Why We Dominate the Earth
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I read his book where he talks about this. It makes some sense: you can operate at varied scales if you have shared fictions.
When you meet a complete stranger, you're both members of the human race, sharing a desire for a better future. Meet a fellow countryman, and there are songs and stories that bind you together. Work for the same company and there's internal culture as well as the glorious leader you both work for. Support the same football team and you both remember that night in Istanbul. You were sitting at home in Liverpool, he was in Malaysia.
Hard to tell as with anything historical whether this is the most convincing explanation though. I'm sure there's other things that separate us from the animals? But a compelling enough story and he tells it well.
[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/70281117
[1] https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...
As for the 'fictions' that Harari likes to talk about, it seems to me that it's more of a rebranding of the concept of social construct than anything new or more insightful than that.
> It is often cited as one of the best episodes of the both The Next Generation series and the entire family of the several Star Trek television series.
OP: an example of shared fiction he uses in the book is the law. The law is a fiction in the sense that it is not a physical object, but a group of shared concepts that allows society to be built to a higher order. "Sapiens" is a great read.
How so? I always hated that episode because it's a straightforward story of developing communications through a language barrier, except that Star Trek is very clear that language barriers don't exist. So it just ends up being an incoherent plot hole.
But the concept of a language barrier isn't exactly new.
This episode explored the language barrier as the other language was referentially based and unlike our own language. It was difficult for Picard to learn. To make that the basis of an episode was unique, I thought.
My other favorite episode was where Picard got shocked by a probe and lived an entire life in only a few minutes. The probe was a device to teach others about a lost culture.
But Darmok doesn't work. To say "the other language is referentially based" is conceptually incoherent. What you're really saying is that "Shaka, when the walls fell" is a very long word for "sad". If the Tamarians really don't speak except in these references, then they aren't references -- they have no internal structure and no meaning other than the surface one. The universal translator wouldn't have them saying "Shaka, when the walls fell." or "Temba, his arms wide.", it would have them saying "Sad." or "Welcome.". That's what a word is.
If the Tamarians can understand a language that isn't just "references", for example because they have to teach their children to speak, then the events of the episode are nonsense, because Picard is speaking perfectly intelligibly.
Shared fictions seems to just be a euphemism for culture. I wonder why he doesn't just call it that.
Culture would be shared rituals like language, food preferences, music etc.
YNH's "shared fiction" idea is about humans' ability to deliberately create new abstract entities that compels humans to act together in service of that entity.
Examples of his shared fictions would be a "company" or "fiat money". These "fictions" somehow organize humans to cooperate and multiply their power over the world.
Culture, on the other hand, like regional food recipes, would accumulate organically and accidentally.
Only some parts of culture are shared-fictions.
For the record, I’m fine with it.
I think the places where it serves us well and the places where it just gets in the way are just about the same now as they were thousands of years ago. If you doubt that, put yourselves in the shoes of someone who distrusts your particular set of tribes. Even if they are better off trusting you or any individual member of one of your tribes, are they better or worse off trusting that tribe as a whole? And if you think they are better off, does the potential advantage conveyed outweigh the potential risks?
Fiction is a loaded word that says "not real" where maybe shared truths, shared beliefs (in the sense of the Greek: hupostasis rather than pisteuo) would be better.
We can conceptualise and communicate about thing that are immaterial like trust, honor and promises.
A "wampeter" is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. "Foma" are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A "granfalloon" is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Tolkien (along with C.S. Lewis), a vocal anti-modernist, had interesting thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories
"Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective...Tolkien [also] asserts that a truly good and representative fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faerie. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.""
He and Lewis even - despite being practicing Christians - had the wisdom to see even their own religion as a kind of fairy-story, not cheapening it but orienting it within the important role that fictions play in the human condition.
Moreover, the majority of Western Europe could be called irreligious and lives more or less equivalently well and "morally" to the United States. Indeed, the United States has always been uniquely religious for an advanced society. We are now also set-up by a wide variety of unique social ills. There might not be any relation between but then again there might be.
We never let go of myths, we just create new ones. And yes, I would say the breakdown of social cohesion is an inevitable consequence when you have competing, incompatible myths causing different groups to see and understand the world differently.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-sem...
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now...
