Walking upright on two legs

Have the ability to think

Use fire to move people from the middle to the top of the food chain

Four Studies

three revolutions

history

The brain volume increases, the brain consumes more energy and needs to spend more time looking for food; the muscles degenerate and atrophy.

Humans walk upright on two legs, which makes it easier to free their hands and make tools; babies are born early; they develop outstanding social skills and form a race with strong social relationships.

By 300,000 years ago, the use of fire had become commonplace for the ancestors of Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens. Benefits: When you start cooking, you can shorten your intestines, reduce energy consumption, and make your brain bigger.

100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain.

About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens expanded from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and soon swept across Eurasia.

The theory of hybrid reproduction: two human races breed with each other and merge into one.

Alternative theories: genocide, purification campaigns.

认知能力：得以集结大批人力，合作形成组织，应对快速的挑战，调整社会行为

Able to convey a greater amount of information about the environment around Homo sapiens, plan and execute complex plans, such as avoiding lions and hunting bison.

Fictional stories: Ability to convey information about fictional concepts such as tribal guardianship, nations, limited companies, and human rights.

Far-reaching impact: cooperation among a large number of strangers, rapid innovation in social behavior.

Many fictional stories

Fictional stories are the secret to Homo sapiens crossing the "150" threshold

objective reality, materialism

imagine reality, idealism

Small tribe life: tens to hundreds of people.

About 15,000 years ago, Homo sapiens domesticated dogs.

Homo sapiens cooperated with each other: exchanging members, hunting together, exchanging rare luxuries, forming alliances, and celebrating festivals.

There are seasonal gathering places.

Homo sapiens tribes were constantly on the move.

Collecting food raw materials and "knowledge" (understanding the natural environment and plant habits), the brain capacity of Homo sapiens is gradually increasing.

Homo sapiens worked short hours and had a varied diet.

Problems: There are shortages of supplies, difficult seasons, and high child mortality.

Ancient foragers generally believed in pantheism, believing that everything has its own consciousness and emotions and can communicate directly with humans.

30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had already invented some social and political norms. eg: A boy and a girl were found in a 30,000-year-old cemetery in Songhir, Soviet Union. They were rich in burial objects, including a large number of ivory beads and fox teeth.

Forager societies may have different religious and social structures, as well as different tendencies toward violence.

Before humans invented the wheel, writing, and iron tools, Homo sapiens has caused about half of the world's large mammals to return to the West and become extinct.

Large animals reproduce slowly.

Homo sapiens mastered the technology of fire farming.

Influence of climate factors.

Wave One: The Expansion of the Gatherers.

Second wave: expansion of farmers.

Third wave: industrial activity.

Agriculture developed independently and blossomed in various places at the same time.

The total amount of human food increases, the population explodes, and elites are produced.

Essence: Increase the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome in the world

Once started, it's irresistible

Trap: All efforts to make life easier actually bring endless troubles to people.

The evolutionary success of a species does not necessarily reflect individual happiness.

For domesticated livestock, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible disaster.

Reverse domestication: settlement, related diseases, reduction of staple food types, triggering violent conflicts, and traps of luxurious life.

animal domestication

plant domestication

Impact of the Agricultural Revolution

Increased importance of “future”

Settlement, artificial island.

The emergence of rulers and elites

Examples of fictional stories

How to be convincing

imagined order

true believer

Thousands or even millions of people need to cooperate

The amount of information that needs to be stored and processed is extremely large

Limitations of the human brain

The Agricultural Revolution produced a large amount of data and information that needed to be recorded, giving rise to the creation of "writing"

invent words

Text is a way of storing information using physical symbols

The influence and function of words

Writing is an important foundation for the birth of bureaucracy

It is not enough to record, you also need to be able to catalog and retrieve the data. What's special about Sumer, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and the Inca Empire is that these cultures all developed good technology to archive, catalog, and retrieve written records, and they also invested in cultivating talents to be responsible for copying, copying, and copying. Data management and accounting matters.

With class, strangers don't have to waste time and energy to truly understand each other, but they should also know how to treat each other. Class regulates the relationships of millions of people.

indian caste system

Concepts of "clean" America: African slave trade; racism; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Sexism

In 10,000 B.C., there were thousands of human civilizations on Earth

2000 B.C., hundreds to two to three thousand at most

In 1450 AD, the numbers dropped sharply

Four worlds of considerable size and complexity

There are only two in the future, religion and science

economic monetary order

political imperial order

religious global order

Shells, horns, hides, salt, cigarettes...

In 3000 BC, the earliest money system in history: the Sumerian "wheat dollar" system

In 2500 BC, the silver shekel system appeared in Mesopotamia.

