Sapiens and Homo Deus

by Yuval Noah Harari

  2.Gregg, Are Dolphins Really Smart?, 82–3.

  3.Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (New York: Viking, 2014); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

  4.Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain.

  5.Pundits may point to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, according to which no system of mathematical axioms can prove all arithmetic truths. There will always be some true statements that cannot be proven within the system. In popular literature this theorem is sometimes hijacked to account for the existence of mind. Allegedly, minds are needed to deal with such unprovable truths. However, it is far from obvious why living beings need to engage with such arcane mathematical truths in order to survive and reproduce. In fact, the vast majority of our conscious decisions do not involve such issues at all.

  6.Christopher Steiner, Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World (New York: Penguin, 2012), 215; Tom Vanderbilt, ‘Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here’, Wired, 20 January 2012, accessed 21 December 2014, http://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_autonomouscars/all/; Chris Urmson, ‘The Self-Driving Car Logs More Miles on New Wheels’, Google Official Blog, 7 August 2012, accessed 23 December 2014, http://googleblog.blogspot.hu/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-logs-more-miles-on.html; Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, ‘Google’s Driverless Cars Run into Problem: Cars with Drivers’, New York Times, 1 September 2015, accessed 2 September 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/google-says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-drivers.html?_r=1.

  7.Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain.

  8.Ibid., ch. 7.

  9.‘The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’, 7 July 2012, accessed 21 December 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20131109230457/http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf.

  10.John F. Cyran, Rita J. Valentino and Irwin Lucki, ‘Assessing Substrates Underlying the Behavioral Effects of Antidepressants Using the Modified Rat Forced Swimming Test’, Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 29:4–5 (2005), 569–74; Benoit Petit-Demoulière, Frank Chenu and Michel Bourin, ‘Forced Swimming Test in Mice: A Review of Antidepressant Activity’, Psychopharmacology 177:3 (2005), 245–55; Leda S. B. Garcia et al., ‘Acute Administration of Ketamine Induces Antidepressant-like Effects in the Forced Swimming Test and Increases BDNF Levels in the Rat Hippocampus’, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 32:1 (2008), 140–4; John F. Cryan, Cedric Mombereau and Annick Vassout, ‘The Tail Suspension Test as a Model for Assessing Antidepressant Activity: Review of Pharmacological and Genetic Studies in Mice’, Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 29:4–5 (2005), 571–625; James J. Crowley, Julie A. Blendy and Irwin Lucki, ‘Strain-dependent Antidepressant-like Effects of Citalopram in the Mouse Tail Suspension Test’, Psychopharmacology 183:2 (2005), 257–64; Juan C. Brenes, Michael Padilla and Jaime Fornaguera, ‘A Detailed Analysis of Open-Field Habituation and Behavioral and Neurochemical Antidepressant-like Effects in Postweaning Enriched Rats’, Behavioral Brain Research 197:1 (2009), 125–37; Juan Carlos Brenes Sáenz, Odir Rodríguez Villagra and Jaime Fornaguera Trías, ‘Factor Analysis of Forced Swimming Test, Sucrose Preference Test and Open Field Test on Enriched, Social and Isolated Reared Rats’, Behavioral Brain Research 169:1 (2006), 57–65.

  11.Marc Bekoff, ‘Observations of Scent-Marking and Discriminating Self from Others by a Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris): Tales of Displaced Yellow Snow’, Behavioral Processes 55:2 (2011), 75–9.

  12.For different levels of self-consciousness, see: Gregg, Are Dolphins Really Smart?, 59–66.

  13.Carolyn R. Raby et al., ‘Planning for the Future by Western Scrub Jays’, Nature 445:7130 (2007), 919–21.

  14.Michael Balter, ‘Stone-Throwing Chimp is Back – and This Time It’s Personal’, Science, 9 May 2012, accessed 21 December 2014, http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/05/stone-throwing-chimp-back-and-time-itspersonal; Sara J. Shettleworth, ‘Clever Animals and Killjoy Explanations in Comparative Psychology’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14:11 (2010), 477–81.