> The biological origins of narrative lie in shallow information cognitive ecologies, circumstances characterized by profound ignorance. What we cannot grasp we poke with sticks. Hitherto we’ve been able to exapt these capacities to great effect, raising a civilization that would make our story-telling ancestors weep, and for wonder far more than horror. But as with all heuristic systems, something must be taken for granted. Only so much can be changed before an ecology collapses altogether. And now we stand on the cusp of a communicative revolution even more profound than literacy, a proliferation, not simply of alternate narratives, but of alternate narrators.
> If you sweep the workbench clean, cease looking at meaning as something somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘transcendent,’ narrative becomes a matter of super-complicated systems, things that can be cut short by a heart attack or stroke. If you refuse to relinquish the meat (which is to say nature), then narratives, like any other biological system, require that particular background conditions obtain. Scranton’s error, in effect, is a more egregious version of the error Harari makes in Homo Deus, the default presumption that meaning somehow lies outside the circuit of ecology. Harari, recall, realizes that humanism, the ‘man-the-meaning-maker’ narrative of Western civilization, is doomed, but his low-dimensional characterization of the ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ as an ‘intermediate level of reality’ convinces him that some other collective narrative must evolve to take its place. He fails to see how the technologies he describes are actively replacing the ancestral social coordinating functions of narrative.
I think that term makes it easier to see how they will continue.
One part _is_ dissolving myths, using the tools of science and education and curation of knowledge.
Another part is regressing into myth: look at antivax, idiocracy, tribalism/xenophobia, and all the political theocracies sprouting up.
I believe you are incorrect - we are replacing the old with the new.
>verb
>have a commanding influence on; exercise control over.
>be the most important or conspicuous person or thing in.
Bacteria have a huge effect on all life, but they don't "exercise control" as they are not self aware. Their influence is comprised solely of externalities. Humans by comparison exert far more control over the environment around them. We shape the world to our purpose. I think humanity wins here.
1) They do exercise control, self-aware or not. Your guts' bacteria control what you can eat or not. The environment bacteria control what diseases you can get and even if live or die. The bacteria decide what chemicals are to stay in the air or not, even what chemicals are released in the air, including the most extremely deadly toxins we know about (e.g. botulin, anthrax...).
2) Humans definitely do not exert far more control over the environment around them. You're talking about building and modifying the environment. Bacteria directly decide if there can be life or not in an environment, and even which forms can be alive or not. What nutrients will be available. What the air, water and earth chemical composition is going to be. Besides, many bacterias are apex predators. They do shape everything to fit their "wishes", even including human behavior since they make up 50% of your body, and that without counting the mitochondrion. So whatever we actually do as humans "controlling" the environment does not even come close to what bacteria control.
3) And finally, we can't get rid of all bacteria, ever, mainly because that would kill us as well. They could easily kill us all whenever they want to, and they won't even notice.
Less than an oily smear on a marble. "Saving the planet" is laughable, the planet could hiccup and wipe out all life and keep going as before ...
("Don't antropomorphize Nature, she hates that.")
What I'm saying is, the "human" does not dominate the earth. The corporation does. We shouldn't be afraid of loosing control to an AI that will rule our world, because we have already let the companies do whatever they want.
Some of us are lucky enough to participate in this world, by forming and working for world-changing corporations, but everybody else is closer to the bacteria side of the spectrum.
I haven't spent much time on that subreddit, but it sounds like I would feel at home there! It is incredibly important that we have each-other's backs.. humanity may technically be thriving, but most people are just trying to make ends meet.
They didn't "lose control"; we discovered that, if we specialize, we can get more done and increase our standard of living. It's not all just farming either. You can see city lights from space. We have sculpted mountainsides. If I'm forced to go back to your angle, none of those things are possible with division of labor and a healthy economy.
>These days, farmers are beholden to governments, banks, and agro companies, who use economical pressure to force specific behavior and crops. How much control do modern farmers really have over their farm?
You're going off on some socioeconomic tangent when the discussion here is simply "which organism is most dominant." I don't see how anything you're saying is relevant.
>humanity may technically be thriving, but most people are just trying to make ends meet.
As they have been for all existence. The difference is that these days it's much easier than it used to be. For everyone.
>I haven't spent much time on that subreddit, but it sounds like I would feel at home there!
Ugh, enjoy.
Are you sure that agriculture isn't just grain's way of domesticating humans ;)
Or maybe the biochemistry of carbon really dominates.
Or just the physics of atoms.
Or quarks and the strong nuclear force.
