Why Stories Matter — Part Deux

The first part of this (2-part) series on the book Homo Deus (by Yuval Harari), focused on explaining how human beings had managed to conquer this planet due to our ability to create inter-subjective webs of meaning. This ability to collectively create and believe in fictions allowed us to cooperate flexibly with each other on an unimaginably large scale. Fictionalized institutions such as law, money, and governments became the cornerstones of modern civilization. While such entities have definitely helped us to vastly improve our lives, there is a danger in forgetting the fact that they are fictions at the end of the day. Over-investing in the power of these entities causes real suffering to real living beings, such as when nations go to war or corporations destroy ecosystems in the name of growth. Thus it becomes imperative that we develop the ability to distinguish what is real from what is fictional. Continuing from where I left off, this post takes a closer look at some of the more important fictions of the modern age, and makes some predictions for what the future holds for us.

Religion is arguably the most important fiction invented by mankind. But it’s important to not confuse religion with superstition, spirituality, belief in supernatural powers or belief in gods. It is none of these things. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It is a tool for preserving social order and for organising large-scale cooperation. By this definition, Capitalism and Communism are as much religions as Christianity and Islam, differing only in the details of their stories, their commandments, and the rewards and punishments they promise. Spirituality on the other hand is a mysterious journey into the unknown, necessarily traversed by an individual. And while almost every classical religion has spiritual roots, those roots are long lost to time. It is also a widely held belief that science stands opposed to religion, but that’s simply not true. Modern history is in fact a partnership between science and one particular type of religion, called humanism.

Until the Scientific Revolution, we believed that we were created by God and were simply playing a part in God’s great cosmic plan. The sacredness of humanity was derived from this belief in God. But modern culture rejected this belief and came to see the universe as purposeless; full of sound and fury but ultimately, signifying nothing. We gave up meaning in exchange for power, as exemplified by our almost religious belief in the capitalist creed of economic growth, placing it above all other values. Economic growth gave us enormous power, but it scarcely sufficed to provide meaning for our existence. We found that meaning in the worship of humanity itself. Our inner experiences came to provide meaning not only to our private lives, but also to our social and political processes. While in earlier ages, God defined values such as ‘goodness’, ‘righteousness’, and ‘beauty’, the humanist religion came to be defined by such mottos as ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’, ‘The customer is always right’, and ‘If it feels good, do it’

Humanism assumed that each human being has free will and has a single authentic inner self. It proposed a different way of gaining knowledge and seeking the truth. In medieval Europe, the chief formula for knowledge was : Knowledge = Scriptures x Logic. Answers to important questions were deciphered by reading scriptures and using logic to interpret the text. Things changed after the Scientific Revolution and the formula became : Knowledge = Empirical Data x Mathematics. Answering questions involved gathering relevant empirical data and using mathematical tools to analyse it. With the rise of humanism, a new formula appeared : Knowledge = Experience x Sensitivity. The subjective phenomenon of experience consists of sensations, emotions, and thoughts, and sensitivity involved paying attention to these factors and allowing them to influence us. “Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences.”

But like all successful religions, humanism also split into conflicting sects as it spread and evolved. While all humanist sects accepted human experience as the supreme source of authority and meaning, each interpreted human experience differently. Liberal humanism, or Liberalism believes in the uniqueness of each human being’s experience and holds that individual free will should have far more weight than state interests of religious doctrines. Social humanism, or Socialism focussed more on the collective human experience that that of any single individual. It encompassed a wide variety of communist and socialist movements. “Whereas in liberal politics the voter knows best, and in liberal economics the customer is always right, in socialist politics the party knows best, and in socialist economics the trade union is always right.” The third major offshoot, Evolutionary Humanism had its roots in Darwinian evolutionary theory and believed that conflict and natural selection were necessary to evolve humanity into stronger and fitter beings, and ultimately give rise to superhumans or the Ubermensch. The 20th century was defined by the conflict between these three branches of humanism, with liberalism finally emerging victorious from the tussle with socialism (exemplified by the Soviet Union) and evolutionary humanism (exemplified by Nazi Germany).

