) If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively. Is there a third alternative?
(p. 441) According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings.
(p. 441) The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves.
(p. 442) the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness, and dissatisfaction.
(p. 442) People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. … The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.

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Oh boy. As I reread this chapter for this final post, it became clear to me that this is exactly why I felt such a deep need to write this review. There is so much of importance here that I think is misconstrued. I wanted to give Harari the first word so you can see his ideas in full, but let’s start with mine with this:

On page 421, Harari wrote, “The earth has been united into a single ecological and historical sphere.” That is sort of true. But we are nowhere near a single cultural sphere in the way that The Major Transitions of Evolution would expect. The last major transition created sociocultural evolution, and we are currently in the midst of winnowing out successful cultures from ones that proffer dead-end worldviews. There is much work to be done there. For example…

On page 425, Harari wrote, “The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. Happiness, according to this view, is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment” (emphasis added). Actually, philosophers have long made distinctions between these two feelings and research in the field of positive psychology has teased out many of the differences. Either way, when Harari asked on page 421, “But are we happier?” this seems to me to be the wrong question. What ultimately matters is the ultimate goal, the greatest good, or what philosophers call the summum bonum. I have defined this in a published paper as, “that which makes the survival of life more robust.” Happiness as an “immediate pleasure” is merely an instantaneous barometer that evolution has shaped to reward actions that have proven in the past to move one towards or away from survival and reproduction. This immediate feeling doesn’t necessarily know anything at all about wider, long-term consequences. It takes emotional reactions to considered judgments for that to occur. Happiness as “long-term contentment” is better suited to rationally deicide if one’s past efforts have done good. But one needs a good definition of good in order to do this correctly. If you accept my definition, then the answers to the rest of Harari’s questions become clearer.

For example, on page 421, Harari asks, “what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science, and industry?” The answer is that they could make the survival of life more robust. If we stopped fighting over all the abundance we have created, Homo sapiens could easily pull together and create the most robust habitats for all of life that Earth has ever seen. And then the possibilities for happiness (according to either definition) would expand exponentially.

This sheds new light on Harari’s claim on page 423 that “Nothing in the comfortable lives of the urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt.” This is madness! I’m not sure this is even true, but if it were, then it would simply be because the forager band was teetering on the edge of starvation, and the successful navigation of a very risky hunt would have meant their continued survival for a few more months. Would we really want to return to such precarious positions just for the sake of some momentary endorphin rushes? By my account we most certainly should not.

With this in mind, let’s go through some more points one by one:

On page 423, Harari said, “Evolution molded our minds and bodies to the life of hunter-gatherers. The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives.” Says who? Our current lives are not supernatural so they are perfectly natural. They may not be optimum, but there is nothing condemning us to lives of misery. We have different constraints now than a hunter-gatherer, but we have so much more security and freedom too. By my account, “evolution molded our minds and bodies” into the most flexible tool on the planet, which is precisely why we have adapted to live everywhere on it and in so many different ways. This is something to celebrate rather than rue.

On page 425, Harari said, “Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity. And perhaps our less well-to-do ancestors found much contentment in community, religion, and a bond with nature.” Instead, I would argue that people suffer because we haven’t made the major evolutionary transition to the right worldview yet. Our cultures are competing for that right now, and it is discomfiting to be in the midst of that, but the beliefs of our “less well-to-do ancestors” were not leading us to a better place. We can confidently leave many of those behind.

On page 434, Harari said, “if we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance.” This is a ludicrous conclusion. Harari’s extreme focus on momentary feelings has blinded him to the realities of progress towards the good. All of the biochemical signals of pleasure that humans have ever received can add up to significant steps forward. (Or backward, wherever too much short-term pleasure has been valued over long-term rewards.) The biological approach to happiness merely shows that we remain biochemically sensitive to positive or negative directions in our experience. There is still much work to do to improve that experience but we have undeniably come a long way.

On page 428, Harari said, “the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health, or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.” Maybe so, but once again this kind of happiness is not the goal. It is only a proximate goal towards something much bigger and better.

On page 436, Harari said, “we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.” This is horrifying. Momentary pleasure is not true happiness, nor does it lead to the ultimate good.

On page 436, Harari said, “Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time—what could be wrong with that?” This is not hard to me. Based on my definition of good, Huxley’s chemical bliss would lead humanity to inaction, fragility, and eventual extinction. That is why it is monstrous.

On page 437, Harari said, “[other] findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.” Finally! This shows some promise.

But then on page 438, Harari said, “Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. … no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade, or building a new cathedral.” NOOOOO! Any meaning that we give to our lives is built from the long evolutionary emergence of life and the goals that we have come to recognize as valuable. Just because no gods gave them to us, that does not make it delusional to work towards them. Our medieval counterparts were delusional and wasteful about this, which is why they had to suffer so much for so long. We should not make their same mistake.

So, when Harari asks on page 439, “Is there a third alternative?”, the clear answer to me is yes. And it is found in evolutionary philosophy.

But Harari has something else in mind. On page 442, he said, “People are liberated from suffering…when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. … The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.” I’ll agree that “pleasant feelings” are not the right goal, but those who blissfully zone out are a problem too. They can hardly imagine the profound missed opportunities for progress that this interpretation of Buddhism leads to. In a 2017 interview, Harari said, “I start and finish my workday with one hour of meditation. Every year, I go for a long meditation retreat of between 30 and 60 days.” This does much more for momentary feelings of pleasure than it does for the good (as I have defined it). I believe this has deeply clouded Harari’s judgment about feelings of happiness vs. meaningful efforts towards goodness. So, this entire chapter (titled “And They Lived Happily Ever After”) ends up being exactly the type of fictional fairy tale that Harari loves. But the moral of its story is nearly the exact opposite of the one Harari intended.

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Chapter 20 The End of Homo Sapiens

(p. 445) The implication has been that, no matter what their efforts and achievements, Sapiens are incapable of breaking free of their biologically determined limits. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.
(p. 448) the replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts), or the engineering of inorganic life.
(p. 450) The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.
(p. 456) of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain–computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, human consciousness, and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for example, retrieve the memories of another – not hear about them, not read about them in an autobiography, not imagine them, but directly remember them as if they were his own. Or her own.
(p. 457) How could you know thyself or follow your dream if the dream is not in your mind but in some collective reservoir of aspirations? Such a cyborg would no longer be human, or even organic. It would be something completely different. It would be so fundamentally another kind of being that we cannot even grasp the philosophical, psychological, or political implications.
(p. 463) If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens’ history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars, and ordinary people.
(p. 464) since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’, but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.

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Harari is far off into wild speculation now, accepting some staples of sci-fi stories as if the sci in them was seriously sound. When Harari asks on page 456, “What might happen to human memory, human consciousness, and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank?”, I have to think this ignores the highly embodied nature of consciousness that we have come to understand. As far as we can tell, our ideas come from our own experiences, and the recombination of these into anything else that our minds can put together. Our default mode network (DMN) is constantly running in the background trying to solve our problems in this way. (This is why Scott Barry Kaufman calls it “the imagination network.”) The DMN seeks to achieve goals that are driven by the needs of our bodies and the best ones bubble up to the surface of our awareness. Once there, neurons that fire together wire together. So, how could the neurons in our DMN ever wander around a “collective memory bank” to come up with creative solutions? I don’t see how it could, because our consciousness is embodied and our bodies can’t wander there. Harari has accepted a kind of sci-fi speculation that is based on a model of memory as if it were some kind of computer hard drive that any reader can access. But that’s just a wildly inaccurate model. Your mind is not a machine. It seems highly unlikely to me that a process could ever be invented to enable some future tech bro to completely stimulate any and every neuron in our brains in the precise way needed to accurately induce new memories into our consciousness. Even then, it would have to be an active process pushed from the outside in, and we would therefore have to give up all personal autonomy to become involved in such an experiment. I just don’t see the future of Homo sapiens as being at risk of actually going down this path.

As for Harari’s “one last question” (What do we want to become?) and “the real question facing us” (What do we want to want?), these are great to consider. Harari doesn’t actually offer any answers here. He just notes that our current squabbles will disappear and the great debates of history will be important to consider. Well of course a historian would say that. And he’s not wrong. But science, philosophy, and art have much to say on this too and that probably deserves a book-length treatment rather than a quick quip near the end of a long book review.

But quip I will! In short, I would start to answer Harari’s questions with my definition of the greatest good — that which makes the survival of life more robust. Then, I would hope that we “wise” sapiens would learn to widely accept that philosophical argument so we can cooperatively build better and better signals (both externally and internally) in order to help us grow more and more goodness for as long as the laws of the universe will allow us. There will still be a balance that needs to be struck between momentary pleasures and striving towards contentment, but that is no different than today, and we will only grow more confident in the right balance as we become more confident about the destination we are headed towards.

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Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

(p. 465) We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going.
(p. 466) Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

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Agreed!

