Keywords:: PermanentNote
Harari is putting forth is the argument that what made us humans so unique is our collective imagination.
Our culture consists of a myriad of abstract concepts like god, heaven, money, rights, morals, companies, nations, philosophies, laws, sins, to name a few that we all treat as something that truly exists. In reality, these are just stories that we tell ourselves to make sense out of our existence.
These things are intersubjective which means that they do not really exist in the physical world—they are not objective things like water, mountains, or heat.
This notion is unique to humans—Harari writes, You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven—with humans it's possible.
Nevertheless, these collective stories, or our intersubjectivity as Harari likes to call it, allowed us to create such abstract concepts like god, money, rights, etc., which enabled us to cooperate elastically in large numbers of thousands or even millions of individuals. It was unprecedented. Even Neanderthals, with whom we were going head to head evolutionary-wise, couldn't break the 150 individuals mark because their relationships were limited by the memory of kin (how much they've been related).
Homo sapiens have this limit as well (even today)—we can only keep friends with around 150 people—but the ability to fantasize collectively helped us get over this barrier. We've had a common story we've believed in. This story connected us, as it was something we've shared. Conversely, Neanderthals lacked this connection, as they've only could be associated by kin which has its limits below 150.
Later this intersubjectivity resulted in the creation of cooperative mechanisms such as laws, morals, money, and science which enabled the creation of much bigger groups such as villages, towns, cities, states which may count even billions.
Relevant notes:
TK PN: The collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is like the intersubjective reality imprinted in our genes in a form of symbols, motives, images, etc.
PN: There is no morality without freedom: humans act morally not because of their nature (objective reality) but because intersubjective constraints our society puts on them. Whenever this intersubjective bubble bursts, homo sapiens turn into beast.
PN: Why have we become so innovative?: Environments in which humans lived densely bred many intersubjective artefacts such as myths, laws, inventions, philosophies, etc., due to information spillover.
PN: What is the adjacent possible: the adjacent possible defines the boundaries of our collective imagination.
Don't get me wrong, theory is sometimes useful and necessary. Heck, the ability to theoretize is what makes us different from animals (P: Collective imagination made us human (intersubjectivity)). When is theory useful then? To make a leap of faith, to create a hypothesis. (connected P: You can make great discoveries by "asking" reality a question)
Or maybe, our intersubjectivity allows us to rise above biology?
P: Collective imagination made us human (intersubjectivity): we are who we are because of stories we believe in collectively.
One negative might be that we can always want more of it, ultimately bringing us misery? A positive might be that it can't end – we can be eternally happy, but we can suffer only once. You can die once but feel joy without a limit. Is that the basis for the concept of the afterlife?
Furthermore, it turns out that what is good and bad, or what is true and false, depends on the times you live in. Most of our perspectives are shaped by the collective stories of our society. These intersubjective stories change with when the external circumstances change like when new technology comes along or a natural disaster surprises us or war hit us. Morality— i.e. what's good and bad—is one of those stories and it's malleable. Don't believe it? Two hundred years ago, slavery was a regular thing, and we thought that diseases were transmitted through 'bad air.'
The intersubjective nature of humans also means that all philosophies, values, morals, truths, traditions, and so on are malleable because they are dependent on the historical context. Usually, similarly to how our brain works [1], our subjective theories of how the world should be are a post hoc fabrication of the pragmatic needs of survival.
However, the environment has changed. Once we introduced intersubjective concepts and information became the currency, it became increasingly more extreme, asymmetric, and surprising—Black Swans started to rule. It transformed into the world of winner takes all and extreme events that invalidate all previous observations.