  15.Gregg, Are Dolphins Really Smart?; Nicola S. Clayton, Timothy J. Bussey and Anthony Dickinson, ‘Can Animals Recall the Past and Plan for the Future?’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4:8 (2003), 685–91; William A. Roberts, ‘Are Animals Stuck in Time?’, Psychological Bulletin 128:3 (2002), 473–89; Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic Memory and Autonoesis: Uniquely Human?’, in The Missing Link in Cognition: Evolution of Self-Knowing Consciousness, ed. Herbert S. Terrace and Janet Metcalfe (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 3–56; Mariam Naqshbandi and William A. Roberts, ‘Anticipation of Future Events in Squirrel Monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) and Rats (Rattus norvegicus): Tests of the Bischof–Kohler Hypothesis’, Journal of Comparative Psychology 120:4 (2006), 345–57.

  16.I. B. A. Bartal, J. Decety and P. Mason, ‘Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats’, Science 334:6061 (2011), 1427–30; Gregg, Are Dolphins Really Smart?, 89.

  17.Christopher B. Ruff, Erik Trinkaus and Trenton W. Holliday, ‘Body Mass and Encephalization in Pleistocene Homo’, Nature 387:6629 (1997), 173–6; Maciej Henneberg and Maryna Steyn, ‘Trends in Cranial Capacity and Cranial Index in Subsaharan Africa During the Holocene’, American Journal of Human Biology 5:4 (1993), 473–9; Drew H. Bailey and David C. Geary, ‘Hominid Brain Evolution: Testing Climatic, Ecological, and Social Competition Models’, Human Nature 20:1 (2009), 67–79; Daniel J. Wescott and Richard L. Jantz, ‘Assessing Craniofacial Secular Change in American Blacks and Whites Using Geometric Morphometry’, in Modern Morphometrics in Physical Anthropology: Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, ed. Dennis E. Slice (New York: Plenum Publishers, 2005), 231–45.

  18.See also Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).

  19.Cyril Edwin Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 279.

  20.NAEMI09, ‘Nicolae Ceaus¸escu LAST SPEECH (english subtitles) part 1 of 2’, 22 April 2010, accessed 21 December 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWIbCtz_Xwk.

  21.Tom Gallagher, Theft of a Nation: Romania since Communism (London: Hurst, 2005).

  22.Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  23.TVP University, ‘Capuchin Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay’, 15 December 2012, accessed 21 December 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKhAd0Tyny0.

  24.Quoted in Christopher Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2005), 98–9.

  25.Serhii Ploghy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (London: Oneworld, 2014), 309.

  4 The Storytellers

  1.Fekri A. Hassan, ‘Holocene Lakes and Prehistoric Settlements of the Western Fayum, Egypt’, Journal of Archaeological Science 13:5 (1986), 393–504; Gunther Garbrecht, ‘Water Storage (Lake Moeris) in the Fayum Depression, Legend or Reality?’, Irrigation and Drainage Systems 1:3 (1987), 143–57; Gunther Garbrecht, ‘Historical Water Storage for Irrigation in the Fayum Depression (Egypt)’, Irrigation and Drainage Systems 10:1 (1996), 47–76.

  2.Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (Danbur: Franklin Watts, 2001), 249.

  3.Jean C. Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 91; Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996); Frank Dikkoter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  4.Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2006); Sven Rydenfelt, ‘Lessons from Socialist Tanzania’, The Freeman 36:9 (1986); David Blair, ‘Africa in a Nutshell’, Telegraph, 10 May 2006, accessed 22 December 2014, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/3631941/Africa_in_a_nutshe
ll/.

  5.Roland Anthony Oliver, Africa since 1800, 5th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 100–23; David van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 58–9.

  6.Ben Wilbrink, ‘Assessment in Historical Perspective’, Studies in Educational Evaluation 23:1 (1997), 31–48.

