Intense realism: maja 2017

What's happening today in places like Silicon Valley is that we are creating artificial intelligence but not artificial consciousenss. There has been an amazing development in computer intelligence over the last 50 years, and exactly zero development in computer consciousness.
We usually confuse Intelligence and Consciousness especially in places like Silicon Valley. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and consciousness is the ability to feel things, to feel joy and sadness and boredom. In humans, all mammals and other animals intelligence and consciousness go together. We often solve problems by feeling things. So if there is some cosmic role for consciousness, it's not unique to Homo sapiens. Cows are conscious, pigs are conscious, chimpanzees are conscious, so we are not the only sentient beings on Earth. And when it comes to sentience, to say that humans are more sentient than whales, or more sentient than baboons, I see no evidence for that.So first of all if there is some cosmic role for consciousness, it's not unique to Homo sapiens. I think we don't need to find our role in the universe. The really important thing is to liberate ourselves from suffering.

Left-right divide is irrelevant today, real divide is between global and national, global or local. We have global ecology, global economy, but we have national politics and this doesn’t work together. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system

For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. There are also many, many positive things about patriotism, and the ability to have a large number of people care about each other, sympathize with one another, and come together for collective action. If you go back to the first nations, so, thousands of years ago, the people who lived along the Yellow River in China — it was many, many different tribes and they all depended on the river for survival and for prosperity, but all of them also suffered from periodical floods and periodical droughts. And no tribe could really do anything about it, because each of them controlled just a tiny section of the river.

9:11And then in a long and complicated process, the tribes coalesced together to form the Chinese nation,which controlled the entire Yellow River and had the ability to bring hundreds of thousands of people together to build dams and canals and regulate the river and prevent the worst floods and droughts and raise the level of prosperity for everybody. And this worked in many places around the world.

9:39But in the 21st century, technology is changing all that in a fundamental way. We are now living — all people in the world — are living alongside the same cyber river, and no single nation can regulate this river by itself. We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.

Authority shifting away from humans to algorithms

There is a very close correlation between nationalism and climate change. I mean, almost always, the people who deny climate change are nationalists. And at first sight, you think: Why? What's the connection? Why don't you have socialists denying climate change? But then, when you think about it, it's obvious — because nationalism has no solution to climate change. If you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century, you have to deny the problem. If you accept the reality of the problem, then you must accept that, yes, there is still room in the world for patriotism, there is still room in the world for having special loyalties and obligations towards your own people, towards your own country. I don't think anybody is really thinking of abolishing that.

19:46But in order to confront climate change, we need additional loyalties and commitments to a level beyond the nation. And that should not be impossible, because people can have several layers of loyalty.
How would world governmant look like and why would it work, considering the fact that wWorld is a corrupted place
Global governance would not replace or abolish local identities and communities it should be part of a single package.

It's very hard to tell the difference between fiction and reality. Fictions that we've created about nations,gods,money, corporations they now control the world. So you cannot say oh it's just fictional entities. But reality is there. There are several test to tell the diference beetwen ficion and reality. The simplest test is the test of suffering. If it can suffer it's real if it cannot suffer it's not real. We say Germany suffered the defeat of II World War. Germany cannot suffer, it has no brain.

Biology tells us two things about Homo Sapiens:

1.That we are absolutely dependent on the ecological system around us

2.We are social animals but on a very local local level. We cannot have intimate familiarity with about more than 150 individuals. The size of natural group for homo sapiens is not more than 150 individuals

And I would go even further than that and say that it starts with the body itself. The feelings that people today have of alienation and loneliness and not finding their place in the world, I would think that the chief problem is not global capitalism. The chief problem is that over the last hundred years, people have been becoming disembodied, have been distancing themselves from their body. As a hunter-gatherer or even as a peasant, to survive, you need to be constantly in touch with your body and with your senses, every moment. If you go to the forest to look for mushrooms and you don't pay attention to what you hear, to what you smell, to what you taste, you're dead. So you must be very connected.

50:45In the last hundred years, people are losing their ability to be in touch with their body and their senses, to hear, to smell, to feel. More and more attention goes to screens, to what is happening elsewhere, some other time. This, I think, is the deep reason for the feelings of alienation and loneliness and so forth, and therefore part of the solution is not to bring back some mass nationalism, but also reconnect with our own bodies, and if you are back in touch with your body, you will feel much more at home in the world also.

What do we want to want?' Well, what do you think we should want to want?"

54:07YNH: I think we should want to want to know the truth, to understand reality. Mostly what we want is to change reality, to fit it to our own desires, to our own wishes, and I think we should first want to understand it. If you look at the long-term trajectory of history, what you see is that for thousands of years we humans have been gaining control of the world outside us and trying to shape it to fit our own desires. And we've gained control of the other animals, of the rivers, of the forests, and reshaped them completely, causing an ecological destruction without making ourselves satisfied.

54:55So the next step is we turn our gaze inwards, and we say OK, getting control of the world outside us did not really make us satisfied. Let's now try to gain control of the world inside us. This is the really big project of science and technology and industry in the 21st century — to try and gain control of the world inside us, to learn how to engineer and produce bodies and brains and minds. These are likely to be the main products of the 21st century economy. When people think about the future, very often they think in terms, "Oh, I want to gain control of my body and of my brain." And I think that's very dangerous.

55:38If we've learned anything from our previous history, it's that yes, we gain the power to manipulate, but because we didn't really understand the complexity of the ecological system, we are now facing an ecological meltdown. And if we now try to reengineer the world inside us without really understanding it,especially without understanding the complexity of our mental system, we might cause a kind of internal ecological disaster, and we'll face a kind of mental meltdown inside us.

https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide/transcript?language=en#t-586790