A synopsis - Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

“History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are choosing to silence others.�

A synopsis

Homo Deus

By Yuval Noah Harari

There are three distinct chapters of the book, that target to unlock what the future holds for the Sapiens, if there is any. The future has always eluded the thoughts of mankind for various reasons, many have tried to predict its course, but the general debate is that, the grand scheme of Sapien life and its surroundings is to complex for any one single person to know let alone foresee. The chapters in this book are: -

1.

Homo sapiens conquers the world.

2. Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world.

3. Homo sapiens loses control.

1. Homo sapiens conquers the world.

70,000 years ago, when the cognitive revolution took place, it gave sapiens tremendous abilities to develop in the coming millennia’s. The discovery of language, writing, mathematics, gods & empires, and finally science have carried the Sapien intellect in a direction far different than from the one it embarked on. The Agricultural revolution, the unification of mankind and the scientific revolution are all major contributors to our present conquests. Up until 500 years ago, the same basic problems worried humans. Wars, poverty & famine were inevitable part of human life on the planet. This situation began changing only in the last century. What happened in the last century, that cause humans to live longer, healthy and relatively satisfied lives? The answer was the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution and its wave of capitalist-consumerist ideals changed almost entirely how humans live today from the way they used to. We realised early deaths could be avoided by advancing medicine, famine and poverty could be avoided by extensively studying and predicting weather patterns coupled with help from government and non-governmental aides. The last hundred years of scientific advancement are married to the idea of overall human life enhancement and therefore their societies. More people die today out of overeating than lack of food, Obesity and diabetes kill more people than starvation, homicide or any other major life taking risks that hover around us.

“Indeed, in most countries today overeating has becomes a far worse problem than famine. In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about a million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.”

• More weapons for lesser wars –

This statement is true for how we fight both diseases and wars today. While for diseases it has a straight forward implication, for wars, it is exactly the opposite. Let’s look at diseases and epidemics first.

Diseases were amongst humanity’s top enemies till recent times. Up until the scientific revolution, we had no real answers on how to tackle diseases. They were a mystery to us. It was known as well by different names; the Black death, Black magic etc. Not only were we helpless to their attacks, we were also in the unknown, for hundreds and thousands of years no one really found out what really caused diseases. The pre-modern or any society before that simply lacked the necessary tools to identify and fight them.

“People consequently lived their lives in ancient Athens or medieval Florence knowing that they might fall ill and die next week.

The most famous such outbreak, the so-called Black Death, began in the 1330’s, somewhere in east or central Asia, when the flea dwelling bacterium Yersinia pestis started infecting humans bitten by fleas. From there, riding on an army of rats and fleas, the plague quickly spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa taking less than twenty years to reach the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Between 75million and 200 million people died, the city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants!”

Fleas, rats or bugs or insects were not the only carriers of these deadly viruses though. The deadliest carriers were humans themselves. What humans failed to realise are the viruses they carry within themselves. As Spanish and Portuguese and British fleets left their mainland for new discoveries towards the American lands, they took with them hordes of these viruses. The south American places they landed at and the people of these islands were completely unguarded against such viruses. The human vessels opened the floodgates for the biggest genocide at the hands of diseases when they sailed to these lands.

“On 5 march a small Spanish flotilla left the island of Cuba on its way to Mexico. The ship carried 900 Spanish soldiers along with horses, firearms and a few African slaves. One of the slaves, Francisco de Eguia, carried on his person a far deadlier cargo. Francisco didn’t know, but somewhere among his trillions of cells a biological time bomb was ticking: The Smallpox virus.”

Historically speaking viruses and disease outbreaks have claimed more human lives than wars or riots. In that sense our first and foremost enemy are these diseases itself, and in the past century and more we have developed a better strategy to fight them. We are still far off from being completely successful at eradicating their presence all together but as we go towards the future and as we prepare to face possibly worse epidemics or outbreaks, rest assured we will be more advanced and prepared to hurdle them in their infancy. The time when humankind was helpless before such threats is long gone but with that act coming to an end, a new one arises. The fact that humans can synthesize and develop new anti-bacterial microbes to fight and defeat diseases also shows we very much have the capability to manipulate them, where the end of mankind being helpless to epidemics may be drawing to a close, the era of medical warfare may be off shooting. It is then imperative that if in the forth-coming future sapiens life is endangered due to such viruses and outbreaks, then we will likely be the cause of them as well. This is the plight of human nature itself.

With great power may come great responsibility but clearly, we are famous for not being careful in that endeavour.

• Defying the law of the jungle and the Chekhov law –

When the land on which we lived first became extremely valuable, during the Agricultural revolution, people lived to protect it. It was because their lives depended on it, it was where they had shelter, clothes and most importantly food.

