Why is the coronavirus beneficial for humanity? Why is the coronavirus the best thing that has happened to us? Why is the coronavirus a blessing? Why is the coronavirus good for technology? Why is the coronavirus good for culture? Why is the coronavirus good for capitalism? Why is the coronavirus good for thinking? And most importantly - why is the coronavirus good for the philosophy of learning and the Netanya school of thought. On development during Sabbaths, holidays and in isolation
What really influences the development of the world - is it technology, economy, politics, or perhaps some of the types of explanations common in historical research? If we sit at home (during the coronavirus period, for example) and do nothing, and let's say we lose about half a year or maybe even a year (let's assume) of global activity until the end of the crisis. Does the world lose development? Is, for example, technology waiting and delayed? Are the economy or science stuck? Will all of history from here on happen a year late, and will the year 2100 actually be 2099? And if not, and in the range of 2100 nothing will change, what is the significance of a year in the world's development? Is it possible that it has no significance? If so, why and how does the world develop at all? Is economic growth really declining? - This is not about the short term (where it's obvious) - but in the long term, won't there be increased growth later, after the crisis, that will quickly catch up to what we lost during the crisis? (This is a known phenomenon, for example after wars). And if so, what is the significance of all the factors for growth and development, if even a whole year of paralysis changes nothing?
If a real epidemic, like the Black Death, which destroys tens of percent of society's human capital, is not considered in retrospect as a regression in world development but as a catalyst - what are the real factors for development? And why in certain cultures is it accelerated, and in others it stops and they fall behind? Is it a collection of random factors? Why, in fact, was there more development in the West? (Hopefully this is clear at this stage in world history). Why, in fact, is development accelerating? (Hopefully this is also clear). When did it actually start to accelerate, and why? Can we, for example, identify which revolution was more critical than others? For instance - was the printing revolution more critical than the scientific revolution or perhaps the industrial revolution, and created a higher coefficient for acceleration, or perhaps it was the discovery of the New World, or the Renaissance, or secularization, or the Enlightenment, or perhaps the Copernican revolution (Kant or the original Copernicus, you choose)?
And in general - what is the value, if any, of comprehensive theories, or comprehensive descriptions, like Yuval Noah Harari? Is it inherent charlatanism, which is gaining popularity in a global era, or is it a preliminary field that is still searching for its basic theories, like biology before evolution? And in general, is it a coincidence that evolutionary development created historical development, or is there a deep connection between them (when it's clear that history is not evolution)? The same questions we asked about Western culture can be asked about the development of culture and the beginning of history itself, and try to identify what is actually the critical factor (is there even one? Can there even be one? - Writing? The empire? The transition to idol worship?...). And just as we asked about the revolutions in the West, we can ask about the revolutions in human development: Is it the linguistic revolution, agricultural, the emergence of intelligence, sociality, tool use, development of the prefrontal cortex, the emergence of consciousness, love, unique human sexuality, the emergence of art, etc. - what are the turning points, and can we even identify the critical ones among them (and perhaps quantify it), and if we can't - why, and what is the significance of that?
Similarly, one could ask about evolution itself, and look for turning points within it, whether it's the emergence of eukaryotes, mitochondria, the Cambrian explosion, the presumed transition from RNA to DNA, the emergence of mammals, amphibians, the emergence of the brain, sexual reproduction, the very creation of life, and so on and so forth - where exactly is the turning point, which apparently didn't happen in countless other places in the galaxy? And how can we describe development more comprehensively, without turning the explanation into a catalogical collection of random details (and random mutations!) of billions of years of evolution?
These questions arise, in an almost equivalent manner, also in current physics. It's not just about the variety of theories on the development of the universe, attempts to explain why its development is accelerating (i.e., what is the source of dark energy - about 70% of the universe), how symmetries were broken and particles gained their current mass, why time flows only forward, and what topology the beginning of the universe took - all these are natural developmental questions for natural science. But as physics tries to progress towards its primary foundations - it turns out that the big questions, like combining the two great theories of relativity and quantum into a unified theory - are actually developmental questions, relating to the beginning of the universe's development, and also the meta-question about the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, from a wide landscape of possible universes - is a developmental question, and they have exactly the same types of problems as in economic, historical and evolutionary development. Why, in fact, these laws of nature and this development - is the universe special? Can we define which laws or constants are critical factors for the development of an interesting universe, or one that has life, and therefore caused it, and which are random? Can there be other universes and how do they look and develop - what are the turning points in the development of a universe? What caused the laws of nature to be tuned to such values, some hair-raisingly precise for the creation of life (the fine-structure constant for example)? Are the constants of nature really constant, or are they developing, and how?
