Sapiens:
A Brief History of Humankind by
Yuval Noah Harari is a best-selling, well-written, but
fundamentally flawed work. Like most serious analysis, it is a
mixture of sense and nonsense and has a good deal of both.
Fortunately, it is “a multitude of different parts and pieces
that do not fit together very well” (as Richard Feynman described
modern physics) so for the most part its fundamental nonsense about
human nature does not contaminate its many good points.
The
author's thesis can be summarized in one sentence:
For you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you upset.
Ashish
Singal, reviewing the book on Amazon.com, makes the same point
somewhat differently: "Our
search for happiness and meaning inevitably involves lying to
ourselves."
Why does Harari think we need to lie to ourselves? I
think it is because he depicts an extremely unattractive picture of
our nature as human beings, a nature which he claims has been proved
by modern biological science.
The Greek philosopher Socrates maintained that human
happiness required us to understand our own nature correctly. Taking
the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself" (page 392) Harari gives
us this analysis:
If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations,
then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical
system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful,
then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more
effectively."
Earlier he had claimed that "from a purely
scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no purpose."
(Page 391).
Someone once joked that a behaviorist was someone "who
had made up his windpipe that he had no mind." I'm afraid that
Harari sounds like he has done exactly that:
"Scientists studying the inner makeup of the human
organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that
human behavior is determined by hormones, genes and synopses, rather
than by free will----the same forces that determine the
behavior of chimpanzes, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and
political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient findings
under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain
the wall separating the department of biology from the departments
of law and political science?"
Notice
in this quotation that on the basis of the fact that some scientists
"argue" a certain thing, the author then refers to what
they argue
as "findings," which is a far more serious claim. This
kind of "reasoning" permeates his discussion of human
nature.
Harari tells us that "According to the science of
biology, people were not created. They have evolved." He
doesn't seem inclined to consider the possibility this is a false
dichotomy, that creation need not be assumed to occur at one point
in time but might take place over a considerable period of
time--which sounds suspiciously like evolution.
Perhaps his disinclination to consider this possibility
rests on his belief that "Just as people were never created,
neither, according to the science of biology, is there a Creator. . .
."
The disturbing thing in all this is not the author's
belief that there is no God (a point that he makes repeatedly in this
book) and no soul, but that he claims that this has been proved by
"the science of biology." The ideas themselves are not
uncommon, but to claim they are based on science misunderstands the
essential nature of science.
Put
most simply, science is a "guess and test" procedure in
which, after careful observation of something, we make a guess
about how to explain it, and then test
that
guess by looking to see if predictions made on that basis hold up and
to
see if there is any evidence which is incompatible with that
explanation. To speculate that there is no God, no soul. and no
creation can be legitimate guesses, but biological science (and the
other physical sciences) have never carried out the mandatory second
part of science, testing the guesses, which they actually have no
way to do. Harari is grossly abusing science by claiming it as
authority for conclusions which are beyond the scope of its
competence.
Rounding out his unappealing view of human nature,
Harari happily accepts without critical scrutiny currently
fashionable ideas about the human brain. He tells us (pages 120-121)
that we store information in our brains. But then (page 127) he
admits that "Exactly how the brain does it remains a mystery."
He tells us (p. 252) that "biologists admit that they still
don't have any good explanation for how brains produce
consciousness." He simply assumes that consciousness and
memory are functions of the brain, which I suppose makes sense if he
has made up his windpipe that he has no mind.
Towards the end of the book (page 401) , however,
Harari lets the cat out of his "scientific" bag,
fundamentally contradicting his assumptions about the brain expressed
earlier. This paragraph has such fascinating implications that I
must quote it extensively:
"Yet of all the projects currently under
development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a
direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to
read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously
transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such
interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to
directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort
of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, human
consciousness and human identity if the brain has direct access to a
collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for
example, retrieve the memories of another---not hear about them,
not read about them in an autobiography, not imagine them, but
directly remember them as if they were his own?"
In
this paragraph Harari is admitting that it is not impossible to
imagine that we can remember things that are not
"stored"
in our own brain, but are located someplace else. But if this is
possible it totally undermines his blind assumption earlier that
memories have got to be stored in our brains.
Harari also introduces the idea of an "interface"
or connection, with a brain on one end and a computer on the other
end, or with one person's brain on one end and another person's
brain on the other end. But once we accept the idea of interfaces,
another possibility would seem to follow: that the brain itself is an
interface between a physical, material body located in space and time
and a non-physical, non-material mind that has no location either in
space or in time.
