"The larger reasons Silicon Valley and its deferential intellectual fans love him is, first, because he gives them air cover to not give a second thought to any idea, any religion, any moral tenet, any “ought,” any philosophy, because remember, they’re all bullshit anyway. It’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for every moral and ethical issue under the sun. As if powerful human beings needed more ammunition to rationalize their self-interest."
Sociopaths, as a rule, have little use for philosophies that cannot be weaponized in their favor, although they regard all of them as so much bullshit.
Late answer, following a link posted by the author from a comment elsewhere.
I guess I have to wholly disagree with this piece. What you call "godless" is not clear enough - first you say that calling myths and religion "fictions" is like shooting fish in a barrel (i.e obviously true), but a few paragraphs later you talk about "sins against God", in all apparent seriousness. So which is it? If you want to defend actual traditional top-down religion with its God(s) who totally want you to do this and not that, then just say so, you'll have plenty of company, and the rest of us will be nicely warned that we're far in foreign territory. On the other hand, if your "sins against God" are metaphorical, and what you are revolted by is the apparent dismissal of all good human values, then why bring God into it? Why muddle things up by throwing shade at successful scientific theories?
I think the word you may be missing here is "emergent". Really, look it up if you haven't seen it, it's a good word, even better than "normative". What people like Harari are claiming (and I'm no big fan of Harari's writing, to be clear), is that even the best human values are emergent. And in that I do agree with him. That means they come out of a process of refinement. They're not built into the cosmos in some already-perfect, ready-to-pick, God-given way. It's like refining a recipe (for civilization in this case), which was not there before; not like refining elemental gold, which was already there in the ore. Genetic evolution is emergent, cultural evolution is emergent, moral norms are emergent, as are all the manifold structures of civilization including rights, laws, companies, and so on.
For me the fault here lies squarely with traditional philosophies, especially religious ones. They took a view at human values, saw that they were good, and decided that God or the Gods must have put them there from the beginning. So when people mostly stopped literally believing in such stories, all of a sudden they found themselves without a basis to support human values. But the problem is fake, because (in this kind of emergentist view), they never were cosmic truths to begin with. They're just evolved, refined recipes. And the good news is we never actually lost them, they're as good as ever, and we can thankfully continue living by them and let them evolve further in our changing environment.
The fun part is, you can have a perfectly spiritual yet emergentist world-view! Once you've emptied your shells into the stale barrel of rotting fish, and killed the last remains of the myth of the supernatural adult in charge who knows ahead of time what you should do and who will for-sure-this-time ensure that things end up well, you can still look around, and marvel at the fine concoction that this self-aware universe has made of itself. In theistic words, God is even better when we stop projecting our parents there.
Thank you for this. Very thoughtful. You're correct that I'm not crystal clear on the contours of godlessness here - for Harari, he's as much a nihilist as anything else. His convention of referring to all widely-held beliefs as being based on stories, which he regards as prima facie falsehoods, to me, leaves no room for any higher truth or spiritual understanding, religious or otherwise. For him, human values might be emergent, but they seem to be only based on historical accident or expedience. This seems like a deeply cynical approach that does not lend itself to wisdom, which is why he is not high on my list of people who should be dispensing advice on important things. By the way, appreciate the "normative" shout-out. Still a word I will never use. I will use emergent, though.
"[Y]ou can still look around, and marvel at the fine concoction that this self-aware universe has made of itself."
But to me, it looks like (a) existing science, combined with (possible) (b) future science, combined with (c) things forever beyond human capability to understand. I'm certainly at peace with that... unlike some "spiritual" people, some of whom are even primitive enough to be hell-bent on creating conditions for nuclear war.
And so, if you can't "see" this supposedly "self-aware" universe -- after about five decades of hearing "spiritual" people harp on and on about it with stars in their eyes and zombie-like smiles on their faces -- what then? Smirk and ignore communication with we "the blind", aka "the other"? Societies today are (vs my childhood long ago), today, awash in *shunning* (vs, say, far-healthier debating, even arguing) others about such things. That ain't good.
In short -- how is this "knowledge" *transferred* to the skeptical? For if you don't start with skepticism, you can't distinguish what you perceive from hallucination.
Thanks for the reply. First, I understand things are not always so easy in real life, but people who would shun you for your philosophical choices don't sound like the kind of group you'd want to join to begin with. Starry eyed woo-types exist too, they can be quite cool as people, but next thing you know they're trying to sell you some quantum consciousness crystals. So I guess "how this knowledge is transfered" can start with dropping out of unproductive discussions and finding quality materials; if you're scientifically minded, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a huge high-quality resource to branch into philosophical and speculative matters without your brain falling out.
The second thing one needs is a bit of an open mind, and that doesn't just happen on its own. If you feel like you're surrounded by hostile strangers on all sides trying to shove their beliefs through the tiniest crack you offer, it's going to be hard to open up beyond the security of a tightly held position, in your case scientific materialism. Paradoxically, it's when you feel secure enough in your own position that you can seek out diverging points of view from intelligent sources, to challenge your views and see if they come out reinforced or transformed. That's how I ended up changing my mind years ago.
Now, taking a scientific perspective, what I observe is that techie and engineer types tend to feel like scientific materialism is obvious and clear, whereas people who work close to the subject, like cosmologists and philosophers of science, actually split up into a vast panoply of views, some of them quite odd-sounding, and will often readily admit that there is no overwhelming evidence for their preferred view, and that smart minds just disagree. That alone should be enough to open a crack in the engineer's sense of absolute certainty.
To go straight into the subject, picture for a moment a physicist in the act of pondering the validity of a physical theory in the light of some experiment that just came out. What you have right there is scientific knowledge in the process of being produced, and if you look closely, there are (at least) three aspects or poles to that. One is the material universe on which the measurements were made. Another is the conscious cognition of the scientist, without which no knowledge would be produced. And an often overlooked third is the mathematical structure of the theory, which would still be valid even if there wasn't a physical universe to instantiate it.
So what is the relationship between those three? We tend to prefer minimalist theories (Ockham's razor and all that), so there's clearly an aesthetic preference for a single principle to be primary, and the others derived. If you feel the physical universe is clearly primary, you're a physicalist (or materialist, you can ignore the slight difference), which is the most mainstream view nowadays, so you're in good company. If you feel consciousness might be primary, you're most likely some kind of "idealist", which these days is often associated with Eastern views, but has plenty of precedent in the West too. It has the advantage of being closest to our actual experience; if you look closely, you can catch your own mind in the process of splitting awareness into a knowing subject "here" and a world "there", which makes conscious awareness experientially prior to the objective world. The third option, according to which the mathematical structure is prior to the physical universe and to consciousness, is a more recent addition, mostly associated with a guy called Max Tegmark. And of course there are other options; just recently I was reading a piece on Nautilus (https://nautil.us/the-reality-ouroboros-809153/) which argues for putting all three on the same footing (fuck Ockham I guess).
So I'm not here to try to convince you of one option or the other, I feel we're already hijacking Brian's thread enough as it is, and it's more interesting if you explore and make up your own mind. The point I want to make is that the act of choosing one of these options (including materialism) is already a metaphysical, speculative and somewhat arbitrary choice. I guess the truly skeptical thing to do would be to remain absolutely agnostic about such matters, but in practice no-one does that, because it's not psychologically very satisfactory, and it also leaves you maximally vulnerable to people who want to sell you their view.
Thanks much for this. Unfortunately I don't currently have much time, so I must save your response and review it soon with proper attention, some review/research, and reflection. Here's a few immediate things that came to mind:
-- I do not consider myself tech/science oriented. My point about "proving" things is simply that if one wants to convince another of the truth of something, one needs to be able to, somehow, communicate this truth. However, if the recipient is prone to acceptance (out of, say, social eagerness, or from an urge to feel they "get it") rather than skepticism, that receiver can easily be unaware of their biases, which can corrupt the "transfer" process, i.e. the recipient eagerly accepts the content, without being aware they didn't capture it sufficiently/properly.
-- This is where traditional revealed religions look, to me, quite ridiculous. In our desperation for "meaning", most chase after them, when they should chase after us. I'm not at all desperate for meaning; I think meaning is itself just another big fat human illusion, like consciousness.
-- I also think that truth (of anything external to one's mind) is unattainable. Everything, for a human being, is belief. The pretentious word "knowledge" should even be abandoned in favor of only perceptions, evidence, belief, thoughts, etc. -- i.e. human-grounded terms.
BTW, I'm not sure we're hijacking a thread, aren't we taking discussion where it leads?
"[He]'s the type of person, even a well-meaning and smart person, who has resolved—as a principal of one’s world view and as a precondition to engagement—that there is nothing outside of material observable reality ... / Except, for Harari, one version of history is true and the other is make believe."
*Where* did he claim that "that there is nothing outside of material observable reality"? Scientists are making transitions about such things all the time. First we had no idea, now we do -- it follows, therefore, that some things will *never* be discovered by human beings.
Did you simply infer this idea from his failure to *explicitly* acknowledge he might be wrong (about whatever)? You, in fact, make all kinds of claims yourself just in this one essay. Yet you don't carefully preface each one of them with "I think" or "I believe". Which is totally OK with me, even for the ones I disagree with. It's how humans talk to each other. Because it should go without saying that one could be wrong -- that is, *anyone* could be wrong, about *anything* (yes, even about gods!) It's in the nature of every one of us.
"The belief that there is nothing outside of what is material and observable is predicated on a leap of faith."
That's right -- because it's *all* belief. Revealed religions, science, and everything else. *Everything*, that is, every claim to truth is, in the final analysis / proof chain, just belief. *For a human, there can never be anything else.* Harari simply dispensed with explaining that; it shouldn't be necessary. For one thing, because epistemology is not the point of the book.
----------------
A problem *I* have with revealed religions (certainly the Abrahamic ones) is the sheer proportion and volume of stupidity and contradiction in scripture, and godmongers' stories *about* scripture (along, admittedly, with plenty of clear ageless wisdom), make that it's clear to me no self-respecting God would have concocted it.
To take just one characteristic in particular: The fact that one had to have gone to the Jews to obtain a book that says the Jews are chosen should leave any (modern) disinterested observer with an arched eyebrow. If it had been discovered simultaneously and independently in (present-day) Norway, Chile, and Korea, then when we all connected with each other and went "Wow!", it would be crystal clear it came from God (or godlike being/beings), and ought to heed it. There is any number of things like this that God could have done, including just showing up in person now and then. But people take this at face value, while godmongers continue to rely on tea-leaves reading to "prove" God's existence.
Meanwhile, claims of direct God-communication also look all-too-convincingly like hallucinations. Any God or gods out there must surely knows that humans hallucinate enough, about all kinds of things. And it appears there's simply no way to prove otherwise (see my points above about the limitations of humans).
Lastly (in this short set off the top of my head), it's clear to me that the "knowledge" claimed by adherents to revealed religions is *non-transferable*. Either you already, to greater or lesser extent believe in the God/gods, and are susceptible, or you're not (again, to greater or lesser extent). In my opinion, this is because a person carries evolution-based propensities or not. So the God-story doesn't actually do the convincing, logically -- although evangelism thinks this is what it's accomplishing. Unlike science, that is, which makes a *specific point* of making knowledge claims transferable to skeptics (even when in many instances it's not successful in doing so, and a proposed change to accepted science fails).
That said, well, yes, all these things *could* be exactly as claimed by godmongers. But from the perspective of this skeptic, the evidence pointing to solely *human* creation is simply overwhelming.
By the way, I too have problems with Harari's "Sapiens", just very different ones.
In particular, he seems to treat all human thought constructions as of similar ethical meaning and value. I'd argue that shadowy figures creating religious stories (in my opinion, for controlling populations) is in a whole other category from those genesis was explicit and often democratically decided. But I didn't find him anywhere drawing this distinction. Does it matter to him?
I appreciate your writing. New to your stack and glad I found it. Wondering why it doesn't have way more readers...because it should.
"The larger reasons Silicon Valley and its deferential intellectual fans love him is, first, because he gives them air cover to not give a second thought to any idea, any religion, any moral tenet, any “ought,” any philosophy, because remember, they’re all bullshit anyway. It’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for every moral and ethical issue under the sun. As if powerful human beings needed more ammunition to rationalize their self-interest."
Sociopaths, as a rule, have little use for philosophies that cannot be weaponized in their favor, although they regard all of them as so much bullshit.
Late answer, following a link posted by the author from a comment elsewhere.
I guess I have to wholly disagree with this piece. What you call "godless" is not clear enough - first you say that calling myths and religion "fictions" is like shooting fish in a barrel (i.e obviously true), but a few paragraphs later you talk about "sins against God", in all apparent seriousness. So which is it? If you want to defend actual traditional top-down religion with its God(s) who totally want you to do this and not that, then just say so, you'll have plenty of company, and the rest of us will be nicely warned that we're far in foreign territory. On the other hand, if your "sins against God" are metaphorical, and what you are revolted by is the apparent dismissal of all good human values, then why bring God into it? Why muddle things up by throwing shade at successful scientific theories?
I think the word you may be missing here is "emergent". Really, look it up if you haven't seen it, it's a good word, even better than "normative". What people like Harari are claiming (and I'm no big fan of Harari's writing, to be clear), is that even the best human values are emergent. And in that I do agree with him. That means they come out of a process of refinement. They're not built into the cosmos in some already-perfect, ready-to-pick, God-given way. It's like refining a recipe (for civilization in this case), which was not there before; not like refining elemental gold, which was already there in the ore. Genetic evolution is emergent, cultural evolution is emergent, moral norms are emergent, as are all the manifold structures of civilization including rights, laws, companies, and so on.
For me the fault here lies squarely with traditional philosophies, especially religious ones. They took a view at human values, saw that they were good, and decided that God or the Gods must have put them there from the beginning. So when people mostly stopped literally believing in such stories, all of a sudden they found themselves without a basis to support human values. But the problem is fake, because (in this kind of emergentist view), they never were cosmic truths to begin with. They're just evolved, refined recipes. And the good news is we never actually lost them, they're as good as ever, and we can thankfully continue living by them and let them evolve further in our changing environment.
The fun part is, you can have a perfectly spiritual yet emergentist world-view! Once you've emptied your shells into the stale barrel of rotting fish, and killed the last remains of the myth of the supernatural adult in charge who knows ahead of time what you should do and who will for-sure-this-time ensure that things end up well, you can still look around, and marvel at the fine concoction that this self-aware universe has made of itself. In theistic words, God is even better when we stop projecting our parents there.
Thank you for this. Very thoughtful. You're correct that I'm not crystal clear on the contours of godlessness here - for Harari, he's as much a nihilist as anything else. His convention of referring to all widely-held beliefs as being based on stories, which he regards as prima facie falsehoods, to me, leaves no room for any higher truth or spiritual understanding, religious or otherwise. For him, human values might be emergent, but they seem to be only based on historical accident or expedience. This seems like a deeply cynical approach that does not lend itself to wisdom, which is why he is not high on my list of people who should be dispensing advice on important things. By the way, appreciate the "normative" shout-out. Still a word I will never use. I will use emergent, though.
"[Y]ou can still look around, and marvel at the fine concoction that this self-aware universe has made of itself."
But to me, it looks like (a) existing science, combined with (possible) (b) future science, combined with (c) things forever beyond human capability to understand. I'm certainly at peace with that... unlike some "spiritual" people, some of whom are even primitive enough to be hell-bent on creating conditions for nuclear war.
And so, if you can't "see" this supposedly "self-aware" universe -- after about five decades of hearing "spiritual" people harp on and on about it with stars in their eyes and zombie-like smiles on their faces -- what then? Smirk and ignore communication with we "the blind", aka "the other"? Societies today are (vs my childhood long ago), today, awash in *shunning* (vs, say, far-healthier debating, even arguing) others about such things. That ain't good.
In short -- how is this "knowledge" *transferred* to the skeptical? For if you don't start with skepticism, you can't distinguish what you perceive from hallucination.
Thanks for the reply. First, I understand things are not always so easy in real life, but people who would shun you for your philosophical choices don't sound like the kind of group you'd want to join to begin with. Starry eyed woo-types exist too, they can be quite cool as people, but next thing you know they're trying to sell you some quantum consciousness crystals. So I guess "how this knowledge is transfered" can start with dropping out of unproductive discussions and finding quality materials; if you're scientifically minded, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a huge high-quality resource to branch into philosophical and speculative matters without your brain falling out.
The second thing one needs is a bit of an open mind, and that doesn't just happen on its own. If you feel like you're surrounded by hostile strangers on all sides trying to shove their beliefs through the tiniest crack you offer, it's going to be hard to open up beyond the security of a tightly held position, in your case scientific materialism. Paradoxically, it's when you feel secure enough in your own position that you can seek out diverging points of view from intelligent sources, to challenge your views and see if they come out reinforced or transformed. That's how I ended up changing my mind years ago.
Now, taking a scientific perspective, what I observe is that techie and engineer types tend to feel like scientific materialism is obvious and clear, whereas people who work close to the subject, like cosmologists and philosophers of science, actually split up into a vast panoply of views, some of them quite odd-sounding, and will often readily admit that there is no overwhelming evidence for their preferred view, and that smart minds just disagree. That alone should be enough to open a crack in the engineer's sense of absolute certainty.
To go straight into the subject, picture for a moment a physicist in the act of pondering the validity of a physical theory in the light of some experiment that just came out. What you have right there is scientific knowledge in the process of being produced, and if you look closely, there are (at least) three aspects or poles to that. One is the material universe on which the measurements were made. Another is the conscious cognition of the scientist, without which no knowledge would be produced. And an often overlooked third is the mathematical structure of the theory, which would still be valid even if there wasn't a physical universe to instantiate it.
So what is the relationship between those three? We tend to prefer minimalist theories (Ockham's razor and all that), so there's clearly an aesthetic preference for a single principle to be primary, and the others derived. If you feel the physical universe is clearly primary, you're a physicalist (or materialist, you can ignore the slight difference), which is the most mainstream view nowadays, so you're in good company. If you feel consciousness might be primary, you're most likely some kind of "idealist", which these days is often associated with Eastern views, but has plenty of precedent in the West too. It has the advantage of being closest to our actual experience; if you look closely, you can catch your own mind in the process of splitting awareness into a knowing subject "here" and a world "there", which makes conscious awareness experientially prior to the objective world. The third option, according to which the mathematical structure is prior to the physical universe and to consciousness, is a more recent addition, mostly associated with a guy called Max Tegmark. And of course there are other options; just recently I was reading a piece on Nautilus (https://nautil.us/the-reality-ouroboros-809153/) which argues for putting all three on the same footing (fuck Ockham I guess).
So I'm not here to try to convince you of one option or the other, I feel we're already hijacking Brian's thread enough as it is, and it's more interesting if you explore and make up your own mind. The point I want to make is that the act of choosing one of these options (including materialism) is already a metaphysical, speculative and somewhat arbitrary choice. I guess the truly skeptical thing to do would be to remain absolutely agnostic about such matters, but in practice no-one does that, because it's not psychologically very satisfactory, and it also leaves you maximally vulnerable to people who want to sell you their view.
Thanks much for this. Unfortunately I don't currently have much time, so I must save your response and review it soon with proper attention, some review/research, and reflection. Here's a few immediate things that came to mind:
-- I do not consider myself tech/science oriented. My point about "proving" things is simply that if one wants to convince another of the truth of something, one needs to be able to, somehow, communicate this truth. However, if the recipient is prone to acceptance (out of, say, social eagerness, or from an urge to feel they "get it") rather than skepticism, that receiver can easily be unaware of their biases, which can corrupt the "transfer" process, i.e. the recipient eagerly accepts the content, without being aware they didn't capture it sufficiently/properly.
-- This is where traditional revealed religions look, to me, quite ridiculous. In our desperation for "meaning", most chase after them, when they should chase after us. I'm not at all desperate for meaning; I think meaning is itself just another big fat human illusion, like consciousness.
-- I also think that truth (of anything external to one's mind) is unattainable. Everything, for a human being, is belief. The pretentious word "knowledge" should even be abandoned in favor of only perceptions, evidence, belief, thoughts, etc. -- i.e. human-grounded terms.
BTW, I'm not sure we're hijacking a thread, aren't we taking discussion where it leads?
"[He]'s the type of person, even a well-meaning and smart person, who has resolved—as a principal of one’s world view and as a precondition to engagement—that there is nothing outside of material observable reality ... / Except, for Harari, one version of history is true and the other is make believe."
*Where* did he claim that "that there is nothing outside of material observable reality"? Scientists are making transitions about such things all the time. First we had no idea, now we do -- it follows, therefore, that some things will *never* be discovered by human beings.
Did you simply infer this idea from his failure to *explicitly* acknowledge he might be wrong (about whatever)? You, in fact, make all kinds of claims yourself just in this one essay. Yet you don't carefully preface each one of them with "I think" or "I believe". Which is totally OK with me, even for the ones I disagree with. It's how humans talk to each other. Because it should go without saying that one could be wrong -- that is, *anyone* could be wrong, about *anything* (yes, even about gods!) It's in the nature of every one of us.
"The belief that there is nothing outside of what is material and observable is predicated on a leap of faith."
That's right -- because it's *all* belief. Revealed religions, science, and everything else. *Everything*, that is, every claim to truth is, in the final analysis / proof chain, just belief. *For a human, there can never be anything else.* Harari simply dispensed with explaining that; it shouldn't be necessary. For one thing, because epistemology is not the point of the book.
----------------
A problem *I* have with revealed religions (certainly the Abrahamic ones) is the sheer proportion and volume of stupidity and contradiction in scripture, and godmongers' stories *about* scripture (along, admittedly, with plenty of clear ageless wisdom), make that it's clear to me no self-respecting God would have concocted it.
To take just one characteristic in particular: The fact that one had to have gone to the Jews to obtain a book that says the Jews are chosen should leave any (modern) disinterested observer with an arched eyebrow. If it had been discovered simultaneously and independently in (present-day) Norway, Chile, and Korea, then when we all connected with each other and went "Wow!", it would be crystal clear it came from God (or godlike being/beings), and ought to heed it. There is any number of things like this that God could have done, including just showing up in person now and then. But people take this at face value, while godmongers continue to rely on tea-leaves reading to "prove" God's existence.
Meanwhile, claims of direct God-communication also look all-too-convincingly like hallucinations. Any God or gods out there must surely knows that humans hallucinate enough, about all kinds of things. And it appears there's simply no way to prove otherwise (see my points above about the limitations of humans).
Lastly (in this short set off the top of my head), it's clear to me that the "knowledge" claimed by adherents to revealed religions is *non-transferable*. Either you already, to greater or lesser extent believe in the God/gods, and are susceptible, or you're not (again, to greater or lesser extent). In my opinion, this is because a person carries evolution-based propensities or not. So the God-story doesn't actually do the convincing, logically -- although evangelism thinks this is what it's accomplishing. Unlike science, that is, which makes a *specific point* of making knowledge claims transferable to skeptics (even when in many instances it's not successful in doing so, and a proposed change to accepted science fails).
That said, well, yes, all these things *could* be exactly as claimed by godmongers. But from the perspective of this skeptic, the evidence pointing to solely *human* creation is simply overwhelming.
By the way, I too have problems with Harari's "Sapiens", just very different ones.
In particular, he seems to treat all human thought constructions as of similar ethical meaning and value. I'd argue that shadowy figures creating religious stories (in my opinion, for controlling populations) is in a whole other category from those genesis was explicit and often democratically decided. But I didn't find him anywhere drawing this distinction. Does it matter to him?