Homo Deus

A review

Yuval Noah Harari is the leading voice of what I call the tiny box school of thought. This school has made a teeny tiny little box, and will only deal with evidence that fits inside. Here is an example: The tiny box school takes it as a given that our consciousness exists in our brain only, and nowhere else, and is sort of a meaningless byproduct of that organ.

But there is good reason to believe that our consciousness can exist independently of the brain. This is evidenced by the well documented phenomenon of remote viewing - see the books by Russel Targ. In cases of near death experiences, (also very well documented) subjects have reported that they were able to view their own body from above. If they can see themselves from above, then their consciousness must at that time be outside of the body.

So we have strong evidence that the consciousness is not brain-bound, or at least not always. But this evidence does not fit into the box of the tiny box school, because it has ramifications that would upset their entire apple cart. So what does it do? Ignore it, of course. The tiny boxers can also be called materialists, as they stubbornly cling to the opinion, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, that all of reality is physical matter, and nothing more.

Chapter 1: Harari opens his book by discussing the turning of the millennium, notes that famine, war, and plague have all declined markedly. He says that these three ills have eaten up much of our focus previously; but we are beginning to master them, so we must decide what we will focus on next.

Most of his discussion on disease is fairly boilerplate, but he does throw in some wildly wrong information. Such as, “Cancer and heart disease… go back to antiquity. In previous eras, however, relatively few people lived long enough to die from them.¹” He seems to have the outdated idea that cancer is only an old person’s disease. Well, it used to be, but lately cancer in children has skyrocketed from basically zero to 1 in 285 in the US, according to the American Childhood Cancer Association. Something has obviously changed with cancer in recent times. We should notice it, and we should be extremely interested in finding out what it is.

On the same page he says, “New infectious diseases appear mainly as a result of chance mutations in pathogen genomes.” This book was written before the Covid scam. We now know that the Covid virus most likely escaped from a lab, and was part of a secret gain of function program, and that there may be, and probably are, many other such secret programs. I wonder if, knowing what we know now, Harari would revise his view on where potentially dangerous pathogens are likely to come from. I don’t know the answer, but judging from the overall tenor of his work, I would make a guess that he wouldn’t.

Still in the first chapter Harari says, “It is not easy to live knowing that you are going to die.”² Here he expresses the infinite despair of atheistic world-view in one simple sentence. It is really astonishing that so many people cling to it, in spite of how depressing it is. Maybe they are not aware of how strong the evidence is for an intelligent creator, or maybe they don’t know that the atheistic creeds actually do a poor job of explaining our observed reality. Or maybe there is a deeper reason, I don’t know.

This is where Harari begins to argue that since we gave generally solved many of our smaller problems, we should now focus the bulk of our efforts on solving our biggest problem, which is to figure out how to physically live forever, through technical and scientific means.

Following John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, he also takes the extreme-materialist view of happiness; that it is nothing more nor less than the absence of pain and presence of pleasure. He follows this through to its logical conclusion: that we should create a Huxlean Brave New World - we should re-engineer our biochemistry so that we can drug ourselves into a never-ending state of pleasant sensations.

Now, pain seems to be a growth mechanism. All of us can point to very painful experiences in our lives that have made us a better person in the long run. If we somehow engineered away pain, and replaced it with pleasure only, we would probably infantilize ourselves - (now that I think about it, almost all of the tiny box club’s ideas would make us into babies).

Of course pleasure is a good, but not the good. I think it is probably an iron law of the universe, that if we take a lower good, like pleasure, and elevate it to the supreme and only good, as Harari wants to do, we will end significantly damaging ourselves - the different “goods” must be in their proper order.

Chapter 2: “Humans managed to domesticate fewer than twenty species of animals and birds.”³ I can’t figure out why Harari puts things in his books that are so easily falsifiable. I was able to think of twenty five domesticated animals, in about five minutes, without the internet. An additional five minutes on the internet turned up about ten more, depending on how we define “domestic.”⁴ And that is not including 19 species of parrots that are commonly kept as pets. Now possibly he meant to limit his scope to pre-modern times, to the Eurasian landmass, and only to animals that had significant agricultural importance, and maybe that his how he reached his number of “under twenty.” But if that is what he meant, he did not say so.

In HomoDeus, Harari is only able to see the negative side domestication, such as the many evils that are done on factory farms. He is, at least in this book, unable to see that domestication can actually be force for ecosystem regeneration on massive scale, if grazing animals are managed the way that Joel Salatin, Greg Judy, Gabe Brown, Allan Savory, and others, manage them.