As discussed in the previous books, with the introduction of agriculture came the demand for more food, more surplus and more land. It was a time when the land meant everything for our ancestors. People often had to fight for its safeguard or fight for its expansion. Either way the inevitability of someone or some neighbouring band of sapiens eyeing their land was a common and legible fear. People lived in the constant fear of a war. Post the industrial and scientific revolution this truth has changed. Wars killed lesser and lesser people. Civil wars still tear through many developing and developed nation, but on a global standpoint lesser people are killed by guns than sugar. From the second half of the twentieth century, land did not signify the world’s biggest power, knowledge did. For the first time in thousands of years, humans defied the norm of the jungle. It was a step up from the barbaric and archaic rules that no longer had the interest of the modern economy.

“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

In consequence, the word ‘peace’ has acquired a new meaning. Previous generations thought about peace as the temporary absence of war. Today we think about peace as the implausibility of war.”

People today have learned the value of human as a resource. Countries do not see the point in invading countries and mining their resources or ruling their people for machines. We have realised that there is more profit to be made by selling and garnering knowledge than forcefully acquiring it. This may not necessarily mean that we use that knowledge correctly or to its desired potential, yet, it has been proven beyond doubt that there is no profit to be made by killing people. The growth of knowledge and by garnering innovation, we have in scientific history achieved some serious milestones. Regrettably using that to create an atom bomb wasn’t one of them.

Although, many would agree that, this particular destructive creation set the human race and history on an altogether different tangent. As sapiens got a taste of how much destruction can be cause by the nuclear bomb in 1945, they also realised that it would be easy to wipe the entire race if the idea wasn’t checked immediately. In the vast network as today, developing these WMD’s is the least of the problem, the problem is about controlling them. With the increasing dependency on wireless networks and bandwidths, there is only so much safeguards one can apply. The coming era is that of cyberwarfare and logic bombs. He/she who controls the signal, controls the game.

“Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the law of the jungle, but also the Chekhov law. Anton Chekhov famously said; A gun appearing in the first act of the play will inevitably be fired in the third.

Throughout history, if kings and emperors acquired some new weapon, sooner or later they were tempted to use it. By now we are accustomed to living in a world full of un-dropped bombs and unlaunched missiles, and have been experts in breaking both the law of the jungle and the Chekhov law. If these laws do ever catch up with us, it will be our own fault – not our inescapable destiny.”

•

A-mortal not immortal –

Humanity’s next probable targets seem to be immortality, happiness and divinity for the simple reason that these things have always eluded them. The biggest mystery out of these is death itself. It seems to be the biggest, most grand problem of the current era. After having doubled our life expectancy over the last century, solving malnutrition and diseases, scientist now want to have a go at achieving the impossible. If we even get remotely close to this target it will have some unfound effects on our daily lives. Hypothetically if we can double our currently life expectancy to 150, it remains a mystery how our social, biological, cultural functions will change. Will marriages last a 100 years, how will we look at work, will we be able to see our kids, kids, kids, kids, kids give birth. These are some questions we cant possibly know the answer to even if we manage to prolong life. Truthfully speaking though, medicine has not really doubled our life expectancy over the last century, it has only saved us from premature death. Many people could still live into their eighties a hundred year ago, it was possible, just not plausible.

• The pursuit of happyness –

While death is a long-term target, happyness is a chronic issue. It has been a long-discussed topic and a question of big debate if humans are happy or no, what makes them happy? and how do we know how happy it makes them?

Spirituality and medical surprisingly has similar takes on it but different solutions. Biology claims being happy is nothing but a result of bio-chemical sensations taking place in the boy as a result of the experience u have. That the only things that make people miserable are resulting unpleasant bodily sensations and that which make them happy do the opposite. In its crude state, this is a valid scientific definition. Yet our current rate and path of evolution and development does little to solve this riddle. If getting a promotion, seeking to climb a mountain or sexual pleasures cause us the desired bodily sensations then, the way we are programmed, we only end up wanting more. As discussed before, it is an integral part of the consumerist-capitalist ideal. Hence, we continuously seek these things to make us

happy, and if it is so, then biologically there is no other way than rigging our system to always feel the desired bodily sensations.

Biochemistry has given birth to many such drugs that stimulate those part of our brain functions that trigger these very satisfactory sensations. Yet across the last fifty years since their inception, such drugs have been at centre of attention for all the wrong reasons. While such drugs have helped many come out of depression and pain, they have cause a huge amount of harm to people who are not prescribed these specifically.

“The biochemical pursuit of happyness is also the number one crime in the world. In 2009 half of the inmates in US federal prisons got there because of drugs, 38 percent of Italian prisoners are convicted of drug related offences; 55 percent of inmates in the UK reported that they committed their crimes in connection with either consuming or trading drugs.