And we won't be surprised that the same developmental questions in sciences also arise in literature, art and culture (for example, the weight of masterpieces in development, what causes certain genres to rise and others to decline - is it just fashion or are there essential internal factors, on the importance or unimportance of the lone genius as a turning point, whether culture would have developed in these directions anyway without random achievements, whether there is something special about Western culture, whether culture is developing faster than before or vice versa, and what contributes to cultural development - and what doesn't). All these developmental questions, in various fields, repeat themselves: why did this happen, why did this particular developmental branch succeed and not another, is there something predictable about it, and can long-term development be generalized to more basic principles than countless cases? For example, the "why specifically" question in physics would ask whether our universe is unique, and this uniqueness led to its successful development (life is a kind of "achievement" of the universe), and the "why specifically" question in culture or history would ask why specifically Western culture: what is its uniqueness, and what in this uniqueness explains its success. Not to mention the most threatening biological "why specifically" question, known as the Fermi paradox, which distills the question of development to its most threatening limit: if we don't have an answer to the "why specifically" question - we shouldn't survive. Because why did we specifically develop, and there are no aliens?
If so, perhaps we should actually ask: why are these questions arising today, and creating widespread interest in searching for answers? It's not just the "Yuval Noah Harari" phenomenon, but also much more serious and challenging people than him, like Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum and Prof. Joel Mokyr and Prof. Avner Ben-Zaken and others, who are currently creating comprehensive developmental theories with enormous scale implications, from which deep developmental ideas can be derived. If we generalize all these intellectual and scientific efforts in various fields - we can call this big question: the question of development. And if so, why, 150 years after the theory of evolution, has this question become especially burning, and influencing not only the content of intellectual discourse, but the very form of intellectual thinking, even of the general public? On the type of questions being asked?
Why do people seek big explanations, in an era of countless details and information - this is probably a self-answering question. But why specifically developmental thinking? Why even in computer science, is the idea of algorithm development so central (and known to us as the field of computational learning)? Even in mathematics - the kingdom of timeless eternity - there are developmental ideas regarding (for example) the central question of creating prime numbers and their distribution. And wouldn't it be correct to conceptualize the field of complexity, the conceptual basis of computer science, as a question of the development of computation, and what are the critical factors in it, as opposed to the random ones? And what characterizes specifically efficient development (P), and distinguishes it from that which is not (NP)? (The most basic spiritual question in computer science - and perhaps in the world - which probably requires a complete intellectual revolution: this is not just another question in mathematics, but the number one fundamental question, and its solution is beyond our intellectual horizon).
The most obvious answer to the question of the rise of developmental thinking and the era of developmental questions is that something happened to development: it is accelerating. Development is noticeable to the eye, and it is both frightening and exciting, and we are interested in understanding how development works, and how trends in it operate. We are riding the tiger, which is no longer dozing or dragging lazily, but galloping - and we want to understand how to control it, and if it's even possible, because it seems we've lost control - and development controls us and is stronger than us. The tiger is leading us - and not us it - and we don't know where, and it seems that the answer may not please us, but we can't stop, and we don't even want to. Therefore: it's so important to understand the tiger.
We can no longer regard the development of technology as an independent force of nature, which we don't understand but enjoy its results, and trust that we've always enjoyed them as it happened (more or less) until now - we want to understand development, but we lack a proper conceptual framework for it. We move between over-generalizations and excessive detail lacking the ability to generalize, between unbridled charlatans and overly restrained responsible researchers, from whose level of detail of insights we learn nothing, and on the other hand those from whose level of detail of insights - and predictions - we can learn everything. Yuval Noah Harari is not such a central icon because of his personal uniqueness or marketing genius (he's quite an ordinary person) - but because of the need for Yuval Noah Harari, which is not related to him at all. He is the symbol for a certain type of intellectual yearning that has become central: not to succeed big - but to explain big. To shorten the history of humanity.
