Feb 20, 2018 08:25 PM
http://inference-review.com/article/godz...:00:35:00Z
EXCERPT: Yuval Harari is a young Israeli historian. In his first book, *Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind*, Harari surveyed the history of the human race; in his second, *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*, he has written an account of its future. [...] In Sapiens, Harari expressed no very great use for the monotheistic religions of mankind, nor for the agricultural practices that, he supposed, made them possible. He commended stone age cultures with the enthusiasm of a man not required to live in any of them. For all that, Sapiens was very much a work of Whig history, an account of successive revolutions, each prefiguring the next.
In Homo Deus, Harari argues that human beings are shortly to be improved. Greatly so. For a start, better genes, better neural circuits, better biochemistry. Thereafter, a variety of implantable contraptions: chips, stents, or shunts. Finally, a full promotion to the pantheon: computer scientists, at last, inscribing intelligence in inorganic matter; the old-fashioned human body declining into desuetude, replaced by the filaments and files of an alien form of life.
[...] “In recent decades,” Harari writes,
[...] Emotions have nothing like the clear-cut identity that is characteristic of an algorithm. [...] There no algorithmic structure controlling how emotions are felt. How they are felt is a matter of how they are felt. An algorithm may exist without ever being run, but an emotion that is never felt is like an idea that is never thought. [...]
Homo Deus is not a work of philosophy, but its arguments turn often on philosophical or logical issues. Harari is persuaded that, no matter their convictions to the contrary, human beings are not free in their actions. [...] The debate has retained its chief features since antiquity, and no philosopher or scientist has made the slightest contribution to enlarging it. Harari belongs to the ages. [...] If human actions are determined, they are not free, and if random, not interesting. Freedom of the will must be an illusion. Perhaps this is so.
If freedom of the will is an illusion, it is both universal and inexpugnable. Every man is persuaded that something is within his power, and none that everything is beyond it. What explains the illusion? [...] The illusion goes too deep to be an accident. It is not random. On the contrary. Free will enters into every deliberation; it is the foundation on which every legal system is constructed; it controls every human exchange; it is the assumption that makes daily life coherent; and if Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are busy undermining consumer choice, they are busy only because, like the rest of us, they share in the illusion of free will and are concerned to make the most of it. To do without the illusion is to live like animals. [...] An appeal to randomness is pointless. No deterministic account is remotely plausible. We are as little able to explain the illusion of free will as to explain free will itself. If the illusion is not a part of the cake, the cake is not all that there is; and if it is a part of the cake, determinism and randomness do not divide it.
[...] Determinism is a doctrine with philosophical bite only if it has some modal force. If it amounts to no more than the observation that generally one thing follows another, it is of no interest. An object dropped from a great height must fall toward the center of the earth. It has no say in the scheme of things, and it cannot do otherwise. Historical laws that determine which possibilities are realized and which are not have the same force of command. This must happen; that is impossible. If anything goes, then we are left with no deterministic explanations why some things went, and if they went for no reason at all, what, then, is the purpose of this book?
[...] “Scientists,” he writes, “have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains.” [...] There is no soul. [...] If Harari is skeptical about freedom of the will or the human soul, in other respects he argues that the life of man is governed by a different imperative. [...] It is this dizzying sense of steadily expanding possibilities that allows Harari to accept with solemn credulity the promise that death is a soluble technological problem, or that, in time, human and machine intelligence, as Ray Kurzweil has predicted, will merge in the burst of a starlike singularity. [...] So long as a scheme or suggestion is not physically impossible, Harari is content to accept as his own the epistemological maxim governing Silicon Valley—anything goes.
[...] It was just yesterday that any number of nervously shuffling TED talkers [...] would, at various TED talks, assure their audience that Big Data was a Big Deal. Harari is with them, an advocate of Dataism, an apostle [...] Like so much else in Homo Deus, Dataism serves chiefly to express Harari’s great gullibility, his willingness to believe what some scientists say without wondering whether what they say is true. Dataism is not the holy grail; it is not a coherent theory; it is not about to unify anything. But, then, death is not a technological problem, and the singularity is an infantile fantasy. Men are not about to become like gods. Harari has been misinformed....
MORE: http://inference-review.com/article/godz...:00:35:00Z
EXCERPT: Yuval Harari is a young Israeli historian. In his first book, *Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind*, Harari surveyed the history of the human race; in his second, *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*, he has written an account of its future. [...] In Sapiens, Harari expressed no very great use for the monotheistic religions of mankind, nor for the agricultural practices that, he supposed, made them possible. He commended stone age cultures with the enthusiasm of a man not required to live in any of them. For all that, Sapiens was very much a work of Whig history, an account of successive revolutions, each prefiguring the next.
