This fellow is deeply engaged in what makes humans, humans? How did an animal in a godless universe dare to somewhat transcend the bounds that other animals can't cross? He speaks of our ability to grasp fictional narratives as one of the main drivers of our transcendence. How did we, no more than jellyfish or woodpeckers arrive at our station in natural order?
They are all fine questions, but he then eliminates his only possible answer. This is not necessarily a bad thing because even futile searches tell you where not to look for answers again.
Our ability to imbibe fiction, to allow fiction to drive a fundamental cohesion between humans is essential. I've been banging on about this for years and here on HC. We owe our existance to acts of creation that are 100% abstract. They are completely opaque to our reasoning, so what do we have left? World building via fictions as a mental construct, fictions within fictions within fictions and then we are bound by a suspension of disbelief.
Religion knows nothing of God and yet look at the countless narratives that have been accepted over the ages. We have constructed heavens and hells, demons and angels and given them complete back-stories and produced vast fundamental tales that absolutely fly in the face of scientific, evidential truths, but this still does not faze these religious bodies who embrace an even more simplistic fiction in which snakes talk and women are made from ribs and planets can be flooded to the tops of the highest mountains. And even those who know that these fictions are a bridge too far, still in some way accept that certain people need their fictions to be so dumbed down that they can swallow them whole without chewing.
There are degrees of fictions from entry level fundamental religion where lambs and lions frolic together up to scientific realities which still cause us to establish more elaborate fictions.
We painted on cave walls to make tangible the forces of life. We established language which is in itself an abstract. A rock is only a rock in the sense that we have a common acceptance that a collection of sounds made in the voice box that produces the sound of the word, rock, then directs us to a specific object.
So Yuval is right to question the rise of the human condition. For me it is knowledge and the human state is relative and conditional. It requires moving the human form firstly the emergence of life, through transmutation to become a viable organism with a comprehensive mind and then the human mind must travel from the auroral darkness of ignorance into the light of reason and subjective justice.
Why and how, he asks and then eliminates God because we self-created? I think not. If we are not our own cause then it is not wise to eliminate any possibilities of causation.
He has exposed the complex details of what differentiates humans from jellyfish and yet his prejudice has removed the only answer from his reach. He has left out God, so he will never arrive at the answer he seeks.
