Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind

Day 1: 12/08/2016

I am reading a thought provoking book by Yuval Noah Harari called “Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind”.  I have had a love / hate relationship with this book and have put it down many times in disgust.  However, eventually, I pick it up and start reading again after my reason for disgust has been forgotten.  There can be no doubt this guy Yuval is a knowledgeable guy and has done a large amount of research.  I have reached a particularly poignant point in the book, my page 288, called Knowledge is Power.  Just that title caused me to press on and read more with ever increasing interest.  The name of the whole chapter that I am reading is called The Discovery of Ignorance and, so far, I found the whole chapter to be thought provoking.  So much so, I woke up about 0530 think about this chapter: It helps that I have always fancied myself to be a scientist and from an early age performed experiments and documented the results.

I think I now see the Yin and Yang of the world as a whole.  There is religion, Yin, that promises a life after death and science, Yang, that promises eternal e-life ( a condition in which there is no death of the body except accidental death).  This is causing me to think of what is the greater good is for humanity.  Or should humanity just be a test tube of swirling debris with no real order?  In any case, I shall have to re-read the book as a whole and in particular, this chapter which I have yet to finish. There are so many thoughts swirling in my head that i cannot organize them into a coherent pattern that would lead me to some conclusion or another.  As soon as I fully awake all this insight will be gone and I will have only this writing to remind me of the thoughts I had in the early morning awakening.

One thought is of a valued friends question of a few days ago: She thought it was worthless pointless to continue extending life when the Earth is already inundated with human life that threatens to terminate all life on the planet, the 6th great epoch of “great dying”, during which, more than 75% of all life on this planet just disappears ( I am concurrently reading a book “Scatter, Adapt, And Remember” by Annalee Newitz). How do you answer this question?  I have thought on occasion that a big war would sort of be good for nature and the Earth.  I really this thinking on my part was sort of faulty since only humans have the extended capacity to really enjoy the beauty of nature.  So, I guess that leaves us with science and technology to sort things out, whereby, e-life has to reach a balance of sustainability with what is available on Earth to sustain it.  For me, I guess it is a mote point since I will probably not live long enough to benefit from e-life so my only recourse is religion and the promises of Christianity.

Being awake is bringing me down to Earth so to speak and the insights of the clear thoughts of sleep dreams are disappearing so I had better terminate this blog and go up and get something to eat to satisfy the primal instinct of hunger.  If I get any clear or additional insight I will add to this blog as an addendum.

Day 2: The Future