Things get more and more absurd as you're descending that ladder.
We definitely came close to being wiped out by bacteria. Several times. And no, we don't have more human "strains".
Bacteria totally dominated us before antibiotics, and this hard conquered defense wall is already evaporating, and fast.
I think a better way to put it would be that plant growth processes exhibit patterns that can be modelled by the mathematics of fractals. "Using mathematics", the way I see it, evokes a mind that uses abstract mental constructs (organized as "mathematics") for the purpose of modelling some aspect of reality. To the best of our knowledge, plants seem to lack that kind of mind.
Not if the aliens had the mental capacity of, say, a house cat.
AFAIK, plants don't communicate or use math concepts (even if they grow using them).
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/science/pigeons-can-learn...
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/animals-can-d...
Should be downloadable as a podcast for the next couple of weeks from most sources.
It's a fairly light take on science with some comedy and teasing, but the scientific element is respectable.
Of course I'm not really talking about the more esoteric fields of math.
If the human race had not, would another species eventually rise to a similar position? And would it have caused the same destruction?
On the flip side, what purpose would natural life serve if there was no species sufficiently cognizant to recognize it?
Without intelligence, there is no good or bad. You can't begin to overlay a moral framework on the world if there are no sentient beings to create it.
I guess it was sort of an "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" sort of question. I am not a philosopher, so perhaps it was the wrong question, or poorly phrased. But I'm glad it sparked a brief discussion nonetheless.
Maybe universal morality does exist, we're just too simple minded to see it.
Similarly, morality is a property of mind. It's like color, not like wavelength. And unlike light, we didn't find any objective source in the outside world, nor do we know of a process that would tune our perception of morality with fundamental laws of physics.
Personally, I currently believe the only somewhat-objective source of morality is path dependence: all humans share the same brain architecture. I think all the base shared moral instincts we have come from that.
Personally, I think there's good evidence towards the truth of a universal morality as laid out by Christopher Alexander in his texts "The Nature of Order", an interpretation that looks to the order of all matter in the universe... not just consciousness. Ie it's not "on top of", it just looks to what is, and wonders how we can learn from this and apply it to "our" ends. Interestingly, if humans were more in tune with the order of nature, there would certainly be a lot less suffering on this planet, and a much much better outlook for the future. ;)
Given roughly infinite time, is there a reason to think that the combo of social + tool users would not win over, say social + raw strength? Imagine perhaps that lions gain the ability to sweat and so can expand their range dramatically. Would the next tool users never achieve dominance over them/be relegated to a small habitat?
I find it hard to imagine tool users not winning long-term, but it's possible that intelligent non-tool users never let them amass the necessary population/skills/tools. Maybe something like the xenomorphs?
‡The only case I could think of is where some organism absorbs prey to continually gain power. But at a certain point it's either unable to grow its geographic reach or it's basically a collection of physically separate social sub-creatures.
The decision-making of other animals may develop generationally, but it has very limited capacity for change within a single organism's life. On the other hand, a human can endlessly rewrite her software on top of the same hardware. We can evolve without waiting for our DNA to change.
Aha! This passage made me realize why we can't seem to get a grip on, for example, climate change (but also that we soon, easily could). Humans can undergo a quick, large-scale shift in behavior having nothing to do with an environmental change; therefore it's also true that humans can staunchly and stubbornly adhere to the same behavior, despite an environmental change.
An example:
Humans are the "creators of the world", the most dominant species on the planet and at the top of the food chain by a long distance and yet we are the most jumpy/scary species of all.
If a tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a lion they wouldn't give a bit of a shit. A lion would remain calm, knowing that the spider cannot do anything and it wouldn't even bother to entertain the spider for a split second.
However if the same tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a human there's a real chance that this person would start jumping up and down, perhaps trying to kill the spider or maybe even rush out of the room until the spider is gone.
This is completely irrational for someone like us - the species who literally dominates everything on this planet - and yet so common. Why is that? Because lions had millions of years to climb the ladder to the top of the food chain and therefore had the time to develop a nature which reflects their strength, whereas humans have jumped to the top so quickly that we still have the fears and behaviour of someone who is extremely weak and vulnerable. It's actually quite scary and also explains why humans often respond to tiny issues with violence, bombings and other out of proportion threats when things could just be ignored.
