To hack a human being - Commentary
Israeli historian, philosopher, and author of popular science bestsellers Yuval Noah Harari has opined about God and free will. He believes that neither exist. “Ultimately my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody can access that or touch that. And this was never true. . .”, says Harari.
His “proof” is that “humans are hackable animals”. What does he mean by this? Harari explains, “To hack a human being is to understand what's happening inside you on the level of the body, of the brain, of the mind. . .” According to Harari, once technology can know what’s going on inside a person, “. . . you can predict what people will do. . . . once you understand and predict you can usually also manipulate and control and even replace.”
Harari gives an example of how technology understands what’s happening inside us and can therefore manipulate us. Here it is in his own words.
You open up that YouTube video your friend sends you after your lunch break. You come back to your computer. And you think okay I know those other times I end up watching two or three videos and I end up getting sucked into it.But this time it's gonna be really different. I'm just gonna watch this one video and then somehow that's not what happens. You wake up from a trance three hours later and you say what the hell just happened and it's because you didn't realize you had a supercomputer pointed at your brain.
The idea of God and free will has been around for thousands of years. Manipulation of humans has been around for quite a while as well. The advertising industry is based on it, and it predates Youtube.
So, what has Harari discovered that’s changed the paradigm? The astounding answer is nothing.
Where did Harari go so wrong? This sentence contains his fallacy: “Ultimately my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody can access that or touch that.”
Harari defines free will as untouchable and then proceeds to show that people can be manipulated. Supercomputers can “predict” how people will react to various stimuli. Free will is therefore not untouchable. Therefore, it must not exist.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines free will as the “freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention.”
This definition does not mention that nobody can predict what I will do in a given circumstance. It does not say that “nobody can access … or touch” my choices or desires.
So, what has Harari done? He made up his own definition of free will, proceeded to show that it’s not true and based on that, claims that it doesn’t exist. This is known as a strawman logical fallacy.
I do not know if Harari is a competent historian, but he definitely gets failing marks as a deep thinker. Free will implies accountability. If we are manipulated and have no choice, then we are not responsible for our actions.
Civilized society is based on accountability. Our legal system, all legal systems assume that we can choose to follow the law or not. We can therefore be held responsible for our actions.
So, what’s Harari getting at? He is getting at control. If people have no free will because they can be manipulated, they are controllable. This is Harari’s end goal. It is the end goal of the WEF and Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset”. Harari is a personal advisor to Schwab.
The ultimate goal is to have totally controlled humans who have no choice in anything about their own lives but who are nevertheless happy. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
