What is Harari's religion?
Answer: Hararism
Explanation: According to Harari, he does not believe in God or that there is no God. And if God exists, He is just a fiction of one's imagination. Therefore, Harari has supplanted or replaced God with himself.
Observations: He is genius at non sequitor and reducio absurdio. To Harari, since God is unknowable, therefore he is not worth of anything. Most of what Harari discuss are delusional claims about the greater power of humanism that can actually dethrone faith. He came at point of his intelligence that he himself can boast to supplant God. You see, Harari puts his faith so much in evolution--which requires more faith to believe on. Harari's analogy: God is mysterious.
Humans have been misrepresenting God or unable to understand God.
Therefore, God is to be blamed.
Climate change and ecological collapse are a present reality.
It is already happening all around us.
And if things continue in the present course in 50 years
it might be impossible to live in Mumbai,
either because the Indian Ocean will rise
and swallow up much of the city, or because it will
be so hot that nobody could live here, at least not
in the hot season of March, and April, and May.
HARARI:
"There is nothing special about the heart
and about the human emotional system.
It is also in the end a biochemical system
that computers will be able to hack and to understand,
and to predict, and to manipulate,
just like any other thing, and it is already
happening right now; computers are becoming better
than humans in identifying human emotions.
If you want to know how another human is feeling
then you basically analyze data.
You look at the face, at the facial expressions,
you listen to the tone of voice,
you listen to the content of the words,
and you know from experience that if you see this kind
of an expression and this tone of voice,
the person is angry, or the person is frightened.
This is just part of recognition and this is something
that now computers are becoming better than humans.
So we have computers that are able to identify,
to recognize emotions better than humans.
So down the road we might have computer psychologists,
we might have computer artists that are able
to inspire and manipulate human emotions
better than any human singer, or poet, or actor
because they know the instrument they are playing on.
In the end musicians don't play on a piano or on a guitar,
musicians always play on the human biochemical system
and computers will be able to know this instrument,
how to press its buttons better than almost any musician.
So this is one side of the issue.
Well my main recommendation to people is don't take any book including my own as kind of the truth about history or about humankind.
I see my own books more as an invitation
to further research, they're more about
the questions than the answers.
My hope is that they will inspire people
to question, to have discussions, to investigate further
and not just to say okay, this is the truth, now we know
everything we don't need to continue with the investigation
and certainly I don't for myself personally,
I'm very afraid of being placed in the position
of a kind of a guru that knows everything
because the danger is that I might start believe that.
You know it goes up to the head
and this is the greatest stupidity of all.
John Sexton. 2016. “A Reductionist History of Humankind.” The New Atlantis (blog). February 26, 2016. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-history-of-humankind.
His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is an effort in the genre of universal history. Like many such efforts, it does not contain much actual history. Rather, it is a speculative reconstruction of human evolution, supplemented by the author’s thoughts on recorded history and the human condition. The book is fundamentally unserious and undeserving of the wide acclaim and attention it has been receiving. But it is worth considering the book’s blind spots and flaws — the better to understand the weaknesses of the genre and the intellectual temptations of our age.Books like this meet an appetite for sweeping history written in an accessible style and stressing the role of science and technology in shaping human destiny.The basic outline of this story will be familiar to most readers. The genus Homo evolved from primates several million years ago, and modern humans emerged, certainly in Africa but also, perhaps, in other parts of the world, several hundred thousand years ago. Around 70,000 years ago, we underwent the first in a series of revolutions, which Harari terms the Cognitive Revolution. The causes of this event, which in his telling is decisive for all of human history, are largely unknown — he makes no bones about the fact that all that remains from this period is, well, bones. But whatever happened, humans began doing things no species had ever done before and spread rapidly across the planet. Around 11,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution turned some of us from hunter-gatherers into farmers, which led to a deterioration in diet, longer hours of work, increased susceptibility to disease, and, ultimately, immense power over nature. Around 500 years ago, the Scientific Revolution began. The world we live in today is in large part a product of this latest, and possibly last, revolution.
Along the way, Harari breezes through some other great and mysterious matters, including the development of language, the rise of religion and the gradual triumph of monotheism, the invention of money, and the growth of empires. And he makes a number of striking claims:
• Prior to the start of the Cognitive Revolution around 70,000 years ago, when humans started making things up, they were an unremarkable species in the middle of the food chain; it was only after the Revolution that large-scale social cooperation became possible through fictions.
• Modern science distinguishes itself from all preceding traditions in its “willingness to admit ignorance.” In fact, the “discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions” is what “launched the Scientific Revolution.”
• Humans’ mastery over nature, especially in the form of industry and the market, has freed us from many forms of drudgery but has also helped to alienate us from each other and to bind us to industry and technology. The state and market now act as — often inadequate — replacements for lost communal bonds.
• All behavior and “whatever is possible” is by definition natural, because nothing can go against the laws of nature. Any behavior we might call “unnatural” is so only by virtue of cultural norms, not biology. The distinction between natural and unnatural is an invention of Christian theology.
• Liberal humanism is a religion founded on “monotheist beliefs.”
• The nation-state is declining in power and we are on our way to a “global empire” with one culture.
• Current developments in biotechnology may lead to the end for us sapiens: we will replace ourselves with bioengineered post-humans, immortal cyborgs who will be as different from us as we are from other species.
Comments