Book Club Rocks

My book club met last night. We talked about Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future by Yuval Noah Harari. One of the early comments was questioning whether this book can honestly use "brief" in the title. It was quite dense and long, or so it seemed to us.

But I enjoyed the book, even though I didn't agree with all of it. I don't mind being told that I don't actually have free will, but I could not really agree with the argument. Sure, there are reactions programmed into us, but was I really programmed, so I had no choice in the matter, to read that book? Or to write this post about it? Was Dr. Harari compelled to write it? He didn't address that question. His examples of human reactions with no free will involved were all pretty simple processes. He dismissed the concept of emergent properties of a complex system as mental somersaults without discussion. Having read a bit about the behaviors of complex systems, I don't think that is a reasonable idea. After all, I have never really believed in Dark Matter, because, well, why can't we find it in anything but its very distant gravitational effects? Nothing we can use can detect it, but it still "exists"? But now there is a theoretical physicist who is arguing, and doing the math to show, that the gravitational behaviors of distant galaxies are emergent properties of complex systems, and that Dark Matter isn't needed to explain them. Hurray!

So, as I see it, if emergent properties of complex systems can allow a new theory of gravity that eliminates an impossible belief in stuff that can't be seen, why can't they also allow humans some conscious control over our behavior? We are complex enough to allow for that, I think. And we certainly feel like we have some free will, besides being compelled to believe in free will to justify having laws. Yes, I see the irony in that. It fascinates me. I like to notice the apparent absurdities of the human condition. It keeps me amused.

We also discussed the current status of the data gods on Facebook and Google. For example, I went to a website for work the other day. Now I get ads for that website when I read the comics online. But there is nothing in that website that I want for my personal use, and I made the order from a work computer, so why is my personal computer trying to sell me my work stuff? And why is Rob getting ads for the coat he just bought? Do the data gods really not realize that a normal human doesn't need multiple copies of a winter coat? They have a ways to go to get beyond being the butt of jokes. So for now, lets keep laughing about them, and their apparent weaknesses. Their efforts seem pretty pathetic at this point, and mostly we ignore them because really they can't get beyond tired repetition of something that worked without them. Unless they are playing a subtle longer game . . .