Now it might be worth asking, why do I spend so much time quibbling over facts? It is because I want to call the credibility of his work into question as much as possible, because his work represents a major attack on humanity. This attack comes into sharp focus in the latter part of chapter two, where he says that humans are nothing more than complicated algorithms, and he begins to strongly hint that we do not have any more inherent value than a circuit board.⁵

Now the idea that humans and animals are nothing more than complicated machines has been popular for along time, but I think the tiny box school has got it precisely backwards. We are not complicated machines. Rather, complicated machines are able to replicate to some degree that way that human and animal bodies function; they can also approximate some of our decision-making processes.

Here is an illustration: the game Monopoly replicates the business of real estate, in a very simplistic way. Should I then conclude, “real estate is nothing more than a game of monopoly!” No, that would be stupid. Only a fool would try to argue that “Since thing B is a crude imitation of thing A, therefore thing A is thing B!” That would be like arguing that “A Child’s crayon drawing looks like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; therefore, the Mona Lisa is a crayon drawing!”

Chapter 3: This is where the attack really begins to get serious. The thesis of this chapter can accurately be summed up as ‘you have no soul, no mind, and you are not valuable.’ Harari points to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as the thing which disproves God, soul, spirit, and anything else that is not entirely mechanical. He mentions that only 14% of college graduates fully believe Darwin’s theory, and concludes that this must be because colleges do not teach this theory very well.⁶ But I think they do an excellent job of teaching it. I think the real reason that most people don’t believe in Darwinism wholeheartedly, is that they trust their feelings. Many can feel energies that cannot be explained by a totally mechanistic science. In certain places and in certain times, they can feel something divine, or something super-sensible. They just have a feeling that there is something more to life than dead and boring Darwinian evolution. And they trust their feelings. “Nooo!” the Darwinists screech; “you can’t trust your feelings!” But they do.

But setting feelings to one side, there a lots cold, hard, scientific reasons to doubt Darwinism, and Neo-Darwinism. Actually almost every part of Darwinism is flawed. Steven C Meyer, in his book, Signature in the Cell, explains the problems in excruciating detail. The book is a very long read, but absolutely worth reading in its entirety. Here is one key point: Contemporary evolutionary theory depends on the first living cells being formed by little bits of matter randomly bumping into each-other. But this is statistically impossible, and many mainstream scientists admit that it is impossible. It takes many pages to explain this adequately, so go to chapters nine and ten of Signature in the Cell for the full breakdown.

It is very important to understand that Darwinian evolutionary theory is currently the strongest bolster of the mechanistic worldview. It is therefore also essential to know that this theory has more holes in it than a flour sifter. So do your homework, and read Signature in the Cell, Darwin’s Doubt, Return of the God Hypothesis, and Darwin’s Black Box.

Harari’s great gift is that he is able to explain in plain terms the ultimate conclusions that atheism leads to. And it leads, as he carefully shows, to the conclusion that you as a human are not special, and you are not any more or less valuable than a machine. Well, I am here to say that because of the intelligent creative force that made you, you have value that is real, infinite, and eternal.

Chapter 4: “The basic abilities of individual humans have not changed much since the Stone Age.” This is one of Harari’s favorite tenets, but it is wrong, and it shows that the historian does not know history. Humans have actually gained critically important faculties just in the last few thousand years. Here are two examples:

If one observes early Greek philosophy, one can literally see the birth of intellectual thinking. Just read the Pre-Socratic philosophers, then read Plato and Aristotle. We discover in this transition that the reasoning intellect blossoms from a sort of dream-like state into a fully conscious power.

Example two: compassion did not exist in ancient times as it does today. This is obvious from the old attitudes toward slavery and torture. It was simply taken for granted that if a tribe or nation was lucky in war, it took slaves, and if unlucky, its members became slaves. This practice was not judged, it simply was. Same thing with torture - it was a common-place in nearly the whole world. If I could go back in time and ask a victorious general, “don’t you feel just a little bit guilty about all these slaves you are taking, and prisoners you are torturing?” He would look at me like I had two heads. Winners won, and losers suffered, that was all.

Then, the Buddha brought compassion down to earth; it was his special mission. (For more information on the Buddha’s mission, see Ancient Mythologies by Charles Kovacs). Compassion began in India with Buddhism, and gradually spread to the rest of the Earth. Fast forward to today, and Slavery is disgusting to every person who owns basic feelings. In ancient times it was standard, unquestioned practice to make slaves of the defeated. That simply does not happen today. If it it were discovered, for instance, that the US, during the Afghanistan war, was making slaves out of Afghan villagers, and selling them off into international slave markets, there would be wide-spread and outrage, and rightly. (There are other reasons to be outraged by that war, but that is a topic for another time). This obvious change in our attitude toward slavery is due to the appearance of the faculty of compassion in human beings.

Same thing with torture. Where it used to be commonplace nearly everywhere on the planet, it is now rare, and hides in the shadows. When it is found out, people with a normally healthy mind are uniformly outraged and disgusted.