This book was first published in Hebrew in 2011, yet this closing is a prescient warning about the current power of reckless billionaires, oligarchs, and tech bros who have no good arguments for where they are going, but who also have no restraints on them for dragging us to some very dark places. Honestly, Harari provided no good answers for this either. But he gave us a lot of good information, and he asked several very good questions. This is why Sapiens is such an important book to consider, just as long as you don’t take the answers it posits very seriously.

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Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (4/5)

11/22/2025

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Time now for the penultimate review of Sapiens. In the first three parts, we saw the emergence of our species, its spreadaround the globe, and some of the unifying forces that have made human culture truly global. Now it’s time for the discovery that helped humans totally transform the planet and which could one day transform our species itself. It’s time to cover the Scientific Revolution.

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Chapter 13 The Secret of Success

(p. 267) History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes.
(p. 267) history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. … Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system.
(p. 269) So, why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
(p. 271) Around AD 1500, history made its most momentous choice, changing not only the fate of humankind, but arguably the fate of all life on earth. We call it the Scientific Revolution.

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This is just a quick little transition chapter on the way to Part 4 of Sapiens. It didn’t really fit in the last review so I moved it here. I also really liked starting with this definition of “level 2 chaos” since that acts as a good lead in to the Scientific Revolution where prediction plays such a large part in any progress. Harari’s reminder of the futility of specific predictions in the dismal science of economics is especially apt for the coverage of capitalism that is coming too.

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Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Chapter 14 The Discovery of Ignorance

(p. 275) In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second to look at those figures – human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
(p. 277) The historical process that led to Alamogordo and to the moon is known as the Scientific Revolution. During this revolution humankind has obtained enormous new powers by investing resources in scientific research. It is a revolution because, until about AD 1500, humans the world over doubted their ability to obtain new medical, military, and economic powers. While government and wealthy patrons allocated funds to education and scholarship, the aim was, in general, to preserve existing capabilities rather than acquire new ones.
(p. 279) modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways: (p. 279) a. The willingness to admit ignorance. … b. The centrality of observation and mathematics … c. The acquisition of new powers.
(p. 279) Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.
(p. 281) Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions. Darwin never argued that he was ‘the Seal of the Biologists’, and that he had solved the riddle of life once and for all.
(p. 282) All modern attempts to stabilize the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: a. Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth. This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted). b. Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings – a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.
(p. 288) In 1620, Francis Bacon published a scientific manifesto titled The New Instrument. In it he argued that ‘knowledge is power’. The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 percent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility.
(p. 298) People avoided the issue of death because the goal seemed too elusive. Why create unreasonable expectations? We’re now at a point, however, where we can be frank about it. The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.
(p. 301) A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).
(p. 304) To channel limited resources we must answer questions such as ‘What is more important?’ and ‘What is good?’ And these are not scientific questions.

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Those are some astounding figures about the growth of our species. However, I don’t know how a historian could possibly claim that “the discovery of ignorance” dated to 1500AD when Socrates famously said, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing.” Skepticism has been around for a very long time. I thought the philosopher Michael Strevens made a better argument for the eruption of science in his book The Knowledge Machine, where the focus was on discarding religious and philosophical assertions. For example, he characterized the fight at the time as saying, “There was nothing wrong with…emphasizing that observation matters, but everything wrong with its insisting that only observation matters.” That may have been an objection from religious holders of power, but it was this methodological naturalism that really provided the impetus for the great leap forward of the scientific revolution.

As for how to stabilize the sociopolitical order and decide where to go next, I think evolutionary epistemology provides a robust third alternative to the “absolute truths” that Harari noted. More on that when my draft paper gets through peer review and is published. And I’ve been sitting on a finished novel about how a-mortality could be handled well with the right evolutionary ethics and politics too. More on that when I finally self-publish it. (Hopefully for Easter 2026.)

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Chapter 15 The Marriage of Science and Empire

(p. 311) In 1775, Asia accounted for 80 percent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production.
(p. 312) In 1950, western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 percent.
(p. 314) The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus, and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalized rapidly.
(p. 315) What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.
(p. 340) Behind the meteoric rise of both science and empire lurks one particularly important force: capitalism. Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America, James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon.

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These are some more fascinating statistics. The claim about the importance of capitalism to science is super interesting and one that I had not really contemplated before. Before judging this claim, let’s see what Harari says as he goes into more depth about it in the next few chapters.

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Chapter 16 The Capitalist Creed

(p. 341) to understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word. The word is growth.
(p. 344) our entrepreneur is in a bind. Without a bakery, she can’t bake cakes. Without cakes, she can’t make money. Without money, she can’t hire a contractor. Without a contractor, she has no bakery. Humankind was trapped in this predicament for thousands of years. As a result, economies remained frozen. The way out of the trap was discovered only in the modern era, with the appearance of a new system based on trust in the future.
(p. 344) The problem in previous eras was not that no one had the idea or knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn’t trust that the future would be better than the present.
(p. 348) Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history … What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.
(p. 348) when the pie grows, everyone benefits. The rich are accordingly the most useful and benevolent people in society, because they turn the wheels of growth for everyone’s advantage. All this depends, however, on the rich using their profits to open new factories and hire new employees, rather than wasting them on non-productive activities.
(p. 349) In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: ‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’ That’s why capitalism is called ‘capitalism’. Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’.
(p. 351) Governments too strive to invest their tax revenues in productive enterprises that will increase future income – for example, building a new port could make it easier for factories to export their products, enabling them to make more taxable income, thereby increasing the government’s future revenues. Another government might prefer to invest in education, on the grounds that educated people form the basis for the lucrative high-tech industries, which pay lots of taxes without needing extensive port facilities.
(p. 352) Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So, they are creating trillions of dollars, euros, and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians, and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
(p. 367) its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naive as belief in Santa Claus. There simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias. The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans.
(p. 368) In a completely free market, unsupervised by kings and priests, avaricious capitalists can establish monopolies or collude against their workforces.
(p. 370) This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
(p. 372) Capitalism has two answers to this criticism. First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.
(p. 372) The second answer is that we just need more patience – paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner.

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Once again, Harari seems to dodge the negative role that religion played here. My guess is that’s because he wants to keep it (along with all fictions) as important unifiers of humankind. But the long history of usury shows that it wasn’t a lack of imagination or trust in the future that stopped credit from unlocking business. It was because, “In many historical societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies, usury meant the charging of interest of any kind, and was considered wrong, or was made illegal. … Christian religious prohibitions on usury are predicated upon the belief that charging interest on a loan is a sin.” As modern societies threw off that nonsense, progress ensued.

Adam Smith did contribute much to help unlock all of this (which is partly why he ended up number 3 in my rankings of the survival of the fittest philosophers). But there are even better answers now to capitalism’s critiques than communism and patience. For example, David Sloan Wilson’s series on “Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship” provides a great overview of the need for properly regulated capitalism to improve human societies as well as the lot of life on Earth.

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Chapter 17 The Wheels of Industry

(p. 374) Economic growth also requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite. When and if they run out, the entire system will collapse.
(p. 379) Only a tiny proportion of the sun’s energy reaches us, yet it amounts to 3,766,800 exajoules of energy each year
(p. 380) All the world’s plants capture only about 3,000 of those solar exajoules through the process of photosynthesis. All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually
(p. 387) Before the industrialization of agriculture, most of the food produced in fields and farms was ‘wasted’ feeding peasants and farmyard animals. Only a small percentage was available to feed artisans, teachers, priests, and bureaucrats. Consequently, in almost all societies peasants comprised more than 90 percent of the population. Following the industrialization of agriculture, a shrinking number of farmers was enough to feed a growing number of clerks and factory hands. Today in the United States, only 2 percent of the population makes a living from agriculture, yet this 2 percent produces enough not only to feed the entire US population, but also to export surpluses to the rest of the world.
(p. 387) For the first time in human history, supply began to outstrip demand. An entirely new problem was born. Who is going to buy all this stuff?
(p. 389) “A real treat with the wonderful taste of more.” Throughout most of history, people were likely to be repelled rather than attracted by such a text. They would have branded it as selfish, decadent, and morally corrupt. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it’), to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
(p. 390) The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum.
(p. 391) most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions—and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.

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Ouch. Adam Curtis’ amazing documentary The Century of the Self offers great insights into the role that Sigmund Freud’s descendants (both literal and intellectual) played in inducing this hyper individualist style of consumerism. Once marketing professional learned about the unconscious and how to appeal to it, they quickly got better and better at tapping into our unfulfilled longings. How will we ever get people to crave buying less? To value experience more than things? To think more about long-term happiness rather than short-term pleasure? I’m hopeful my art and philosophy can help with inspiring this fundamental shift, but I’m worried the money and momentum behind selfishness is far too large. This is another area for regulation that a well-formed government will have to consider.