> However if the same tiny spider would crawl up the leg of a human there's a real chance that this person would start jumping up and down, perhaps trying to kill the spider or maybe even rush out of the room until the spider is gone.
I think there is a chance this might be a bad comparison. Do non-human primates not fear spiders?
Some interesting read:
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/Ohman....
If you see other peoples freak out from spiders, you think thats the correct reaction and so you do it.
The rise of Abrahamic religion, with man as the most important creature on the planet and everything on earth created for man, is a factor for why we "dominate" the earth.
The reason there were so many bison in the US when the settlers arrived is that the native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction. While I think there is a kernel of truth to your comment, I also think the premise that primitive people's were more "in tune" with nature than their Western counterparts in some deep cultural or spiritual sense is a revisionist myth predicated on the "noble savage" archetype. The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival for such people. Obviously, if your culture survives primarily on deer, you don't kill all of the deer. But primitive people were quite capable of destroying or harming their environment, as long as they could survive it, just not as capable as more advanced societies.
The idea of primitive people being more in tune with the earth doesn't have to go hand-in-hand with the "noble savage" romanticization. There's evidence that North America was essentially a well-managed game reserve. For people that didn't have much in the ways of truly domesticated livestock, it makes sense that they worked towards food security in a different way than societies that had cattle and pigs. By necessity, they would have had to develop practical and efficient methods for managing their food source. So sure, they were probably much more in tune with nature their contemporary Europeans or modern Americans, if "in tune" means having the know-how to bend and shape the natural world for their benefit.
do you have a good source that details the evidence of this? and what megafauna were killed off?
i tried searching and from what i found, it isn't anywhere as close to clear cut as you state it. i even saw an article debunking the "overkill hypothesis" which claimed some scientists did some dating studies and showed that in a region of north america the large animals died off before native americans arrived. of course that could be false, but it just doesn't seem so clear as you state it.
The only indigenous population I know about in any detail is that of my nation (Australia). They were far from "primitive", rather constituted an unimaginably ancient continent-wide civilisation.
> native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction
Again, speaking for the Aus equivalent: there's an arguable case that descendants of the original settlers arriving across the PNG land bridge may have caused species extinctions. Given what we know of H. Sapiens, it's pretty likely.
But that has little to do with the indigenous Australians who the European invaders encountered. By this time they had undergone 40-60,000 years of cultural and social development. By this advanced stage they had an extraordinarily detailed understanding of the ecologies they lived in and managed. The "in tune with nature" phrase is not to my taste, but if any population could be described this way, it was them.
> The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival
Well this assumes they were not true human cultures, a hallmark of which is rarely doing anything only for survival. All known human cultures have myths and institutions, beliefs, roles and manners of life woven deeply with all the acts that also happen to perform survival functions. It's a bit of a dehumanising stance to expunge everything but the survival aspect. It's also not a stance that ever withstands even a modicum of familiarity with any real human culture.
It's unlikely this is a factor.
I may not have made that clear enough, however.
That sapiens mostly preferred 'Abrahamic religion' to others is then a consequence to this starting point.
Sapiens didn't mostly prefer Abrahamic religion. Judaism didn't proselytize as far as I'm aware, and Christianity and Islam converted many cultures and people by force (although not exclusively.)
And you're not considering the widespread preference for Buddhist and animist religions, which over time likely equal if not surpass the Abrahamic faiths... although to be fair those also sometimes were spread by force as well.
Actually I'm not considering anything, I was just pointing that the theory in the parent's book could be reversed.
Humans are not only unique in their abilities like problems solving and language, but also in their 100% dedication to the tribe.
I think it is this combination that allows for us to work together in such large groups and successfully.
Harari calls it "fictions" that bind us together, but that doesn't quite seem to work for me.
The question I ask is WHY do these "fictions" work so well?
Why would a Nebraska farmer go half way across the world and climb French beaches with German guns shooting at him?
Why are we so compelled to identify with a group?
A comedian has a great joke about this. Essentially, the WORST thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. Even being surrounded by criminals and prison guards is infinity better than being forced to be alone in a room. We desperately need to connect with people. It seems hard wired genetically to me.
I think culture helps serve this purpose of binding us together.
Art, music, theatre, and even sports are all a part of the process of group cohesion.
Group cohesion and dependency is so powerful that it's often the number one factor in determining which societies/countries/groups come out victorious with intergroup conflict.