If so, we must ask what is the conceptual framework with which we should approach the question of development, now that we've identified it as a central question, which breaks our main types of explanation: the detailed, the narrative, the statistical, the scientific in the form of law, etc. No one, for example, believes anymore in the naive possibility of finding scientific regularity in history. The attempt to find such regularity failed not only on the scientific level, but even more so on the social level: after Nazism and Communism, no one wants to approach simplistic explanations, and certainly not deterministic ones, because the damage of these explanations has been proven (surprisingly!) to be exceptional in the number of people it eliminates - it turns out that the power of developmental explanations is enormous. Therefore, the aversion to general developmental explanations was very strong since the mid-twentieth century - and only in our days, with the acceleration and the rise of the question of futurism with greater force (including post-humanism), it is rising again in its full intellectual power. Let's note the dominance of the developmental question: the very engagement with the developmental question produces from it a developmental question: why specifically now? And developmental answers. Sometimes it seems that we are no longer capable of thinking outside the framework of the burning developmental question and the burner it has opened behind it, which sometimes illuminates and sometimes consumes, without a proper and valid conceptual framework.
The answer proposed by the Netanya school to the developmental question is one, and it stands out in the power of its conceptual strength and its simplicity: if we want to understand development - we need to look at development as learning. Since the theoretical side of the answer has been elaborated in the collection of essays
we will focus here on applying the answer to the questions we opened with. For this purpose, we will ask an opening question: Did the Jews lose progress because of the Sabbath? For example, did the Jews lose economic development and growth compared to other societies that didn't rest one day a week? Let's imagine two factories, one resting on the Sabbath and the other working - it's clear that over time one factory will develop a cumulative production lag, and therefore an increasing economic lag compared to factory two. After seven years, one factory will be a full year behind in revenues, investments and output compared to the other, and the gap will only grow over time. It's clear to us that this description doesn't fit the development of a society, or historical development, and the question is why: what really causes development and affects its speed, or in our conceptualization - how does learning occur and what affects its speed.
What happens during the coronavirus is that there are two types of processes, or in abstraction two types of brains, each affected differently by the shutdown. There are processes in which no learning takes place, like an industrial production process, and these processes stop, and open an increasing lag over time. But these processes are not the ones that really affect the speed of human development - because they are not learning processes. The sources of human development are not rooted in creating economic value, but in something else entirely - in the overall learning of humanity as a system. If we break this down, for the sake of illustration, into individual brains, we'll find that human development doesn't happen when the brain does what it already knows how to do, but when it learns something new - and better: innovates something in the world, that is, innovates something for the system. That's where the learning of the system takes place.
Technological or economic or historical development happens, for example, at the moment when one of the brains in the system reaches new thinking, and each brain has a limited speed at which it can do this. There are those who are not capable at all, and these people indeed contribute nothing to general learning and history - and come and go from the world as they came, without developmental-learning importance. But even the shared developmental effort of all brains - the learning effort - is fundamentally limited because of the limited ability of every human brain for new learning, as it is driven precisely by the power of this learning ability. This is actually the variable that controls development - the speed of learning. This speed is of course influenced at the systemic level by many factors, since it's a system: the learning speed of individuals (which is influenced by their perceptions of innovation and their learning tools, like the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment or skepticism, and their human capital, including - God forbid - their intelligence), the ability to preserve past learning and spread it in the system (for example: language, writing, printing, journalism, electronic communication, the Internet, social network, etc.), the system's ability to block innovation or its desire to encourage it (capitalism, the start-up ethos, the scientific community, the republic of letters, and so on), and more.
For example: technological development is not an internal force of nature to history, or a product of science, or of the economy (or vice versa) - all these are products of learning, and specific learning domains. But the force that drives the economy or technology (for example) is not the monetary incentive itself. The incentive may encourage learning and increase the likelihood that it will occur (and much more so - the likelihood that it will be realized and spread in the system), but it doesn't create the learning itself. There may be an incentive - and there will be no learning, the solution will not be found, because the brain didn't learn, because it was, for example, educated in conservative and fixed thinking. Even a scientific perception itself doesn't create the development of technology or the economy, because there may be a new perception in science - and it won't translate into learning in practical fields, because the interest is not accepted, or because it requires more perceptual changes (which are not scientific), or any other learning-blocking reason (for example: lack of incentive). Even the competitive structure itself or the market doesn't create learning - it only enhances it, and the likelihood that it will be realized, and even creates good thinking patterns for learning in the brain (like considering alternatives), but nothing replaces learning itself as the force behind development, but only enables it.