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Chapter 18 A Permanent Revolution

(p. 396) in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.
(p. 398) The Industrial Revolution brought about dozens of major upheavals in human society. Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. Other notable examples include urbanization, the disappearance of the peasantry, the rise of the industrial proletariat, the empowerment of the common person, democratization, youth culture, and the disintegration of patriarchy.
(p. 398) Yet all of these upheavals are dwarfed by the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.
(p. 401) Life in the bosom of family and community was far from ideal. Families and communities could oppress their members no less brutally than do modern states and markets, and their internal dynamics were often fraught with tension and violence—yet people had little choice.
(p. 403) But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives.
(p. 403) Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.
(p. 411) As kingdoms and empires became stronger, they reined in communities and the level of violence decreased. In the decentralized kingdoms of medieval Europe, about twenty to forty people were murdered each year for every 100,000 inhabitants. In recent decades, when states and markets have become all-powerful and communities have vanished, violence rates have dropped even further. Today the global average is only nine murders a year per 100,000 people, and most of these murders take place in weak states such as Somalia and Colombia. In the centralized states of Europe, the average is one murder a year per 100,000 people.

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As the power of culture far outstrips that of genes in the evolution of our species, this liberation from the family only makes sense. For those of you lucky enough to have a wonderful family around you, you still have the freedom to enjoy that. But for those who prefer a Friendsgiving to a Thanksgiving with their biological family, that is now possible too. We will have to invent new and better ways to deal with alienation and isolation. But if that is done well it could be seen as the next logical step towards larger and larger groups of cooperation. The statistics about drops in violence for better-organized societies may indicate that this is indeed the right path.

Next up, we’ll finish with some musings about the future of Homo sapiens and then render a judgment about the book Sapiens as a whole. Stay tuned!

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Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (3/5)

10/15/2025

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I’m back now for part three of my detailed review of Sapiens. As a reminder, the book is subdivided into these main sections:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

I’m roughly following the shape of this outline for my review, so in my first post we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago, and then traced the details of “the Cognitive Revolution” that started about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. In part two, I criticized Harari’s unnecessarily pessimistic view of “the Agricultural Revolution” that followed, which led to explosions in humanity’s population and global reach. (Note that the downsides that Harari pointed out about that revolution do unquestionably give us lessons that still need to be learned.) Now, in part three, Harari explores more of what he called “the single question” for understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution—“how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks?” He covers the seemingly inexorable trend toward unification in human societies and how the cultural phenomena of money, imperialism, and religion have enabled this. The last chapter in Part Three is basically a setup for Part Four and the role of the scientific revolution in this story, so I’ll leave that chapter for the next part of my review. Also, the chapter on religion is a doozy so I want to have plenty of space for that. As before, I’ll share quotes from the 2014 eBook and then react to each chapter along the way.

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Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Chapter 9 The Arrow of History

(p. 181) After the Agricultural Revolution, human societies grew ever larger and more complex, while the imagined constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
(p. 181) During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars taught that every culture was complete and harmonious, possessing an unchanging essence that defined it for all time. … Today, most scholars of culture have concluded that the opposite is true.
(p. 184) does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures,
(p. 185) break-ups are temporary reversals in an inexorable trend towards unity.
(p. 191) The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Merchants, conquerors, and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.

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This story of efforts towards unification are very much in line with evolutionary history. On the home page of my website, under the section “Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters,” I wrote:

In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published a seminal book about The Major Transitions in Evolution. This book described the eight major transitions that have taken life from its simplest origins of replicating molecules all the way to its current biodiverse web of complex relations. The big takeaway from this book is that each of the 8 major transitions occurred when formerly separate and competitive biological elements figured out new ways to join up and cooperate with one another and thus begin to evolve together.

The most recent major transition was the one from primate societies to human societies via the origin of language. It stands to reason, therefore, that the next great transition will come when the multitude of conflicting and competitive human societies bond together around a single shared worldview.

There are no guarantees that we will make this next major transition. Countless other species have failed to do so. But it’s important to see this as a legitimate goal based on an urge dating back to the origin of life.

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Chapter 10 The Scent of Money

(pp. 194-5) Hunter-gatherers had no money. … only a few rare items that could not be found locally – seashells, pigments, obsidian and the like – had to be obtained from strangers. This could usually be done by simple barter … Little of this changed with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Most people continued to live in small, intimate communities.
(p. 196) In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. If 100 different commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 different exchange rates. And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates!
(p. 201) Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance, or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of colored paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.
(p. 207) Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.
(p. 207) For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance.
(p. 207) Money is based on two universal principles: a. Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge. b. Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project.
(p. 208) When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations, and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand. Human communities and families have always been based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honor, loyalty, morality, and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money.

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Harari’s emphasis on fictions is again too strong here. It’s not that money-users “trust the figments of their collective imagination.” Rather, we all trust the laws, institutions, and behaviors that support the usage of currency. Those pieces of cooperation are very real and easy to believe in. But I do think it is extremely important to think about what is lost when Harari’s “priceless” items aren’t priced in to the regulation of markets. These externalities must be considered by societies and the governments they organize.

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Chapter 11 Imperial Visions

(p. 214) empire has been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half millennia have lived in empires. Empire is also a very stable form of government. Most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions. In general, they have been toppled only by external invasion or by a split within the ruling elite.
(p. 218) Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion, and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing.
(p. 220) Empires have played a decisive part in amalgamating many small cultures into fewer big cultures. Ideas, people, goods and technology spread more easily within the borders of an empire than in a politically fragmented region.
(p. 227) It is tempting to divide history neatly into good guys and bad guys, with all empires among the bad guys. For the vast majority of empires were founded on blood, and maintained their power through oppression and war. Yet most of today’s cultures are based on imperial legacies. If empires are by definition bad, what does that say about us?
(p. 231) 200 states increasingly share the same global problems. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and atom bombs recognize no borders, and no nation can prevent nuclear war by itself. Climate change too threatens the prosperity and survival of all humans, and no government can singlehandedly stop global warming. An even greater challenge is posed by new technologies such as bioengineering and artificial intelligence. As we shall see in the last chapter, these technologies could be used to reengineer not just our weapons and vehicles, but even our bodies and minds. Indeed, they could be used to create completely new types of life forms, and change the future course of evolution. Who will decide what to do with such divine powers of creation? It is unlikely that humankind can deal with these challenges without global cooperation. It remains to be seen how such cooperation could be secured. Perhaps global cooperation can only be secured through violent clashes and the imposition of a new conquering empire. Perhaps humans could find a more peaceful way to unite. For 2,500 years, since Cyrus the Great, numerous empires promised to build a universal political order for the benefit of all humans. They all lied, and they all failed. No empire was truly universal, and no empire really served the benefit of all humans. Will a future empire do better?

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Let’s hope so! Our evolutionary urges are directed towards both competition AND cooperation, and the principles of cooperation exist and are now well known. It is up to us, however, to regulate human societies in a way to promote this rather than to allow the strong to dominate the weak to the detriment of all.

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Chapter 12 The Law of Religion

(p. 234) Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement, and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
(p. 234) Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws. This involves two distinct criteria: 1. Religion is an entire system of laws, rather than an isolated custom or belief. … 2. To be considered a religion, the system of laws must claim to be based on superhuman laws rather than on human decisions.
(p. 235) a religion must possess two further qualities. First, it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere. Second, it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone.
(p. 235) As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind
(p. 236) How then to safeguard the fecundity of the flocks? A leading theory about the origin of the gods argues that gods gained importance because they offered a solution to this problem. Gods such as the fertility goddess, the sky god, and the god of medicine took center stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak, and the gods’ main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals.
(p. 237) Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.
(p. 238) The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares, and worries of humans.
(p. 239) once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you’ll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance.
(p. 240) The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelizing god of the Christians.
(p. 240) In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
(p. 245) Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.
(p. 246) monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe—and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
(p. 249) During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia. The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterized by their disregard of gods.
(p. 250) [Siddhartha Gautama] spent six years meditating on the essence, causes, and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.
(p. 250) even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify.
(p. 252) craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity, known as nirvana (the literal meaning of which is ‘extinguishing the fire’).
(p. 252) This law, known as dharma or dhamma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature. That ‘suffering arises from craving’ is always and everywhere true, just as in modern physics E always equals mc2.
(p. 254) The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
(p. 256) Humanist religions sanctify humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapienshas a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species.
(p. 256) Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’
(p. 257) Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.
(p. 257) If we encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’.
(p. 257) Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheist beliefs. The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.
(p. 258) Another important sect is socialist humanism. Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole.
(p. 258) According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence.
(p. 258) socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundations. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.
(p. 258) The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives were the Nazis. What distinguished the Nazis from other humanist sects was a different definition of ‘humanity’, one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.
(p. 261) following the logic of Darwinian evolution, they argued that natural selection must be allowed to weed out unfit individuals and leave only the fittest to survive and reproduce
(p. 261) the fittest humans would inevitably drown in a sea of unfit degenerates. Humankind would become less and less fit with each passing generation – which could lead to its extinction.
(p. 261) A 1942 German biology textbook explains in the chapter ‘The Laws of Nature and Mankind’ that the supreme law of nature is that all beings are locked in a remorseless struggle for survival. … the textbook concludes that “These natural laws are incontrovertible; living creatures demonstrate them by their very survival. They are unforgiving. Those who resist them will be wiped out. Biology not only tells us about animals and plants, but also shows us the laws we must follow in our lives, and steels our wills to live and fight according to these laws. The meaning of life is struggle. Woe to him who sins against these laws.”
(p. 262) Then follows a quotation from Mein Kampf: ‘The person who attempts to fight the iron logic of nature thereby fights the principles he must thank for his life as a human being. To fight against nature is to bring about one’s own destruction.’
(p. 263) At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear.

