Category: Sapiens – Yuval Noah harari

What Do We Want to Want?

What Do We Want To Want?

Posted on by jabittan
Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Sapiens by asking his readers to consider the following, “the only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. … the real question facing us is not what do we want to become?, but what do we want to want?“
 
 
For all of human existence, up to this point, human lives have been defined by scarcity and physical limitations. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived were only able to do a limited amount with the objects available to them in their environment. But modern humans may be on the cusp of effectively becoming gods. We are at a point where we can build both real and imagined (virtual) worlds where we are no longer limited in meaningful ways by resources. We are harnessing huge amounts of energy, figuring out how to do so in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way, and we may be able to soon engineer human beings to be whatever we want them to be. Harari describes our current path as guiding us to become “self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.”
 
 
And so Harari’s initial question becomes ever more important. What do we want to want? Suppose that we can geo-engineer the planet to always have the weather conditions and hospitable planetary needs for human survival. Suppose we can get a surplus of cheap energy from renewable sources without damaging the planet. Suppose we can conquer biology and even death. What will it mean to be human? What will we want, and what should we want when the only limits are the limits of the extremes of space?
 
 
Harari continues, “is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” This is a question that I cannot answer on my own in a single blog post. I can hardly decide what I want to want in my own personal life. I certainly cannot think about what other people should want in their own lives. It is easy to say we should all want happiness, peace, and flourishing for all humans on the planet, but that is so broad that it means nothing. A scientist engineering the human mind could say that is what they work toward while creating something that makes humans something other than human. An engineer moving mountains could believe they are doing it for all the reasons I laid out, but who is to say that moving mountains is really what we want or should want? Humans are on the cusp of merging with machine, controlling our biology, and becoming gods, but we don’t even have a way to think about whether we should want to be doing these things. We certainly can’t accurately judge whether the outcomes will be in the best interest of humans. It is also possible that none of this will matter if the future of humanity is to become something other than humans. However, it is dangerous for humans to amass essentially unlimited power and to not know what to want to do with it.
Genetic Evolution is More Complex Than You Think

Genetic Evolution Is More Complex Than You Think

Posted on by jabittan
A little while back I remember learning about something within genetic evolution that really surprised me. Genes that are immediately next to each other on a chromosome tend to stick together during cellular division. Physics is at play in the way that chromosomes line up and pull apart during cellular division and the separation of genes in both eggs and sperm. This can have a strange effect on how some genes get passed along. Imagine you have a gene that is crucial for survival, such as a gene that codes for whether lungs develop and a gene that is somewhat negative for survival, like a gene that makes your immune response a little less effective. If these two genes are immediately next to each other on a chromosome, then they will likely be passed along together, because it would be hard for them to be separated. If you don’t get the lung development gene, you also don’t get the weak immune system gene, but you don’t develop in the womb. If you get the lung development gene, you also get the weak immune system gene. The genes are passed along in the standard evolutionary process, but one gene seems actively harmful to survival.
 
 
I share this story because it demonstrates that genetic evolution is more complex than I had ever thought. I hadn’t considered the way that physics could influence which genes are passed along. Scientists could spend time trying to find exactly why a weak immune system gene is beneficial for survival and what competitive advantage that gene gave to a species for it to be favored by evolution. However, the real answer would just be that the gene was stuck next to a more important gene, so it kept getting passed along. An inadvertent deletion that would have inactivated the weak immune system gene may have also damaged the lung development gene, making it more likely that evolution would favor the two genes being passed along without errors together.
 
 
Looking at more complexity within genetic evolution, Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens writes, “a microorganism belonging to one species can incorporate genetic codes from a completely different species into its cell and thereby gain new capabilities, such as resistance to antibiotics.” We think of evolution as a chain, with organisms and species slowly evolving as random typos provide advantages or disadvantages to a species. But this is too simple of a model as Harari’s quote shows. A microorganism can take in genetic information from outside, completely transforming that organism in a single generation.
 
 
Science also knows, however, that this kind of genetic adoption is not limited to microorganisms. There is evidence that sweet potatoes evolved when a virus infected a potato plant and inserted its DNA into the plant. The potato adopted DNA from a different organism and started down a new evolutionary path toward becoming the modern sweet potato. This sounds like a very niche and strange thing, but it is something humans are now exploring through CRISPR technology that may be able to cure many genetic disorders.
 