  7.M. C. Lemon, Philosophy of History (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 28–44; Siep Stuurman, ‘Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China’, Journal of World History 19:1 (2008), 1–40.

  8.William Kelly Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt (Yale: Yale University Press, 1973), 332–3.

  5 The Odd Couple

  1.C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 15; Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-First Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 82.

  2.Glenn Hausfater and Sarah Blaffer (eds), Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives (New York: Aldine, 1984), 449; Valeria Alia, Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 23; Lewis Petrinovich, Human Evolution, Reproduction and Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 256; Richard A. Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 289.

  3.Ronald K. Delph, ‘Valla Grammaticus, Agostino Steuco, and the Donation of Constantine’, Journal of the History of Ideas 57:1 (1996), 55–77; Joseph M. Levine, ‘Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine’, Studies in the Renaissance 20 (1973), 118–43.

  4.Gabriele Boccaccini, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002); Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2nd edn (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 153–7; Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders (eds), The Canon Debate (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002), 4.

  5.Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).

  6 The Modern Covenant

  1.Gerald S. Wilkinson, ‘The Social Organization of the Common Vampire Bat II’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 17:2 (1985), 123–34; Gerald S. Wilkinson, ‘Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat’, Nature 308:5955 (1984), 181–4; Raul Flores Crespo et al., ‘Foraging Behavior of the Common Vampire Bat Related to Moonlight’, Journal of Mammalogy 53:2 (1972), 366–8.

  2.Goh Chin Lian, ‘Admin Service Pay: Pensions Removed, National Bonus to Replace GDP Bonus’, Straits Times, 8 April 2013, retrieved 9 February 2016, http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/admin-service-pay-pensionsremoved-national-bonus-to-replace-gdp-bonus.

  3.Edward Wong, ‘In China, Breathing Becomes a Childhood Risk’, New York Times, 22 April 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/world/asia/pollution-is-radically-changing-childhood-in-chinas-cities.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Barbara Demick, ‘China Entrepreneurs Cash in on Air Pollution’, Los Angeles Times, 2 February 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/02/world/la-fg-china-pollution-20130203.

  4.IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change – Summary for Policymakers, ed. Ottmar Edenhofer et al. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.

  5.UNEP, The Emissions Gap Report 2012 (Nairobi: UNEP, 2012); IEA, Energy Policies of IEA Countries: The United States (Paris: IEA, 2008).

  6.For a detailed discussion see Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

  7 The Humanist Revolution

  1.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’éducation (Paris, 1967), 348.

  2.‘Journalists Syndicate Says Charlie Hebdo Cartoons “Hurt Feelings”, Washington Okays’, Egypt Independent, 14 January 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/journalists-syndicate-sayscharlie-hebdo-cartoons-percentE2percent80percent98hurt-feelings-washington-okays.

  3.Naomi Darom, ‘Evolution on Steroids’, Haaretz, 13 June 2014.

  4.Walter Horace Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 24, 25.

  5.‘All-Time 100 TV Shows: Survivor’, Time, 6 September 2007, retrieved 12 August 2015, http://time.com/3103831/survivor/.

  6.Phil Klay, Redeployment (London: Canongate, 2015), 170.

  7.Yuval Noah Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Armchairs, Coffee and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100–2000’, Journal of Military History 74:1 (January 2010), 53–78.

  8.‘Angela Merkel Attacked over Crying Refugee Girl’, BBC, 17 July 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33555619.

  9.Laurence Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania State, 2002), 159.

  10.Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: The Story of Modern Warfare (New York: New American Library, 2001), 301–2.

  11.Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 165.

  12.Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China (London: Vintage, 2014), 95.

  13.Mark Harrison (ed), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–10; John Ellis, World War II: A Statistical Survey (New York: Facts on File, 1993); I. C. B. Dear (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  14.Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.

  8 The Time Bomb in the Laboratory

  1.For a detailed discussion see Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: Ecco, 2011).

