（十五）
第二部分Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World。
談到cognitive revolution產生虛構體之後，文字的產生導致大社會能夠分工協調，完成巨大的項目。
《人類簡史》裏談到社區或帝國的統治階級不見得都是最強壯的人（所以，作者爭辯，女性被歧視沒有道理），是不是和文字出現有關？如果女性沒機會接觸文字，那麽男女不平等現象肯定比大家都不懂文字時更加劇烈。
因為文字功能如此強大，文字的產生，雖然允許身體並不見得很強壯的男人當領導，卻更加排斥同樣身體不見得很強壯，但不識字的女性？
談到這個世界/曆史充滿了謊言和虛構。而且都是主流思想，像聖經一類的。談到司馬遷的曆史觀更符合現代曆史觀。
我們知道信仰對基督教橫行世界有重大影響，但一般都從宗教的正麵影響去考慮（至少我是這樣理解的），但本書很幹脆，說，就是因為這些不真實的虛構的信仰能聚集大量人口：No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation.
（十六）
讀《人類簡史》的時候，總覺得作者對遊牧民的美好生活理想化了，雖然事實上農耕社會的農民生活的確很辛苦。
這裏作者給我們兩個旅遊單子，對比非常強烈。
但是，為什麽智人會選擇農耕，拋棄遊牧生活呢？純粹為了複製更多的DNA？還是有其他目的？是自然選擇？還是當時智人的選擇？
如果是當時智人的選擇，那就證明了，即使遊牧生活在我們現在看來比農耕生活要好，但在當時的智人看來，農耕社會應該過得更好。
可以有兩個解釋。第一，農耕社會人口多，雙方起爭論的時候，一下就把遊牧社會給幹掉了。就是說，遊牧民族雖然什麽都好，但是沒有在和其他種族起爭執時生存意義上的競爭力。第二，對於統治階層來說，顯然農耕社會更完美。首先不用到處跑，定居在舒服的屋子裏。其次，農民被土地和神話拴住，有可能不如遊牧民族那樣容易造反。
第二個解釋尤其可以拿來和現代來比較。比如，現在人類大量養畜，這些家畜生活非常悲慘，但是人類基本擺脫了挨餓。作為生物鏈上的頂端，人類舒服了。
就是說，以前的統治階層等於現在的人類，而以前的農民等於現在的家畜。
抄一段：Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function...But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks.
（十七）
講到religion and spirituality的區別：religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it。
講到舊約的形成，講到猶太教最初根本不是經傳教（from rabbis），而是一些寺廟祭祀之類的宗教活動（from priests）。
確實，所有的宗教，你一旦去看其形成的曆史，那麽其神秘感就蕩然無存。
作者認為宗教成分有三部分：Ethical judgement， Factual statement， Practical guideline。科學不能和ethical judgment爭論，但是絕對可以用在第二部分factual statement。
這一段涉及宗教核心: In truth, it is not always easy to separate ethical judgements from factual statements. Religions have the nagging tendency to turn factual statements into ethical judgements, thereby creating terrible confusion and obfuscating what should have been relatively simple debates. Thus the factual statement ‘God wrote the Bible’ all too often mutates into the ethical injunction ‘you ought to believe that God wrote the Bible’. Merely believing in this factual statement becomes a virtue, whereas doubting it becomes a terrible sin.
作者置所有宗教於死地!!!
（幽默片段）講到關於量化“快樂”的困難，作者問了這個問題：Eating ice cream is enjoyable. Finding true love is more enjoyable. Do you think that if you just eat enough ice cream, the accumulated pleasure could ever equal the rapture of true love?
我在前麵也給出了量化快樂的困難。
這幾節的目的在於闡明科學和宗教之間的複雜關係。駁斥了兩個極端觀點。第一，宗教和科學各司其職。第二，科學顛覆宗教。作者的觀點是兩者互相交叉互相作用。
作者給出了一個很顛覆性的觀點：無論宗教還是科學，都對所謂的“真實”不感興趣。他認為，宗教最關心秩序（order），而科學最關心權利（power），緊接著解釋，這是as collective institutions，not as individuals.
（十八）
說Modernity is a deal...The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
乍一看，沒看懂。其實原因在後麵一段：Up until modern times, most cultures believed that humans play a part in some great cosmic plan. The plan was devised by the omnipotent gods, or by the eternal laws of nature, and humankind could not change it.
這是典型的西方聖經教中心論。我作為一個中國人後代，中國數千年文化沒有談到人類在宇宙中有啥目的。中國文化講究天人合一，人是自然的一部分，人和自然和睦相處。
（可笑的一段）The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.
所以We can do anything we want – provided we can find a way. 作者羅列了一堆“anything”：和平，永生，此地天堂等等。但是，憑什麽就做這些“好”的事情呢？如果沒有purposes，大家互相毀滅，一起毀滅也就無所謂了。是什麽理由讓人類做這些“好”的事情呢？
作者說下一章會談到：The next chapter will examine how humankind has used its growing power to somehow sneak meaning back into the infinite emptiness of the cosmos.