 
Genetic evolution is not a simple chain. It is much more complex than we think, and there is likely more we will discover that will demonstrate how complex the system truly is.
Get to Know as Many Different Approaches as Possible

Get to Know as Many Different Approaches as Possible

Posted on by jabittan
On the most recent episode of the Don’t Panic Geocast, Shannon Dulin said something along the lines of, “all models are wrong.” Our minds are not perfect replications of reality.  They operate on models that explain and to some extent predict reality, but what takes place within our mental models is not actually what happens in reality.
 
 
Think of a map. A super simple map doesn’t match the bend in each road perfectly. It doesn’t give you a sense of elevation. It is a model for the area you are interested in traversing with the aid of the map. On the other end, most accurate possible model of the area would be a complete and perfect replication of the area, but of course that would be of no use in helping us better understand and navigate the area. Our mental models are just like these maps. They simplify, cut out some of the clutter, and reduce some of the unique of aspects of reality to give us a more manageable picture and sense of direction. Our mental model is not a perfect replication of reality. Our model is wrong because the only way for it to be right would be for it to be a perfect replication which would be too complex for our minds.
 
 
Given that models are wrong, but that we need them because we need to simplify in order to think, it is important that we constantly explore to better understand what does and does not need to be in our mental models. Along the same thought lines, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “what is important is to get to know as many different approaches as possible and to ask the right questions,” in his book Sapiens.
 
 
We can focus on any given area, from earthquakes, to human happiness, to minimum wage laws and adopt rigid conclusions based on our mental models for understanding the world. But those conclusions are almost certainly wrong because our mental models are almost certainly insufficient and wrong. Getting locked in on a singular mental model or idea will lead us to rigid conclusions that don’t accurately match reality. To get beyond this we need to be able to gather various perspectives and points of view. Not just on a single issue or idea, but on topic. We have to be willing to rethink any mental model that operates in our mind. We need to hone, refine, and adjust mental models with a spirit of exploration and research. Only by trying many different models and combinations will we start to know what is important and what can be stripped out of our model. We have to do this, because we will always rely on mental models to understand the world, and having a wrong model means we misunderstand reality and means we will make poor judgments and decisions that will impact the real world in a negative way.
Yuval Noah Harari on Being Present

Yuval Noah Harari on Being Present

Posted on by jabittan
Toward the end of his book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari begins to ask why humans are moving in a direction of progress. There is an inevitable sense that humans will continue to push toward progress in technology, medicine, social fields, culture, and life in general. There is no stopping this evolution and progress, but Harari wonders if any of it is actually making human life better, happier, or more meaningful. Harari asks what exactly the changes that humans are introducing to the world are doing, and as such, he asks the reader to consider what nebulous ideas like happiness even are and whether such ideas should  be pursued.
 
 
His questions around happiness allow him to introduce ideas and concepts that have been part of stoicism and Buddhism. Stoic thought encourages that we reflect on ourselves in the present moment and attend to what we can control right now. It recommends that we decide not to pursue hedonistic pleasures, but that we try to recognize what we are doing with our mind and body in this moment. Stoicism encourages us to do our best to make the most of our short time on earth. Buddhism is similar, encouraging us to recognize that our individual thoughts and feelings will come and go, sometimes seemingly for no reason. Striving to maintain or be a certain thought, feeling, or emotion is impossible and so we should instead allow our thoughts, feelings, and emotions to come to us and to observe them without being overjoyed at the good emotions, thoughts, and feelings nor too dejected by the bad. When you manage to do so, Harari writes, “you live in the present moment instead of fantasizing about what might have been.”
 
 
I have heard many people over time complain about meditation and being unable to enjoy meditation because they cannot clear their mind. My understanding is that such individuals misunderstand the point of meditation. It is not to sit and focus with a clear mind, but rather to recognize that the mind has thoughts that we cannot seem to control. Meditation allows us to practice returning the mind to a single focus. It helps us see that we are not the random thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flitter through our head on a daily basis. We may be trying our hardest to focus on nothing but the feeling of air moving in and out of our bodies, but our minds can’t help but suddenly think about the thing we forgot at the grocery store, the person we need to call, or the hot person we saw at the gym. We do our best to keep our minds on one topic, but thoughts think themselves, and they pop into our head even when we do not want them. In many ways, we are not our thoughts, our thoughts are simply their own.
 