People drink alcohol to forget, they smoke pot to feel peaceful, they take cocaine and methamphetamines to be sharp and confident, whereas ecstasy provides ecstatic sensations and LSD sends you to meet lucy in the sky with diamonds.

To attain real happyness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.”

Pleasure, happyness, love, are not sensations or emotions to be gulped down one’s throat, there is considerable reason to believe they’re better off being enjoyed than be treated like a switch. We must gulp the truth first that, our lust to attain happyness is not another target we need to achieve to become perfect or cheered up, because in this way our happyness will be as short-lived as a few seconds or minutes, at the most a few hours. Its difficult to say if the Buddhist’s are right to denounce the greed for craving such pleasant sensations or say that the scientists are faulted in their notion to develop products providing unending pleasant sensations, perhaps a good way to experience them would be to earn them rather than completely isolate ourselves from them or gulp them down like antibiotics. For our pleasures are deeply embeded in our daily work or in the million other things which you can’t possibly isolate to tick mark.

• The Manhattan Project – Till now we have discussed the two main projects homo-sapiens look certain to carry out in the near future, but on the contrary, they are also the stepping stones toward a much grander dream. Happyness, pleasure, Death surely are a big riddle, yet they are part of a bigger vision that mankind has for itself. If there is something we have learned, something that we can take away from the first book about our own history as a species, it’s that we have a relentless hunger to achieve ideals that we simply can’t. This sort of relentlessness is better termed as a fetish. And one such thing that has always escaped our grasp is divinity. Gods, their divinity, their powers are targets us humans have never managed to achieve, so it seems obvious to shoot for such goals. Bi0-engineering humans in the future is the scientific communities inevitable target, it is what they are heading towards. Life on earth has evolved close to 4 billion years, humans have evolved for 4 million of them, and yet bio-engineering states that they cannot wait for evolution and natural selection to get us to divinity, that genetic mutation, artificially coding our brain circuits, altering its biochemical balance and even grow entirely new limbs can help us evolve from Homo sapiens to Homo Deus and faster.

“Bio-engineering starts with the insight that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies.

However once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.

In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be humans.”

We collectively fear not becoming old as much as the inabilities we may develop when we grow old, that we may not comprehend the briskness of the world around, the speed at which it is moving, the technology that it is developing etc.

That is also the same though that fills our minds when we think of a near future with humans with super human abilities. What will happen to people who can’t afford to buy these abilities, what will happen if the rich become extremely rich and poor become completely redundant. This does seem like an inevitability on the path that we are travelling on. It may look like this is not happening any time soon, though when scientist talk about not being able to achieve these genetic mutations and bio-engineering technologies any time soon they talk in a time scale dependent on grants and jobs.

“hence, very far away means twenty years, and never may denote no more than fifty years.”

The internet first came into existence in the early 1990’s, back then no one thought banking could be done without going to banks or newspapers would be without papers, yet in less than 25 years the internet has not become an integral part of our life, it has become more of a thread holding our world together. A world without internet right now; in 2018 would crumble. Yet even if we wanted to reduce our reliability on the internet today, we can’t! We cannot hit the brakes on a car we are neither driving or help drive. In the control over internet we are as helpless as we would be if the Homo Deus came around. The only difference would probably be that they would be real rather than virtual, and that only makes it worst. Not being on the internet will not make us miserable and feel redundant, but being part of a community that knowingly has high functioning humans around will probably do.

“Nobody knows where the brakes are. No one is an expert on everything. No one is therefore capable of connecting all the dots and seeing the full picture. Different fields influence one another in such intricate ways that even the best minds cannot fathom how breakthrough in artificial intelligence might impact nanotechnology, or vice versa. Nobody can absorb all the latest scientific discoveries, nobody can predict how the global economy will look in ten years, and nobody has a clue where we are heading in such a rush. Since no one understands the system anymore, No one can stop it.

Secondly, if we somehow succeed in hitting the brakes, our economy will collapse, along with our society. If the growth stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cosy equilibrium; it will fall to pieces.”

Even in the most absurd way if we manage to create a society of highly functioning humans and highly redundant ones, and keep it from falling to shambles, there is still something we cannot make sure promises on. There is a fine line between healing and upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people, but the same know how is then used to surpass the norm. Even if we manage to nullify all the uncertainties of becoming super human beings, how can we ever predict and control what one may do with them. There are simply too many variables comprehend for a single person here, and therefore its impossible to know until you get a thousand of the world’s best minds in a room and make them chalk out all the rules, even after which there could be another person who can still come up with an idea none of them saw coming. It is this messiness and ambiguous nature of human mind and decision making that makes us difficult to predict. We know where the capitalist economy may take us, yet you and me reading this cannot do anything about it.