Now of course our human faculty of compassion is VERY FAR from perfect, and has a long way to go, and exists in varying degrees in different individuals; but it is only absent completely in rare cases where a person’s psyche is badly malformed.

We can see a pattern in both of these examples. A new human ability begins among a small group, or even a single individual. Gradually, it becomes the property of the entire human race.

Chapter 5: A very interesting thing about Harari, is that although he is a committed atheist, he regularly highlights with excellent clarity, the worst implications of that creed. Chapter five is a great example. Step by step, he shows us that if the universe is really nothing more than dead, soulless matter, then there can be no extra-human law. And if there is no law other than the one that we ourselves make-up, then the ideas of “universal human rights,” that every human has “the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” can be nothing more than myths, based on made-up stories we tell ourselves, with no basis in anything real. That is the ultimate conclusion of the purely mechanistic worldview, as Harari tells us himself.

But the funny thing is that he doesn’t totally believe it. You can tell from his book that he really does care about the wellbeing of people and animals, and he is justly offended when they suffer. His feelings give him away. If he were really the biological automaton that he thinks he is, created by nothing more than “blind, pitiless forces” (as Dawkins puts it) he would not care one whit about anyone’s suffering, not even his own.

C. S. Lewis thought that the clearest proof of God was in our feelings. He said that our innate senses of justice and injustice tell us very clearly that there is a higher moral law, and our conscience can help us a long way toward discovering it.

That is why at this time in history there is maybe nothing more dangerous to us than to have dead feelings, or to not trust our feelings. Unless our feelings are totally destroyed, it is not possible to fully buy into atheism. And the healthier our feeling life is, the more is our certainty of a higher power.

Chapter 6: “Until modern times most cultures believed that humans played a part in some great cosmic plan.” “Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwrights, no director, no producer - and no meaning.”⁷ Harari has made a mistake here. What is really going on is, the particular subculture that he belongs to, does not believe in meaning. Unfortunately, they are a large subculture, with no scruples, a lot of political power, and a ton of money. This gives them the resources to play out their insane fever-dreams of making themselves into gods.

Outside of the this deluded sub-culture, the rest of the world is aware, or at least suspects, that there is a higher power, and that there is meaning. Evidence for it actually increases everyday, and members of the tiny box fever-dream subculture increasingly have to shut their eyes and stuff their fingers in their ears not to notice it.

“No paradise awaits us after death - but we can create paradise here on earth and live in it forever…”⁸ Whenever our author talks about living forever in a physical body, he overlooks a rather large problem. In five billion years, our sun will die, making our solar system uninhabitable. Eventually, every star in the entire universe will burn out, and all physical matter will be totally dark, absolute zero temperature, and every possible means of sustaining life will be exhausted. There is no hope for eternal life in a physical body. It is just plain obvious that our only hope for eternity lies with God.

Chapter 7: In chapter 7, Deus goes in-depth into humanism, which turns out to be a direct inversion of traditional religious understanding. In humanism, we should worship ourselves instead of God; we don’t strive to discover the higher moral law - instead, whatever makes us feel good is moral. In humanism, we don’t conform our art to a divine aesthetic; art is merely whatever we say it is. The Anti-Christ himself could not have stated it any more succinctly. Now I don’t think Harari is evil, just confused. He actually has a very good heart, and I think there is a real chance he could turn himself around, because he does tend to follow things through to their ultimate conclusion. So if he ever happens to stumble upon a healthy premise, he could end up as a leading proponent for good, instead of evil.

All of his words are repellent to good sense, but they are extremely important to hear, because they tell us exactly what the great deceiver would like us to believe.

Just a quick note on feelings: Feelings are extremely important, but not in the way that humanists think. The humanists think, whatever your feelings tell you feels good, do that, it is good. But that is a very low and self-satisfying use of feelings. Good is not something we make up, it is something we discover. If we cultivate our higher and finer feelings, we can use them to help us discover what good really is. Often, what is good is actually very painful for us, at least in the short-term: like confessing to a lie, instead of covering it up.

If we cultivate our finer feeling, we can sometimes feel that a great sacrifice is good, no matter how painful. Think of Frodo in the Lord of the Rings for an illustration of this principle. He walked into Mordor, to risk near certain death, to save Middle Earth from the horror of Sauron. He did not feel that he wanted to do it. But he did feel that he had to do it.

The humanist says, “we are merely here to gratify ourselves, that is all.” The traditional religious view says, “we are here for some higher purpose.” Which one of these two opinions feels correct to you?

Chapters 8: Harari says there is no free will. Decisions are caused by neurons in the brain firing, and the neurons fire either randomly, or for purely deterministic reasons. Scientists have not found a ‘free will’ organ in the brain, so there is no free will. But this theory falls short, as tiny box theories always do. Of course free will cannot be found in the brain, because our self is not our brain; our brain, like the rest of our body, is an instrument, that our true self uses.