  2.Chun Siong Soon et al., ‘Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain’, Nature Neuroscience 11:5 (2008), 543–5. See also Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Benjamin Libet, ‘Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985), 529–66.

  3.Sanjiv K. Talwar et al., ‘Rat Navigation Guided by Remote Control’, Nature 417:6884 (2002), 37–8; Ben Harder, ‘Scientists “Drive” Rats by Remote Control’, National Geographic, 1 May 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0501_020501_roborats.html; Tom Clarke, ‘Here Come the Ratbots: Desire Drives Remote-Controlled Rodents’, Nature, 2 May 2002, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nature.com/news/1998/020429/full/news020429-9.html; Duncan Graham-Rowe, ‘“Robo-rat” Controlled by Brain Electrodes’, New Scientist, 1 May 2002, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2237-roborat-controlled-bybrain-electrodes.html#.UwOPiNrNtkQ.

  4.http://fusion.net/story/204316/darpa-is-implanting-chips-in-soldiers-brains/; http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/28/5758018/darpateams-begin-work-on-tiny-brain-implant-to-treat-ptsd.

  5.Smadar Reisfeld, ‘Outside of the Cuckoo’s Nest’, Haaretz, 6 March 2015.

  6.Dan Hurley, ‘US Military Leads Quest for Futuristic Ways to Boost IQ’, Newsweek, 5 March 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/us-military-leads-quest-futuristic-ways-boost-iq-247945.html, accessed 9 January 2015; Human Effectiveness Directorate, http://www.wpafb.af.mil/afrl/rh/index.asp; R. Andy McKinley et al., ‘Acceleration of Image Analyst Training with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation’, Behavioral Neuroscience 127:6 (2013), 936–46; Jeremy T. Nelson et al., ‘Enhancing Vigilance in Operators with Prefrontal Cortex Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS)’, NeuroImage 85 (2014), 909–17; Melissa Scheldrup et al., ‘Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Facilitates Cognitive Multi-Task Performa
nce Differentially Depending on Anode Location and Subtask’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014); Oliver Burkeman, ‘Can I Increase my Brain Power?’, Guardian, 4 January 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/04/can-i-increase-my-brain-power,accessed 9 January2016; Heather Kelly, ‘Wearable Tech to Hack Your Brain’, CNN, 23 October 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/tech/innovation/brain-stimulation-tech/, accessed 9 January 2016.

  7.Sally Adee, ‘Zap Your Brain into the Zone: Fast Track to Pure Focus’, New Scientist, 6 February 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328501.600-zap-your-brain-intothe-zone-fast-track-to-pure-focus.html. See also: R. Douglas Fields, ‘Amping Up Brain Function: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning’, Scientific American, 25 November 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amping-up-brain-function.

  8.Sally Adee, ‘How Electrical Brain Stimulation Can Change the Way We Think’, The Week, 30 March 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://theweek.com/article/index/226196/how-electrical-brain-stimulation-can-change-the-way-we-think/2.

  9.E. Bianconi et al., ‘An Estimation of the Number of Cells in the Human Body’, Annals of Human Biology 40:6 (2013), 463–71.

  10.Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 1985), 73–5.

  11.Joseph E. LeDoux, Donald H. Wilson and Michael S. Gazzaniga, ‘A Divided Mind: Observations on the Conscious Properties of the Separated Hemispheres’, Annals of Neurology 2:5 (1977), 417–21. See also: D. Galin, ‘Implications for Psychiatry of Left and Right Cerebral Specialization: A Neurophysiological Context for Unconscious Processes’, Archives of General Psychiatry 31:4 (1974), 572–83; R. W. Sperry, M. S. Gazzaniga and J. E. Bogen, ‘Interhemispheric Relationships: The Neocortical Commisures: Syndromes of Hemisphere Disconnection’, in Handbook of Clinical Neurology, ed. P. J. Vinken and G. W. Bruyn (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1969), vol. 4.