This is why the mars project seems interesting. At one hand terraforming mars seems like an impossible task, much like the tasks we are trying to carry out here on earth, but if we do manage to turn it into a liveable, self-sustaining habitat, we may just get another shot at remodelling our societal structures right down to money, modes of exchange, what unifies us and what divides us.

Simply brainstorming the idea of terraforming mars seems absurd, because once u ask yourself that question and try to make sense out of it in your own mind, there comes a point where you don’t know something about the equation, and that may be something no one can know and only predict because even if we take x-ray’s of the entire planet which in itself is impossible, we will only be guessing what goes on within its inner core. To terra form an entire planet we firstly need to know more about it than we know about our own planet right now.

For example, consider the idea of colonising it, first we need to build a vessel big enough to get there and get us back, fair enough, a few companies and countries are throwing a shot at this. (as few as u can count on a single hand) Once we get there we need a team of scientist, geologists, architects to go there, conduct tests and examinations on how to create an environment for a million people to one day live there. Once we have what it takes to go there and start living (even if that may not be self-sustaining at the start), we need to get a million people there, and the fastest we can possibly get there (even if we consider some entirely ambitious rocket technologies that have been hypothised get practically feasible) is in 3 months. This window where we can get to mars with minimal fuel, minimal delta V and maximum payload in 3 months only occurs once every 2 years! So, considering we don’t always wait for people to liftoff in this optimum window and launch 10 rockets with 100 passengers each everyday (where it takes them 5/6 months to get to mars and use more fuel and lesser payload) it will take us 4/4 and half years to just get a million people on mars with only the total transportation cost of 60 billion dollars. Off-course to get to such a technology and economy that lets us launch 10 ships a day and get to mars via long route in 5/6 months is at least 25-30 years away, if countries and companies pursue space travel relentlessly in the coming years, so 25-30 years from now will not be 60 billion dollars, it could be much more. Before this comes to a reality, a series of missions will have to be undertaken to send different experts to establish and build an entire city that could inhabit a million people. Another hoard of unmanned mission carrying hundreds if not thousands of satellites would have to be undertaken to establish a global positioning network, weather network, space station, for mars cost of which will be much more because special satellites will be developed for these kinds of missions having their own huge production costs. Even if all of this goes with the speed at which planned, a big question mark given the bureaucracy involved in such missions, none of these scenarios have even addressed the possibility of terraforming mars. All of these missions will only lead to a million people living on mars inside a pressurised cage. Understandably so, terra forming mars is a far far far bigger project than just getting there; which in itself is a bit of a task.

• The paradox of knowledge –

We have come across complex systems in the previous books. We have studied their types; one’s that are oblivious to the predictions made about them and one’s that react to these predictions. Knowledge, economy, the process of human development, colonising mars, bio-engineering humans, terra forming mars etc. are a part of the later system. All these events, systems are reacting to what has been predicted about their future, some even take inspiration from these predictions to make leaps in the process. The more we predict the more it reacts and ultimately more unpredictable it becomes. The more clarity we pursue in these subjects, and the more knowledge that we acquire, the more it is difficult to make sense of what will happen ahead. These worldly phenomena are so dependent and influenced by another worldly phenomenon’s that they can dramatically change each other’s outcome. No single process or a hundred processes are involved in them, it is more like billions of billions are simultaneously acting to creat these systems the way we know them today.

“We may know how the economy functioned in the past – but we no longer understand how it functions in the present, not to mention the future.

This is not a hypothetical example. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights he predicted an increasingly violent conflict between the proletariat and the capitalists, ending with the inevitable victory of the former and the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx was certain that the revolution would start in the countries that spearheaded the industrial revolution – such as Britain, USA and France – and spread to the rest of the world.

Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read. At first only a handful of disciples took Marx seriously and read his writings. But as the socialist firebrands gained adherents and power, the capitalist became alarmed. They too pursued Das Kapital, adopting many of the tools and insights of Marxist analysis. In the twentieth century everybody from street urchins to presidents embraced a Marxist approach to economics and history.

As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly. Capitalists in countries such as Britain and France strove to better the lot of the workers, strengthen their national consciousness and integrate them into the political system.

As a result, Marx’s predictions came to naught. Communist revolutions never engulfed the leading industrial powers such as Britain, France and the USA, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was consigned to the dustbin of history.

This is the paradox of knowledge.

Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdates.

The single greatest constant of history is that everything changes. “

In exactly this same sense, as discussed before, when in the next quarter of a century we get closer and closer to our target of colonizing mars we may end up developing abilities to terraform it. As monumentous a task as It seems in 30 years from now it may seem like a real possibility. As we’ve learned that knowledge that has the power to cause a change quickly loses relevance, just like that by the time we reach the ability to send a million people comfortably to mars, it may seem like a redundant task, and with all the technology that we will develop to get to that stage, may help us see that terra forming a planet like mars is not as difficult a task after all.