If this were the case then it would be plausible to
think that consciousness might be a function of the mind rather than
of the brain. If this guess were correct, it would explain the
facts, reported by Harari, that scientists are unable to explain how
the brain produces consciousness and how it stores memories. If the
brain does neither of these things, it would explain why nobody can
figure out how it does them. (For a further discussion of this
idea, which I wrote several years ago before ever hearing of Harari,
see part my short appendix to this review, below.)
Perhaps
a concept of human nature in which our actions are controlled by our
non-material minds rather than by the blind operation of physical
causation ("hormones, genes, and synopses") and in which
human life is not meaningless would make it unnecessary to use drugs
applied to our brains to make us happy as the author recommends (page
389). Perhaps our present unhappiness results from failure to
understand our true natures. Know
thyself, indeed!
As I indicated, Harari's book is loose-jointed enough
that his portrait of human nature does not undermine the validity of
most of the other things he talks about in the book. I found these
other things interesting, often insightful, and agreed with many of
them, but do not have anything unique to say about them.
Let me conclude by pointing out that from the Biblical
point of view Mr. Harari, though he is obviously very intelligent
and well-educated, is a fool. "The fool says in his heart,
'There is no God.'" (Psalms 14: 1) The foolishness, however,
lies not in his theological conclusions, but in his belief that they
are grounded in science.
Appendix
(Written
at least five years ago, before I had ever heard of Mr. Harari)
417 words
It seem to me that it would be useful for some researchers to
examine the possibility that the conventional assumptions are
incorrect, and see what can be accomplished by postulating that the
brain (a physical/material system operating in space and time) is an
interface device connecting the physical/material body with a
non-material, non-physical mind that is not located in space and is
"outside of" time----"eternal" in the sense of
beyond time rather than in the sense of infinite duration in
time.
The left-brain, right-brain differences, seen from this
point of view, might suggest that the left brain is the side of the
interface device that connects to the time-bound body, and the right
brain is the side of the device that connects to the "eternal"
mind. I doubt if it is actually this simple, partly because the
available evidence from imaging seems to show a lot more complexity
in the distribution of functions, and partly because some functions
such as vision and hearing draw on both hemispheres of the brain.
But it might be possible to devise some experiments based on this
general hypothesis that might not occur to scientists who take the
current assumptions as proved facts.
A simple analogy that I
have thought about that is suggestive of the problems of proving the
correctness of current basic assumptions uses a "black box"
model: Imagine a black box whose exterior we can see, with two push
buttons on it. We push button one and speak to it, then push button
two and hear the same words coming back out. Certainly one
possibility is that there is some kind of tape recorder or memory
chip inside which records sounds when button one is pressed, then
plays them back when button two is pressed. But another possibility
is that there is a transceiver in the black box, which transmits the
sounds it picks up to a transceiver located somewhere else and which
in turn is connected to a recorder. When you push button two on the
known black box, it sends a signal to the second transceiver to play
back the "tape" and send it back over to the black box
which then duly emits it. (This is where the analogy, like all
analogies, is inexact, since the second mechanism here, the
transceiver-recorder, is itself a physical system, but it is being
used to stand for the non-material mind in the hypothesis.)
Assume
we are talking about memory, and are assuming that memories are
stored in some fashion in the black box. Then assume that after
speaking into the black box but before pushing button two we take a
baseball bat and beat the heck out of the black box. Then we push
button two, and nothing happens. Aha! we say. This proves that
memories are stored in this box, and that we have damaged those
memories.
Of course in the case of the black box it is
obvious that we have proved no such thing.
Why should it
prove anything in the case of a brain that has been damaged by
disease or trauma?
It is well known that by poking an
electrode into specific areas of someone's brain, certain memories
can be evoked. According to my analogy, however, this is not proof
that the evoked memory was "stored" in that area of the
brain, or indeed stored in the brain at all. Given the
unconventional hypothesis that the mind is "eternal" in
the sense of not located in time or space, and that memory is the
ability to recall some experience that happened at some other point
in time, it would be quite possible that memory would a function of
the mind and not of the brain. In this event, what would need
explaining would not be why we remember things, but why we ever
forget things, and also (wildly) why we don't remember what happened
the day after tomorrow. ("It's a poor sort of memory that only
works backwards"-----Alice in Wonderland.)