In Homo Deus, Harari argues that human beings are shortly to be improved. Greatly so. For a start, better genes, better neural circuits, better biochemistry. Thereafter, a variety of implantable contraptions: chips, stents, or shunts. Finally, a full promotion to the pantheon: computer scientists, at last, inscribing intelligence in inorganic matter; the old-fashioned human body declining into desuetude, replaced by the filaments and files of an alien form of life.
[...] “In recent decades,” Harari writes,
life scientists have demonstrated that emotions are not some mysterious spiritual phenomenon that is useful just for writing poetry and composing symphonies. Rather emotions are biochemical algorithms that are vital for the survival and reproduction of all mammals.
Biologists have demonstrated no such thing. What the life scientists are doing is anyone’s guess. No one has ever supposed that emotions are useful just for writing poetry or composing symphonies. The concept of a biochemical algorithm occupies space without doing work. Some biochemical reactions may be described step by step, but this tells us nothing more than that some biochemical reactions may be described. Very many human emotions have nothing to do with survival or reproduction. [...][...] Emotions have nothing like the clear-cut identity that is characteristic of an algorithm. [...] There no algorithmic structure controlling how emotions are felt. How they are felt is a matter of how they are felt. An algorithm may exist without ever being run, but an emotion that is never felt is like an idea that is never thought. [...]
Homo Deus is not a work of philosophy, but its arguments turn often on philosophical or logical issues. Harari is persuaded that, no matter their convictions to the contrary, human beings are not free in their actions. [...] The debate has retained its chief features since antiquity, and no philosopher or scientist has made the slightest contribution to enlarging it. Harari belongs to the ages. [...] If human actions are determined, they are not free, and if random, not interesting. Freedom of the will must be an illusion. Perhaps this is so.
If freedom of the will is an illusion, it is both universal and inexpugnable. Every man is persuaded that something is within his power, and none that everything is beyond it. What explains the illusion? [...] The illusion goes too deep to be an accident. It is not random. On the contrary. Free will enters into every deliberation; it is the foundation on which every legal system is constructed; it controls every human exchange; it is the assumption that makes daily life coherent; and if Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are busy undermining consumer choice, they are busy only because, like the rest of us, they share in the illusion of free will and are concerned to make the most of it. To do without the illusion is to live like animals. [...] An appeal to randomness is pointless. No deterministic account is remotely plausible. We are as little able to explain the illusion of free will as to explain free will itself. If the illusion is not a part of the cake, the cake is not all that there is; and if it is a part of the cake, determinism and randomness do not divide it.
[...] Determinism is a doctrine with philosophical bite only if it has some modal force. If it amounts to no more than the observation that generally one thing follows another, it is of no interest. An object dropped from a great height must fall toward the center of the earth. It has no say in the scheme of things, and it cannot do otherwise. Historical laws that determine which possibilities are realized and which are not have the same force of command. This must happen; that is impossible. If anything goes, then we are left with no deterministic explanations why some things went, and if they went for no reason at all, what, then, is the purpose of this book?
[...] “Scientists,” he writes, “have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains.” [...] There is no soul. [...] If Harari is skeptical about freedom of the will or the human soul, in other respects he argues that the life of man is governed by a different imperative. [...] It is this dizzying sense of steadily expanding possibilities that allows Harari to accept with solemn credulity the promise that death is a soluble technological problem, or that, in time, human and machine intelligence, as Ray Kurzweil has predicted, will merge in the burst of a starlike singularity. [...] So long as a scheme or suggestion is not physically impossible, Harari is content to accept as his own the epistemological maxim governing Silicon Valley—anything goes.
[...] It was just yesterday that any number of nervously shuffling TED talkers [...] would, at various TED talks, assure their audience that Big Data was a Big Deal. Harari is with them, an advocate of Dataism, an apostle [...] Like so much else in Homo Deus, Dataism serves chiefly to express Harari’s great gullibility, his willingness to believe what some scientists say without wondering whether what they say is true. Dataism is not the holy grail; it is not a coherent theory; it is not about to unify anything. But, then, death is not a technological problem, and the singularity is an infantile fantasy. Men are not about to become like gods. Harari has been misinformed....
MORE: http://inference-review.com/article/godz...:00:35:00Z