 
Harari writes that when we recognize that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not inherently the things that define us, we are able to step back and prevent them from controlling our lives. He writes, “the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer.” The more we think it is important that we travel and have novel experiences, the more we will crave those things and be unhappy when we don’t travel and have lots of novel experiences. The more we think that the way we feel in any given moment is important, the more we strive to only experience happy and positive emotional states. When we don’t experience those perfect emotional states, we will become more stressed and put more pressure on ourselves to get back to experiencing those positive emotional states. We won’t be present, we will be distracted by trying to control our emotional valence. We won’t experience the world, we will be too busy worrying about our future and fixating on something in the past. Letting all that go, Harari argues, and living in the present moment will give us a greater sense of peace and calm in our lives, and will help us better experience the world we move through. 
Evolution Doesn't Care About Happiness

Evolution Doesn’t Care About Happiness

Posted on by jabittan
As humans evolve it is not clear that our lives are actually becoming happier. We have more stuff, better technology, and more comfortable lives, but that hasn’t always translated into happiness at the individual level. One reason why we may not be finding more happiness as our societies and technological capabilities continue to evolve may be due to evolution itself.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “according to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals.”
 
 
Humans desire status almost to the exclusion of everything else. Higher status means a greater opportunity to find a partner and to pass your genes along. It means you have more allies to assist you, ensure your offspring receive assistance, and gives your offspring an advantage as they try to find a partner to pass their genes along. It gives you access to more resources to ensure your survival and that of your offspring, making it more likely your genes will be passed on. Status is almost everything for humans in the evolutionary game of reproducing genes. But constantly fighting for more status flat out sucks.
 
 
At an individual level, the fight for status means working long hours in jobs you may not like so that you can get a promotion, get a fancy title, and become impressive in your career. You are likely to win more allies, attract more romantic partners, and have more financial resources at your disposal if you work hard to rise up the social ladder and become a CEO. Your status will be high, but your actual life may be miserable. You will constantly be stressed over your company. You won’t have set hours and designated time-off to simply enjoy your hard earned financial resources. And if you are like most Americans, you will buy the biggest house possible, the fanciest car possible, and have the most stuff possible to demonstrate your success and status, which means you will have more things to worry about losing if it goes wrong.
 
 
You could alternatively move to a tropical island, wash dishes for a living, and spend most of your time on a beach. You may not have much status, but if you are ok with living quite modestly, you might find a relaxing and enjoyable day to day life. You won’t have the big fancy house and your job might still suck, but you won’t be living with the constant stress of losing everything and managing a business. Instead, you will get to clock off, leave your troubles behind you, and enjoy the sunset on a warm beach.
 
 
Our drive for status, thanks to our evolutionary drive to pass on our genes, makes us more likely to push to be the CEO, to strive for the American Dream, and to desire lots of things to demonstrate our status rather than live on the beach. Individually, evolution has pushed us toward lives that are rather miserable. It helps ensure we, and everyone else, pass our genes along by working hard and having families, but we might individually all be more happy living as beach bums in Southern California. Evolution cares about passing our genes along successfully, it doesn’t care about our happiness in the process.
Happiness Depends on Narratives

Happiness Depends on Narratives

Posted on by jabittan
I try to think rationally about the world around me, and I think most people would say the same. However, I know that what I mostly do is create a narrative of the world, of how people interact, and of what is positive or negative for the world. I sort out things that I observe based on the narratives that help me understand the world. I try to be objective and rational, and I believe those ideas play a role in my overall calculus, but science has demonstrated that it is likely that narratives based on my limited set of experiences and knowledge shape my understanding of the world more than my attempts at objective rationality.
 
 
This can be a disappointing conclusion, but it can also mean that we can tap into our narratives to help us find happiness in our lives. It means we can work to develop narratives for ourselves that are more helpful than harmful. Regarding meaning, happiness, and narratives in his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “the scientists who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning reading scriptures, going on a crusade, or building a new cathedral.” In each case mentioned above, for modern individuals and their medieval counterparts, their sense of meaning is tied to a narrative. Harari claims they are all delusional because they are operating and basing their lives on a narrative that isn’t entirely based on reality. They are giving their lives meaning by working toward shared social goals that are in some ways based on myths and hypothesis about what will make people happy and what will therefore be good. None of them is more or less delusional than the other, at least in Harari’s eyes.
 
