Utku Kaynar
Three: The Courage to Know
Saturday, November 10, 2018, San Jose, California
Ada,
In my previous letter, I said a few things about the history of life and humanity.
The right conditions arose, and this insignificant ape not only climbed to the top of its entire planet's food chain but also built a great civilization over which it ruled absolutely. A civilization in which all the planet's resources—water, soil, air, and other living things—came to serve human purposes.
In this letter, I will explain how that could happen: how humans—this insignificant ape—managed to reach the top of the planet's food chain, the abilities they used to get there, and how those abilities can help you. I am telling you this so that you will know what can and cannot make your life flourish within the human civilization you belong to.
My girl, science has shown that the number of lasting social relationships a person can maintain in their life is around 150. Yes, only 150. We call this Dunbar's number. So how did people capable of maintaining only 150 meaningful relationships manage to hold together cities of a million people and a planet of billions without everything falling apart?
The secret lies in our ability, unlike other living things, to create complex stories and believe in them. That does not make these imagined stories absolutely true, but humanity is the only species bound together by the power of shared stories it believes in. What sets us apart from other species, lets us build increasingly complex social orders, and enables us to sustain them is the stories we tell one another and believe.
Power and Imagination - Yuval Noah Harari
All the systems you belong to and live within essentially contain an ideal state described by human beings. On our journey toward a more advanced civilization, we created and believed in stories that were increasingly better, more believable, and more conducive to a livable life. Such as the idea that all people are equal and free.
In other words, the most important thing that sets humans apart from other living things is imagination.
The second thing that distinguishes humans from other living things is the ability to follow their reason—in other words, the courage to know.
Ada, we were born into a vast loneliness and uncertainty. From that condition, step by step and stage by stage, we reached our present level of understanding of the universe, the Earth, and ourselves.
For example, we know for certain that the force holding objects in the universe together is the same force that keeps your feet on the ground. We call it gravity. We know that, reduced to your smallest parts, you and the stars you see in the sky are made of the same material. You read that correctly: humans, stars, and planets are made of the same stuff, all of them different combinations of the same atoms.
How do we know all this? Because generations before you, someone dared to follow their reason and accept only what science and reason showed them. They then published what they had learned, and in this way that knowledge became the common property of all humanity.
The third thing that distinguishes humans from other living things is the ability to spread knowledge. We gained this ability with the invention of writing. No community of living things other than humans can convey the knowledge one of its subgroups has acquired—or the fiction it has created—to other communities in an organized form. This invention is the fundamental means by which science, religions, and systems spread throughout the world.
Humans became human because they could use reason to turn what they dreamed up in their imagination into knowledge, and spread it through writing.
You will encounter all three of these ideas again and again throughout your life. You will witness the exploitation of imagination, reason, and the circulation of knowledge. We generally call the consequences of this exploitation ignorance. Sadly, at the time I am writing this, billions of people in the world live without knowing or thinking, blindly believing in things.
View the original linked media on Medium
Ada, apart from the Earth and the universe you see around you, everything is made by humans. That means it can all be dismantled, changed, and rebuilt in a better way.
So this is the advice I want to give you in this letter: never hesitate to be curious about more, to learn, and to share what you know. If human civilization is to create better stories for its own well-being, the way forward will be through greater knowledge of ourselves and the universe, greater empathy, and greater love.
Be curious, learn, and share, my girl.
With love,
Dad.