If one looks at why there is a need to foster the idea of colonizing or terra forming another planet in the first place, we realise we have more power than we think we have. Global level catastrophes are a regular part of earth’s history, the ice ages, the heating of the planet are all normalities on a planetary level. The last major global warming extinction event occurred 55 million years ago, and in the 4 million years that humans have evolved, they have managed to change the proximity of this happening again exponentially in just they last 200/300 years. That is enough proof that we have more impact on the planet than we think we have, because we have managed to accelerate the global warming of a planet much by ourselves. If we, sapiens, a single species has the ability to terra’break’ the planet to support our life we certainly have some qualities even right now to make planetary changes.

The biggest positive of acquiring more knowledge today and not knowing how it will shape our future is that tomorrow or 10 years or a hundred years into the future is that we may end up creating techniques to alter a human brain or artificially generate genes which in turns takes us closer to creating fabrics of life, be it sapiens or Deus. While in many ways our history has shown how we can suffer at the hand of our own inventions, even so being able to transcend the normal living conditions to create life or sustain it in places beyond the biosphere that does not support it itself makes us super human.

2. Terra’breaking’ – “Scientist divide the history of our planet into epochs such as the Pleistocene(glacial period), the Pliocene(Cool & dry periods like modern times), and the Miocene epoch(first geological global warming of the Neogene Period). Officially, we live in the Holocene epoch. Yet it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene (human centric) Epoch. For during these millennia Homo Sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology. This is an unprecedented phenomenon. Since the appearance of life about 4 billion years ago, never has a singl species changed the global ecology all by itself.

For homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This global ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem at par with what happened during the ice ages, and tectonic movements.

Within a century, our impact may surpass the effect of the asteroid that killed of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”

• Source code -

What are emotions? How do they work? Where do they originate? How do we understand why we feel the emotions we feel? These questions have eluded the understanding of science for ages until the most recent past. Scientist have deduced that all emotions are calculations made using algorithms by our brain. They are highly refined algorithms that have been honed into our genetic code for millions of years by evolution. Survival instincts, reproductive instincts; whom we find attractive and whom we do not, are all a result of millenniums of algorithmic decision making by all animals. It is certainly not restricted to only sapiens. All animals’ different feelings and emotions, and they all have different decisions coded within them.

One emotion though transcends the algorithms of our genes, i.e. is the mother-infant bond. It is not a sanctified belief, it is well proven that infants or offspring need to be nurtured under the care, touch and feel of their mother. It is more of a necessity than a coded rule. Without such nurturing, the offspring often become weak and redundant or unstable in one or many ways. Humans with their need and ever-growing demands are ruthlessly disrupting this emotional bond between mammals for the breeding industry. These mammals like cows, pigs have evolved for millenniums with a need for motherly love and nurturing, and the breeding industry shamelessly makes use of this to produce more milk and meat. It is heartless and unforgiving.

Our forager ancestors were quite the opposite in this regard. They were a community of animist beliefs that sanctified the needs of the animals around them. The belief was they both (humans and other animals) were living entities of the same environment, looking for the same thing; food. These communities prayed to their animals for food and security.

Such animist religions and sects were then followed by theist religions that came up during the agriculture revolution as understood in the previous book. Further theism was surpassed by humanist beliefs, that are still popular in today’s world. The humanists sanctify the humans themselves and their importance.

“where theism justified traditional agriculture in the name of gods, humanism justified mass torture and genocide of fellow mammals of the modern industrial farming in the name of man.

We are now suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one. As it stands there seems a high possibility that the future human species will attain super human abilities through the advances in genetic coding and bio-engineering, and end up creating supercomputers and programs that will be more valued than human life itself, rendering a majority of human species that are unable to sustain this change, useless and redundant. Would it be fine? “

• Do you mind?

Another part of human life and experience that scientists have tried to dart down into algorithms and probabilities is the human mind, the human consciousness and the idea of soul. While they have a good explanation for the soul, the same cannot be said about the mind and consciousness. It is easy for the science community to denounce the idea of soul, its role in essence of human life and religion. Scientists do this by saying that the basic idea of soul which is that it is indivisible and eternal is biologically wrong. As Sapiens have evolved and were not created (first book), and evolution is an incremental process there is no space for an entity in science that is indivisible. For if humans have evolved then they have evolved parts from more parts which in turn have evolved from more parts. The human body

and mind are a result of step by step evolution of various organs over a course of millions of years, so if that is true then we cannot possess within us a thing that is indivisible. Because, it is all an evolutionary process and keeps changing, no by product can be eternal.