In 640 BC, the Kingdom of Lydia in western Turkey minted the first coins in history.

ancient rome dynasty silver coin

trust

Money is the most universal and efficient mutual trust system ever created

Because "trust" is so critical, we can understand why the financial system is so closely linked to political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why stock traders alone one morning Feelings can affect the rise and fall of the stock market.

Their value is entirely due to culture.

The imprint on a coin represents certain political powers that ensure the coin's value.

Everything is replaceable

Believed by all

The focus of religious belief is what you believe, but the focus of money belief is "others believe."

Of all the belief systems created by mankind, only money can cross almost all cultural divides and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age and sexual orientation. Because of the money system, people can work together even if they don't know each other or don't know each other's character.

Different ethnic groups and different cultures bring about cultural diversity.

The territory is flexible and can be expanded almost infinitely.

There does not necessarily have to be an autocratic emperor, and scale is not the point.

Original Sin: Almost all empires are built on blood and maintain power through oppression and war.

Conquering different ethnic groups makes it difficult to rule efficiently.

Ethnic diversity has been significantly reduced.

This is immoral. Every ethnic group has the right to be conscious and should not be controlled by other ethnic groups.

The Qin Dynasty unified the world, established a system, and burned books and harassed Confucian scholars.

Empires can accelerate the spread of various ideas, institutions, customs and norms

empire cycle

It is united by a common culture and common interests.

Nationalism is rapidly losing ground.

Global problems are eroding the legitimacy of individual nation-states themselves.

The global empire is not governed by any particular nation or ethnic group.

Universal qualities: The transhuman order it believes in must be universal.

Promotional traits: It must also firmly spread this belief to the masses.

The first monotheistic religion appeared in 1350 BC, when the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten declared Aten to be the Supreme Being of the Universe.

Judaism → Christianity; Islam emerged in the 7th century.

Unitarians are more fanatical and keen on preaching.

Believe in the existence of two opposing forces, good and evil.

Persian religion, also known as Zoroastrianism.

3rd-4th century AD, Manichaeism.

Sakyamuni, desirelessness, the essence of human suffering is the way of thinking in everyone’s mind

Pain comes from desire. To be free from pain, you must let go of desire; and to let go of desire, you must train your mind and experience the nature of things.

Worship of non-gods: Jainism and Buddhism in India, Taoism and Confucianism in China, cynicism and hedonism in the Mediterranean.

Believe that God is also limited by the laws of nature.

Liberal Humanism: Each person has unique and sacred qualities, and personal freedom is sacrosanct.

Social humanism: making all people equal.

Evolutionary humanism: Represented by the Nazis, it is believed that humans will evolve into "saints" or degenerate into inhumans.

The fallacy of hindsight

Cleo, the Blind Goddess of History

This event rather than that event. But if you only have a partial understanding of a certain period, you will be easily affected by the results. Only see the possibilities that finally come true.

An iron rule of history: What seems inevitable in hindsight was never obvious at the time. It is particularly important to emphasize that those things that seem most impossible in the contemporary world are often the things that finally come true. Such as the rise of Christianity in the ancient Roman Empire (previously it was just a mysterious Eastern sect)

Not to know the future, but to expand our horizons and understand that the present is neither "natural" nor inevitable. The possibilities for the future are far greater than we imagine.

In 1500 AD, the scientific revolution brought about an astonishing growth in human power.

The historical process that brought humans to Alamogordo and the moon is called the "Scientific Revolution." In this revolution, mankind has gained tremendous new power because of its resources invested in scientific research.

Be willing to admit your ignorance

Centered on observation and mathematics

acquire new abilities

Adopt a scientific theory but go against common scientific practice: claim it to be the absolute truth. For example: The Nazis claimed that their racial strategy was derived from biological facts.

Instead of adopting scientific methods, we resort to "non-scientific absolute truths." Liberal humanist strategy: The basis is to insist on advocating the special values ​​and rights of human beings, but scientific research on Homo sapiens does not agree with this view.

Various empirical observations are collected and organized using mathematical tools.

Newton's three laws of motion, actuarial science, Malthusian demography...

The scientific revolution is not a revolution of knowledge, but a "revolution of ignorance." The great discovery that really started the scientific revolution was the discovery that "human beings actually know nothing about the most important problems."

eradicate poverty

A plan to extend human lifespan, the Gilgamesh Project.

used in war

Thousands of years of history after the Agricultural Revolution can be summed up in one question: If human genes do not have the biological instinct for large-scale cooperation, how are all cooperative networks maintained? To put it simply, human beings have created an order constructed from imagination and invented writing, using these two to make up for the shortcomings in our genes.

Science, as a means, is inseparable from politics, economy, and religion.

Scientific research is expensive and requires government, corporate, foundation and private funding.

