Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Ideas: Drugs vs. meditation, Darwinism of system, The Prediction Paradox Prog Bar: 0.01% progress: 0.01

The premise of the book is that humanity was very successful in solving some of its biggest problems: hunger, plague and war. If these problems are eradicated, where do we go from there?

Harari argues that we will probably strive for the following things: longer life, happiness and divinity

On happiness he brings up the question, what it exactly is and what strategy is best used for getting it. He compares the possibility of happiness-inducing drugs with buddhist teachings. As a dedicated meditator he accuses the drugs that would e.g. stimulate dopamine of only creating short-term happiness instead of the permanent bliss associated with meditation. This misses the point in my opinion. Meditation seems to me more appealing than drug, because I think its saver and its not “fake”. This might be a view thats not backed by science or a phenomological way of looking at the world but I believe it to be intuitive for most people. This however is then no real argument against drugs.

People fear progress because they are afraid of being lost in a new world. Because this fear get more prominent with higher age, older people also tend to be more conservative. If progress further accelerates and lifespans become longer, this might actually become a realistic fear.

All knowledge is only useful if it changes behaviour, but if it changes behaviour it can’t predict future behaviour. Therefore, there is no useful knowledge about future behaviour.

If there is no soul, how is a human life worth more than any other?

An interesting thing he brings up is that the way we think about consciousness appears to be related to our current technology. He brings up examples of Freud describing it like a steam engine, later 20th century psychologists like a computer and we do now describe it as an algorithm. He also says that each of these descriptions seem to work on one level of abstraction but all seem to miss the true essence. We know thought works similar to algorithms but does consciousness too? We just don’t know.