The human brain is a very complex system containing more than 80 billion neurons. What is difficult for and unknown is why do we feel? why are we conscious? why am I, I? It is possible for scientists to factually and ideologically denounce the idea of a soul, because no one has seen it, no one has proven its existence. But, scientists cannot claim to have no felt pain or anger. They also cannot claim to know where exactly in our brain is this anger generated, no one has seen its existence under a microscope. It is true that our body and the mind are hardwired to act accordingly under given conditions. All responses to heat, pain, hunger are genetically wired in our body and occur due to the firing of neurons from our brain to necessary body parts, yet nowhere in this process can one claim to have observed the birth of anger. Our bodies will respond with the necessary action for burning irrespective of whether we feel the burning sensation.

Is then the mind different from the brain, if so where is it, because all the other parts of our body are counted for.

Some scientists dismiss the idea of mind and consciousness as being irrelevant and that one can understand the responses and action of a human being by just truly studying the synapse patters of the neurons firing within a brain during a particular action or sensation. Although –

“if any scientist has to argue that subjective experiences or consciousness are irrelevant topics, their challenge is to explain why torture or rape are wrong without reference to any subjective experience.”

Another group of scientists claim that subjective experiences are real and of great moral, ethical and political value but that they do not fulfil any biological function whatsoever, that they are a useless by product of the brain processes.

“jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn’t propel the aeroplane forward, humans don’t need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff. Similarly, consciousness maybe a kind of a mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It is quite amazing to realise that as of 2016, this is the best theory of consciousness that contemporary science has to offer. “

It does not help to think purely from a biological perspective, nor from an ideological one. One of the most important things that empowered humans to venture out into space itself was our motivation to overcome the space barrier, to do something that had only been though before. To say that our subjective experiences are purely a useless by product of the with no biological function would mean that these useless by product were the biggest driving force behind humans ever venturing out into space. It is no use to map our neural networks and brain processes to know what responses brain issues under which circumstances if we do not know what it means or feels like. Without this useless by product it would be quite difficult to explain these brain processes itself. Our social and ethical structures are built around these subjective experiences. How we react to too much light and to the absence of it is what helps us achieve a suitable living environment, one that in return stimulates even higher brain processes.

(the Turing test (pg. 140) and the previous page, as well as the story of clever Hans the horse (pg. 150) are not a part of this synopsis but must be referred to for a further study about the subjective experiences of humans.)

3. Homo Sapiens gives meaning to the world – The power of the brain, the battle to understand it as well as subjective experiences, consciousness, is a very difficult task. The deeper we get into the subject the lesser we seem to make sense out of it. When we try to define the reasons behind our streams of consciousness all sorts of variable realities pop up. It then becomes extremely difficult to know what actually is real and what is not. Especially, with the coming of the computer age, and the ever-increasing power we are giving to them try to integrate the computer system with our own mind creates bigger concerns regarding our future realities. It is naïve to compare the human brain and mind to that of a complex process of a computer, as in the very essence they are completely different systems. Computers do not feel or emote, they do not know how to differentiate between pain and anger and pleasure. Even today how can we trust people themselves to know if they are mindfully conscious or know, we have no real way of knowing it. We trust them to know if they are, but that doesn’t seem like a valid solution. What, then would happen if we give computers a major seat at the table who create and impose their own emerging algorithms about what is conscious or not. If we find ourselves questioning these things, it sets us into a vicious cycle of not knowing what really is real and what is fake.

“According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the real world. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real worlds, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability of you ever waking up in the real world is almost zero.

None of our scientific breakthroughs has managed to overcome this notorious problem of other minds. The best test the scholars have come up with so far is called the Turing test. But it only examines social conventions.

According to the Turing test in order to determine whether a computer has a mind, you should communicate simultaneously both with that computer and with a real person, without knowing which is which. You can ask whatever questions you want, you can play games, argue, even flirt with them. Take as much time as you like. Then you need to decide which is the computer and which is the human. If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind. However, that won’t really be a proof, of-course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.

The Turing test was inventedin 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age.

Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration. Two years later he committed suicide. The Turing test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950’s Britain: can you pass for a straight man? Turing knew from personal experience that it didn’t matter who you really were – it only mattered what others thought about you. According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the

1950’s. It won’t matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not. It will mater only what people think about it.”

You could just say that Turing is merely mixing up what he feels to be a gay in 1950’s with what world will think of computers and human computers, (both of which were not of high regard in those times until accepted by the people) yet he comes up with the most brilliant & simple way to examine social conventions and human consciousness itself.

Knowing what you know about the test after reading about it, we must think really hard about the result…. Is it ok to be right or wrong in this test? Is either way the result in the favour of the Sapiens?

Our religions, our money, our companies, our sense of nationalism are all fictions we tell ourselves along with those around us. We already leave consciously in a world of what is not real. Even the internet exists in thin air. No one has physically touched anything over the internet. Yet all these virtual realities are foundations to our modern society and they are what keep us from falling apart.

