Does happiness require us to lie to ourselves about our nature?

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.)