說對經濟增長的迷信似乎已經成為了一種宗教。More than that: Capitalism...has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek.
上一段問題的答案：humanism.
（十九）
（幽默一段）every year for the past decade the Israeli LGBT community holds a gay parade in the streets of Jerusalem. It is a unique day of harmony in this conflict-riven city, because it is the one occasion when religious Jews, Muslims and Christians suddenly find a common cause – they all fume in accord against the gay parade. 但是，這些人並不試圖用“上帝禁止同性戀”來譴責，而是用“這些遊行傷害了他們的感情”來譴責（humanism）。
和《人類簡史》一樣，作者把humanism分成三類，liberalism（英美法等）, social humanism（蘇聯中國等）, and evolutionary humanism（納粹等）。在談到第二次世界大戰時，作者也用這三方麵來解釋。
作者認為，越戰後liberalism進入了危機，全靠著核武器支撐。當然到了1980後期，冷戰以蘇聯慘敗結束，liberalism席卷全球。
講到中國可能可以給liberalism以一定的威脅。Yet this economic giant casts a very small ideological shadow. Nobody seems to know what the Chinese believe these days - including the Chinese themselves...This ideological vacuum makes China the most promising breeding ground for the new techno-religions emerging from Silicon Valley。
我認為，新的religions可能會在中西方碰撞中產生，但不一定是techno-religions。作者對於東方文化顯示出比較明顯的無感。
作者認為激進伊斯蘭（以及其它fundamentalist Christianity, messianic Judaism and revivalist Hinduism等）對liberal package沒有啥大的影響。包括儒家學說。作者認為，所有這些都和現代科學技術不沾邊，所以無法複興。
作者的觀點顯然是，新的宗教必然和現代科技緊密相連。
雖然現在還有很多信伊斯蘭教，印度教等，但是，History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.
理論上沒錯，但是作者為什麽會忽略文藝複興呢？文藝複興不就是從希臘文明裏去找源頭嗎？
作者其實舉了馬克思列寧的成功（和洪秀全等比較），原因就是馬列試圖和科技結合。所以作者的觀點其實是，純粹的backward-looking是沒有機會的。
所以重要的是，即使是想複興以前的思想，也必須和現代科技結合。
講到馬克思：Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods. Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. 這從另一的角度評價了馬克思主義，也可能可以用來解釋為何中國當時最先進的思想者，很多也信奉了馬克思主義。比如，首先，馬克思主義不是以上帝為出發點。其次，馬克思主義帶有先進的科技思想。再次，馬克思提倡全人類的解放。
作者拋出了兩個很有啟發性的問題。Ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That’s a difficult question，因為太多了。Now ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions such as Islam and Christianity in the twentieth century? This too is a very difficult question，因為太少了。
介紹第三部分：the third and final part of the book will argue that attempting to realise this humanist dream （就是immortality, bliss and divinity，長生，快樂，和神性） will undermine its very foundations, by unleashing new posthumanis technologies.
（二十）
作者給liberalism的第一擊：根據現代科學，Homo sapiens have “neither soul, nor free will, nor ‘self’ – but only genes, hormones and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality.”
解釋random和free的區別。比如扔一個鋼蹦，有正反兩麵，但不會多於兩個結果。並宣稱：Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented. 再辯論，freedom 和進化論是矛盾的。說if an animal ‘freely’ chooses what to eat and with whom to mate, then natural selection is left with nothing to work on。
接著描述了一堆科學實驗，目的就是要說明，我們想做什麽其實是很容易被控製的。比如你現在不想練習鋼琴，帶上一個頭盔，馬上就很想彈了。所以，在這種科技下，所謂的自由意誌毫無自由可言。
（二十一）
自由意誌沒有了，個體（individual）呢？和聖誕老人一樣，虛構的。Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’. 主要有兩個，narrating self and experiencing self.
這一小節最後一段：Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond the grave). This gives rise to the questionable liberal belief that I am an individual, and that I possess a consistent and clear inner voice, which provides meaning for the entire universe.
緊接著一個問題asked by Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘A Problem’: what happens when the yarns spun by our narrating self cause great harm to ourselves or those around us?
給出三個答案。第一，什麽事也沒有；第二，醒來之後的害怕；但還有第三種情況，強化緣由，In politics this is known as the ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome.
應用上麵第三種情況：If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities suh as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.
在經濟，政治，金融，生活當中，這也有很多應用。
這一段點題：We see, then, that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories. 貌似殘酷了點。
作者說，我們需要a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.
（二十二）
關於計算機在象棋和圍棋中打敗人類已經家喻戶曉了。作者給了一個在藝術上的例子：David Cope is a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz... Cope has written programs that compose concertos, chorales, symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialised in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. 程序一天寫了5000首類似巴赫的作品，做了演出，結果大部分人無法區別，多說非常感人。Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album –
Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surprisingly well.
然後是詩。In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.
（二十三）
The preceding pages took us on a brief tour of recent scientific discoveries that undermine the liberal philosophy. It’s time to examine the practical implications of these scientific discoveries.
