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Of course, it is entirely possible that someone will finally work out that they can fit the contents of brain onto a chip – but given the fact, that as Harari suggested, our body and its “systems” play a crucial role in our perception of reality – will that chip be recognizably “me”?Īn example of disturbing experiments on the subject are those being made on rats. It’s a fairly common sense and deliberately inexact rebuttal. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it - “I refute it thus.” I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. We stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. This is not a very sophisticated counterargument on my part – it reminds me a little of this bit of the biography of Johnson Therefore the self could be quite simply be limited to the body. So far it has been impossible for us to transfer a human brain onto another substance or even to transplant it (though people have been tempted to do it – see this article in Wired). Hence selfhood is simply constituted by the bodily-contained self. These theoretical ideas are indeed fascinating – but to Harari’s argument of ‘dividuals’, one is tempted to say – well, there are many systems that compose “me” – however, there is only one body that I can move around or perceive the world through. These sides of the brain often give contradictory answers – Harari relates the mid-20th century scientific experiments that discovered this.
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He also talks about humans who had, for one reason or another, experienced the separation between the right and left half of the brain. (Incidentally, I should really reread that book, as I remember little of it apart from thinking it was awesome).However, the idea of a human being simply being a flow of thoughts in consciousness united through its passage through time, is hardly new: any literary modernist work in the beginning of the 20th century – think Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or more famously Joyce’s Ulysses highlights the fragmentary and self-contradicting nature of human thought.
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Instead, he posits that the latest discoveries in the biological sciences make more sense of humans as “dividuals” – and here he mentions the differences between the experiencing and the remembering self highlighted by Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
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He denounces the liberal ideology’s tendency to think of human as individuals with a free will. Though I didn’t necessarily agree with the tendency of Harari’s argument. Second, I was fascinated by the section, which discussed both brain enhancement techniques employed by the US army, as well as experiments on controlling the brains of the rats.
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This is something I have often thought of instinctively of both socialism and fascism, but I had hitherto negligently omitted liberalism from the list. The first is Harari’s clear belief that one can analyse liberalism, socialism, and fascism as religious systems. Indeed, it is tempting to consider Harari’s book more in comparison with the science fiction genre- it reminded me a great deal of the central thesis of Brave New World – except, well, that it was a little drier.ĭespite the fact that I tend to be suspicious of grand historical theories, which Harari is very fond of making: “democracy is the product of the fact that the state needed population for its armies”, or “no important new religious trend will come of the existing religions”, I found there were nevertheless many interesting ideas in this book. In the different scenarios Harari explores, he reminds me a little of Max Tegmark exploring the various ways in which AI could take over the world (or not). My least favourite part of Sapiens were Harari’s predictions about the future: and here was a book that consisted solely of his predictions of the future. I was sceptical about this book initially. I listened to this book over a protracted period of time – which means, sadly, that I had forgotten most of the first half by the time I was listening to the second.