Book: 20241203 to 20250529, 2nd read, "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

1st reading:  https://chaojidigua.blogspot.com/2019/03/20180512-20171003-20180512-sapiens.html

2nd reading.

Part One. The Cognitive Revolution
20241203 - 1. An Animal of No Significance

Big brain is big burden. It's not that useful for individuals. But it's critical for large scale cooperation.

20241204 - 2. The Tree of Knowledge

It's all about collative stories. Advertisements, money, juricial system, state, and even PUA.

When "The Power of Now" says live in the present, does that help us not getting affected by those imagined stories? If we can choose not to accept those stories, can we avoid the negative side of them?

What's the relationship between stories and game theory(and compound effect)?

20241206 - 3. A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. p53

This could be the meaning of live in the moment, so we can enjoy the advantages of cultures and technology, and avoid the addictions.

The stories are competing with each other. Eventually some of them won the game, such as all kinds of law, nation, money, religion, etc.

In AI age, what will happen?

20241211 - 4. The Flood

If we believe Sapiens is just some smart animal, then "the flood" is nothing special.

What's wrong if we eradicate many large mammals?

Species appear and disappear all the time.

What did we learn from "the flood"? Species go extinction is irrevocable. It makes the world less fun, forever.

Who knows what we can learn from them if they were still there?

Part Two. The Agricultural Revolution
20241212 - 5. History's Biggest Fraud

This is the conflict between the benefit of group and the benefit of individuals.

Normally we believe WW2 is bad. But what if people learned the lesson from WW2, which prevent us from going extinction?

This is also the reason that we don't know what ASI should do.

20241214 - 6. Building Pyramids

Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. p116

Inter-subjective is what we now calls "meme". Common shared imagination.

Meme is the key of large scale cooperation.

20241218 - 7. Memory Overload

Writing make memory sharing and inheritence possible to large groups of people, which allow human to accumulate knowledge.

So no one needs to start from scratch.

This is the major reason that civilization progress got accelerated.

20241220 - 8. There Is No Justice in History

There is no right or wrong to natural selection. Only survival of the fittest.

The one that can slow down entropy increase most, survive.

That's the ultimate "justice".

Part Three. The Unification of Humankind
20241222 - 9. The Arrow of History

20250121 - 10. The Scent of Money

20250122 - 11. Imperial Visions

It's all about cooperation. All changes, in the end, improved the efficiency of the whole human society.

We can use the change of median income to judge the invasion of a empire/country.

Are we going to form global empire? In that case, what would happen when the empire collapse?

Irregualr small scale wild fire is necessary, or else a destructive wild fire may bring the whole civilization back for hundreds of years.

Empire represents force, especially millitary force.

20250307 - 12. The Law of Religion

There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. p228
This "God" is entropy.

If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. p232

Suffering is negative emotion, not feeling. Feeling are real, but emotions are not.

These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, ‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’ p233

But following the logic of Darwinian evolution, they(Nazis) argued that natural selection must be allowed to weed out unfit individuals and leave only the fittest to survive and reproduce. p241

The major difference is not at gene level, but more at culture level. The mutation at culture level is much faster.

Natural selection is correct, but no one knows what mutation of culture push us forward.
What we can do is to give cultural competitions a fair environment.
Fairness is more important than equality.

20250311 - 13. The Secret of Success

Game Theory. Random mutations compete against each other.

There will be winners, but no clear logic in the competitions.

We have all kinds of animals thrive with their own advantages in their own environment. There is no right or wrong.

Part Four. The Scientific Revolution

20250313 - 14. The Discovery of Ignorance

Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge. p265

A lot of knowledge need hundreds of years to show their utility. That's why we need government to invest in "useless" research.

With same science and technology level, offensive weapons are more powerful than defensive weapons, because attack only aim at one point such as a city, and defense need to cover a large area such as the whole country.

20250314 - 15. The Marriage of Science and Empire

20250322 - 16. The Capitalist Creed

What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism. p317

Things changed a lot 250 years after the publication of "The Wealth of Nations". We have too much Goods. Between two countries, the more jobs you get, the less jobs I own. When robots like Tesla Optimus come out, even Services will have same problem.

20250422 - 17. The Wheels of Industri

The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs. p349

How many parents are there who made this mistake?

20250502 - 18. A Permanent Revolution

A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead.
This is the consequence of agriculture revolution. In primitive age, most of people can easily join another tribe. ("The dawn of everything" by David Graeber, David Wengrow)

What's the reason for 70+ years of peace after WW2?

The most important two reasons are the progress of technology and democracy. No one want war if they can have decent lives. We can get material and energy from machines, and machines are getting cheaper and cheaper.

The reason that Russia invaded Ukraine is because Russian don't have a say about the war.

20250509 - 19. And They Lived Happily Ever After

Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson. p384

Not true.

Which one push human civilization further ahead? Individuals are not equal.

they are both likely to give the same answers they did on the morning of that fateful day. p386

Not matter good or bad changes, we get used to it quickly. After getting used to it, we are not motivated to change it. Why?
It's like how token is generated in LLM. The token is generated in the context window, not out of the context window two years ago.
How can we utilize this feature in our gene? Try to break the good event into many parts, or prolong it; and take the bad event in one go.

Don't stay in comfort zone. Think ahead the far away future. Think ahead, think hard.

Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. p394

Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that? p395
If we rely on medicine, such as Soma from "The Brave New World", we will lose the capability to generate serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. These chemicals lead us to thrive and reproduce. When external chemicals replaced them under irrelevant conditions, our mind will get lost.

That's the postential threat of all these addictive drugs, including sugar, alcohol and cigarette.

20250529 - 20. The End of Homo Sapiens

20250529 - Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

What do Homo sapiens want?
It's like asking what cells in our body want. They all want to be immortal, which may turn themselves into cancer cells.
What if all those cells been turned into God alike individual creature? Our body will get dismantled.

Is that the future of Homo sapiens?
Will we stop sharing the same identity and value with each other?