27 Luglio 2021 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti

Dear friends and enemies of Stilum Curiae, Agostino Nobile offers us a lucid and merciless critique of the “thought” of what is considered one of the maitre a pénser of the dominant culture, that of the mainstream, the Zuckerbergs and the Bill Gates. The translation of the article is by the author. Enjoy reading.

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                        FREE WILL? NO, ALGORITHMS

For some time I have been following interviews with Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As is often the case with characters who achieve a certain amount of success, he is perfectly attuned to all the nuances with the establishment thinking. 

I bought the first Harari book, but despite my efforts and having imposed a certain form of masochism on common sense, I could not finish it. At one point I wondered if Harari is really a history professor. But the most hilarious things are his analyses. Like when he talks about gorillas and humans. According to him, gorillas didn’t evolve because they didn’t cooperate like humans did. But more on that let’s talk later.

As I wrote in an article about my Italian colleague Alessandro Barbero, the Israeli professor reads history exactly as it is taught in schools. He does not delve into the causes that produce events. For example, he has never said, at least in the dozens of articles and videos I have followed, about the role of Freemasonry in the French Revolution and of finance in the dictatorships of the 20th century. On the Covid-19 he accepts the mainstream as indisputable truth, and does not say a word about the endless ambiguities and inconsistencies spread by the media and politicians. His contradictions are numerous, such as when, while calling himself a moderate nationalist, he promotes the open borders policy by violently criticizing Trump for building the wall between Mexico and the USA. He does not say that Bill Clinton started building the wall, followed by Obama. Nor does he seem to understand that the invasion of illegal migrants represents a multi-million dollar market for gangs of slavers reminiscent of the slave traders of past centuries. He pretends to ignore the fact that these slavers are supported by the host governments to the tune of millions of euros taken from the pockets of the natives.

Let us now see the certainties (transcribed in italics) about free will that Yuval Noah Harari flaunts in his books and speeches.

  “Free will is not a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of free will to explain why God is just to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices are not freely made, why should God punish or reward us for them?”

While it is true that Christian theology has fleshed out the concept of free will like no other religion or philosophy (especially St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas), punishment for those who do evil, precisely because it is considered deliberate, is present in both transcendental religions, pantheistic philosophies and atheistic ideologies: hell, rebirth and earthly punishment. Perhaps Professor Harari has missed the thought of Aristotle (who lived almost four centuries before Christ), who comments: “As virtues, so also vices are voluntary, because it depends on us to perform good or bad acts. Man is the principle of his acts and generates his acts as he generates his children”. 

So all cultures of all times condemn crime as a voluntary act, which anthropomorphic apes have never done. Transcendental religions try to change man’s heart before he does the damage. Atheistic ones throw the offender in jail or eliminate him. Harari, therefore, is talking nonsense when he claims that free will “is a myth inherited from Christian theology”.

“Humanism today is facing a great challenge from laboratories, which tell us that free will is a false concept. For science, free will is a myth and feelings do not reflect free will. Feelings are biochemical algorithms, and the data can understand my feelings better than I can myself, because they are measurable. The big idea of our age is supported by the fact that organisms are algorithms, and these can clearly detect organisms”.

What do feelings have to do with free will?

Harari states that his theory is based on the experiments of Benjamin Libet. Born in the US in 1916, Libet was a renowned neurologist whose early work focused on the study of synaptic (junction between nerve fibres and cells or between nerve fibres and effectors) and post-synaptic responses. In 1977, through his experiments he tried to understand whether a movement considered free and voluntary is preceded or anticipated by a series of electrical changes in the brain and, therefore, whether the movement starts consciously or not. Libet and his collaborators took up the studies of Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke from 1965 which they defined as preparation potential or disposition. In 2008 John-Dylan Haynes carried out a series of more sophisticated experiments that would confirm Libet’s theories.  

At this point I did a brief research to understand how the tests that would establish the non-existence of free will took place. 

The researcher Libet used an electroencephalograph and electromyograph to measure the electrical activity of the brain and muscles, using a specially modified oscilloscope. Participants had a watch in one hand which they could block with the voluntary impulse of a finger; when the subjects felt the need to move the fingers of their free hand and wanted to do so, they had to block the watch. The experiment was designed in such a way that the temporal relationship between the potential for preparation, the consciousness of the decision to be made and the execution of the movement could be known. Everything was aimed at knowing when the conscious desire or intention to carry out an action ‘appears’. The results confirm that there are cortical preparation potentials which precede the conscious action which realizes the voluntary movement by approximately 350 milliseconds. If you want to see the experiment, click on the YouTube site: Neuroscience and the Libet experiment.

