Homo Deus
Thoughts on Yuval Harari’s book
A few weeks ago, my partner and I embarked on our annual summer vacation trip. This time to Utah, to visit all five of their national parks. While putting 1500+ miles on our rented Prius, we had time to finish two audiobooks.
Homo Deus was the second book we listened to, and… I have really mixed feelings about it. The first hour had me captivated. The author’s predictions of humankind’s three future goals were laid out, and thought provoking justifications were presented. After that, the rest of the book focused much more on history, and the ending really lost me. The author went on a lot of tangents that I did not think tied well to his main points, and by the end I wasn’t sure what the main points of the book were anymore.
It seemed that the author filled the pages of the book with ideas that fascinated him, with or without connection to bigger ideas in the book. Like, how did lucid dreaming make it into this book?
Because the ideas in the book seem disconnected to me, I enjoyed it more thinking of it as a collection of persuasive essays. The author’s biases come across pretty strong though. Some points were made ad nauseam. And some of the logic, I thought was lacking.
Harari went through a bunch of different arguments against why humans are not really better or greater than animals (except for being able to create complex societies). From an evolutionary standpoint, other humans are better/greater/more important to me than other animals just because humans are more similar to me. The humans versus other animals comparison is not objective because it’s a human making the comparison.
On the point that Harari made about humans not having souls because science has never been able to measure a “soul”, I think also falls short because not all things can be physically measured. Some people believe that a soul is a person’s relationship to god.
I don’t really get his claim that vaccinations for the masses are the result of needing the masses for war either. There are great humanitarians out there, even if I’m not one of them.
Two other parts that really irked me about the book are Harari’s use of the word religion and the portion on free will.
Equating social/political ideologies to religion was completely unnecessary. Harari could have just said that social/political ideologies and religions achieve a similar purpose to make his point. I think redefining liberalism (capitalism)/socialism/humanism (Nazism) as religions obfuscates his explanations because he’s not using the commonly understood definition of religion. On top of that, I imagine that his claim would piss off a lot of people. It bothers me when people seem to be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian.
On the topic of free will, Harari’s gave a really poor argument for determinism. If arguing that researchers are able to predict what someone wants before the person knows it themselves, the unstated assumption is that awareness is required for a person to make a choice with their free will. This is not obviously true, so I’m not sold.
Besides sounding cool, I don’t understand what it means that between determinism and randomness, there is no room for freedom. From quantum mechanics (my knowledge is limited here, but thank you college), we live in a non-deterministic world with macro level restrictions and there is “freedom” in the form of unpredictability. Harari doesn’t discuss randomness, but the existence of randomness can be the basis for an argument for free will.
(I’ve always thought of science as very similar to religious doctrine. If science tells me something, I don’t really “know” it to be true since I didn’t take any part in the experiments and my knowledge of science if very limited. Believing in science means that I’d have to accept it on faith.)
My bigger issue with the author’s discussion on free will is, why does it matter? Take out religion, whether or not I have free will has no practical impact on anything. I don’t get how this has any relevancy to the rest of the book.
Imagine what life would be like for someone who actually doesn’t believe in self, choice and free will. Nothing would have any meaning. It wouldn’t matter if this person is alive or dead. No one actually lives like this, so talking about not having free will is purely a thought experiment. Logically then, if believing that there is free will is the belief that makes us the happiest (and have a stronger will to stay alive), evolution would have forced us to believe that free will exists and someone arguing against free will like Harari should not have existed or made it this far in life. There.
I’ll admit that I did fall asleep for a few portions of the audiobook, especially toward the end. I did enjoy the book immensely though because of how it made me think about stuff, and now I wrote about it to sort through my thoughts.