In the twenty-first century three practical developments might make this belief obsolete:
1. Humans will lose their economic and military usefulness, hence the economic and political system will stop attaching much value to them.
2. The system will still find value in humans collectively, but not in unique individuals.
3. The system will still find value in some unique individuals, but these will be a new elite of upgraded superhumans rather than the mass of the population.
（二十四）
關於程序，說，即使編了一個看起來毫無惡意的程序，比如計算pi，也有可能後院起火：AI可能會毀了人類，占領地球，銀河係，然後把整個宇宙整成一個超級計算機，用全宇宙的能量來計算pi。這個腦洞得多大才想得到啊。
接著回顧自由派的三大基本假設：1. 我是一個體；2. 我這個自我是有自由意誌的； 3. 除了自己，沒有其它更了解自己。
然後駁斥：1. 我不是一個個體，而是多個程序組成； 2. 可以隨機和不隨機，但毫無自由可言；3. AI可以深入了解各種體內荷爾蒙，信號等，所以可以做到比自己更了解自己。
（二十五）
關於穀歌的一些例子。比如，如果大家同意穀歌可以查詢他們的郵件，那麽穀歌可以在幾個小時內（說不定半小時之內）就能發現大麵積的流感爆發，因為很有可能上班的早上起來發現身體不舒服，用郵件請個假，如果穀歌發現有大量的“頭痛，發燒，喉嚨痛”等等關鍵字，它就能做出正確判斷（Google Flu Trends）。
如果這個例子還比較正麵，下麵的例子就比較恐怖了。如果穀歌能收集個人的DNA和各種身體指標，等等信息，然後給每個人設計相對完美的生活習慣，請問，我們自己離機器人的距離又有多遠？是不是以後一大群身體素質差不多的人，過的日子就基本相同了？（Google Baseline Study and Google Fit）。
還有一個例子，你如果想知道自己的DNA情況，付23andMe $99，寄去你的口水樣本，他們就可以告訴你一切有關你基因方麵的信息，預測和注意事項。
然後是一段非常有意思的描寫，假設某女孩子喜歡兩個男性，決定不下來，她可以問知道到她所有信息的機器人。機器人根據這些信息和程序，說，87%的可能性，你和約翰結婚比較好。
當然，所謂的民主，選舉啥啥的，都沒有必要了。你的機器人早就知道你選誰對你來說更合適。
Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well.
FB做過一個實驗，從86220用戶中，FB根據他們的點讚，可以更精確預測此人對一份調查問卷的回答。結果，程序隻需要10個點讚，就比此人的同事更準確，需要70歌點讚，就比此人的朋友更準確，需要300個點讚，就能超過此人的丈夫或妻子。
（二十六）
Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns. 舉了WAZE和CORTANAS的例子。
還提出了一個很有意思的問題。如果你的理智告訴你，你要去鍛煉，然後你告訴CORTANAS 把電視機打開。那麽CORTANASS會聽誰的？理智的你，還是偷懶的你？
The shifting of authority from humans to algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of mundane choices.
（二十七）
談到貧富差距會拉大。首先，Twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy。其次，twentieth-century medicine benefited the masses because the twentieth century was the age of the masses...in the twenty-first century the most efficient (albeit ruthless) strategy may be to let go of the useless third-class carriages, and dash forward with the first class only.
（二十八）
說新的techno-religions很可能會在Silicon Valley產生。這個techno-religions可以分成兩部分，techno-humanism and data religion。
前者創造Homo Deus，with the help of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
the spectrum of possible mental states may be infinite, but science has studied only two tiny sections of it: the sub-normative and the WEIRD（Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic）.
positive psychology （vs mental illness) has become the trendiest subfield of the discipline
如果技術可以改變人類不好的思維感情等，如何設計？Suppose Romeo and Juliet opened with Romeo having to decide with whom to fall in love. And suppose even after making a decision, Romeo could always retract and make a different choice instead. What kind of play would it have been?
後者，認為世間一切都是數據，根據這種觀點，free-market capitalism and state-controlled Communism 本質上沒啥區別，無非是數據處理的不同，Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing.
Like capitalism and communism, so democracies and dictatorships are in essence competing mechanisms for gathering and analysing information. Dictatorships use centralised processing methods, whereas democracies prefer distributed processing.
按照這種觀點，21世紀根據數據處理的有效性改變，民主有可能會落伍。現在像穀歌，臉書，亞馬遜等公司，擁有大量數據，導致的是數據處理的中心化，就是獨裁的一種表現。
政府想要規範？The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.
Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future.
From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system, through four basic methods:
1. Increasing the number of processors.
2. Increasing the variety of processors. （to increase its dynamism and creativity.)
3. Increasing the number of connections between processors.
4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections.
If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.
關於自由信息The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.’
關於人類比動物要高級，根據dataism, a human can write a poem about his experience and post it online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system.
未來？Internet-of-All-Things。
最後作者問了三個問題：
1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
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