Apart from these researchers who occasionally lose their wits, is Professor Harari really convinced that consciousness is in the finger? Is it not, by chance, in the brain? It is the brain that sends signals to the body, so free will and consciousness are in the brain, not in the finger. It is the brain that sends the signal to the finger that receives it after 350milliseconds, not the other way around. Sight, in this case, is the main actor, which sends the signal to the brain, which relays it to the finger. If Dude does not see a guy positioned behind him who is about to hit him with a hammer, the brain does not send any signal in advance. Dude is done for.

With Libit’s experiment, therefore, we have to talk about instinctive movements and not about consciousness and free will. If through algorithms we can quantify love and prove that the brain anticipates the caress, it does not mean that love does not exist. Among other things, it seems that the researcher himself, Benjamin Libet, in a moment of lucidity, admitted that the concept of free will continues to exist, since the person retains the conscious power to voluntarily and freely interrupt the movement. 

              Fortunately, at least until now, legislators have distinguished crimes between intentional (meditated), culpable (due to negligence, recklessness) and involuntary (where the harmful event has gone beyond the author’s intention). If they had listened to these experiments, the prisons would be empty and the operating theaters full of brains to be mutilated.

So why professor Harari try to convince his readers that free will does not exist? I have written this many times. Human beings, starting from philosopher to the very last thinking being, defend their ideological and sexual tendencies. Any religion, ideology and philosophy that points the finger at its tendencies must be attacked, destroyed, annihilated, even by embroidering lies that clash with common sense. I guarantee you that if Christianity preached free sex, the very demonisers would become prophets of it.

Hahari, like many rich young men who have existential problems, is a Buddhist adept who has been practicing Vipassana of the Narayan Goenka school for twenty years. Vipassana meditation is about the present moment and involves staying in the here and now for as long as possible. It consists of observing the body and mind attentively. Concentration is achieved through awareness of breathing. It is therefore not surprising that the Israeli historian considers life an illusion and that “the story of human life is that there is no story”. Basically, it all boils down to his bank account. 

Returning to free will, a person’s choices can be influenced by the environment and fashions. In such cases, as the media and schools amply demonstrate, free choice goes out the window. For believers, Jesus Christ is clear as a sunny day: “the truth will make you free”. Anyone who does not seek the truth cannot have an awareness of reality and of himself. They are slaves to deception, instincts, fashion, the environment and, at the limit, to those who tell them that sleeping upside down is good for their health.

According to Harari, man is the only living being capable of imagining and living in fiction. These two characteristics made him different from the macaques and he became what he is today. Through fiction, man has created religions, myths and ideologies that, unlike other animals, have given him the ability to imagine collectively and to form empires and nations.  

Following this thesis, the great thinkers of the last 2500 years were image and fiction makers. It seems to us, however, that they were great researchers of the human soul, of science and medicine. Empires and states were formed, not because the community collaborated, but because capable men established ethical values and disvalues. They knew that without an established order, even the small family unit collapses. Unlike Harari, true thinkers distinguish personal habits and tendencies from social ones. In other words, one does what one wants in one’s own home, but the community needs values and laws if it is not to sink into chaos. Religions and philosophies, whether false or not, were thus established for the survival of society. 

Modern science, for example, was born in Europe, not because people were more intelligent, but because of faith in the Absolute. For the Christian, God is neither chaos nor fiction but a perfect Entity, therefore His work is intelligible and can be studied through research and judgement that only man possesses. This is the key to describing, for example, the motivations that have given the West a development in all fields of knowledge. Not even the oldest cultures of five centuries and more, such as the Chinese and Indians, have possessed the concept of development. On fiction and imagination Harari can only be right if he does not lump other religions, philosophies and ideologies in with Christianity, because through development in all fields of knowledge and the beauty of the arts it has proved not to be fiction, but tangible reality in all respects. 