In a world and city that has to truly remain and sustain itself in he darkness of space and the coldness of Mars, such fantasies have to be reduced. It will be grave if we colonize a new planet and try to make the colony self-sustaining with the same we lead our lives here, for it is these fictions itself that have led us to choose harming the planet for our existence over not doing so, it is these same fantasies that have also led us to believe we are a special living being on this planet. Even if that may be true then very soon in the coming millennia the time of this most special living species is coming to an end.

“From 1958 to 1961 communist China undertook the great leap forward, when Mao Zedong wished to rapidly turn china into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial and military projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made there way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headman.

The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further. Adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen.

Consequently, in 1958 the Chinese government was informed that annual grain production was 50 percent more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history of China and death of tens of millions of Chinese.”

It is time for us to use these fantasies to really save us for once rather than ruin us, in order to really stay together in large numbers, we need to first stop pampering our desires and whims and try to make them our targets. Money, religion, liberty, freedom, are all fictional concepts not truer than the other. If it is at all in doubt whether we live in a real world or no, it is largely because we do not know whether to make our fictions our priorities or our realities.

Reshaping reality according to the fantasies will never put an end to the countless unjust act we make as humans on other humans.

“Fiction isn’t bad, it is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states, co-operation, no complex humanity can function, but they should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

When examining the history of any human network, it is therefore advisable to stop from time to time and look at things from the perspective of some real entity. How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself. ‘Can it suffer?’ When bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her new-born calf, she suffers. This is reality.”

In the society of the future, if we want to be a truly multi-planetary species (which we must all spare a moments time to understand how big an ask it is of ourselves, what it truly entails) we have to live these fake realities behind. We have spent some 5 millennia’s cooperating in large numbers, and if through these times we have seen that our fictions for mass co-operations cause either mass murder in the beginning or chaos at the end, we must learn to seek what will subtract both these acts. We can stop telling ourselves fictions and keep failing at them or we must seek a true societal belief that involves cooperation without murder or chaos or division of population into two majorities. We will have to live behind the ideas of real estates, FSI’s. unachievable profit, consumerism etc. We must slow the wheels of success and speed up the wheels of innovation and survival for they both guarantee the survival of all and not some.

• 16 rounds between science and religion –

“It is customary to portray the history of modernity as a struggle between science and religion. In theory, both science and religion are interested above all in the truth, and because each upholds a different truth, they are doomed to clash.

In-fact, neither science nor religion cares that much about the truth, hence they can easily compromise, co-exist and even co-operate.

Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars, and produce food. As individuals’ scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer power and order over the truth. They therefore make good bedfellows.”

These differences and similarities in the two are a prime example regarding the space race, and how we initially ventured out into space. The scientists as individuals claimed interested in seeking the unknown while the governments were only interested in the power that this exercise got them.

The debate for this past few decades has not been between science and religion, it has in-fact between two opposing humanist ideologies; Liberalism & Socialism. This is the problem, in truth, both of them are in themselves humanist beliefs, gratifying humans themselves. The debate is just about how that is to be done. Socialist believe in placing importance on experiences of others and liberalists believe in placing importance in the experiences of one’s self. How

ideologically different is this debate from that between the protestants and Catholics, sure it may encompass different believes al-together, but in the whole scheme of things, it is more about dividing beliefs than uniting them. Sure, it will always be a task trying to unite all 7 billion people on earth, especially because of the extremely varied roles they play in the society, yet going ahead, such divisions will only reduce our hopes of survival as a species. Capitalism, coupled with liberalism means no leash on the desires and greed’s of the human beings.

“Religious understanding of Knowledge – Scriptures X Logic Scientific understanding of Knowledge – Empirical data X Mathematics Humanist understanding of Knowledge – Experiences X Sensitivity”

Yet there is one belief that seems to escape the everyday mind, yet is universally felt by the entire 7 billion. Because of the humanist or theist religions we have followed or been brought up with for the past thousands of years, we have learned to survive. Death across all religions and beliefs is feared, unwanted and disliked. As discussed before, that is why, it seems like the inevitable hurdle humankind will look to overcome in the coming centuries. But this chance may never come if we do not gather our thoughts about the future the planet holds for us. For us to successfully have a second home, on a different planet, we must realise survival is the key. There is no point gratifying human life if it won’t be around 500 years from now.

4. Homo Sapiens loses control – Like souls, there is no freedom – it is just in our imagination – we are driven by determinism and randomness of the mind.

One of the biggest truths that science has shown in the past decade is the way our brain takes decisions. By studying its biochemical responses across thousands of cases, by numerous experiments and scientists it has been clearly stated that our brain function is either deterministic or random. Deterministic means it has been shaped by years of evolution and grooming of our brain functions about certain things, that it has been genetically passed on to us from our ancestors. Randomised means certain responses and decisions we make can be related to random events such as spontaneous decomposition of a radioactive atom. Any decision we make then is either random, deterministic or a combination of both, but it definitely is not freedom or free will. We only feel what we act, how we feel those things are either random or determined or both.