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Wow, that stuff about humanism is atrocious and a lot has already been written about it. My philosopher friend and fellow Humanist Andy Norman published an exchange with Harari about this in Free Inquiry. And I commented further on it in my long post “In Defence of Humanism”, which I wrote while I was a trustee of North East Humanists. I will just add here that I think of evolutionary philosophy as a worldview rather than a religion, but I do hope it represents a much better alternative for the future of evolutionary humanism than Harari seems to think is possible.

As for the history of more traditional religions, Harari is right that they have certainly acted as unifying forces for large segments of the world population. However, due to their insistence on owning revealed truths, which also happen to be in conflict with one another, these religions are now intractable barriers to the further coming together of humans. (Unless, of course, one religion wipes out all the other ones in a genocide far worse than the latest attempt.) In evolutionary terms, this means the world’s major religions have become stranded on local peaks in a fitness landscape where there is actually a much higher possibility out there for Homo sapiens and the rest of life. To reach that peak, many will have to come down off their perches and make the trek to a truly unifying vision for the world. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen anytime soon, but I’ll keep working on building that new peak in the hopes that it will attract others eventually.

Next up, another great unifying force for the world—the scientific revolution. I’ll be back soon to cover that in part four of these reviews.

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Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (2/5)

9/18/2025

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Hello again. I’m back for part two of my detailed review of Sapiens. In part one, we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago. That was then followed by “the Cognitive Revolution” about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. That dominance would be built off the back of “the Agricultural Revolution”, which started about 12,000 years ago and is the topic of part two of Sapiens. But what kind of revolution was this and was it a good thing? Let’s look at the four chapters in this section of the book to learn more. As before, I’ll share quotes from the 2014 eBook and then react to them along the way.

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Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Chapter 5 History’s Biggest Fraud

(p. 87) For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.
(p. 87) All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground, and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.
(p. 90) The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
(p. 90) The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
(p. 91) Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias.
(p. 92) Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes, or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions.
(p. 93) It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
(p. 94) The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. … This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
(p. 97) It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.
(p. 98) One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
(p. 100) But there’s another possibility. Maybe it wasn’t the search for an easier life that brought about the transformation. Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them.
(p. 101) The only way to build Göbekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time. Only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts.
(p. 104) Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.
(p. 109) This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

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Ouch. I’ve always found this denigration of the agricultural revolution (and lionization of hunter-gatherer life) to miss the point about everything great that modernity permits. But Harari backs up his judgment with lots of facts about diet, leisure time, and illnesses. For more on this, my friend and author Rob Swigart wrote a fascinating book called Mixed Harvest: Stories from the Human Past that explores this time in human history. It’s a groundbreaking mix of short stories interwoven with scientific facts that provided Rob with inspiration.

Still, I do have hope that all of the progress enabled by more food, more people, and more specialization will one day inarguably lead to better things. We’re in the middle of this living experiment right now and it’s not looking too good in the political landscape these days. Fermi’s paradox also makes us wonder if techno-civilizations can last. But I’m still a long-term optimist about this. Misery is not a necessity for progress. We can do better if we throw off the “elites” who don’t care about others’ misery. Nothing in evolution precludes that and “the arc of the moral universe is long.” We are not doomed to a repugnant conclusion. The wonderful book Small Giants profiled several businesses that “chose to be great instead of big”. Sapiens could do the same. My co-authored paper “Rebuilding the Harm Principle” addressed this in much more detail and is one example of how we could consciously design our society to achieve aspirations other than mere maximalization of profits and populations.

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Chapter 6 Building Pyramids

(p. 110) Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.
(ppp.113-4) The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
(p. 114) The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war.
(p. 115) The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
(p. 115) Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of people were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths.
(p. 115) Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that. Mythology, the ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis. But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.
(p. 116) we mustn’t harbor rosy illusions about ‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.
(p. 122) Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
(p. 124) We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
(p. 126) How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
(p. 126) You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes, and fashions.
(p. 127) Three main factors prevent people from realizing that the order organizing their lives exists only in their imagination:
(p. 127) a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
(p. 127) b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
(p. 131) c. The imagined order is intersubjective.
(p. 132) imagined orders are intersubjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. However, in order to establish such complex organizations, it’s necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

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It may be a historical fact that “Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up”, but it is an evolutionary fact that mass cooperation beats selfish competition in the long run. We don’t need a genetic instinct for mass cooperation to evolve either. We just need special conditions, as identified in the book Prosocial. We Sapiens are already fully equipped to mentally create larger and larger tribes that we identify with and support. The rise in the blink of evolutionary time of cities, regions, nations, and international blocs for which people give their lives is clear evidence of this. We just have to continue this trend to its logical conclusion. Most human cooperation networks may have been geared towards oppression and exploitation, but that is only history, not fate. The principles of equality, fairness, and justice may not have objective validity. (Jeremy Bentham called these natural rights “nonsense on stilts”.) But it is a clearly observable fact that following these principles does improve the lives and well-being of communities who agree to follow them. This fact does not need to be hidden away from the masses via imagined stories. Instead, the worldview of evolutionary philosophy could provide a rational basis for exactly the kind of ideological movement that inspires worldwide, intersubjective agreements for cooperation. We need only to spread the meme that all of life is in this fight against death together. And we can do better collectively than we can in warring tribes.

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Chapter 7 Memory Overload

(p. 134) puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes.
(p. 135) Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages.
(p. 136) evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical, and social information.
(p. 138) Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts, and the ownership of property.
(p. 146) The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

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Well, that is a sweeping generalization about the impact of human script. I highly doubt that free association and holistic thinking was better before the written word. I would argue that holistic thinking is actually much easier to generate after the invention of abstract terminology and the sweeping views that “immense quantities of information” can give us. Sure, compartmentalization does happen, but even that has driven immense gains in knowledge by providing dedicated areas of specialization to millions and millions of inquisitive researchers. And we can always strive for consilience across these disciplines once they are established.

As for bureaucracy, that gets a bad rap too. Without proper management and incentives, bureaucracies can of course become sclerotic. In fact, my first job after my MBA degree was “making government more efficient” in the FBI Special Advisor Program, which was entirely dedicated to improving bureaucracy. (Long before Elon Musk and DOGE made a mockery of that calling.) But as David Sloan Wilson has written:

“Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be constructed for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest.”

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Chapter 8 There Is No Justice in History

(p. 149) Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
(p. 149) The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.
(p. 150) it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
(p. 152) Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighborhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor—which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighborhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities—seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans.
(p. 154) All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences?
(p. 158) Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle.
(pp. 160-1) Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time.
(p. 164) How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others.
(p. 164) A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
(p. 165) evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago.
(p. 166) Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male Homo sapiens has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female Homo sapiens has two Xs. But ‘man’ and ‘woman’ name social, not biological, categories. While in the great majority of cases in most human societies, men are males and women are females, the social terms carry a lot of baggage that has only a tenuous, if any, relationship to the biological terms.
(p. 170) Since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological, no society automatically crowns each male a man, or every female a woman. Nor are these titles laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired.
(p. 172) there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is. There are plenty of theories, none of them convincing.
(p. 177) How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.

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These are very good examples to pay attention to, but evolutionary studies have even more to teach us about Harari’s “single question” here. (“How did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks?”) I’ve already written at length about David Sloan Wilson’s organization called Prosocial that is working on answering this and improving such mass-cooperation. See Prosocial (In Theory) and Prosocial (In Practice) for more on that.

Overall, I found this second part of Sapiens to be unnecessarily pessimistic and a bit speculative and uninformed about the ways that cooperation has been achieved. But it did provide a powerful presentation of the dangers of ignoring these lessons (which we still need to learn!). Next time, part three will about the further “unification of humankind”. Since this is a key element of Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters, I can hardly wait.

