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.
-------------------------
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Chapter 19 And They Lived Happily Ever After
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.
-------------------------
Chapter 20 The End of Homo Sapiens
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.
-------------------------
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God
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.
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.
-------------------------
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.
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.
-------------------------
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.
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.
-------------------------
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?
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.