 
Harari continues, “as long as my personal narrative is inline with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.” Science is very objective in ways that religion is not, but the goals and priorities of science are not always objective (a wealthy individual provides a grant to research the rare cancer their mother died from rather than give a grant to research malaria). A soldier fights for a nation, a fictional concept that we bring to life through shared beliefs and narratives. An entrepreneur works for money, within the market, to expand the economy, all concepts that are in some ways based on myth and shared social constructions.
 
 
We tie our narratives together with other people and coordinate our actions accordingly to find meaning in our lives. Without shared narratives and coordinated efforts between them we would be isolated individuals without a purpose. This can be depressing and scary, but it can also give us hope. We can work with others and develop narratives together to create lives and roles that will bring us meaning. We don’t have to be stuck with a single narrative and a single role for our life. We can work within social systems and structures to reshape our narratives to find new meaning and new purposes for how we want to live. Our happiness depends on our narratives which we can all shape both individually and collectively.
Progress and Meaning

Progress & Meaning

Posted on by jabittan
“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. For Harari, human evolution over the two million or so years that homo Sapiens has been a species and our cultural evolution during that same time do not seem to have made modern humans happier than ancient humans. In particular, Harari would argue that humans today may be more likely to feel a sense of meaningless in their lives relative to ancient humans. As the quote above testifies, a comfortable but meaningless life can be worse in some substantial ways than a brutal but meaningful life.
 
 
For Harari this is important to think about because as a collective humans have been engaged in vague questions of progress for thousands of years. But the progress humans have made hasn’t really been productive in terms of increasing human happiness. Sure we are better off in terms of wellness and comfort, but that isn’t quite the same thing as actual happiness or having a sense of meaning and purpose in ones life. It is quite possible that a tech worker who spends all day in a home office, watches TV, and only occasionally interacts with close friends is far more comfortable and better entertained than a forager 20,000 years ago, but they may feel like there is no real purpose for their life. They may feel that they don’t have any close connections or individuals who depend on them and whose lives they matter to. A forager from 20,000 years ago may have been stressed by a challenging and deadly environment and may not have had enough to eat, but they probably had a very close group of kin that they could rely on for support and and meaning.
 
 
“Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose,” Harari writes. Progress has not been undertaken with the goal of making people happier. Individual products and advancements are certainly marketed that way, but the end result doesn’t actually seem to be more happiness. Often, the end result is that we end up with more things we don’t really like or need. Things that take our time away from meaningful connections and engagements that make our lives actually worth living. Progress happens simply because we choose to allow it to happen, not because we are all looking around and consciously choosing progress with clear macro explanations for how progress makes lives for our species more meaningful, happier, and more worth living. Cars enabled faster transportation, but we ended up moving out to suburbs and adopted long soul crushing commutes. Social media promised to bring us closer together with friends, but left us isolated and jealous. Television promised to entertain us, but it took us away from real entertainment with actual people in the real world. Not all advances have this false profit characteristic, but many advances appear to make us happier, and for various reasons do the opposite.
 
 
To find meaning in the world is not the same as to find comfort and happiness. To find meaning is to engage with the world in pursuits that help improve the world for ourselves and others. It may be through our work, it may be through leisure activities with others, and it may be found through other means. No matter how we find meaning and pursue progress, it is clear that all progress doesn’t bring all humans meaning and happiness.
Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Posted on by jabittan
Our bodies and brains seem to always keep us wanting more. A new job, a new house, a new sexual partner all seem to be able to bring us pleasure, excitement, and joy, but those pleasant feelings soon fade and the things we like tend to become our new baseline. The house we loved when we moved in becomes normal and we don’t appreciate it as much after a few years. We settle into our job and can become bored or uninterested. Our love for our partner may go from red hot to cool.
 
 
There are evolutionary explanations for why our brains and bodies seem to respond in this way. If we became complacent in our current lives and living standards, we might not push for more and might not make new discoveries, work for new thing and improved status, and might not try to have more sex with more partners. Failing to make new discoveries means that our entire tribe doesn’t advance and could get wiped out by a neighboring tribe that did make a new discovery. Failing to try to do more and become a more impressive person means we don’t improve our social status, and don’t get as many mates, so our genes don’t get passed along. And settling for just one sexual partner means we have fewer chances to procreate, again decreasing the chance that our genes are successfully passed along.
 
 
“Perhaps it’s not surprising, then,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “that evolution has molded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last forever.”
 