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Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (1/5)

9/3/2025

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In my last blog post reviewing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I mentioned that I wanted to review two books that I had read during the research for my recently submitted epistemology paper. While the first one was directly related to that topic, this second book was just one that I have regularly received a lot of questions about and I absolutely had to read and digest. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by the historian Yuval Noah Harari was first published in English in 2014 and was soon a worldwide smash hit. Sapiens was on the NY Times bestseller list for 182 weeks and has been translated into 65 different languages. And it is exactly aligned with the motto on the top of every page of this website: “Contemplating the past. Choosing the destination.” The scholarly reception of Sapiens was not very positive (to say the least!), and I wasn’t really ready to contribute anything substantial to that when Sapiens first came out. But after 400+ blog posts, I have a lot more research behind me now so it’s finally time.

First off, Sapiens is almost 500 pages long and it really does deserve a close reading. There is no way I can cover all of that in one blog post, but luckily (for all of us) the book is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

The first three parts are just 4 or 5 chapters each, so they will fit nicely into separate blog posts. The final part, however, is comprised of 7 chapters, and I took by far the most notes there. So, I’m going to split that part of Sapiens into two posts where I think there is actually a nice natural break in between two of the chapters. I’ll explain more about that when I get there. For now, I’ll follow my standard review procedure of noting important quotes (in this case from the 2014 eBook) and then reacting to them along the way. Here goes!

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Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Chapter 1 An Animal of No Significance

(p.3) About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
(p. 5) Our nearest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
(p. 8) from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species.
(p. 9) Humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing sixty kilograms have an average brain size of 200 cubic centimeters. The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 600 cubic centimeters. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,200–1,400 cubic centimeters. Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
(p. 11) We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities, and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
(p. 12) Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
(p. 17) If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans, and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.
(p. 17) It turned out that 1–4 percent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s significant. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilized finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6 percent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.
(pp. 20-21) What was the Sapiens’ secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn’t even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.

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This first chapter is a very quick introduction for Homo sapiens to take the stage. The timeline of events is good to know. And it’s great to conceive of humans existing as a minor part of nature for so many millennia. The “political dynamite” for differences in the genes of different races of people, however, should really only be a concern for naïve racists. The world really needs to better understand the role that culture plays in our gene-culture coevolution. So, the fact that a few percentages of other hominids are in the genes this or that people (or the fact that “As much as 17% of the Denisovan genome from Denisova Cave represents DNA from the local Neanderthal population”) is actually of minor importance compared to the differences within groups and the differences of cultural and environmental influences. Tracing hominid DNA is an important tool for understanding the history of hominid settlements, but it should have no bearing on current social policies. I wish Harari had said more about that rather than just throwing some “dynamite” onto the stage and leaving it open for speculation.

I also think his claim that humans are unlike other “majestic top predators” and are “banana-republic dictators”, “full of fears and anxieties”, because our dominance came too quickly is highly speculative and most likely wrong. When I examined the logical appraisals behind the beliefs that cause our emotions, I found that anxiety came from not knowing what the future will hold. Due to epistemic limitations, this will be the case for any minds that can look into the far future. If “majestic” lions or orcas ever developed the cognitive abilities to make plans for decades into the future, I am quite sure they would develop anxieties about that future too.

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Chapter 2 The Tree of Knowledge

(p. 23) The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure.
(p. 27) Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.
(p. 27) fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths … Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
(p. 30) Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers.
(p. 36) The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories.
(p. 37) ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.
(p. 38) This was the key to Sapiens’ success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn’t stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behavior to rapidly changing challenges.
(pp. 41-2) Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’. The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until the Cognitive Revolution, the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology, or, if you so prefer, prehistory.
(p. 44) The next chapter takes a peek behind the curtain of the ages, examining what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.

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For more on the development of language and cooperation during this time in human history, I highly recommend Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution. Harari grazes the surface of this topic just fine, but then he goes a bit off the deep end with his theme about fictions and myth-making. These are of huge importance to Harari, as two later articles in the New York Timesmade clear to me. (See the op-ed by Harari in May 2019: “Why Fiction Trumps Truth”, and the interview in November 2021: “Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet”.) But there is a huge category error here! Harari says “our modern institutions” will “function on exactly the same basis” as “believing in ghosts and spirits”. This is nonsense. Ghosts and spirits have no actual effect on the world because they do not exist, whereas modern institutions have huge real-world effects because they are built from very real humans agreeing to very real cooperative actions. I like the point that Harari made about our “ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all”. This is exactly aligned with the fact that the highest tier in my hierarchy of consciousness is for “abstraction”. But these abstractions aren’t only for imaginary inventions. They can also be cognitive labels for categories of things and actions that are very real. Tribes, nations, virtue, and vice are all examples of this that are wholly different from gods and goblins. Abstractions are indeed vital to the way human minds work. And these can change must faster than genetic changes. But all abstractions are not the same. And insisting that they are will only make it harder to replace myths that have no evidence for them. Good leaders and change agents are not “powerful sorcerers”. They have just contemplated the past more deeply in order to better choose the destination.

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Chapter 3 A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

(p. 45) The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era.
(p. 47) we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago. Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors.
(p. 49) all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been influenced by neighboring agricultural and industrial societies.
(p. 49) modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture.
(p. 49) the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are one from the other.
(p. 51) The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
(p. 56) The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, laborers, and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
(p. 58) The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
(p. 62) Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have – a handful of artefacts and cave paintings – can be interpreted in myriad ways.
(p. 68) Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates.

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I thought this was an excellent chapter, pointing out all the holes in our knowledge about hunter-gatherer societies as well as noting the diversity that is seen in what we do know. It is an excellent rebuttal to the “paleo” people who have greatly oversimplified the lives of our ancestors.

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Chapter 4 The Flood

(p. 82) Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.

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And this chapter was chock full of examples where large populations of non-human animals were wiped out over and over, around the world, wherever Sapiens showed up. It should give pause to anyone championing “indigenous wisdom” as something that is worth more than wisdom earned the rational way. Just to be clear, it is absolutely wise to learn from indigenous ways. But then that is just modern, scientific, rational wisdom when we glean the best ideas from as many sources as possible. As Jonathan Rauch put it in Kindly Inquisitors, no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority over knowledge. Don’t listen to anyone claiming otherwise.

So, that will do it for this first installment of reviewing Sapiens. I have a lot going on in my personal life at the moment so I plan to release the rest of these reviews every couple of weeks. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve read Sapiens and what your impressions of it were. Or, maybe consider buying the book and reading it along with me so you can see if I missed anything and then take the chance to share your own thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you!

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An Evolutionary Note about "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

8/12/2025

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Last week, I finally submitted an epistemology paper for publication that I’ve been working on for several years. It’s very ambitious and I can’t wait to share it when/if it gets accepted. But in the meantime, I have some thoughts to share on a couple of books that I read during the research on that project. The first is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn starts by saying he “is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.” In it, Kuhn distinguished between “normal science”—which simply grows the dominant “paradigm” in its field—and “revolutionary science”—which upends paradigms so thoroughly that scientists on each side of the divide can no longer understand one another. This is Kuhn’s controversial “incommensurability thesis”, which posits that theories from differing periods suffer from deep failures of comparability.

Mountains of criticism have been written about this, which you can quickly see summarized in the SEP entry, as well as in Wikipedia. In a postscript written seven years after TSoSR was first published, Kuhn himself admits that his definition of paradigm is “intrinsically circular”. (“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.”) But the most damning criticism to me was that “the philosophical reception was…hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational.”

Boooo! Yes, there are countless examples to share of scientists behaving badly and any good scholar can unearth them. But these are all failures of individual scientists, not a feature of the scientific method. The very reason Kuhn and other critics of science point them out is because they go against what science demands. The stories are certainly not held up as exemplars of what future scientists should do.

I also don’t honestly understand how Kuhn could have put forth a theory about the incommensurability of ideas pre- and post- a “scientific revolution” while at the same time explaining them in such detail that he and the reader can understand why the ideas changed so much. If he can write about all of this, then surely expert scientists can grasp the differences too! Wittgenstein already helped us decide that purely private language is not possible. So incommensurable scientific theories are out too.

And yet, despite these criticisms, much of TSoSR contains incredibly admirable scholarly work on the history of science. Kuhn profiled many major and minor theories that have been developed over the past several centuries. And for that, TSoSR is still worth the read. But I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing a post about this book except for the fact that Kuhn ended TSoSR with a comparison to evolution. And “in 1995 Kuhn argued that the Darwinian metaphor in the book should have been taken more seriously than it had been.” Well, that’s just begging for this blog to take a look and weigh in.

Here, then, are the main evolutionary points that Kuhn made. All quotations below are from the second edition of TSoSR.

p.171 “All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process.”
p.172 “For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature.”
p.172 “The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to the issues of this closing section it is very nearly perfect.”
pp.172-3 “the entire [scientific] process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar.”
p.173 “Why should scientific communities be able to reach a firm consensus unattainable in other fields? Why should consensus endure across one paradigm change after another? And why should paradigm change invariably produce an instrument more perfect in any sense than those known before? …those questions…are as open as they were when this essay began. It is not only the scientific community that must be special. The world of which that community is a part must also possess quite special characteristics, and we are no closer than we were at the start to knowing what these must be. …it need not be answered in this place.”

