This article explores the impact of rapidly advancing technology on the human mind and analyzes the future and possibilities of technological humanism through the lens of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus.
The rapid development of science and technology will bring about a major revolution in the near future. Even the human mind, which has been considered inviolable by the scientific community, will be manipulated through powerful chemical drugs, genetic engineering, and brain-computer interfaces. Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus predicts a future in which such mind-altering changes are possible and describes a new religion called technological humanism. He argues that while this new future may seem like an upgrade of the mind at first glance, it actually has the potential to downgrade humanity’s mind, exposing the contradictions of technological humanism. While this argument seems to make sense as you read the book, it raises the question of whether upgrading and downgrading the mind can happen simultaneously. The short answer is that future technologies will thoroughly upgrade the human mind, and the contradictions of technological humanism will not arise. Before we discuss this, let’s analyze exactly what Yuval Noah Harari is saying.
According to Yuval Noah Harari, current research on the human mind is focused on “substandard” minds that suffer from mental illness, and we do not have a good understanding of healthy minds. Therefore, even if we have the technological capabilities to upgrade the mind, we may not know what a normal human mind should look like. As a result, Yuval Noah Harari predicts that advances in technology will only enhance the capabilities of the mind that the current political and economic system requires, and degrade other capabilities.
The first question that arises is why the “other capacities” that the system doesn’t need would be degraded. Noah Harari uses the examples of cavemen’s sense of smell, hunter-gatherers’ sensitivity, and modern humans’ inability to concentrate to answer this question, but these were all before technology was able to upgrade the mind. If we can upgrade our minds with drugs and technology, there’s no reason why we can’t restore our now-diminished caveman sense of smell or hunter-gatherer sensitivity. The only reason we don’t have them is because we don’t have the circumstances and money to develop them, but advanced technology will solve that problem once and for all.
Hearing this argument, Yuval Noah Harari might ask: “Why would you want to have abilities that you don’t need in your current life? “Why should I upgrade abilities that I don’t need in my current life?” However, in the future of humanity, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary abilities will not depend solely on social systems. As Eugene Noah Harari predicted at the beginning of Homo Deus, in the technological future, humans will live near-eternal lives, and the relationship between humans and society will be different than it is today. According to Spinoza, the reason early states arose was so that humans could overcome misery through stability and order. One of the main reasons humans formed states and societies was for the efficiency of production, but in a life of eternal life, “efficiency” will no longer be considered an important value. Therefore, the decision-making power of social systems will certainly be lower than it is today, and capabilities of the mind that are deemed unnecessary for social systems will not be neglected if they are meaningful to the individual.
Although Yuval Noah Harari suggests that the downgrading of the mind will result from the degradation of capacities that are marginalized in the process of upgrading the mind, as we have seen, it is unlikely that certain mental capacities will be completely marginalized in future societies. Rather, due to the diversity of mental capacities that individuals value, humanity will experience a range of different states of mind that exist in the world and will find their own optimal state of mind. The current debate about whether animals should be respected and treated like humans, which was also mentioned in Homo Deus, will be naturally resolved through mind upgrades.
Currently, we don’t know whether animals think like humans with our current technology. We know that animals feel physical pain thanks to biotechnology, but physical pain only serves as a means for organisms to detect danger. We don’t yet know if physical pain causes animals to suffer mental illness in the same way that humans do. However, if future technologies give us the opportunity to feel the mind of an animal, we will be able to clearly determine whether we should treat and respect them like humans.
Rather than downgrading our minds, the emergence of future technologies will upgrade our minds to levels we have never imagined. By upgrading the capabilities of different minds, humanity will be able to control itself without relying on social systems, and will be able to better understand the minds of other creatures, making us more worthy of the title “Warrant of All Things” than we are today.