 
Harari is not the first to make such an observation. This observation is part of the core of Stoic thinking. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations wrote about the ways in which we always want more and how we lose our value in the things we have that become ordinary to us. Stoic thinking encourages that we reflect on this reality and work to avoid becoming unhappy with things that are truly great and spectacular. Stoics suggest that we practice focusing on our gratitude at having such things, rather than focus on what more we could have. There will always be more we could strive for, and our brains and bodies will always push us to have more, but that doesn’t mean it will make us any happier. Our biology is destined, thanks to evolution, to keep us from being too miserable and too happy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a valuable place where we accept this reality and enjoy our lives, appreciate what and who we are, and strive to be great, without overreaching and becoming unhappy with what we have.
Animal Happiness

Animal Happiness

Posted on by jabittan
Do you ever think about the happiness of animals? If you have a pet, then you probably think about their happiness all the time. My wife and I have a dog and we go out of our way to ensure she gets walks, has some entertaining things to play with when we are working, and gets to socialize with other dogs. She may not be human, but we still care about her happiness.
 
 
But I almost never think about the happiness of other animals. There is a commercial that says that good milk comes from happy cows, and that happy cows come from California. But I don’t ever actually think about whether dairy cows are happy. I almost never think about whether factory farmed chickens are happy, or if any other animal raised for slaughter and human consumption is happy. But some people, like Peter Singer and Yuval Noah Harari think I should.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Harari writes, “when evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness of only the upper classes, of Europeans, or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.” Perhaps we should be thinking about whether other animals on the planet are happy, and whether our actions make them less happy. Perhaps there is nothing inherently special about humans that makes us more deserving of life and happiness than any other sentient animal and creature, and perhaps we should think about that when we think about factory farming and animal suffering.
 
 
We clearly care about our pets and see them as members of our families, complete with many emotions that we experience ourselves. We see a consciousness and an ability to experience the world in the minds of our pets, but we still think of them and other animals as less than ourselves. This is how we have ended up with a factory farming system that creates short, brutal lives for animals that the animals themselves may not find to be worth living. We have created systems with huge amounts of suffering, and if we think about global happiness, the unhappiness of factory farmed animals, Singer and Harari would argue, should be part of the equation. I don’t personally think about animal happiness too often, but I do think Harari is correct. I do think we should think about life and work to make it better – or at least not cause life to deliberately suffer – whether it is human or not.
Are we Happy?

Are We Happy?

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari asks a simple question that I had never paused to ask prior to reading his book. Are we happier than humans of the past? Are we happier than the humans who fought and lived through WWII or WWI? Are we happier than the humans alive when Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492? Are we happier than the ancient Romans? Are we happier than humans living 20,000 years ago? Are we happier than the first homo Sapiens?
“Historians seldom ask such questions,” Harari writes, “…yet these are the most important questions one can ask of history.” These questions are important, Harari argues, because most of the organization and progress of our lives is in one way or another geared around increasing human happiness. If history is not exploring the happiness of humans, than each step in human cultural evolution is a step that may not serve humans for the best. It also means that our ideas and views of how the world should be organized to help expand human happiness and flourishing may be based on incorrect judgements of happiness.
Happiness is difficult to measure and quantify. We are not actually all that good at thinking about our own happiness. Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have an experiencing self, which is our active conscious self, and a remembering self, which pauses to think back on our lives. Those two selves experience happiness differently. Getting beyond just ourselves and measuring the happiness of others is even more difficult, especially when those others lived 30,000 years ago.
So instead of measuring happiness we measure progress. We measure electrical devices, time spent in leisure activities, energy used to heat or cool homes, rates of sex, rates of violence, and other proxies for human happiness or unhappiness. These measures are probably a good way to estimate happiness, but we can see that they don’t tell the whole story. It is also possible for societies and collectives to become focused on a single measure, and drive toward that measure as if it were a goal that should be achieved to produce more happiness. Sometimes efforts to increase GDP, access to electricity, and other noble sounding efforts produce more of one thing at the expense of other things that contribute to human happiness. In the end, pursuing progress may not be an avenue for pursuing happiness
When we think about human progress, about our lives and where we want to head, and about what we think is best for society we should consider happiness. We should consider whether we are happier than humans in the past and think about whether the things we strive for are the things that are most likely to bring happiness to ourselves and others. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have progress in our lives, that cultural evolution is bad, or that happiness is all that matters, but we shouldn’t assume we will always progress in ways that will make us happier just progress it increases our technological capabilities or brings us more resources.