Ugh! The evolution of organisms and the evolution of scientific ideas are extremely different things. They are not “very nearly perfect” for analogous analysis. Biological life has emerged and evolved into the vacuum of a non-living universe. Random mutations, scarce resources, and eons of natural selection have created “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful” (as Darwin famously described). Life has immense freedom to create survival mechanisms within this space of possibilities. But scientific ideas are not like this at all. They are highly constrained truth-seeking hypotheses that evolve via empirically-driven imaginations (not random mutations), which compete to be the best rationally-selected predictions. This is not at all like brute, unthinking, goalless, natural selection.

As I wrote in the epistemology paper that I recently finished (see a draft sketch here), there are plenty of skeptical arguments that have come down to us through the ages (e.g. Socrates, Pyrrho, Descartes, Hume, Gettier, Putnam, Bostrom), which show us why the evolution of scientific ideas never actually reach “a permanent fixed scientific truth.” But that is indeed the goal, despite what Kuhn would argue. The question of why scientific communities are able to reach consensus is easily answered when we posit that our universe (not multiverses) is an objective, knowable, thing that we keep trying to grasp through our subjective lenses. Only a very twisted view of science as a mere relativistic construction of ideas would see it otherwise. But that view doesn’t hang together at all and can therefore be dismissed.

One of the most cited academic books of all time? What a shame.

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Draft of My Paper “On the Origin of Knowledge”

2/27/2025

12 Comments

Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say the least) so I’m starting by asking for feedback here before I proceed with the final submission. I have a journal lined up already (This View of Life), but if you have other suggestions for where this would be appropriate, I would very much appreciate it.

I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:

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On the Origin of Knowledge*

In 1900, the young artist Gustav Klimt presented the first of his three “Faculty Paintings”, which he had been commissioned to produce for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. It was a time of growing confidence in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the sciences, and the power of reason. However,

“Rather than the anticipated glorifying works, Klimt created mysterious symbolic paintings that, instead of celebrating the triumph of human knowledge, exposed it as powerless. In ‘Philosophy’, a group of naked people drift through a nebulous starry sky, despairing at the reality of their untethered existence.” (Gustav Klimt, p.61)

This monumental painting, over 4x3 meters in size, was never installed and was later destroyed in a fire in May 1945. All we have left is a black and white photo of the original. But it is still powerful, and in fact captures the present situation of philosophy perfectly.

Why are we like this? The history of unsolved problems in epistemology makes it clear.

At the heart of this, is philosophy’s definition of “truth”, which has proven impossible to attain.

There are two ways that evolutionary thinking can help with this. First, is thinking in terms of gradualism rather than essentialism.

Second, is building from the bottom up, rather than using imaginary sky hooks to descend from the top down.

This gives us a starting point for knowledge as something like a pinpoint of light floating in the complete darkness of a universe that life was ignorant of.

Living beings slowly learned to navigate their environment using a process we now call cybernetics.

And so…

Over time, life develops two “species of thought” in this epistemological world. One is for the realm we can learn about. The other is for the realm where we are totally ignorant.

And so…

The field of evolutionary epistemology has identified mechanisms for how knowledge continued to evolve.

Note that the latest step in this evolution came with the invention of the scientific method. There are many ways this method can be depicted. Here is one example:

Reviewing the literature turns up at least 11 more ways that the scientific method has been depicted.

All of these are actually just extensions and refinements of the original cybernetics loop. Therefore, we could label all knowledge production (including the scientific method) as coming from an epistemological method.

Note that the 12 scientific methods identified earlier do map to this very easily. This is important because it helps us understand knowledge as existing along a continuum. So-called “scientific knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” is related to simpler forms of knowledge.

With all this talk of methods and loops, it is important to see that we are not merely running in circles! Here is an AI-generated cartoon to help drive that point home.

As described in an earlier paper, we raise and lower the credence of our ideas as we discover more and more information about them.

Our new knowledge is connected to previously generated knowledge. It grows or shrinks with each new turn of the epistemological loop. This turns our 2-dimensional circles into 3-dimensional spirals.

There is a long history of different truth-seeking disciplines recognizing this and creating hierarchies for their evidence and knowledge.

Analyzing this history, we see the same pattern emerging over and over. The famous “Photo 51” helped Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win Nobel prizes for their roles in discovering the structure of DNA. That photo showed two crossbeams that determine the size and shape of the double helix. In a similar (though purely metaphorical) fashion, this paper posits that there are two crossbeams that push knowledge spirals outwards.

With each iteration of the epistemological loop, it is the quantity and diversity of observations that make for wider and sturdier spirals in our knowledge production.

This is because “intersubjective views from everywhere” are the closest we can ever get to the “objective view from nowhere” that would be required for full and certain philosophical truth.

So….

We start with an undifferentiated word cloud. (Do not actually read this.)

Then perform a “functional analysis” on this heap to help make sense of the emerging phenomena of knowledge as it evolves through different hierarchical stages.

Try to do all of this comprehensively. Tinbergen created his Four Questions for studies of biology, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive because they sit at the four quadrants of a 2x2 matrix where “ultimate vs. proximate” distinctions are located on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales are on the other axis. Similarly, four questions can be created for studies of knowledge. These lie in the four quadrants made by “objective items vs subjective knowers” on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales on the other. Answering all of these questions about a piece of knowledge will give you a comprehensive understanding of it.

After performing such a functional analysis on the word cloud for knowledge collected above, the following hierarchy for knowledge is proposed. Knowledge grows from fragile to robust as the epistemological loops that produce it increase in quantity and diversity. Each piece of knowledge has facts, knowers, processes, and credence associated with it. These progress across five columns based on the knowers — subsystems of an individual, an individual, small niche groups, larger established groups, and globally diverse groups. Each column can only progress so far. The knowledge produced by these groups could also be placed in a hierarchy of quality from A to F. But note there is an overlap between columns as the best knowledge production in small groups transitions to new knowledge production in larger groups.

Placing all of the terms from the word cloud above into this hierarchy gives us the details we need to more fully understand it and use it for further analysis. (Click here if you want to read the details of this table.)

There are many points of discussion to be considered from all of this.

First, some important disclaimers…

This hierarchy doesn’t apply directly to all forms of culture. However, It can be applied to “knowledge about” the utility of those other items.

There is an important paradox about power embedded in this view of epistemology.

This view may also help us understand experts and expertise better.

We can imagine disseminating this using simplified scorecards for knowledge.

It may also shed light on another paradox about the perceived quality of knowledge due to its stability or instability.

It could help with the issues of “fake news”.

In fact, this evolutionary view can help dissolve all of the knowledge problems of philosophy.

This brings us back to Klimt’s picture of philosophy. In recent years, researchers have used historical facts and AI analysis to colorize the painting as it may have been originally. The result does not change the meaning of the painting, where its subjects are still floating untethered, surrounded by a universe of ignorance. But it does make things in there more beautiful now. Hopefully, the view presented in this paper on the evolution of knowledge can do the same for us.

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*Now that you have read this post, you can see why I think it is ambitious. The full title of Darwin’s revolutionary book about biology was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As a playful ode to this, I’ve been considering the following title for my paper:

“On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Rational Selection or the Survival of Justified Beliefs in the Struggle Towards Truth — How the Universal Acid of Evolutionary Thinking Can Dissolve the Great Epistemological Problems of Knowledge, Scepticism, Relativism, Demarcation, and Disinformation.”

That is way more than one mouthful, though, so let me know if you have a better title in mind.

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Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 2 of 2)

8/23/2024

1 Comment

(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page)

Okay, I’m back for part 2 of the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion. As I covered in my last post, part 1 of this fascinating book offered a vision for “secular ethics for a whole world”, which I was inspired to read because this goal matches ProSocial World's purpose statement as well as my own views on evolutionary ethics and why evolutionary philosophy matters. Each of these sources speaks similarly about how empirical data gives us overwhelming evidence to appreciate our deep interdependence and therefore we need to be compassionate towards all beings as we try to survive and flourish together in this world. Let’s do that!

Now, in part 2 of the book, the Dalai Lama tells us how he personally strengthens his mind to work towards these goals in the face of all the obstacles that are sure to come. This mostly amounts to descriptions and tips for various methods of meditation, which is not something I know a ton about. But the evidence shows it is so beneficial, and these tips are coming from perhaps the world’s premiere expert, so I wanted to share them as succinctly as I could, with the hope that it will inspire you (and me!) to take up more of this mental training. As before, the quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.

Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama

Part II — Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind

Introduction to Part II: Starting with Oneself

(p. 101) How are we to become more compassionate, kinder, more forgiving, and more discerning in our behaviour?
(p. 102) Educating the heart takes both time and sustained effort, though I have no doubt that with sincere motivation we can all learn kindheartedness, and we can all benefit from it.