While liberalism is by far the most dominant religion in the world today, recent developments in science and technology have called liberalism’s most fundamental assumptions into question, especially that of the existence of free will. While it is possible for us to act according to our desires, modern science has found no evidence that humans can choose their desires in the first place. To the contrary, brain scans of people’s decision making process reveals that most of our choices are actually unconscious, even if they feel conscious. Our electrochemical brain processes are either deterministic or random or a combination of both, but never free. Experiments also indicate that our desires can be manipulated and controlled using drugs, genetic engineering, or direct brain stimulation. The notion that humans have a single authentic self has also been debunked by the latest scientific research. Most of our decisions are not made by a single self but result from a tug of war between different and often conflicting inner entities. Even at a basic level, there are two distinct selves existing within us, the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self is our moment to moment consciousness, while the narrating self uses our experiences to shape the story we tell ourselves about our life and its meaning. From the looks of it, belief in liberalism seems to be as delusional as the belief in God and heaven.

(On a personal note, my experiences with meditation indicate to me that it is quite possible for human beings to get in direct touch with our experiencing self, and approach life authentically from an ‘indivisible’ foundation. There might even be a God :D)

But just as Christianity did not disappear on the day Charles Darwin published ‘On The Origin Of Species’, liberalism will not vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as a free individual. The biggest threat to liberalism and in the liberalistic beliefs of free markets, democracy, and human rights, comes from concrete technologies. “We are about to face a flood of extremely useful devices, tools, and structures that make no allowance for the free will of individual humans.” There are three major societal shifts which if they happened, would accelerate the demise of liberalism.

If humans lose their economic and military usefulness, the economic and political system will stop attaching much value to them. Liberalism did not succeed simply because of it’s more accurate philosophical arguments, but because there was a lot of political, economic, and military sense in ascribing value to every human being. Humans have two basic abilities — physical abilities and cognitive abilities. Machines have long since beat us in physical ability but we have so far been better at the cognitive tasks. Even though there have been massive advances in computer intelligence in the last few decades, there has been no advance at all in computer consciousness. But now we are close to the point where intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. We are developing new types of non-conscious intelligence that can perform most cognitive tasks, especially the ones based on pattern recognition, far better than humans. The real question of the 21st century will be what to do with conscious humans, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better, including art. There is of course the chance that we will be able to harness this intelligence to provide a decent standard of life for all human beings, but what will keep them occupied and content. One solution could be drugs and computer games, especially the virtual reality kind. The other possibility, as espoused by philosophers such Nick Bostrom, warn that once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it might simply exterminate humankind.

The second threat facing liberalism is that in the future, while the system might still need humans, it will not need individuals. Modern science suggests that human beings are less unique individuals than aggregates of different algorithms that don’t really possess free will, but are instead shaped by genetic and environmental factors. Thus external algorithms could theoretically know human beings much better than we know ourselves. Once such an algorithm is built, the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms. Liberalism sanctifies the narrative self and gives it free rein over all decisions regarding humanity. This made good sense for centuries because no other system knew humans better, even though it believed in all kinds of fantasies. But once we have a system that does know humans better, it wouldn’t make sense to pass control over it. While this might not necessarily be a bad world to live in, it will definitely be a post liberal world.

And finally, there is the chance that the only individuals the system finds value in will be a new elite of upgraded superhumans, rather than the teeming masses. Till the end of the 20th century humankind’s main problems were famine, plague, and war. And while there is still a significant amount of hunger, disease, and conflict in the world, especially in the under developed countries, these problems have largely been eliminated, especially in comparison to the scale of these issues in the pre modern world. Harari predicts that we will replace these challenges with a new agenda, focussed on attaining immortality, bliss, and divinity. And this will be driven by the rich, who have always had a different agenda to the poor. As of 2016, the 62 richest people in the world are worth as much as the entire bottom half of humankind. “Throughout history the rich enjoyed many social and political advantages, but there was never a huge biological gap separating them from the poor. In the future, however, we may see real gaps in physical and cognitive abilities opening between an upgraded upper class and the rest of society. Unlike in the twentieth century, when the elite had a stake in fixing the problems of the poor because they were militarily and economically vital, in the twenty-first century the most efficient (albeit ruthless) strategy may be to let go of the useless third-class carriages, and dash forward with the first class only.”