A great book called "War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin is a fantastic book to read if this concept interests you.
Another one, "Tribe" by Sebastion Junger also explores this topic.
My unscientific response to this is that it's more a personality dependency. Our personality or individuality is dependent on other individuals so when you your all alone your ego starts to disolve and all your skills and attributes that depend on ego start to fade. Most people would experience this as going insane.
Cohesion in large groups are aided by strong personalities that create and sustain larger groups(hierarchies) and than in turn enables larger groups.
Even people who claim to hate other people find it very difficult to work in environments where their work is unappreciated or useless.
Almost no one in the world would be happy digging a ditch and refilling it the next day and repeating it even if they were paid $1000 a day to do it.
Why is that? Why would a programmer who isn't very social want only work on stuff that is useful to other people?
It's because the vast majority of us are hard wired to be useful to society and other people. We desperately need to feel some connection to others.
The only way digging a ditch and filling it in would be satisfying is if you knew you were taking care of your family by doing it.
>Cohesion in large groups are aided by strong personalities that create and sustain larger groups(hierarchies) and than in turn enables larger groups.
I completely disagree. Cohesion is stronger in small, less hierarchal groups.
The key is grouping groups together.
Why did the American states unite and form the USA and the Greek city states before the rise of Macedonia not?
It's not an easy question to answer, but strong man personalities doesn't seem like it's an answer.
>>Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.
Human intelligence has been around a lot longer than a few decades and for the vast vast majority of that time has not only still dominated the world but sects of people were uncooperative and competing with each other all the time, wiping out people here and there without a though otherwise.
If the main thesis is that a common language lead to cooperation and therefore world dominance, that's false too. People have dominated the earth for a while, and with a language, and without much cooperation but through fighting and spilled blood.
It's still a testament to human flexibility that human went from small bands of anarchistically organized gatherer-hunters only actively cooperating with each other to larger agricultural groups cooperating within a hierarchical framework. If one wanted to find a full explanation for this, it seems like one look for what gave humans the ability to do either.
And those groups who cooperated with in-group better have repeatedly outcompeted groups that didn't cooperate as well.
Technically yes, but for all practical purposes no. Different clans of primates (chimpanzees iirc) have "innovated" distinct and novel ways to get food, specific to their clan. These are not innate, they are taught within the clan and passed down from generation to generation. With this, they share a common cultural knowledge and can preserve it into the future.
From a practical point of view, the speed of this "innovation" is glacial, but not all that different from the pace of human progress for most of our history.
So what makes us different? I'd argue that the evolution of speech/language provided the most important initial boost. With language, all cultural knowledge, including innovations, becomes so much easier to retain across generations.
WRT. the social part, I'm reminded of something 'lisper keeps saying - that the minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a tribe or a village.
Shared fiction is nothing else than just shared knowledge. Without collecting and keeping your knowledge you can't go further, there's no basis for innovating further.
> About 70,000 or so years ago [...] the cognitive revolution
https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/homo/homo_4.htm
> about 2.5 million years ago [...] Oldowan tools
Regarding the global scale, even if we don't realize it, we mostly already have a global common culture. Everyone is organizing its time in year of 365 days, split in 24 hours, counting in base 10, have mostly the same economical policies. Even ISIS has seized and used dollars from banks in their occupied territory, so they also believe in the dollar [0]. All of the these things were not true 10,000 years ago, we have probably already lost thousands of different human cultures since the start of agriculture. Sure we still have regional preferences on sport, food, festival, etc, but mostly all humans are running the same basic OS, so to speak.
So are we going to coordinates on the global scale, only time will tell, but this is much more likely today that it was 1,000 years ago.
[0] IIRC this is an example taken from Sapiens in the chapter about money.
One is that our species is at least 100,000 years old, most probably 200,000 and possibly a million years old. Yet, culture, history and "world dominance" only happened very recently. Why did it take so long?
Another is that there were many "sapiens" species and they went extinct, either because we exterminated them, or nature did, or we absorbed them by cross-breeding. Being cognitive is no guaranty of success and even, it turns out, no protection from extermination.
Yet another is that other species have language (dolphins for instance, which are neither "dogs" or "fish" or "ants").
And finally, talking of our "success" is the most ironic way of putting it, since we're in the process of destroying all mammal life on earth (including us). Maybe ants "eat our garbage" but they are likely to survive us, unlike anyone who's reading this.