Therefore, if technology is developing at an increasing speed - we will identify its source in increasing learning ability, which causes exponential acceleration (because learning causes more learning, including learning how to learn). And if the West demonstrated exceptional development - we will identify this in its learning ability. And if evolution changed phase several times - we will identify this in new learning abilities that were added each time. There were many changes that created man out of evolution, but this phase jump has one comprehensive explanation - a jump in the learning ability of man as a species, which is man's advantage over animal learning (whose innovation approaches zero). This learning ability is what created a period where the speed of learning is much higher (by orders of magnitude), and there is also acceleration in it (it's difficult to talk about significant acceleration in evolution before man, and if there is, it stems from the increasing complexity which is itself a learning process). If there is any natural division of history into periods - it is a division according to different learning speeds and accelerations. And what is the innovation of life itself in relation to other phenomena in the universe? Only learning - very inefficient compared to human learning - called evolution. Learning is the fundamental principle of development in the world. And the conceptualization of development as learning solves all the questions we opened with.
For example, the coronavirus itself stopped the economy, and also stopped all institutionalized technological development (the kind that requires high technology, which doesn't happen at home). One might have thought that it indeed created a halt in development, and naturally ask the series of opening questions. But do they sound like valid questions if we replace the word development with learning? Would we have thought that the coronavirus stopped learning in the world? Learning is happening in full force all the time, even on the Sabbath, and maybe especially on the Sabbath. In fact, a different kind of time, or any change, is actually a catalyst for learning. Here, this article was written precisely because of the coronavirus. The epidemic asks questions, gives time for thinking, and takes things out of their usual context (a known trick for creativity), and allows time for writing and dissemination. Is it possible that the coronavirus actually contributes to learning? Is it possible that a sabbatical year actually contributes to economic development, in the long run, just as the Sabbath may not help the Jew in the short economic term, but certainly it cannot be said that the Jews were less economically successful than the Gentiles? Even the least creative people - the coronavirus filled with ideas like a pomegranate, and they indeed flooded social networks with them, developed models, learned biology, became interested in economics, read graphs, filled gaps in mathematics they hadn't touched since high school, and specialized in public policy and regulation. Who knows how many genius ideas were conceived during the coronavirus period, which we'll only hear about in the future? As the viral post asks: Isaac Newton invented calculus, the theory of gravity and Newtonian mechanics in a year and a half when he was hiding from an epidemic - what did you invent during the coronavirus?
Yes, during the coronavirus a lot of books were read, and maybe more than (say) in the two years before it, and probably also written. The home stay also almost necessarily imparted - like throwing a child into water to learn to swim - invaluable skills of self-management and self-learning in all age groups of the population. I even bet that the children who stayed at home - and at least those from the top decile in their learning abilities, which is more important for future learning than all the other deciles combined - received learning several times more quality from their parents than from the education system (all over the world). But the main thing - it's not just (and mainly) about more time for thinking and personal learning. It's also about the increase in beneficial forms of learning in the system, that is - in systemic learning. The coronavirus is the great victory of the network, and of distance learning, and of remote work and remote collaboration - that is, of the ability to spread learning in the system. The coronavirus is also the great victory of the learning method called capitalism (the only method that disconnects the expressions hunger and epidemic), and of globalization and international cooperation and the exit from the narrow perception of nationalism. Not because exceptional international cooperation happened in it (on the contrary) - but because the form of thinking, all over the globe really, in parallel and in synchronization, became for the first time one that sees the entire world system as what it is: one big learning system.
All inhabitants of the world understand that the spread operates as a system and so do the ways of dealing with it: all over the world they compare the performance of countries (the new world competition), are interested in foreign news, in the global economy, and everyone also knows that the effort for a solution is scientific (the most systematic learning method of all), all-human and cross-border. Every stupid viral video from isolation that runs all over the globe and every additional news item on the subject of the coronavirus contribute to the view of all humanity in its own eyes as a species, and to the erasion of differences, and to the imprinting in consciousness of our identity as the human species, and not just as Russian, or Hindu, or black. Only a common enemy (and preferably of the existential kind) can unite human beings, and in the absence of aliens - we have coronavirus, and we're all in the same boat. Everyone understands that the threat or solution can come from anywhere: from India, France, Israel, or maybe Argentina. And everyone understands that it's not their religion or nation or particular belief principles that are the relevant variables for understanding the situation and getting out of the situation, but the speed of global learning - which competes with the speed of the virus. Only when human learning catches up with evolutionary learning - will we return to normal productive activity, and much less learning-oriented, as we are accustomed to.