We have so many options out there to improve our minds and bodies. Yet all of these are “slaves to our passions”. So, why don’t we spend more time working on our emotions?? This is deeply brilliant. I know Buddhists have practiced this for centuries, but I’m not sure it has been “sold” this way, or always focused towards the secular ethics that the Dalai Lama is now advocating for. Before we get to the actual training, some Buddhist context is helpful.

Chapter 8 — Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life

(p. 103) even the most sophisticated ethical understanding, if it is not applied in daily life, is somewhat pointless.
(p. 103) regarding the question of how to put ethics into practice in everyday life, it may be helpful to consider the process as having three aspects or levels
(p. 103) As outlined in some classical Buddhist texts, these are as follows: an ethic of restraint — deliberately refraining from doing actual or potential harm to others; an ethic of virtue — actively cultivating and enhancing our positive behaviour and inner values; and an ethic of altruism — dedicating our lives, genuinely and selflessly, to the welfare of others.
(p. 106) I personally find a list of six principles from a text by the second-century Indian thinker Nagarjuna to be helpful.
(p. 106) Avoid excessive use of intoxicants. Uphold the principle of right livelihood. Ensure that one’s body, speech, and mind are nonviolent. Treat others with respect. Honour those worthy of esteem, such as parents, teachers, and those who are kind. Be kind to others.
(p. 107) we require a basic toolkit to help us in our daily effort to live ethically. In Buddhist tradition this toolkit is described in terms of three interrelated factors known as heedfulness, mindfulness, and introspective awareness
(p. 107) heedfulness, refers to adopting an overall stance of caution.
(p. 109) mindfulness is the ability to gather oneself mentally and thereby recall one’s core values and motivation.
(p. 109) Awareness…means paying attention to our own behaviour. It means honestly observing our behaviour as it is going on, and thereby bringing it under control.

I don’t see anything wrong with any of that. This is more evidence fitting with my belief that “Buddha Will Survive”, as I wrote during my series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers. Buddha came in at number 7 out of 60 on that list. The Dalai Lama might take Buddhism even higher now.

Next up, are two chapters about our emotions.

Chapter 9 — Dealing with Destructive Emotions

(p. 113) the greatest impediments to our individual well-being and our ability to live a spiritually fulfilling life are our own persistent propensities toward destructive or afflictive emotions.
(p. 115) in contemporary psychology the main distinction is often drawn between emotional states which, on the one hand, are pleasurable or joyful and are described as positive, and those which, on the other hand, are unpleasant or painful and are described as negative. In classical Buddhist psychology, however, the distinction is rather different. Instead, the primary distinction is not between those states which are pleasurable and those that are painful, but between those that are beneficial and those that are harmful.
(p. 117) In the context of secular ethics, this distinction between those mental states which undermine well-being — our own and that of others — and those which promote survival and well-being can be very useful, since it is directly relevant to our pursuit of happiness and an ethically sound way of life.
(p. 124) Our inner development with regard to regulating our destructive emotions calls for a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we must seek to reduce the impact of the destructive potentials that are inherent within us; on the other, we must seek to enhance the positive qualities that also naturally exist within us. This two-pronged approach to mental training is what I consider to be the heart of genuine spiritual practice.

Chapter 10 — Cultivating Key Inner Values

(p. 137) a few of the other key human values: patience or forbearance, contentment, self-discipline, and generosity.
(p. 138) There are three aspects of patience, or forbearance, to consider: forbearance toward those who harm us, acceptance of suffering, and acceptance of reality.

I really appreciate the difference between contemporary psychology and classical Buddhist psychology. And the focus on enhancing well-being (“our own and that of others”) is brilliant to see. I would just add that the distinction between “beneficial” and “harmful” is often a difficult one because of the uncertainty over short-term and long-term consequences as well as the benefit accruing to yourself or others (which ultimately may or may not benefit you). So, it’s very hard to simply place an emotion into any one category. The ultimate judgment of each one will be very dependent on context — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful. Rather than looking forward into the mists of this murky future, I found it easier, and very useful, to look to the past for my own taxonomy by asking “what’s causing these emotions?” These are quibbles about how to categorize emotions, though. There doesn’t seem to be any conflict between the goals of my system and the Dalai Lama’s.

Finally, in the last chapter, we arrive at the Dalai Lama’s advice for how to work on all of this.

Chapter 11 — Meditation as Mental Cultivation

(p. 155) I would like to say a few words about cultivating mental discipline. For myself, such cultivation is an indispensable part of daily life. On the one hand, it helps reinforce my determination always to act compassionately for the well-being of others. On the other, it helps me keep in check those afflictive thoughts and emotions by which we are all assailed from time to time, and to maintain a calm mind.
(p. 155) the Sanskrit term bhavana … [and the] Tibetan equivalent gom [are] often translated into English as meditation, [but they] refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being.
(p. 156) [There are] “three levels of understanding,” as found in the classical Buddhist theory of mental transformation. These levels are understanding derived through hearing (or learning), understanding derived through reflection, and understanding derived through contemplative experience.
(p. 156) this progression — from first hearing or learning, to deepening one’s understanding through critical reflection, to conviction — is quite usual.

This is great! It really expanded my naïve understanding of “meditation”.

(p. 158) I engage in two main types of mental cultivation practice — discursive or analytic meditation and absorptive meditation. The first is a kind of analytic process by means of which the meditator engages in a series of reflections, while the second involves concentrating on a specific object or objective and placing one’s mind upon it as if dwelling deeply on a conclusion. I find that combining the two techniques is most beneficial.
(p. 159) The first of these two approaches corresponds to the development of mental states that are more cognitively oriented, such as understanding, while the second develops more affect-oriented mental states, such as compassion. We might refer to these two processes as “educating our mind” and “educating our heart.”

Fascinating. And I would say from personal experience that writing philosophy might qualify as an “education of the mind” exercise then. Before we get to the details of how else to do this, the Dalai Lama offers a few practical tips, which makes him seem just as human as the rest of us.

(p. 159) Mental cultivation takes time and effort and involves hard work and sustained dedication.
(p. 160) As to the specifics of practice, early morning is generally the best time of day. … you need to have had a good night’s sleep beforehand.
(p. 161) the mind will tend to be sluggish if you have eaten a lot beforehand.
(p. 161) in the early stages even ten to fifteen minutes per session is quite adequate.
(p. 161) It is also helpful to plan to practice for a few minutes several times during the day in addition to the main session.
(p. 162) sit where we will not be disturbed by noise.
(p. 162) any position that is comfortable will do

Love it. Next up, the Dalai Lama gives us details of his different practices. He didn’t lay it out like a simple formula, but I see it starting by taking us progressively through these six steps: 1) Getting Settled; 2) Affirming the Practice; 3) Strengthening Your Focus; 4) Understanding What Focus Is; 5) Really Focusing on Emotions; and 6) Returning to Your Day.

So, let’s see these steps in action.

1) Getting Settled

(p. 163) take one inhalation and one exhalation while silently counting from one to five or seven, and then repeat the process a few times. The advantage of this silent counting is that, in giving our mind a task to perform, it makes it less likely to be swept away by extraneous thoughts.
(p. 163) it can be helpful to quietly say a few words over and over. A formula such as “I let go of my afflictive emotions”
(p. 163) you may find that a whole session is taken up with exercises to calm or still the mind.

2) Affirming the Practice

(p. 164) When you have succeeded in establishing a more settled state, perhaps a few minutes into your session, you can then begin the actual work of mental cultivation.
(p. 165) One very useful exercise at the beginning of a session is to consider the benefits of practice. An immediate benefit is that practice gives us a brief respite from the often obsessive worrying, calculating, and fantasizing with which our minds are habitually occupied. This by itself is a great boon.
(p. 165) One who never engages in this kind of work has very little chance of dealing effectively with the destructive thoughts and emotions which, when they take hold of us, destroy all hope of peace of mind.
(p. 165) we should find that the benefits far outweigh any arguments in favour of not practicing. We then rest the mind on this conclusion for a short time before moving on to the next stage of the session.

3) Strengthening Your Focus

(p. 165) A more formal meditation practice is the cultivation of sustained attention through single-pointed concentration.
(p.166) Having relaxed and settled your mind, try to maintain your focus on the object. Visualize it about four feet in front of you and at the level of your eyebrows. Imagine the object to be approximately two inches in height and radiating light, so that the image is bright and clear. Also try to conceive of it as being heavy. This heaviness has the effect of preventing excitement, while the object’s brightness prevents the onset of laxity.

4) Understanding What Focus Is

(p. 167) after many, many weeks or months of persistent practice — you now try to inspect the mind itself as it holds the object in view.
(p. 167) you can start to familiarize yourself with the sort of focus that in ordinary life you may only experience when attempting to solve a particularly challenging mental problem.

5) Really Focusing on Emotions

(p. 167) when you have learned to really focus the mind, then, … you can use the whole force of your mind to focus on qualities such as compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness.

6) Returning to Your Day

(p. 168) Finally, when we wish to end our session, we can do some deep breathing exercises once again so that we finish in a relaxed state of mind.

