Book review - Homo Deus

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I read Home Deus almost a year ago but never got to writing the review till now. To be honest, it was still a fun read with quite interesting titbits but I did not find it up to the first of the series. Anyways here are a few interesting parts of the book I felt like highlighting

  • Terrorists can be compared to a fly in a china shop. They rarely are able to cause damage by themselves but the reaction to their actions can. Like the war in Afghanistan started based on what Osama did
  • If people become immortal and could only die of natural causes, they will stop taking risks, like even driving and trekking!
  • If humans got pleasant sensations from anything for long, they would not survive. So naturally we derive satisfaction and its all momentary and goes away.
  • The green lawn has evolved as a symbol of luxury from medieval dukes in France and England. It costs time and money with no real benefit. And now its taken over the world 😊
  • Sensations, emotions and desires are all just algorithms which make us make decisions
  • The theory of evolution is completely opposite of the theory of humans having souls
  • New Zealand and Quebec are the only two countries who have declared animals as sentient beings with consciousness
  • Cooperating flexibly and using imagination to create believable stories is the reason for the human races mastery of the world
  • When truth and reality collide, sometimes reality has to give way. For example, when the written fantasies of European bureaucracies encountered the African reality, reality was forced to surrender
  • Science and religion are very interlinked. They are needed to prove or disprove each other. ‘...in fact neither of them care for the truth, hence they can compromise, coexist and even cooperate'. Religion is interested in social order and science in power to control things. ‘The quest for truth is actually a spiritual journeys which cannot remain within the confines of religious and scientific establishments ‘!
  • The great scientific revolution happened in the most intolerant of societies - Europe, where religious extremism was at its worst, muslims and jews were expelled, women were burnt as witches, and catholics and protestants regularly killed each other. While Cairo and Istanbul in that age were multicultural and tolerant societies (Very interesting)
  • Modernism is all about humans gaining power while giving up on meaning, unlike the earlier times
  • Capitalism had started making judgements about family relationships and bonds too. Also capitalism had put humans in a rat race to produce more, always. They cannot rest, ever
  • Humanism is the new religion, providing meaning to human life. The world is now all about how it affects humans and how any action makes them feel.
  • Humanism has had different forms. Liberal humanism is about the individual and his feelings. Socialist humanism is about the collective against capitalists. Evolutionary humanism focus on survival of the fittest of humans.
  • If someone slept in 1914 and woke up in 2014, one would feel liberal humanism has always continued to dominate the world but the world went through 8 decades and 3 global wars to replace socialist humanism with liberal humanism.
  • Helmets called transcranial direct current stimulation are used by military to affect the minds of soldiers in simulations. They send ot electromagnetic fields to stimulate or inhibit some brain functions. It can quieten the voices in the brain and make them focus
  • We have multiple selves - the left and right dont know what the other is doing. The narrating self and experiencing self are completely different. And therefore the peak-end rule affects our thinking and memories a lot. For example, women go through labour again even though its traumatic always
  • There is nothing known as free will. Or free desires. All of these are electrochemical reactions of the brain.
  • Voices in our head are based on society’s prejudices. Our personal history and our genetic legacy create our thoughts, behaviours and desires
  • Facebook can predict better a person’s likes and dislikes than their spouses, based on only 300 likes!!
  • Techno humanism hopes to create superhumans whose desires and thoughts can be controlled.
  • Dataism is the new religion which says, all data needs to be uploaded and shared. Its value comes from sharing

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