Why We Dominate the Earth

https://fs.blog/2019/01/yuval-noah-harari-dominate-earth/

by feross • 8 years ago

138 129 8 years ago

lordnacho2• 7 years ago

Surprisingly, it’s not our shared language or even our ability to dominate other species that defines us but rather, our shared fictions.

I read his book where he talks about this. It makes some sense: you can operate at varied scales if you have shared fictions.

When you meet a complete stranger, you're both members of the human race, sharing a desire for a better future. Meet a fellow countryman, and there are songs and stories that bind you together. Work for the same company and there's internal culture as well as the glorious leader you both work for. Support the same football team and you both remember that night in Istanbul. You were sitting at home in Liverpool, he was in Malaysia.

Hard to tell as with anything historical whether this is the most convincing explanation though. I'm sure there's other things that separate us from the animals? But a compelling enough story and he tells it well.

hammock• 7 years ago

That night in Istanbul was a fiction? Isn't that just a shared story?

mostlysimilar• 7 years ago

"Football" being anything other than a bunch of humans running around on some grass kicking the ball is the "fiction" in this context, where "fiction" means "shared belief" and things like game rules, organized competition, etc. are mutually agreed upon and able to be talked about.

lordnacho2• 7 years ago

The fiction is that you have something to do with those guys who kick the ball around.

learc83• 7 years ago

There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that explored a similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

flippyhead• 7 years ago

I love this episode but was surprised that wikipedia said this:

It is often cited as one of the best episodes of the both The Next Generation series and the entire family of the several Star Trek television series.

x3tm2• 7 years ago

I've just seen it after reading your comment. (long bus ride). Excellent episode and so much more enjoyable than the peugeot story of Harari. Thanks for the implicit recommendation.

As for the 'fictions' that Harari likes to talk about, it seems to me that it's more of a rebranding of the concept of social construct than anything new or more insightful than that.

NotAnEconomist• 7 years ago

This seems like a technology enabled by our capacity for language and abstraction.

e40• 7 years ago

I think the shared fears, or propensity for fear, is what rule us in the internet age. And some people seem to have an innate hatred/distrust of others, which probably served humans well thousands of years ago, but now it just gets in the way.

cgriswald• 7 years ago

And some people seem to have an innate hatred/distrust of others, which probably served humans well thousands of years ago, but now it just gets in the way.

I think the places where it serves us well and the places where it just gets in the way are just about the same now as they were thousands of years ago. If you doubt that, put yourselves in the shoes of someone who distrusts your particular set of tribes. Even if they are better off trusting you or any individual member of one of your tribes, are they better or worse off trusting that tribe as a whole? And if you think they are better off, does the potential advantage conveyed outweigh the potential risks?

sonnyblarney• 7 years ago

It's right ... but those things are not really 'fictions'.

keeper7777• 7 years ago

Netflix is hosting Joseph Campbell and 'The Power of Myth' with Bill Moyers which wonderfully details how this idea of shared fiction works. [0] It's amazing how deep it permeates our culture including how Disney adopted Campbell's ideas as not only a vehicle for story telling but also as a matter of social responsibility creating a unified view among all the billions of Earth's human inhabitants.[1] You and I have a shared fiction that is also the same as a person buying a bootleg copy of Star Wars or Frozen on the street corner in Moscow, Beijing, Mexico City, or New Delhi.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/70281117

[1] https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...

felipemnoa• 7 years ago

>> Surprisingly, it’s not our shared language or even our ability to dominate other species that defines us but rather, our shared fictions.

Shared fictions seems to just be a euphemism for culture. I wonder why he doesn't just call it that.

jasode• 7 years ago

If you're only going by the short snippet lordnacho quoted, yes it might seem like it's just "culture".

Culture would be shared rituals like language, food preferences, music etc.

YNH's "shared fiction" idea is about humans' ability to deliberately create new abstract entities that compels humans to act together in service of that entity.

Examples of his shared fictions would be a "company" or "fiat money". These "fictions" somehow organize humans to cooperate and multiply their power over the world.

Culture, on the other hand, like regional food recipes, would accumulate organically and accidentally.

quadrangle• 7 years ago

Because culture also includes something like how we construct and decorate houses, and there's nothing fictional about that. Same with the types of food we eat or music we make.

