90 Days with Yuval Noah Harari

The scope of my understanding is broadening — but I have more questions than answers.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is the third book I’ve read by Yuval Noah Harari this year. I also digested Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Adding it up now, that means I’ve spent about 3 months out of 7 in close company with this gentleman – and his voice is definitely beginning to take up permanent residence in my brain. His writing is clear, well-reasoned and presented in a dispassionate tone at times even drily funny. In case you’re wondering, there’s nothing “brief” about either Sapiens or Homo Deus, unless you consider that the 70,000 or so years he focuses on are but a brief blip in the fullness of time.

In Home Deus, some of his ideas about what our future might hold are wholly disturbing. Will we merge with machines? Will Homo Sapiens go the way of the Neanderthal – i.e. obsolete and thus extinct? Will there be a new privileged class of superhumans? Are we naught but a collection of algorithms such that AI and social media will know us better than we know ourselves given enough data? Do we matter as individuals at all? Or are we just bits of data that count only inasmuch as they can improve the system in which we all live (or are trapped)?

If anything at all is comforting, it’s the continuous lesson in the vast sweep and scope of history. We have green lawns because people have always had green lawns. That’s what we think. But lawns are actually relatively new in the context of the tens of thousands of years of our existence. Knowing that what we experience now is absolutely NOT how it’s always been is incredibly helpful. If you understand that nothing is inevitable and everything is subject to change, then you can be free to live differently, both as individuals and collectively.

Every Human Life Is Equally Valuable… Right?

Even our commonly held humanist doctrine is not sacrosanct. We all believe that individuals are inherently valuable, which forms the foundation of democracies (every vote counts) and even corporate culture (the customer is always right). But what if that story is a convenient, convincing myth? It may be that we are unreliable narrators of our own lives – and that something else (algorithms and AI, specifically) could help us make better decisions that would make us happier, healthier, wealthier and longer lived. If that were true, would we give up the right to autonomy?

We really already are, right? Who actually reads those interminably long terms of agreement scrolling down your smartphone screen? We freely, unthinkingly give our personal data to get free stuff all the time. Do you pay for your email service? For ChatGPT? Then you are the payment. Your attention, your information, your data. Reams and streams of inputs about what you like, what you want, what makes you laugh, what keeps you scrolling or watching. 

To take this line of thinking even further, consider this: perhaps all we are is the sum of our data bits, which would be the logical conclusion to the idea that algorithms might know us better than we can know ourselves. Harari convincingly argues we have no souls and also no single essence (no inner voice) that makes us who we are as an individual. Oh and also, no true free will. This sounds borderline crazy, I know, but not after you consider the research Harari presents.

Our Souls Make Us Special… Right?

I’m still processing the idea of being soulless, but after the initial shock and inclination to push it away, I’m finding it oddly comforting. No soul is the final logical lynchpin in the case against not believing in God (or heaven and hell, the fear-based stick-carrot combo most youngsters are indoctrinated with in all kinds of Christian churches). And if you aren’t a single self? Well, that’s freeing too. I have changed, evolved over my lifetime. I do feel conflicted over significant decisions. Because of my brain! Perhaps the idea that I struggle with most is Harari’s hypothesis that we don’t have free will. Specifically, he means we don’t control or even manifest what it is we desire. Yes, we can choose to act on our desires (or not), but that wanting or longing in and of itself is beyond our willing it.

As someone who’s been practicing yoga for 25 years now, I do intimately understand the basic premise that these desires spring from the ever-flowing current of our stream of consciousness. I know it because I’ve tried to turn it off. One of my favorite teachers called this the “monkey mind,” and that’s about right. It’s a bunch of unwanted patter and chatter without all that much meaning. From that illogical stream well our deepest desires, unbidden and perhaps not even in your best interests. What I suppose I take issue with is the question of whether, as a conscious self, we have the will to determine and chart a course for the future of our own making. But because we don’t manufacture the desires that drive us to those destinations, it’s exceedingly hard to say. Of course, we make many decisions each and every day, but they’re all underpinned by those pesky driving desires.