It needs to join forces with certain religions or ideologies (imperialism and capitalism) to have the possibility of flourishing.

Scientists are in the minority who really control the progress of scientific development.

Ideology can rationalize the cost of research, and the price is that ideology can influence the scientific process and determine how research results are produced.

modern science

capitalism

China and Persia do not lack technology. What they lack are Western values, stories, judicial systems, and social and political structures. These took centuries to form and mature in the West. Even if they want to copy them, they cannot be internalized overnight. . Therefore, France and the United States can quickly follow the footsteps of the United Kingdom because they already share the most important set of stories and social structures.

Building an empire is like a scientific experiment; establishing a scientific discipline is like a nation-building project.

The driving force behind it is unsatisfied desires. There are poems in the distance, waiting for them to trample on them.

The empire funded and used science; science fed back, practical knowledge, ideological foundations and tools, making the empire scientific.

It is another amazing display of human imagination. What allows banks and even the entire economy to survive and even prosper is actually our trust in the future. "Trust" is the only backing for most money in the world.

The focus of modern economic history is "growth".

The monetary concept of "credit" represents goods that do not yet exist and exist only in the imagination. It is the concept of "credit" that allows us to advance the future and build the present. There is a basic assumption behind this, that is, future resources will definitely far exceed current resources; as long as we use future income to invest in the present, it will bring many new and wonderful business opportunities.

development changes

The economy is a win-win situation; profits from production must be reinvested in increasing output.

The profits of private enterprises are the basis of the overall wealth and prosperity of society.

The basis of all human wealth lies in the selfish desire to increase personal profits.

Basic principle: Justice, freedom, and happiness all depend on economic growth, so it can be said that economic growth is the highest good.

Connection to science

connection with politics

imperial capitalism

dogma

Free market capitalism cannot guarantee that profits will be earned equitably or distributed equitably. And on the contrary, because humans have the desire to pursue profits and economic growth, they will decide to blindly eliminate all possible obstacles. When "growth" becomes the supreme goal and is not checked by other moral ethics, it can easily lead to a disaster.

plant growth cycle

solar energy cycle

energy conversion

Harness and transform energy effectively.

Solving the shortage of raw materials has brought various energy and raw materials.

Mechanization of machines, mechanization of animals and plants. Metropolis Modern Times Tragedy

Consumerism

Families and local communities collapsed; the state and the market intervened in family relationships, especially the relationship between parents and children.

Markets and states shape “imagined communities”

The costs of war rise and profits fall. Nuclear peace.

There have been structural changes in the form of wealth, such as human capital, scientific and technological knowledge, etc., which cannot be obtained through war. Live in peace.

Peace became a good deal. To revitalize the economies of various countries through foreign trade, the leaders are shrewd pacifists.

Epidemic pauses rapid development

The body emits sensual sensations of pleasure.

Feeling subjectively happy. It could be immediate pleasure, or it could be long-term lifestyle satisfaction.

Look at "pleasant moments more than painful ones"; look at life as a whole; look at important cognitive and moral aspects.

Money is not everything

people network

Subjective expectations and objective conditions

The concept of freedom: family, marriage, disease, community, money...; if individuals want freedom, then family, marriage, disease, community, money also need their freedom.

Feel the meaning of life

Knowing yourself

Accept reality: not too happy, not too painful.

Happiness is neither a subjective feeling of pleasure nor a subjective feeling that life is meaningful. Instead, it lies in letting go of the pursuit of subjective feelings. Most people attach too much importance to their own feelings, thinking that pleasure is happiness and unpleasant feelings are suffering. As a result, humans crave pleasure and avoid unpleasant feelings.

The pursuit of subjective feelings is all-consuming and ultimately futile, only leaving us in thrall to the pursuit itself. The root of suffering is not feeling sad or in pain, or feeling like everything is meaningless. The real root of suffering lies in the "pursuit" of subjective feelings. No matter what it is, it will make people fall into continuous tension, confusion and dissatisfaction.

If people want to escape suffering and gain happiness, they must understand that all their subjective feelings are just momentary fluctuations, and stop pursuing certain feelings. In this way, although it hurts, it no longer feels miserable; although it is pleasant, it no longer disturbs the peace of mind. As a result, the mind becomes clear and at ease. The peace of mind this produces is so powerful that it is unimaginable to those who spend their entire lives frantically pursuing a happy mood.

Bioengineering: Manipulating genes

Biomimetic engineering: innovation of similar biological elements

Inorganic life engineering: computer programs and viruses that can evolve independently

As medical knowledge improves, new ethical dilemmas arise: DNA privacy issues.

The Gilgamesh Project: Create super humans who will live forever.

Singularity - Big Bang