Only some parts of culture are shared-fictions.

x3tm2• 7 years ago

Social construct is closer to what he talks about. As for why he had to use a non standard formulation for this ... I believe it's marketing.

uhtred• 7 years ago

A better example is that before our cognitive revolution humans could only really cooperate in groups no larger than 100. When we developed the ability to imagine shared fictions, such as countries, money, law, religion, we gained the ability to cooperate on some level with every other human that also believed in those fictions. Money, even back when it was something like sea shells that were money, meant many disparate groups could cooperate as long as they shared the belief in the fiction of those shells being more than just shells.

dwd• 7 years ago

I find the term "shared fiction" just doesn't convey it adequately, at least in English.

Fiction is a loaded word that says "not real" where maybe shared truths, shared beliefs (in the sense of the Greek: hupostasis rather than pisteuo) would be better.

We can conceptualise and communicate about thing that are immaterial like trust, honor and promises.

yesenadam• 7 years ago

Well, it's shorter than "wampeters, foma & granfalloons" -

A "wampeter" is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. "Foma" are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A "granfalloon" is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

devmunchies4• 7 years ago

I saw an interesting, related theory in an ecology book I read recently. Most native peoples were very in tune withe the earth (Pagan Europe, Native American tribes, Hindu India, Tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, etc).

The rise of Abrahamic religion, with man as the most important creature on the planet and everything on earth created for man, is a factor for why we "dominate" the earth.

bpizzi2• 7 years ago

Or maybe the starting point is that sapiens' DNA really is shaped for ruling.

That sapiens mostly preferred 'Abrahamic religion' to others is then a consequence to this starting point.

krapp2• 7 years ago

That sapiens mostly preferred 'Abrahamic religion' to others is then a consequence to this starting point.

Sapiens didn't mostly prefer Abrahamic religion. Judaism didn't proselytize as far as I'm aware, and Christianity and Islam converted many cultures and people by force (although not exclusively.)

And you're not considering the widespread preference for Buddhist and animist religions, which over time likely equal if not surpass the Abrahamic faiths... although to be fair those also sometimes were spread by force as well.

mtts2• 7 years ago

The Chinese don't follow an Abrahamic religion and yet they've built huge urban empires.

It's unlikely this is a factor.

devmunchies4• 7 years ago

It could be a factor everywhere else I mentioned, though. This is a logical fallacy.

pnongrata2• 7 years ago

Also, the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs.

mikeash2• 7 years ago

I’d say the Earth was fairly well dominated by the time Abrahamic religion started to become mainstream around 300AD.

Symmetry2• 7 years ago

Axial[1] religion might have something to do with which societies succeeded later, but that isn't the same thing as Abrahamic and is all about a later phenomenon.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

krapp2• 7 years ago

Most native peoples were very in tune withe the earth (Pagan Europe, Native American tribes, Hindu India, Tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, etc).

The reason there were so many bison in the US when the settlers arrived is that the native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction. While I think there is a kernel of truth to your comment, I also think the premise that primitive people's were more "in tune" with nature than their Western counterparts in some deep cultural or spiritual sense is a revisionist myth predicated on the "noble savage" archetype. The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival for such people. Obviously, if your culture survives primarily on deer, you don't kill all of the deer. But primitive people were quite capable of destroying or harming their environment, as long as they could survive it, just not as capable as more advanced societies.

nikofeyn• 7 years ago

The reason there were so many bison in the US when the settlers arrived is that the native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction.

do you have a good source that details the evidence of this? and what megafauna were killed off?

i tried searching and from what i found, it isn't anywhere as close to clear cut as you state it. i even saw an article debunking the "overkill hypothesis" which claimed some scientists did some dating studies and showed that in a region of north america the large animals died off before native americans arrived. of course that could be false, but it just doesn't seem so clear as you state it.

pokeymcsnatch• 7 years ago

The theory of natives wiping out American megafauna is well-disputed. It was probably a combination of factors (possibly including hunting).

The idea of primitive people being more in tune with the earth doesn't have to go hand-in-hand with the "noble savage" romanticization. There's evidence that North America was essentially a well-managed game reserve. For people that didn't have much in the ways of truly domesticated livestock, it makes sense that they worked towards food security in a different way than societies that had cattle and pigs. By necessity, they would have had to develop practical and efficient methods for managing their food source. So sure, they were probably much more in tune with nature their contemporary Europeans or modern Americans, if "in tune" means having the know-how to bend and shape the natural world for their benefit.

crispinb• 7 years ago

primitive people

The only indigenous population I know about in any detail is that of my nation (Australia). They were far from "primitive", rather constituted an unimaginably ancient continent-wide civilisation.

native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction

Again, speaking for the Aus equivalent: there's an arguable case that descendants of the original settlers arriving across the PNG land bridge may have caused species extinctions. Given what we know of H. Sapiens, it's pretty likely.

But that has little to do with the indigenous Australians who the European invaders encountered. By this time they had undergone 40-60,000 years of cultural and social development. By this advanced stage they had an extraordinarily detailed understanding of the ecologies they lived in and managed. The "in tune with nature" phrase is not to my taste, but if any population could be described this way, it was them.

The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival

Well this assumes they were not true human cultures, a hallmark of which is rarely doing anything only for survival. All known human cultures have myths and institutions, beliefs, roles and manners of life woven deeply with all the acts that also happen to perform survival functions. It's a bit of a dehumanising stance to expunge everything but the survival aspect. It's also not a stance that ever withstands even a modicum of familiarity with any real human culture.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

I think this is a little simplified but I honestly believe that if the bible didn't contain the phrase "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" the world may be a better place.

dustinmoris• 7 years ago

Sapiens is a must read for anyone who wants to better understand the fabrics of humanity. It's one of my most favourite books and reading it definitely has opened up my eyes to the world.

An example:

Humans are the "creators of the world", the most dominant species on the planet and at the top of the food chain by a long distance and yet we are the most jumpy/scary species of all.

If a tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a lion they wouldn't give a bit of a shit. A lion would remain calm, knowing that the spider cannot do anything and it wouldn't even bother to entertain the spider for a split second.

However if the same tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a human there's a real chance that this person would start jumping up and down, perhaps trying to kill the spider or maybe even rush out of the room until the spider is gone.

This is completely irrational for someone like us - the species who literally dominates everything on this planet - and yet so common. Why is that? Because lions had millions of years to climb the ladder to the top of the food chain and therefore had the time to develop a nature which reflects their strength, whereas humans have jumped to the top so quickly that we still have the fears and behaviour of someone who is extremely weak and vulnerable. It's actually quite scary and also explains why humans often respond to tiny issues with violence, bombings and other out of proportion threats when things could just be ignored.

devmunchies4• 7 years ago

I don't agree. I lived in the Caribbean for a while and the longer i was there the less i cared about spiders or flies crawling on my face.

If you see other peoples freak out from spiders, you think thats the correct reaction and so you do it.

gnulinux2• 7 years ago

If a tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a lion they wouldn't give a bit of a shit. A lion would remain calm, knowing that the spider cannot do anything and it wouldn't even bother to entertain the spider for a split second.
However if the same tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a human there's a real chance that this person would start jumping up and down, perhaps trying to kill the spider or maybe even rush out of the room until the spider is gone.

I think there is a chance this might be a bad comparison. Do non-human primates not fear spiders?

Some interesting read:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/Ohman....

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-07628-001

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-05872-001

tim333• 7 years ago

In my experience house cats certainly react to tiny spiders but often by eating them.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Yeah the comparison is subpar, I'd bet a dollar that anything that proved hurtful to a lion will make him jump the next time he runs into it by mistake. Animals have fears, we just have different ones.

jimmy1• 7 years ago

A lion has tougher skin than a human. But the primary difference is knowledge. We as humans know that some small tiny spiders are warrant no amount of fear but some, like the brown recluse, can absolutely mess your day up. A small brown spider is a small brown spider to a lion. On a more higher level, we are aware of our mortality, and this colors our entire experience of almost everything in life, from the biggest things to the littlest things like spiders, which is why all the world's faiths all have something to say about death. I am not sure the lion sits and contemplates his mortality.

adrianN• 7 years ago

Cats are startled by cucumbers. My cat sometimes gets spooked for no apparent reason at all.

est31• 7 years ago

We are great at coordinated actions on varying scales, but I wonder whether we can also do coordinated actions at global scales that outspan an individual's lifespan. Like in preventing climate change. Or in making sure that we don't nuke each other. The nuking experiment has been running for a few decades only. Can we avoid rocking the boat so hard that it keels over?

seren• 7 years ago

Empires or religions are great unifying forces that span centuries and continents, so yes it is possible to have a narrative that goes beyond a simple human life.

Regarding the global scale, even if we don't realize it, we mostly already have a global common culture. Everyone is organizing its time in year of 365 days, split in 24 hours, counting in base 10, have mostly the same economical policies. Even ISIS has seized and used dollars from banks in their occupied territory, so they also believe in the dollar [0]. All of the these things were not true 10,000 years ago, we have probably already lost thousands of different human cultures since the start of agriculture. Sure we still have regional preferences on sport, food, festival, etc, but mostly all humans are running the same basic OS, so to speak.

So are we going to coordinates on the global scale, only time will tell, but this is much more likely today that it was 1,000 years ago.

[0] IIRC this is an example taken from Sapiens in the chapter about money.

rimliu• 7 years ago

Is it not just autoplasticity vs. alloplasticity?

jpadkins3• 7 years ago

I've wondered if mathematics is a 'shared fiction'. Obviously money and laws are shared fictions, but I wondered if other species can't grasp math concepts (beyond counting) because there is a fictional or conceptual element that their brains can't process.

mjlee• 7 years ago

There is a fair amount of discussion about this in the most recent episode of the BBC show This Infinite Monkey Cage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00024ph

Should be downloadable as a podcast for the next couple of weeks from most sources.

It's a fairly light take on science with some comedy and teasing, but the scientific element is respectable.

akvadrako• 7 years ago

Of course not, at least in any practical sense. Even plants use the mathematical properties of fractals to make effective structures. If we encountered aliens that are as alien as possible, they would agree on the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle on a flat plane.

jpadkins3• 7 years ago

I'm not debating whether math exists or governs our reality. My question was can other species understand math concepts? Or is this a unique sapien genetic mutation.

AFAIK, plants don't communicate or use math concepts (even if they grow using them).

fmihaila• 7 years ago

Even plants use the mathematical properties of fractals to make effective structures.

I think a better way to put it would be that plant growth processes exhibit patterns that can be modelled by the mathematics of fractals. "Using mathematics", the way I see it, evokes a mind that uses abstract mental constructs (organized as "mathematics") for the purpose of modelling some aspect of reality. To the best of our knowledge, plants seem to lack that kind of mind.

jimbokun2• 7 years ago

"If we encountered aliens that are as alien as possible, they would agree on the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle on a flat plane."

Not if the aliens had the mental capacity of, say, a house cat.

planteen• 7 years ago

Animals can do more than just count. Some birds understand ordering/ranking as well as the concepts of addition and subtraction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/science/pigeons-can-learn...

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/animals-can-d...

chillingeffect• 7 years ago

the math part of it, e.g. geometry isn't fiction, but some of the context around math, how we use it, which assumptions are acceptable is. For example, we overapply linearity and periodicit and overlook tooling cost.

raincom• 7 years ago

Philosophy of Mathematics deals with your question: whether numbers or sets exist? Some say they don't exist in our world, but exist in a Mathematical world (Platonism).

mikelyons• 7 years ago

We exist inside absolute infinity. Reality is not physical. math is just a subset of the infinite number of dimensions in the godhead we inhabit.

rafiki62• 7 years ago

In practical terms, math is a language, i.e. a medium of communication, which helps us model physical and real phenomena. There are certainly theories in math, but most of the "math" that matters is pretty matter of fact. It may not cover the entire spectrum but most math models do well enough to help us explain real things.

Of course I'm not really talking about the more esoteric fields of math.

sh4rk• 7 years ago

Sorry but isn't it just because we innovate? We innovate without evolution. Does any other species innovate without evolution? Something feels wrong to me here. It almost like it's the exact opposite: shared fiction is what hold us back (though it's probably good from a survival stand point), and innovation is what makes us unique, and it specially happens when there is no fiction but a real search for the truth.

cobbzilla• 7 years ago

Does any other species innovate without evolution?

Technically yes, but for all practical purposes no. Different clans of primates (chimpanzees iirc) have "innovated" distinct and novel ways to get food, specific to their clan. These are not innate, they are taught within the clan and passed down from generation to generation. With this, they share a common cultural knowledge and can preserve it into the future.

From a practical point of view, the speed of this "innovation" is glacial, but not all that different from the pace of human progress for most of our history.

So what makes us different? I'd argue that the evolution of speech/language provided the most important initial boost. With language, all cultural knowledge, including innovations, becomes so much easier to retain across generations.

dan00• 7 years ago

It almost like it's the exact opposite: shared fiction is what hold us back ...

Shared fiction is nothing else than just shared knowledge. Without collecting and keeping your knowledge you can't go further, there's no basis for innovating further.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

As 'dan00 points out, without the ability to retain the results of the innovation process over generations, innovating pretty much goes to waste. What makes us special is a combination of ability to innovate, to pass it to others, to pass it to next generations, to build new innovations upon the old ones, and the ability to build stable societies that let us extend the scope of innovation to things beyond capability of single individual. As much as shared stories are crucial for building and maintain societies, it's an important element of what makes us special.

WRT. the social part, I'm reminded of something 'lisper keeps saying - that the minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a tribe or a village.

LoSboccacc2• 7 years ago

I think this is all nice and well and but we raised to the top of the food chain because we had pointier sticks, abstract thinking came later. Much later.

About 70,000 or so years ago [...] the cognitive revolution

https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/homo/homo_4.htm

about 2.5 million years ago [...] Oldowan tools

spurgu• 7 years ago

Give a bunch of chimpanzees an unlimited supply of chainsaws and fuel, I doubt that'll take them to the top of the food chain.

LoSboccacc2• 7 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vssqb-0i2-A mhm

scoot2• 7 years ago

Unrelated to the article, but the headline raised the question in my mind - is intelligent life an inevitability, and is that a good or bad thing?

If the human race had not, would another species eventually rise to a similar position? And would it have caused the same destruction?

On the flip side, what purpose would natural life serve if there was no species sufficiently cognizant to recognize it?

Juliate• 7 years ago

Why would purpose be a thing to the accidental?

malvosenior• 7 years ago

is intelligent life an inevitability, and is that a good or bad thing?

Without intelligence, there is no good or bad. You can't begin to overlay a moral framework on the world if there are no sentient beings to create it.

dota_fanatic2• 7 years ago

Without intelligence, there is no red or blue. You can't begin to overlay a color framework on the world if there are no sentient beings to create it.

Maybe universal morality does exist, we're just too simple minded to see it.

scoot2• 7 years ago

We are, by some definition (!), intelligent life. Therefore we can reason about a parallel universe where humanity did not rise to become the dominant species; what the alternatives might be (or have been); and what the implications of that might be.

I guess it was sort of an "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" sort of question. I am not a philosopher, so perhaps it was the wrong question, or poorly phrased. But I'm glad it sparked a brief discussion nonetheless.

mannykannot• 7 years ago

On Earth, it took something over half the available time for it to happen, and during that time, several events nearly rolled back complex life, so it doesn't seem inevitable. In the universe as a whole, it would seem much more likely, unless you think the Fermi Paradox indicates that there's probably at least one difficulty that takes literally astronomical odds to surmount.

herodotus• 7 years ago

Nice point. And it could be a clue to Fermi's paradox. Perhaps the universe is teeming with life, but intelligent life is perhaps inevitably doomed to over consumption and extinction in a (astronomically speaking) very short time. Therefore, we have not heard from there short lived aliens.

mLuby• 7 years ago

Intelligence? 100%. Sociability? 100%‡. What I think you're asking about is tool use.

Given roughly infinite time, is there a reason to think that the combo of social + tool users would not win over, say social + raw strength? Imagine perhaps that lions gain the ability to sweat and so can expand their range dramatically. Would the next tool users never achieve dominance over them/be relegated to a small habitat?

I find it hard to imagine tool users not winning long-term, but it's possible that intelligent non-tool users never let them amass the necessary population/skills/tools. Maybe something like the xenomorphs?

‡The only case I could think of is where some organism absorbs prey to continually gain power. But at a certain point it's either unable to grow its geographic reach or it's basically a collection of physically separate social sub-creatures.

Finnucane• 7 years ago

We don't dominate the earth. Ants do.

WilliamEdward• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what you think dominate means...

eanzenberg3• 7 years ago

It's kind of revisionist to consider the last 60 years (if we're generous) but more like 10 years as proof that intelligent beings got there through some massive amount of cooperation across borders and beyond close-knit groups

>Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.

Human intelligence has been around a lot longer than a few decades and for the vast vast majority of that time has not only still dominated the world but sects of people were uncooperative and competing with each other all the time, wiping out people here and there without a though otherwise.

If the main thesis is that a common language lead to cooperation and therefore world dominance, that's false too. People have dominated the earth for a while, and with a language, and without much cooperation but through fighting and spilled blood.

golergka2• 7 years ago

sects of people were uncooperative and competing with each other all the time

And those groups who cooperated with in-group better have repeatedly outcompeted groups that didn't cooperate as well.

eanzenberg3• 7 years ago

Up to a point. Successful cooperation seems to be through family ties or common upbringing, such as the vikings or spartans.

joe_the_user2• 7 years ago

Indeed,

It's still a testament to human flexibility that human went from small bands of anarchistically organized gatherer-hunters only actively cooperating with each other to larger agricultural groups cooperating within a hierarchical framework. If one wanted to find a full explanation for this, it seems like one look for what gave humans the ability to do either.

Retric2• 7 years ago

Trade routes have demonstrated cooperation across vast areas for thousands of years. This is not selfless cooperation, but was dependent on multiple nations and cultures.

eanzenberg3• 7 years ago

Cooperation, until the next war started.

Symmetry2• 7 years ago

Sapiens was a pretty decent book but if you want take that's both deeper and more scientifically informed I'd go for The Secret of Our Success instead.

chkaloon• 7 years ago

Reading the book right now. What's concerning to me is that we are currently seeing the dissolving of myths across the board, whether it be religion, faith in public institutions, or facades that we kept before social media existed. Is the breakdown of social cohesion a consequence? Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good, but can we survive it?

joe_the_user2• 7 years ago

The debunking of myth began quite a while ago, maybe the 19th century even but certainly, the mid 20th century showed what horrors could be produced by the nation state.

Moreover, the majority of Western Europe could be called irreligious and lives more or less equivalently well and "morally" to the United States. Indeed, the United States has always been uniquely religious for an advanced society. We are now also set-up by a wide variety of unique social ills. There might not be any relation between but then again there might be.

embwbam• 7 years ago

The book Homo Deus also introduces this idea, but calls them “intersubjective realities”, and they include not only religion, but capitalism. He claims that the strongest of these today is humanism, and even those who are religious usually share the humanist dream. He then goes on to talk about how we will continue to create new ones, some of which are terrifying.

I think that term makes it easier to see how they will continue.

86carr• 7 years ago

You should check out RS Bakker or Peter Watts. https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ https://www.rifters.com/

nyolfen• 7 years ago

bakker has some thoughts of his own on harari:

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-sem...

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now...

The biological origins of narrative lie in shallow information cognitive ecologies, circumstances characterized by profound ignorance. What we cannot grasp we poke with sticks. Hitherto we’ve been able to exapt these capacities to great effect, raising a civilization that would make our story-telling ancestors weep, and for wonder far more than horror. But as with all heuristic systems, something must be taken for granted. Only so much can be changed before an ecology collapses altogether. And now we stand on the cusp of a communicative revolution even more profound than literacy, a proliferation, not simply of alternate narratives, but of alternate narrators.
If you sweep the workbench clean, cease looking at meaning as something somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘transcendent,’ narrative becomes a matter of super-complicated systems, things that can be cut short by a heart attack or stroke. If you refuse to relinquish the meat (which is to say nature), then narratives, like any other biological system, require that particular background conditions obtain. Scranton’s error, in effect, is a more egregious version of the error Harari makes in Homo Deus, the default presumption that meaning somehow lies outside the circuit of ecology. Harari, recall, realizes that humanism, the ‘man-the-meaning-maker’ narrative of Western civilization, is doomed, but his low-dimensional characterization of the ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ as an ‘intermediate level of reality’ convinces him that some other collective narrative must evolve to take its place. He fails to see how the technologies he describes are actively replacing the ancestral social coordinating functions of narrative.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Partial agree: I think there's a bifurcation in society.

One part _is_ dissolving myths, using the tools of science and education and curation of knowledge.

Another part is regressing into myth: look at antivax, idiocracy, tribalism/xenophobia, and all the political theocracies sprouting up.

jimbokun2• 7 years ago

"Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good, but can we survive it?"

We never let go of myths, we just create new ones. And yes, I would say the breakdown of social cohesion is an inevitable consequence when you have competing, incompatible myths causing different groups to see and understand the world differently.

kansface• 7 years ago

seeing the dissolving of myths across the board

I believe you are incorrect - we are replacing the old with the new.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

The modernist movement which started around a century ago assumed that "Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good", but I think that's naiive and I think we're starting to grasp that fact. Certainly some myths are destructive, and many of them are limiting, but myths are also a fundamental construct that we require to be able to function. Knowing where to draw the line and learning how to suspend your disbelief as needed is a great challenge, but an important one.

Tolkien (along with C.S. Lewis), a vocal anti-modernist, had interesting thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories

"Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective...Tolkien [also] asserts that a truly good and representative fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faerie. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.""

He and Lewis even - despite being practicing Christians - had the wisdom to see even their own religion as a kind of fairy-story, not cheapening it but orienting it within the important role that fictions play in the human condition.

devoply• 7 years ago

Why we dominate the earth is not an interesting question. An interesting question is should we and is it a net positive? I personally don't think so. We as a species is completely incapable of managing the earth... or we have not yet evolved systems to do so and until we do we should stop dominating the earth.

m0skit03• 7 years ago

Define "dominate". IMHO bacteria dominate the Earth, but of course, they don't know. They don't even need to know to dominate.

EpicEng3• 7 years ago

dom·i·nate
verb
have a commanding influence on; exercise control over.
be the most important or conspicuous person or thing in.

Bacteria have a huge effect on all life, but they don't "exercise control" as they are not self aware. Their influence is comprised solely of externalities. Humans by comparison exert far more control over the environment around them. We shape the world to our purpose. I think humanity wins here.

evv2• 7 years ago

Humanity may win here, but you should be careful about how you define it. Individual humans don't control much more of our environment than animals do. Like animals in a zoo, we are often born into very constrained situations that wildly limit our actual control. We are usually caged by our economic situation.

What I'm saying is, the "human" does not dominate the earth. The corporation does. We shouldn't be afraid of loosing control to an AI that will rule our world, because we have already let the companies do whatever they want.

Some of us are lucky enough to participate in this world, by forming and working for world-changing corporations, but everybody else is closer to the bacteria side of the spectrum.

B1FF_PSUVM• 7 years ago

Meh. The biosphere, being generous and giving it 10 km depth and 10 km height (ocean trench, mountain peaks), is 20 km worth of skin on a 12 700 km diameter sphere.

Less than an oily smear on a marble. "Saving the planet" is laughable, the planet could hiccup and wipe out all life and keep going as before ...

("Don't antropomorphize Nature, she hates that.")

m0skit03• 7 years ago

Sorry, I absolutely do not agree.

1) They do exercise control, self-aware or not. Your guts' bacteria control what you can eat or not. The environment bacteria control what diseases you can get and even if live or die. The bacteria decide what chemicals are to stay in the air or not, even what chemicals are released in the air, including the most extremely deadly toxins we know about (e.g. botulin, anthrax...).

2) Humans definitely do not exert far more control over the environment around them. You're talking about building and modifying the environment. Bacteria directly decide if there can be life or not in an environment, and even which forms can be alive or not. What nutrients will be available. What the air, water and earth chemical composition is going to be. Besides, many bacterias are apex predators. They do shape everything to fit their "wishes", even including human behavior since they make up 50% of your body, and that without counting the mitochondrion. So whatever we actually do as humans "controlling" the environment does not even come close to what bacteria control.

3) And finally, we can't get rid of all bacteria, ever, mainly because that would kill us as well. They could easily kill us all whenever they want to, and they won't even notice.

rafiki62• 7 years ago

I'd argue that domination requires agency. We want to dominate the earth and are doing it. Bacteria maybe more prevalent, but they haven't wiped us out yet. We on the other hand have wiped out several strains of bacteria.

m0skit03• 7 years ago

All living beings want to dominate, it's genetics: if you dominate you can pass down your genes easier.

We definitely came close to being wiped out by bacteria. Several times. And no, we don't have more human "strains".

Bacteria totally dominated us before antibiotics, and this hard conquered defense wall is already evaporating, and fast.

Florin_Andrei• 7 years ago

bacteria dominate the Earth

Or maybe the biochemistry of carbon really dominates.

Or just the physics of atoms.

Or quarks and the strong nuclear force.

Things get more and more absurd as you're descending that ladder.

wanted2• 7 years ago

We do not dominate Earth, we're just destroying it. Just as we think we are intelligent beings, we're actually incredibly stupid.

Eire_Banshee• 7 years ago

This is such an easy, garbage take on the article.

pqhwan• 7 years ago

I think about how language, in a utilitarian sense, is a tool for individuals to program each other. I guess, in gaining the ability to tell convincing fictions, we've discovered more powerful primitives, and were able to spread consistent programming to wider groups of humans.

socrates19982• 7 years ago

My unscientific guess is that the mutation allowed for greater group dependence and cohesion. This article and Harari's book sort of dance around this, but I think it's some type of emotional gene that we are emotionally hard wired to NEED to connect with people. Like a tiger stalks with your back turned to it, people emotionally need to be connected to other people in a deep, meaningful way.

Humans are not only unique in their abilities like problems solving and language, but also in their 100% dedication to the tribe.

I think it is this combination that allows for us to work together in such large groups and successfully.

Harari calls it "fictions" that bind us together, but that doesn't quite seem to work for me.

The question I ask is WHY do these "fictions" work so well?

Why would a Nebraska farmer go half way across the world and climb French beaches with German guns shooting at him?

Why are we so compelled to identify with a group?

A comedian has a great joke about this. Essentially, the WORST thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. Even being surrounded by criminals and prison guards is infinity better than being forced to be alone in a room. We desperately need to connect with people. It seems hard wired genetically to me.

I think culture helps serve this purpose of binding us together.

Art, music, theatre, and even sports are all a part of the process of group cohesion.

Group cohesion and dependency is so powerful that it's often the number one factor in determining which societies/countries/groups come out victorious with intergroup conflict.

A great book called "War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin is a fantastic book to read if this concept interests you.

Another one, "Tribe" by Sebastion Junger also explores this topic.

Phenomenit• 7 years ago

"A comedian has a great joke about this. Essentially, the WORST thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. Even being surrounded by criminals and prison guards is infinity better than being forced to be alone in a room. We desperately need to connect with people. It seems hard wired genetically to me."

My unscientific response to this is that it's more a personality dependency. Our personality or individuality is dependent on other individuals so when you your all alone your ego starts to disolve and all your skills and attributes that depend on ego start to fade. Most people would experience this as going insane.

Cohesion in large groups are aided by strong personalities that create and sustain larger groups(hierarchies) and than in turn enables larger groups.

socrates19982• 7 years ago

Sure, they are some people who are okay with being alone and would be okay with living on a desert island without other people around, but I think these are much fewer people than most people think.

Even people who claim to hate other people find it very difficult to work in environments where their work is unappreciated or useless.

Almost no one in the world would be happy digging a ditch and refilling it the next day and repeating it even if they were paid $1000 a day to do it.

Why is that? Why would a programmer who isn't very social want only work on stuff that is useful to other people?

It's because the vast majority of us are hard wired to be useful to society and other people. We desperately need to feel some connection to others.

The only way digging a ditch and filling it in would be satisfying is if you knew you were taking care of your family by doing it.

Cohesion in large groups are aided by strong personalities that create and sustain larger groups(hierarchies) and than in turn enables larger groups.

I completely disagree. Cohesion is stronger in small, less hierarchal groups.

The key is grouping groups together.

Why did the American states unite and form the USA and the Greek city states before the rise of Macedonia not?

It's not an easy question to answer, but strong man personalities doesn't seem like it's an answer.

iskander• 7 years ago

These evolutionary backsplanations feel like they're saying more about our current society, values, and biases than any group of past humans.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

I've previously thought about the idea that Humans are the first species with software, instead of just hardware. When a bug exists in a chip, you have to wait for the next generation to have it fixed. But a programmer can fix a bug or add functionality to the same physical machine; this is why software exists in the first place.

The decision-making of other animals may develop generationally, but it has very limited capacity for change within a single organism's life. On the other hand, a human can endlessly rewrite her software on top of the same hardware. We can evolve without waiting for our DNA to change.

rdiddly• 7 years ago

"There is no parallel in other species for these quick, large-scale shifts. General behavior patterns in dogs or fish or ants change due to a change in environment, or to broad genetic evolution over a period of time."

Aha! This passage made me realize why we can't seem to get a grip on, for example, climate change (but also that we soon, easily could). Humans can undergo a quick, large-scale shift in behavior having nothing to do with an environmental change; therefore it's also true that humans can staunchly and stubbornly adhere to the same behavior, despite an environmental change.

bambax• 7 years ago

There are many problems with the thesis that sapiens is oh but so special (and of "special" being good).

One is that our species is at least 100,000 years old, most probably 200,000 and possibly a million years old. Yet, culture, history and "world dominance" only happened very recently. Why did it take so long?

Another is that there were many "sapiens" species and they went extinct, either because we exterminated them, or nature did, or we absorbed them by cross-breeding. Being cognitive is no guaranty of success and even, it turns out, no protection from extermination.

Yet another is that other species have language (dolphins for instance, which are neither "dogs" or "fish" or "ants").

And finally, talking of our "success" is the most ironic way of putting it, since we're in the process of destroying all mammal life on earth (including us). Maybe ants "eat our garbage" but they are likely to survive us, unlike anyone who's reading this.

Why We Dominate the Earth

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