My Authentic Self Is in There Somewhere… Right?

The premise of modern life says that each of us possesses at our core some sort of central self. As Hararis puts it: “Humanism assumes that each human has a single authentic inner self, but when I try to attend to it I often encounter either silence or a cacophony of contending voices.”

Yes! There are at least two loud voices in there (right and left hemispheres) and one of them can’t even talk. There’s constant conflict inside our skulls, between our experiencing selves (right) and the narrator (hey there, left brain). No wonder nothing ever seems all that clear.

In fact, our brain is perhaps nothing but a trickster who makes up stories to help us make sense of the chaos swirling around us. As referenced above, we all have two brain hemispheres: the right and the left. The left brain is associated with language, speech, logical thinking, precise details, math and science. The right is connected to creativity and imagination, emotional processing, holistic thinking and intuition. Linking them together is the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibers that’s crucial in facilitating communication between the disparate sides.

What Happens When You Cut the Corpus Callosum?

As a last resort treatment for severe epilepsy, the corpus callosum can be severed which can stop or reduce seizures, or at least keep them from crossing from one hemisphere to the other. This severance effectively stops the two hemispheres from communicating. Researchers have made many compelling discoveries by conducting experiments on these “severed” patients. Effectively, these studies highlight that the two sides of the brain operate separately. One side is the experiencing part of the brain – it sees things and feels things, but it has no language to describe them. On the other side, is the narrating brain. It has lots of words and logic, and its job is to make sense of things, even when things don’t really make sense.

In Homo Deus, Harari describes one such study. The researchers show participants a pornographic image. One participant giggles and blushes. When they ask her what’s so funny, she says one of the machines in the room struck her as silly. But that was just a sense-making story. She didn’t really have any idea at all what had elicited her reaction.

For those of us with intact corpus callosum, we rely on our hemispheres to work together to synthesize our experiences into language. What an imperfect system, if you think about it – especially in a world and society where introspection and reflection aren’t exactly part of the daily grind.

All Sides Together Now

For me, understanding this neurobiological reality is a relief. No amount of meditation or soul searching will reveal a calm and tranquil inner me. In my head, there is fighting. Inside all of our heads, there is constant conflict. In retrospect, I think that’s what’s been so incredibly useful about journaling for me. It forces reflection and connection between those independent brains sharing space in my head. Perhaps it even sheds light on my affinity for one particular journaling method, which is a type of dialogue between “me” and what I’ve come to call Higher Wisdom or HW for short, which I might now identify as a seemingly “wiser” area of probably my right brain. Perhaps I’m able to tap more directly into my right brain’s intuition and higher-level holistic perspective through a concerted effort at applying precise language to what I’ve experienced and am currently feeling. At any rate, “knowing yourself” is no simple job. And now I know better why not.

You Got Me Feeling Emotions

Also don’t get me started on emotions, which have been evolutionarily programmed into us ostensibly to help us make good decisions. I mean, yes, I see why it’s helpful to love your children with an overwhelming ferocity. But why the heck do I cry when I get mad? And sure, the “ting” of attraction and the intoxicating oxytocin of falling in love is definitely conducive to procreation. But deciphering the why and what of other more complex emotions is like trying to find your way out of Pan’s labyrinth. At least for me, it can be tempting to brush feelings aside as nuisances – especially if they’re problematic, confusing or seemingly unhelpful. Many times we skip right to coping mechanisms: what will make me feel better? Versus the harder work of deciphering what my emotions are trying to tell me. What is the right way to process these difficult sensations and come out healthier, smarter and more resilient on the other side?  

Current scientific thinking holds that our emotions are algorithmic. In fact, that most of our processes can be understood as algorithms. Understanding ourselves in this way allows us to experience our emotions differently. Feelings aren’t to be ignored, brushed aside and “solved,” they are important messages and signals that need to be synthesized, probed and given proper attention.

The Peak-End Rule

One more element I found fascinating about our trickster brains is this phenomenon called the peak-end rule. It refers to the way our brains process how good or bad an experience was for us. Essentially, the brain literally takes the best/worst moment from the entire experience as well as the very last moment of the experience, and then averages the two together. Like literally, mathematically averages them. That’s the number it tells us captures the ENTIRE experience. Which completely explains why women willingly give birth multiple times. The absolute worst pain of labor and delivery gets averaged together with the exceptional ecstasy of holding your newborn for the first time.

“The narrating self goes over our experiences with a sharp pair of scissors and a thick black marker,” explains Harari. “It censors at least some moments of horror, and files in the archive a story with a happy ending. […] The narrating self uses our experiences as important (but not exclusive) raw materials for its stories. These stories, in turn, shape what the experiencing self actually feels. When we say ‘I’, we mean the story in our head, not the onrushing stream of experiences we undergo. Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning,” he writes.

Researchers were actually able to verify this quirky brain calculation with colonoscopy patients. Minute-by-minute, they asked patients undergoing a colonoscopy to rate their pain. Then at the end, they had them give an overall rating of the painfulness of the experience. The patients did NOT average their overall pain rating using all the minute-by-minute data points. They used only two: the worst pain they felt through the whole procedure, and the pain level they reported at the very end. Seriously, every time, every patient’s brain used this formula.

You Are a Lying Liar

This means that we are not (by nature) truth tellers to ourselves. If you really want to know the truth about you and your inner workings, it takes real work and serious self-reflection. But you can’t do that unless you have some rudimentary understanding of what’s going on in your noggin.

“When we try to listen to ourselves, we are often flooded by a cacophony of conflicting noises. Indeed, we sometimes don’t really want to hear our authentic voice, because it might disclose unwelcome secrets and make uncomfortable requests. Many people take great care not to probe themselves too deeply,” notes Harari.

This is one reason we focus on feeling better or “getting over it” when we experience intense emotions. But the real work begins when you really tune into your emotions and examine them to glean helpful information. All of this can feel intense and uncomfortable. And this kind of mind-body knowledge isn’t exactly taught in school.

(Understanding Your) Ignorance Is Bliss

It’s humbling to understand how little I don’t understand about my own inner workings. But vastly exciting, too.

As Harari writes: “The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”

Perhaps that same great revelation can spark a revolution at the personal level of knowing ourselves. In a way, it may be now or never. If we don’t undertake the journey inward now, the outward algorithms will do it for us. I often marvel at how much of my memory I have outsourced to that powerful little computer I carry around with me all day and sleep beside at night. Ask me how many phone numbers I have memorized? Two. Mine and my husband’s, which is probably only because we started dating pre-smart-phone. I also outsource most directions and obviously birthdays.

And maybe that isn’t a big deal. Although when I was in a strange city and my Maps wouldn’t load, I suddenly realized I had NO idea how to get to my next destination. I was considering stopping a random stranger on the street when the Wifi finally kicked in, thank goodness. The truth is, extending our brain power is the secret sauce of Homo sapiens success. When writing and money were developed (a mere 5,000 years ago), our data processing power was exponentially improved. Consider what you can keep inside your brain versus what you can capture by typing out endless sequential characters. Algorithms and AI are the newest wave of this endeavor, magnitudes bigger than the original data processing tools (a stylus and a stone tablet were at one point the height of technological superiority).

Pay Attention – to the Right Stuff

There is no simple or straightforward path forward into this brave new world we’ve already entered. But there are some signposts pointing the way. And at least one of them points inward. At a time when we are constantly flooded with information, misinformation, disinformation, images both real and fake, our biggest job is how to navigate the flow.

“We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues,” writes Harari. “In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore,” warns Harari.

I’m trying to be more judicious about the information I take in. Reading non-fiction books and articles offer big-picture context instead of in-the-minute commentary. Journaling is helping me to process emotions and synthesize my hemispheres. Going for walks without my smartphone allows me to intentionally tune out and be truly alone in a way that most of us never are anymore. I’m curious. I’m learning. And I’m practicing optimism.

For more on my thoughts about another Harari books, Sapiens, check out this post.

To delve into more brain-based connections between Homo Deus and The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, read this.