After a lifetime of working on this, the Dalai Lama next offers several pieces of advice.

(p. 168) Two qualities are essential in this kind of meditation: mental clarity and stability. Mental clarity assists you in maintaining your focus. Stability assists you in ensuring clarity by monitoring whether or not your attention remains vibrant.
(p. 168) It is through constant application of these two faculties that you can gradually learn to train your focus so that you become capable of sustaining your attention for a prolonged period of time.
(p. 168) set a forceful intention not to allow your mind to be swept away by thoughts of what might happen in the future or recollections of things that have happened in the past.
(p. 170) every now and then you will come to experience short intervals of what feels like an absence or a vacuum, when your mind has no particular content. Your first successes in this will only be fleeting. But with persistence over a long period, what begins as a glimpse can gradually be extended, and you can start to understand that the mind is like a mirror, or clear water, in which images appear and disappear without affecting the medium in which they appear.
(p. 170) Like a detached onlooker watching a spectacle, you will learn how to see your thoughts for what they are, namely constructs of your mind. So many of our problems arise because, in our naive untrained state, we confuse our thoughts with actual reality. We seize on the content of our thoughts as real and build our entire perception and response to reality on it.

As your practice gets more advanced, the Dalai Lama offers 4 more options for what you might work on. I see these as options for step 5 above, so I’ll label them that way. They are: 5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness; 5b) Equanimity; 5c) More Equanimity; and 5d) Positive Imitation.

Again, let’s see these in action.

5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness

(p. 170) Another very beneficial class of practices involves cultivating positive mental qualities, such as compassion and loving-kindness.
(p. 170) begin with a preliminary breathing exercise to relax and settle the mind.
(p. 171) when you are struggling with your attitude or feelings toward a person with whom you have difficulty. First, bring that person into your mind, conjuring up a vivid image so that you almost feel his or her presence. Next, start to contemplate the fact that he or she also has hopes and dreams, feels joy when things go well and feels sadness when they do not.
(p. 171) try to feel connected with the person and cultivate the wish that he or she achieve happiness.
(p. 171) saying something like “May you be free of suffering and its causes. May you attain happiness and peace.” Then rest your mind in this state of compassion.
(p. 171) this way of cultivating compassion primarily involves a discursive process, but every now and then it is also good to rest the mind in a state of absorption, somewhat in the fashion of bringing home a concluding point in the course of an argument.

5b) Equanimity

(p. 171) equanimity is a state of mind where one relates to others in a way that is free of prejudice rooted in the afflictions of excessive attraction or aversion.
(p. 172) begin by relaxing and settling the mind through a breathing exercise and then proceed as follows. Call up an image of a small group of people you like, such as some of your close friends and relatives. Establish this image in as much detail and with as much verisimilitude as you can. Then add an image next to it of a group of people toward whom you feel indifferent, such as people you see at work or out shopping but do not know well. Again, try to make this image as real and detailed as possible. Finally, call up a third image, this one of a group of people you dislike, or with whom you are in conflict, or whose views you strongly disagree with, and again establish it as clearly and in as much detail as you can. Having created images of these three groups of people in your mind, you then allow your normal reactions toward them to arise. Notice your thoughts and feelings toward each group in turn. You will find that your natural tendency is to feel attachment toward the first, indifference toward the second, and hostility toward the third. Recognizing this, you next turn to examining your own mind and considering how each of these three responses affects you. You will find that your feelings toward members of the first group are pleasurable, inspiring a certain confidence and strength coupled with a desire to alleviate or prevent their suffering. Toward the second group, you will notice that your feelings do not excite you or inspire any particular thoughts of concern at all. Toward the third group, however, the feelings you have will excite your mind in negative directions. The next step is to engage in contemplation, using your critical faculty. The people we consider our enemies today may not remain so, and this is also true of our friends. Furthermore, sometimes our feelings toward friends, such as attachment, can lead to problems for us, while sometimes our interactions with enemies can benefit us, perhaps by making us stronger and more alert. Contemplating such complexities can lead you to reflect on the futility of relating to others in an extreme manner
(p. 174) Over time, the aim is to be able to relate to others, not as friends or foes according to your divisive classification of them, but as fellow human beings whose fundamental equality with yourself you recognize.

5c) More Equanimity

(p. 174) for the second form of equanimity practice, … The key points are two simple truths: that just as I myself have an instinctive and legitimate desire to be happy and to avoid suffering, so do all other people; and that just as I have the right to fulfil these innate aspirations, so do they.
(p. 174) over the course of weeks, months, and even years, we will gradually find that we are able to generate true inner equanimity based on a profound recognition of humanity’s shared, innate aspiration to happiness and dislike of suffering.

5d) Positive Imitation

(p. 174) Another exercise which can be very helpful in cultivating beneficial states of mind is a discursive practice taking as its object the good example of a person we greatly admire.
(p. 175) the idea is to train ourselves to act, in our daily lives, as the person we admire would act
(p. 176) Having chosen which afflictive emotion or attitude you will address first, you begin as described earlier, relaxing the mind with a breathing exercise. Then you are ready to start the actual practice.
(p. 176) First, reflect on the destructive effects of the mental state you have selected.
(p. 176) This contemplation of the destructive nature of these mental states needs to be sufficiently deep that over time your basic stance toward such states becomes one of caution and vigilance.
(p. 177) Once you are convinced of the destructive nature of these afflictions, you then move on to the next stage of meditation. This involves developing a greater awareness of the mental states themselves, particularly of their onset.
(p. 177) The third stage of this mental cultivation practice for dealing with afflictive mental states is to apply the relevant antidotes to them: for example, forbearance to counter anger, loving-kindness to counter hatred, contemplation of an object’s imperfections to counter greed or craving for that object.
(p. 177) In all three stages of this practice it is important, as suggested earlier, to combine discursive, analytic processes with resting your mind in single-pointed absorption on the concluding points. This combination allows the effects of your practice to seep deeply into your mind so that it begins to have a real impact in your everyday life.

After giving all of these options for a deeper meditation practice, the Dalai Lama offers some more advice about dealing with things you may also encounter there.

(p. 178) there are two principal obstacles to good practice. One is distraction, while the other is laxity or what we can call “mental sinking.”
(p. 178) Sometimes it will be enough to recollect our purpose in undertaking this mental cultivation. At other times, we may have to leave off whatever we are trying to practice and move on to some other exercise. Or we may do a short breathing exercise, or repeat a few words suitable to the occasion. This may be as simple as saying, “I let go of my distraction,” slowly and deliberately a few times. But sometimes we may need to break off the session and walk around the room for a few minutes.
(p. 178) laxity or mental sinking, is what happens when the mind becomes too relaxed. We succeed in withdrawing from our habitual preoccupations and manage to free the mind from distractions, but then, because our energy is low or we are not alert enough, the mind sinks and we become, as it were, “spaced out.”
(p. 179) A short, brisk walk may be an effective remedy, or a few moments spent visualizing a bright light. For those with religious inclinations, briefly considering the surpassing qualities of some figure in their religious tradition may help. Another remedy is to imagine our consciousness springing up into space.

To finish up, the Dalai Lama offered some brief reflections on the value of all of this.

(p. 180) what we are talking about here is not suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. Instead, we must learn to recognize them for what they are and replace them with more positive states of mind. And we do this not only to achieve self-mastery but also because attaining this kind of control over our minds puts us in a much better position to compassionately benefit others.
(p. 182) What we want is a moderate, steady light which enables us to see the objects around us clearly. Thus when we develop some degree of control over our minds we are more able to take events, whether they are positive or negative, in our stride.
(p. 182) What good practice really requires is a constant stream of effort: a sustained, persistent approach based on long-term commitment. For this reason, practicing properly, even for a short period of time, is the best way.

Afterword

(p. 185) when each of us learns to appreciate the critical importance of ethics and makes inner values like compassion and patience an integral part of our basic outlook on life, the effects will be far-reaching.

So, to recap, meditation is great! Of all the books, podcasts, apps, and seminars about meditation that I have been exposed to, this one was by far the most helpful and far-reaching. It is much more than just the emptying of the mind or the building of focus that I have mostly learned about before. Yet it is simple! In its explanation, anyway. I’m sure the experience and effort will be more difficult. But I plan to work on these steps over the years ahead. 10 to 15 minutes at a time.

1) Getting Settled
2) Affirming the Practice
3) Strengthening Your Focus
4) Understanding What Focus Is
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
     5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
     5b) Equanimity
     5c) More Equanimity
     5d) Positive Imitation
6) Returning to Your Day

I hope you found this as interesting as I did and are inspired to work on this too. My post here shared a lot of quotes to get you going, but you should really buy the book to capture the full depth of the Dalai Lama’s thoughts and emotions here. I’ll just finish with this quote from the man who caddied for the 13th incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

"Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.”

Nice indeed. Maybe we can all hope for that with some effort. 😁

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