Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Like his previous book Sapiens, this book is also very intellectual and interesting. The author is constantly challenging to humanism, the most prevalent and strong religion in modern society, with historical and scientific knowledge. In the book, the author said that religion is interested in order, whereas science is interested in power – this viewpoint is quite different from the common belief that religion or science seeks truth or freedom. The definition of religion is also different from traditional or popular belief. The religion defined in this book encompasses ideologies such as communism and humanism. Anything can be a religion if it holds ethical values, as a value cannot be verified by factual evidence or experiment. Value is just believed and accepted by human beings, so it can be considered as a part of religion. In this regard, humans are inherently religious and everyone has one’s religion.

Like in the Sapiens, the author stressed the importance and power of storytelling. As only sapiens can share common stories and beliefs, we could cooperate and became to conquer the world now. In this respect, the human psyche is a really interesting realm. People believe things that do not exist and place a high value on them. People even give their lives voluntarily for keeping things believed to have ultimate value. I have always thought scientists are playing more important roles in our society than philosophers or storytellers. But, I found out that thinkers or storytellers are influential, so they can be equally important to our society.

Some concepts like ‘organisms are algorithms’ and ‘life is data process’ were new to me and hard to grasp at first, but after thinking it over, I could see that life and machine can be interpreted as the same logic for computer scientists. Perhaps, such concepts might be closer to the hidden truth than common beliefs. As traditional religion and humanism lose their powers, new religion will emerge and the author contends that ‘data religion’ or ‘dataism’ is the strongest candidate. If then, a small portion of people who can understand and handle data will be endowed with more powers.

Books about the future always attract me. After reading this book, I became to think that the current world population is too large, and for the ecosystem and future children, a gradual decline in the global population could be better than the constant increasing that always has been and would be for quite some time. The too low birth rate is a current national issue in Korea, and the government is pouring a huge amount of money to increase the birth rate. Now, I wish the global environment and animal welfare can be treated as seriously as socio-economic development.

 

Written by Shim G.

 

Friday, September 25, 2020

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