This revelation throws into air the entire basic beliefs of humanist religions, of any kind. If for all these years humanists fought for freedom of though and will, and if that does not exist then what are we fighting for. From the numerous experiments conducted for studying how we respond, and with what part of the brain, it has been clearly found that there exist between us, at-least two different selves; the narrating self and the experiencing self. (refer the experiments conducted by Daniel Kahnemann, Sally Adee, professor Roger Wolcott Sperry & Prof. Michael S. Gazzaniga regarding split brain activities, transcranial simulators etc.) Surely then, if I am not calling the shots, then the importance of I; the Individual is lesser than we thought it was.

“For liberalism to make sense, I must have one – and only one – true self, for if I had more than one authentic voice, how would I know which voice to heed in the polling station, in the supermarket and in the marriage market?

However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that the liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. To be an individual means that I am in-dividual. Yes, my body is made up of approximately 37 trillion cells. Humans aren’t individuals, they are Dividuals!”

It is difficult to control our narrating self and the experiencing self even as we know they exist, but it is not necessary to know how to control them. It is because we feed our experiencing self and narrating self about the imaginations of our virtual worlds, so much so that when the yarn is spun out of them they may cause either grevious harm to those around us or cause self-damage. The idea that we are a single self, that is the ultimate decision maker, and it decides with freedom and not inhibitions, creates these problems.

“ there are three possible way we chose out of the delusions from our narrating self – first, or delusions are so overpowering that we hurt others, or second, that once these delusions over power us they shake & horrify us to the core; this is akin to a young recruit who goes to war believing that it’s good to die for one’s country, or third, which is more profound and complex; once we hurt some one because of these delusions, we cling onto these fantasies for all they are worth, because only they will give meaning to the tragic actions caused in the first place. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have cause.

In politics this is known as the ‘our boys didn’t die in vain’ syndrome.

In 1925 Italy entered the First world War on the side of the Entente powers. Italy’s aim was to liberate Trento and Trieste – two Italian territories that the Austro-Hungarian empire held ‘unjustly’. In the first battle they lost 15,000 men. In the second battle they lost 40,000 men. In the third battle they lost 60,000 men. So, it continued for more than two dreadful years until the eleventh battle. Then the Austrians finally counter-attacked, and in the twelfth battle, better known as the battle of Caporreto, they soundly defeated the Italians and pushed them back to the gates of Venice. By the end of the war almost 700,000 Italian soldiers had been killed and more than a million were wounded.”

In today’s world, with the delusions and fantasies we sell ourselves, its going to get increasingly difficult to compete with new technological innovations like Artificial intelligence, 3-D printing etc. It will even make it difficult for us to get employed, because humans today give more importance to specialising in fields rather than practicing and gathering wholesome knowledge of subject as opposed to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We are lesser and lesser aware of our own surroundings and more interested in the virtual. AI will not replace humans in workplaces because they are human like, but because they are not, and the way we have developed our education, workplace and life, 99% of human habits have become redundant for the performance in most modern jobs. Ever since the industrial revolution, when we introduced machines, they were always going to be faster than us. The moment we introduced mundane education systems that stress on marks rather than learning, we stamped our own downfall.

With the way we have made our lives so heavily dependent around socialising over the internet rather than in person, it has made us more vulnerable to study. Algorithms of most social media sites use human behavioural pattern techniques, how fast or slow one reads, biometric sensors and web history to know what people prefer and like. It is not false that they can predict our likes and dislikes better than our partners themselves. If that continues even extremely human feelings and emotions like love could be easily duplicated without much effort, very much like what Alan Turing prophesied in the Turing test.

As the new technologies like AI and computer downloaded brain systems come closer to become reality, we come closer to another worse possibility. Because of the disparate and divisive nature of the technological innovations, only a few people will be of use to this new currency. Most people will be out of jobs or livelihoods. The worst part is not that they will be jobless but that, there will be enough money and materialistic resources to go around to provide these unemployed people with. This will not just divide the world into rich and poor, but employed and Un-employable.

“Despite all the medical breakthroughs we cannot be certain that in 2070 the poor will indeed enjoy better healthcare than today, because the state and the elite may lose interest in providing the poor with healthcare. In the twentieth century medicine benefited the masses because it was the age of the masses. Twentieth century army needed millions of healthy soldiers, and economies needed millions of healthy workers.

But the age of masses maybe over, and with it the age of mass medicine. AS human soldiers and worker give way to algorithms, at-least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels pf health for masses of useless poor people, and that is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm.