On Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, a brief history of tomorrow

According to the back cover, this book from 2016 was a best seller in Israel and many luminaries, such as Barrack Obama, Mark Zuckenberg and even Bill Gates, read Harari’s works. I read the recommendations by Obama, Zuckenberg and Gates on Harari’s Sapiens, but all were short and roundabout comments.

            I had a quite different impression on Homo Deus. The first 150 pages were quite painful reading to me as the author has an irritating way of reasoning: he first discusses the topic in a seemingly logical way considering the possibilities, and does not get to any solution, but after some pages he states in an authoritative way how it is, naturally without any arguments. As an example, he first considers Beethoven, Chuck Berry, African native drumming and wolf’s howling, but a bit later he concludes that Beethoven is the best and that’s it.

            That is just a funny example, but Harari does the same thing with the essential arguments he uses in his book. These essential arguments concern ancient issues like the existence of a soul. It may seem strange that anybody would today be interested in existence of a soul or a mind, at least if he is not planning on becoming a priest, but for Harari these questions are not corny. They are not corny for me either, and I even wrote some posts about such topics. They are not corny because they are central to the justification of the new religion that Harari preaches.

            Yes, he is a preacher of a new religion. It is covered under a seemingly scientific smokescreen: he argues that technological development changes the world to the direction where elites can live centuries while most of the ordinary people become unnecessary and replaced with machines. He calls this religion (it is his choice to call it religion) data processing. Central articles of faith in this data processing religion include claims that the evolution theory is beyond questioning, that there is no eternal soul and no gods, and though mammals and birds and maybe some other animals have consciousness and computers do not, it does not matter because computers can do everything and who cares of consciousness. So, as you get these unnecessary people and because they are no longer needed for the army or the economy, we can stop democracy and health care and all such things. We should allow Facebook and Google to spy on these people, and then the network knows everything that these people could think of, so why give them any vote or word? Some smart programmers are still needed, but that’s it, and the elite that lives centuries.

            This religion is clearly superbly totalitarian, much more than Communism ever was. It is not a logical outcome of information technology. It is a goal that is heavily pushed by a small group of people, the so called globalists. Harari dismisses such a view: according to him to think so is a conspiracy theory. He imagines that millionaires are smoking cigars and drinking scotch in some salon, pondering how to make some more millions and not caring of any political goals. But it is not so, it is enough to look at American politics. Some of these millionaires are very strongly pushing political goals and they have one beloved child in where Harari comes from. These millionaires, rather than smoking and drinking, want to control the world. In one place in the book Harari reveals that also he would like to control. That is the obsession behind totalitarianism: control, enslavement.

            Now you naturally ask, how can the existence of a soul have any relevance to globalization? I will not answer this question yet, because first I want you to look at Harari’s proofs to these ancient questions that you would imagine have no relevance today, and especially I want you to notice that his arguments are all invalid and he must know it. So, what is he doing it for?

            First Harari concludes that there is no eternal soul. His argument is that an eternal soul is indivisible, while evolution can only work by changing parts. So, as the DNA has many parts, mutations can change these parts slowly and new genes can emerge in this way, while as an eternal soul is indivisible, it cannot be built by changing parts. To complete his argument, he still considers the possibility that the indivisible eternal soul just appears as a whole at some point, but this he discards because things just cannot appear suddenly in evolution. Therefore an eternal soul does not exist.

            You see what I mean. This is the way the first 150 pages are in this book.

            Is that a example of logical thinking by a university professor, even a historian? We cannot assume that the evolution theory is necessarily correct. We do not know if an eternal soul, if there is such, must be indivisible. And finally, even if an eternal soul for some reason would be indivisible and the evolution theory would be correct and evolution would always work by changing parts, it does not follow that an eternal soul cannot exist. It is just as possible that it exists and evolution has not created it. We must add a highly improbable additional claim to Harari’s argument: nothing in the nature can be a product of something else than evolution. But if we assume this, then we may just as well assume that there is no soul and as there is no soul there is no eternal soul.

            It gets even more amusing when Harari discusses the conscious mind. He admits that humans have one, and that all mammals and birds have one. He even accepts that octopuses have a conscious mind. I am not familiar what evidence there is of a conscious mind of invertebrates, but never mind. Let’s agree that Harari accepts what all of us would accept: there is such a thing like a conscious mind. He also agrees that computers do not have it. He seems to agree that the traffic system of a city and the stock market do not have consciousness. I am quite sure that computer networks do not have it as I worked with them. All consciousness in a network is in the human users. So, Harari agrees with all of this, and then he is in a problem because evolution should not create consciousness. He admits that there is a problem: science does not manage to explain consciousness, but he assures that it is just an algorithm that evolution once found was useful for survival, even though we do not know any conscious algorithms. I am sure there cannot be such things, algorithm is just an algorithm: a sequence of simple rules. Thus, here Harari ended into a contradiction in his assumptions and logical reasoning, which should be a warning, but he prefers to skip over the problem.

            Harari thinks about evolution and comes to the old conscious mind problem, and earlier we looked at his proof that there is no eternal soul. Instead of evolution, let’s think about technical development. Do we get the same problem with a conscious mind and does his proof that there is no soul works there?  Like evolution, technical development has proceeded from earlier forms to more advanced solution. You could not talk to the earliest electro-mechanical devices and expect an intelligent answer from the machine, but you certainly can talk to a phone and it feels like as if you were talking to a real person. But clearly, you are taking to a machine. If you break this machine into pieces, you cannot find any small man from the inside. How can technical development bring as a sudden step an apparently indivisible conscious mind to a machine? No methods of technical development seem to be capable of producing a conscious mind and engineers do not know how to make consciousness. But surprise, it happened and it was not any supernatural event: there actually is a real person to whom you can call with a phone. He is not here physically but somewhere far. When arguing of a soul/mind, Harari discards this possibility in his typical way of argumentation: he just states that for sure consciousness cannot come from any Platonic fifth dimension.  I wonder why. How does Harari know that there are not more dimensions? If your logic leads to a contradiction, then you should try to find a solution, but this author does not think that way. Harari rejects the most natural solution (there exists something we do not see) and prefers to argue by hand waving: scientists do not know how, but for sure it is just an algorithm because I say so.

            Though Harari does not manage to explain off consciousness, he claims to show that there is no free will. This is also a tragicomic part of the book, if we expect that logic should follow some rules. Harari argues with examples. Thus, there is an experiment where electrodes have been inserted to the brain of a rat and pressing one button the rat turns and pressing another button the rat climbs. Harari correctly assumes that the electrodes affect what the rat wants to do, so it turns and climbs when it wants, only a human controls what the rat wants. Thus, for Harari, the rat has no free will. The fallacy of Harari’s argument is that a free will is the ability to decide and cannot be deduced from decisions made.

            To explain what I mean, let us think of a professor who reluctantly agreed to be the dean and really dislikes management, but has to do it. He lets the very competent secretary to prepare everything and then reads and signs all papers. He always makes as the secretary suggests. Does this mean that he does not have the free will to decide differently than the secretary has suggested? Of course it does not. He has the right and ability to do so, but he does not use the right. As he has the right, he also has the responsibility. He just has a very competent secretary, that’s all. So, we see that you may not exercise your free will because there is a good reason to do what your brain tells is the best thing to do, and your brain may work out many possible actions and weight them and suggest the best. And you do so, but it does not mean that you could not have done differently. Another Harari’s example demonstrates this: in one experiment brain waves are measured and from them researchers can predict what the test person will do before he has decided it. Does this not show that a free will is only an illusion? No, it shows that the brain works out the solution just as the secretary worked out a proposal for the dean. Even if every decision agrees with what the brain suggested, it has no relevance to the question if the conscious mind had a free will, like the dean had a free will.

            Why does Harari do all this and how does this relate to globalization? Harari is not explaining interesting history in an intelligent book, even though the three luminaries seem to have got such an impression. In my opinion Harari has a goal in the book. Otherwise he could not have presented such faulty arguments. He needed them for something.