The tiny boxers see neurons firing in the brain, and think they have found the true source of a human being’s actions. But they are confused. They have gotten how and why mixed up. They think that an explanation of how a thing works is the same as saying why it works. Suppose I have explained the workings of a light bulb. Does that mean I have also explained why my neighbor’s porch turns on at some times, but not at others? of course not. Just so, if we can explain the operations of the brain, this does not mean we have explained the why of the brain. To find the why, we must look further, to the non-physical self that uses our brain as a tool.

Oh, and also in chapter 8, Harari argues that none of us is even an individuality. Maybe I’ve gotten tired of refuting, or maybe I’m feeling lazy, so I’ll just say, if you’re dumb enough to believe this one, you deserve whatever happens to you.

Chapters 9, 10, 11: The main thrust for the last part of the book is that due to AI and robotics, most humans will soon become economically and militarily useless. Humans who want to remain relevant will increase the processing power of their brains by using a combination of genetic therapy, direct brain-computer interfaces, and nanotech. Those who can’t or won’t upgrade their brains will become an irrelevant under-caste. Along the way, democratic institutions will collapse.

Eventually, he says, it may come to pass that an Internet-of-All-Things could replace humans entirely, and what remains of humanity may be subsumed into some totally impersonal machine world.

Now he is probably right that in the near future, robots will be able to do most jobs better and cheaper than humans. I am not sure how we will cope with this, but I think we will find a way. But something thing we have to remember is that humans have one major advantage that is inaccessible to machines. As far as I know, machines are not able to make contact with higher powers. But we can, and do. Actually, all of us already are in contact with angels and archangels, and other higher beings. Through these, we are in contact with God himself. For most of us, this contact is still unconscious, but for a growing minority, it is conscious. I think this is where all of our truly great inspirations come from, and also why machines can’t have inspiration.

I think that great art is inspired by higher beings. That is why machines can be trained to make excellent imitations of great art, but probably won’t ever be able to produce original great art. But the influence of angels and archangels is probably not limited to art; it likely extends to every field. That is why I think that if we are going to properly handle the machine age we must all of us turn our unconscious contact with higher worlds into a conscious one. This is why feelings are so important. Refined feeling is how we make conscious contact with higher realms. Just as Ancient Greece was the time for our thinking to become conscious, right now is the time for our feelings to become fully conscious.

Conclusion: The tiny box world-view is conceited in the extreme. It says plainly, “the material world is the only thing that exists, because it is the only thing that I myself can perceive. Anyone who claims to be able to perceive a non-material existence is either a liar or a crazy person; I know this because I myself, and others who share my world-view, cannot perceive such things.” This logic is obviously faulty, yet the materialist view clings to it, even though the ultimate implications of this view point to nothing more than a meaningless life, followed by a meaningless death.

They refuse to see the human being as anything other than strictly physical. Any evidence that points to something more than physical, is resolutely excluded from their little box. If they were right, and everything was merely physical, then their dystopian vision would be correct; there really would be bo soul, no mind, no spirit, or free will, purpose, meaning, life after death, justice, human rights, animal rights, morals, or ethics. In short, no reason to live.

So this leaves me with a transcendently important question: I myself cannot “see” a non-material reality - should I believe the (many thousands of) people who say they can? My own response when I hear such a report is that I am extremely interested. I am interested because if such reports are true, then it points to the possibility that there might be a God. And if there is a God, then maybe there is eternal life. And if there is eternal life, I am overjoyed beyond measure. (Side note: I am actually very certain that there is a God).

Postscript: The Devil’s mouthpiece. I am starting to roam a little farther afield here, but I think that unconsciously, Harari is speaking out loud the Devil’s fondest wishes. Now this does not make him evil, and I do not think he is evil, as I said earlier. We should be thankful to him, because he states the Devil’s wishes in such plain terms, and even draws out for us what these plans would lead to.

The Devil wants to trap us in a densely material hell-hole, separated from our Creator. He wants to do this by tricking us into believing that matter is all there is, and that our only hope is to bind ourselves to it, even more tightly. If we follow his plan, as laid out in Homo Deus, he might even succeed.

1. Homu Deus, 2017, pg 11.

2. Ibid, 27.

3. Ibid, 78.

4. Here is a list of thirty-two domesticated mammals and birds: dog, cat, horse, donkey, cattle, water buffalo, yak, dromedary camel, Bactrian camel, llama, alpaca, sheep, goat, pig, ferret, emu, finch, duck, goose, chicken, guinea hen, swan, peafowl, turkey, rock pigeon, parakeet, cockatiel, quail, African elephant, Asian elephant, rabbit, reindeer. This list is not exhaustive.

5. Ibid, 99.

6. Ibid, 103.

7. Ibid, 201.

8. Ibid, 202.