Without compassion and a sense of the Common Good (which Buddhists do not possess) Christian monks would not have created schools, hospitals, and no one would have taken in the poor, widows, and abandoned children. Religious men and women would not have risked their lives – and would not still risk their lives today – in the most remote places on Earth to free from the deepest ignorance human beings, condemned to slavery for tribal, divine or political reasons. For the Christian, compassion has nothing to do with pity or welfare. It means sharing, solidarity, brotherhood, making oneself available, sense of justice. We have never seen Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, atheists who have spent their lives for the poorest of the poor. Faith has given Europe men who have enriched humanity, such as Dante, Michelangelo, Palladio, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Galilei, Beethoven Mozart, etc. They did not focus on their own breath to achieve inner peace, but on making human life more liveable and rewarding.

The human cooperation Harari talks about has certainly helped development, but it is not the constitutive cause. It was the great minds that shaped societies. Not because, as the Israeli historian says, they were part of a certain community or because they received particular genes from their parents. 

Throughout history we have people who, born slaves or in absolute poverty and in uninspiring environments, have distinguished themselves in all fields of knowledge and art. They may have invented things that millions of university graduates living in stimulating environments never even dreamed of. For example, Leonardo da Vinci was not born in a city where he encountered extraordinary engineers, treatise writers, painters, mathematicians, astronomers, inventors, etc. on every corner.  He was born in the small village of Anchiano, a hamlet of Vinci, an insignificant village inhabited by peasants, conceived by an illegitimate relationship between a notary and a woman of very modest social extraction. It was not algorithms, community or family genes that shaped a man like Leonardo, but innate curiosity, a rare sensitivity and an overflowing desire to understand. The Tuscan genius did not look at his belly button and listen to his breath. He did not shun the  world. He changed it, improving it.

Isaac Newton, who was born into a family of farmers, wrote in his treatise on the Apocalypse: “And if God was so angry with the Jews because they had not examined more diligently the prophecies he had given them to recognize Christ, why should we think that he will excuse us if we do not examine the prophecies he has given us to recognize the Antichrist? For surely to adhere to the Antichrist must be as dangerous and as easy an error for Christians as it was for the Jews to reject Christ. And therefore it is as much our duty to endeavour to be able to recognize him, we who can avoid him, as it was theirs to recognize Christ whom they could follow”.          If this comment had been written by a famous Christian, Harari & C. would have ridiculed him and buried him with insults. But it is difficult to berate one of the greatest scientists in planetary history. Better not to talk about his great faith. Christian, in fact. 

All things considered, Yuval Harari is a true soldier of the establishment. With his approximate notions and good-natured appearance, thanks to Hollywood star publicity, he is poisoning the minds of millions of naive readers. Suffice it to say that he has been invited to Davos, the European Parliament and the most renowned institutions of the mainstream. People like Bill Gates and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg adore him, so much so that the latter interviewed him, see: Zuckerberg Harari interview. You will realize that we are dealing with individuals of staggering intellectual narrowness. If Harari shows at least a superficial historical knowledge, Zuckerberg is the classic parvenu. Listening to the other CEOs of Big tech (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft), the EQ values do not change.   

Narcissistic atheists like Bill Gates, the CEOs of Big tech, as opposed to science giants infused with Christian culture, are creating the most aberrant dictatorship in history. On their digital platforms they obscure comments and videos not aligned with the mainstream, defrauding them economically and of their constitutional rights. Hundreds of bloggers around the world are methodically threatened and blacked out because they do not align with the avalanche of lies spread by the poisonous fumes of the mainstream. To give just one example among many, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling was attacked for insisting that only women menstruate. In Great Britain, Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert, spokeswoman for the national association of midwives and maternity assistants Doula Uk was forced to resign because in one of her Facebook posts she wrote “Only women give birth”.

As unrepentant scoundrels, these billionaires reject science, biology and suppress common sense without batting an eyelid. They do dehumanizing brainwashing, such as Covid-19, masks, lock downs and vaccines. To add to their anti-life and anti-freedom madness, they have decided to annihilate free will, reducing human beings to unconscious algorithms. 

Good work Professor Harari. You are living proof that under the wings of the establishment you can sell poison like apple pie.

Agostino Nobile

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Ecco il collegamento per il libro in italiano.

And here is the link to the book in English. 

Y este es el enlace al libro en español

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Tag: big tech, harari, mainstream, nobile

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