            He reveals the goal at the end of the book. The goal is the new religion of data processing. There is no such new religion. Harari is defining it, so he is a religion builder. According to this new religion the goal of evolution and development of human cultures is to achieve more efficient data processing. Harari even goes so far as to claim that data processing is the prevalent paradigm in all fields and that it is connecting all fields. There is no such accepted paradigm. Harari just claims it in the book to give it scientific authority.

            But he has examples of his new truth. For Harari Communism failed because it had worse data processing than Capitalism: members of the politburo tried to decide prices and production quantities in a centralized manner, while the free market decides them in a distributed manner, and in the particular situation of the 20th century it was more efficient to decide them in a distributed manner. Harari remembers to add that in the Imperial Rome it was more efficient to decide in a centralized manner and that is why the republic failed at that time. Today and tomorrow, according to Harari, the most efficient way of data processing will be that Facebook and Google collect all information from human users and decide based on algorithms. Then, if we are believers of Harari’s new religion, we have to accept it, because what ever is more effective as data processing it the goal of everything.

            Read this so that, OK, we tried to push through Communism as the logically superior system, though we very well knew it is enslavement for you, but at that time our method of centralized control did not work as well as a free society. But do not worry, we have now a better and even more totalitarian solution. We will introduce it everywhere already tomorrow and there is nothing you can do.

            Later on Harari lists four ways of increasing data processing. One of them is having different kinds of processors. In this new religion of data processing you should always increase data processing, because that is the goal of life. In plain text different kinds of processors mean multi-culture and immigrants. It is a method currently used by globalization for weakening countries, and it is clearly pushed forward by some hidden elite.

            Please, notice what these ideas are. They are nothing new.

            The book in reality is a manifest of globalization, an effort to create a rational sounding religion of globalization and a pseudo-logical justification why the majority of people should be replaced and turned into a controlled mass. But does Harari intend it as so? He is twenty years younger than I am, so at his age I was still somewhat naive. I did not know how the world works. I had not checked any so called conspiracy theories. I am sure that at that time I would have considered Harari’s book as an intelligent and balanced contribution to the present discussion of what humans are, what the society is, and what will be tomorrow. I guess I even could have recommended the book, like Obama and Zuckenberg did.

            Could be, maybe Harari is naive. But, honestly, I do not think so. Not being any more so young and having checked many conspiracy theories I count Harari into a distinguished group who include the authors of the books of the Old Testament, Saint Paul of the New Testament, Marx, Freud and Einstein. All these people had one thing (and only one) in common: they were false prophets and they themselves knew it.

             The theories of Marx and Freud are commonly discarded as false and the priests who wrote the Old Testament fabricated most of the text, but what do I have against Saint Paul and Einstein? Well, I did look at Einstein’s theories. He did some good work and stole some other good work, but his main contribution to the philosophical concept of the world is that there is no ether time: the world is a four dimensional Minkowski space. It is from here that Harari gets the certainty that he can discard Plato’s fifth dimension as impossible. But Einstein is false: if you care to calculate (and I hope you do) the Lorentz factor from time dilation both in the transverse direction and in the direction of the movement and set the factors equal, you see that the physical world is not a Minkowski space and there is needed an external time just to get the time going forward. Einstein’s theory was one step in the long effort to confuse the old truths and to set up a control society. What I have against Saint Paul? He actually claimed to have seen resurrected Jesus as a bright light and hearing the truth directly from Jesus. That is not very likely and as I see it was all done for the uprising and war against Rome, or in fact a war for the control of Rome. Most of these false prophets want to mislead and control.

            Maybe I am too hard for Harari. He looks like a nice guy in photos. He is openly gay and a vegan, certainly not what you would think if the hidden rulers of the world. Of course he is not a hidden ruler of the world, and maybe he really does not want to control other people, not to say anything of realizing the promises given in the end of the times prophesies. Maybe Harari has though about these things and come up with his faulty argument without any hidden goals. But it was about the same with Marx. Marx also most probably saw himself as a thinker without any intentions of creating something like what Communism turned out to be. Or maybe he did. I think he did. It follows logically from what Marx wrote. In the same way I am not so certain Harari does not understand that he justifies globalization. I think he does. It is just not conceivable that someone could present such faulty arguments without noticing their logical errors. There must be a goal for it and with these false prophets the goal is always the same.