While the world is lumbering along without a coherent religious ideology to give direction to it’s scientific and technological advancements, Harari argues that the religions of the future are being cooked up in Silicon Valley. These techno-religions can be divided into two main types: techno-humanism and data religion.

Techno-humanism believes that Homo Sapiens as we know it has run its course, and that we should use technology to upgrade ourselves into a superior human model — Homo Deus, in order to remain relevant in the future. Homo Deus will enjoy upgraded physical and cognitive abilities that will allow it to compete with even the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. This idea, which is an updated variant on the old evolutionary humanistic dreams, plans to create superhumans using genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces. The danger here is in re-engineering our mental states without a full understanding of our mental landscape. Modern Western culture has studied in detail sub-normal mental states but the super-normative zone is largely unknown territory. “When you mix a practical ability to engineer minds with our ignorance of the mental spectrum and with the narrow interests of governments, armies and corporations, you get a recipe for trouble.” Techno-humanism faces the impossible dilemma of considering the human will to be the most important thing in the Universe, but at the same time having to push humanity to develop technologies that can control and redesign our will.

Dataism argues that the universe consists of data flows and that the value of any phenomenon is determined by its contribution to data processing. It was born out of the realisation that the exact same mathematical laws apply to both biochemical and electronic algorithms. In fact, dataism expects electronic algorithms to eventually decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms. According to dataism, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, but are competing data-processing systems. Whereas capitalism uses distributed processing, communism relies on centralised processing. Thus capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing. Human political institutions can also be interpreted as data processing systems. As data processing conditions change in the 21st century and both the volume and speed of data flow increases, institutions such as elections, parties and parliaments might become obsolete because they don’t process data fast enough. Thus many modern economists and political theorists advocate leaving the important decisions to the free market.

Dataists perceive the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans acting as its chips. The whole of history can be understood as a process of increasing the efficiency of this system, through four main stages.

1. Increasing the number of processors. This happened during the Cognitive Revolution which made it possible to connect unlimited number of humans into a single data processing network.
2. Increasing the variety of processors. This stage began with the Agricultural Revolution and the kinds of trading and specialisation that it enabled.
3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. This stage kicked off with the invention of writing and money about 5000 years ago and lasted until the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.
4. Increasing the freedom of movement among existing connectors. This began around 1492 when early explorers and traders started creating the first networks which encompassed the whole world.

Like Capitalism, Dataism is now mutating into a religion whose supreme value is ‘information flow’ and whose God will be a cosmic data-processing system which will be everywhere and will control everything. According to Dataism, humans are better than animals as we absorb more data, and process it using better algorithms. The greatest sin in this new religion is to block the data flow, such as what happens during death. Dataism is neither liberal nor humanist. It’s not even anti-humanist. It just does not think that human experiences are intrinsically valuable unless they’re a part of the cosmic data flow. Just as free market believers trust in the invisible hand of the market, Dataists believe in the invisible hand of the data flow. Today, they argue for the sacredness of the data flow because it serves human needs, but eventually the focus will shift just to the sacredness of the data.

A critical examination of the Dataist dogma is one of the most pressing scientific, political, and economic challenge of the 21st century. We have to ask ourselves whether we are missing anything when we understand life as data processing and decision making. But even if Dataism is wrong and organisms are not just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent it from taking over the world. Many religions have become enormously popular in the past despite being factually incorrect. While Dataism has started off by serving the human pursuit of health, happiness, and power, once authority shifts from humans to algorithms, humanism will lose its relevance. We will thus be subjected to the same fate that we subjected other animals to; being plugged into a global network and evaluated solely based on our contributions to the value of that network.

The book ends with Harari posing 3 questions to society at large.

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable — intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

The answers to these questions might well hold the key to the long term survival of our species, and indeed of all earthly sentient life.

Fin!