Yuval Noah Harari
Dataism as the emerging religion of the data age — humans as biological algorithms, history as the cumulative storytelling of fictions
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (Hebrew 2011, English 2014) made Harari a global public intellectual; "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" (2015) extended the analysis forward into the data age and named "Dataism" as the emerging religion in which information flow becomes the supreme value. "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (2018) addresses the present; "Nexus" (2024) returns to the long history of information networks. The substantive philosophical thesis: humans are biological algorithms whose evolutionary success has been built on the unique capacity to construct and believe in shared fictions (gods, nations, money, human rights); the AI revolution of the early twenty-first century is uncoupling intelligence from consciousness and threatens to render the humanist framework — with its central commitment to inner experience as the source of authority — obsolete. Harari trained as a medievalist (PhD Oxford 2002 on Renaissance military memoirs) and is a practising Vipassana meditator who credits two-hour daily meditation and two-month annual retreats as central to his thinking.
Key works
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011/2014)
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)
- Sapiens: A Graphic History (2020 onward)
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks (2024)
Declared Influences
Dataism / Information Ontology 40%
Naturalism 25%
Buddhism 20%
Constructivism 10%
Nihilism 5%
Harari coined the philosophical term "Dataism" in Homo Deus (the term had earlier journalistic uses) and is the school's most institutionally consequential expositor. The thesis that information flow becomes the supreme value in the data age is his.
"Dataism… declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing." (Homo Deus, ch. 11)
A working evolutionary-naturalist substrate — Sapiens reads human history through the lens of evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics, and ecological constraint, with no appeal to supernatural agency. Harari is explicit that humans are animals.
"There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." (Sapiens, ch. 2)
Harari is a practising Vipassana meditator (he credits S. N. Goenka as his teacher) and integrates Buddhist categories — non-self, the distinction between thinking and direct observation, the analysis of craving — into his public philosophical writing.
"Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving." (21 Lessons, ch. 20)
A working constructivism about money, nations, gods, human rights, and the law — all are inter-subjective fictions that gain practical reality through shared belief. The cognitive-revolution thesis of Sapiens depends on this analysis.
"Two Catholics who have never met can join the Crusades because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh." (Sapiens, ch. 2)
Diagnosed rather than embraced. Harari's framework — that meaning is made by humans through shared fictions, that there is no cosmic meaning waiting to be discovered, that humanism may be the next fiction to dissolve — has been read by some critics as inviting a twenty-first-century nihilism. Harari himself recommends the Buddhist path as the alternative.
"You probably won't hear it from the gurus or the pundits, but the best advice I can give you is to follow your heart only if you have first hacked your heart." (21 Lessons, ch. 21)
Internal Tensions
The simultaneous diagnostician-of-Dataism and Buddhist-meditation-practitioner positions are read by critics as logically uneasy: if humans are biological algorithms, what is the meditation practice for? Harari's answer is that meditation provides access to direct observation of mental processes that the human-as-algorithm framework otherwise obscures — a working pragmatism that does not require resolving the metaphysical question. His political commentary on Israeli and global politics has drawn criticism from both right and left; his public-intellectual reach has been criticised by academic historians for over-confident generalisation while being defended by his publishers for accessibility.
I. Time
Conventional modern. The historical time-horizon of Sapiens is millions of years; the future-oriented Homo Deus is centuries to a millennium.
Attributes
II. Space
Conventional modern cosmological.
Attributes
III. Matter
Emergent within an informational ontology — biological substrate matters, but the substantive analysis is at the level of data flows.
Attributes
IV. Observer
A single embodied person constituted as a biological algorithm. Both agency: nominally autonomous, in fact heavily determined by evolutionary and informational structures. Metaphysical agency: None. Constructed moral authority — humanist values are themselves historical-constructive achievements, not natural-law derivations.
Attributes
V. Energy
Conventional modern.
Attributes
VI. Information
Substantival and discrete — the data-flow ontology of Dataism. Cosmic-scale conserved; personal-identity non-conserved (Harari's Buddhist sympathies and his Dataist analysis converge on this).
Attributes
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Yuval Noah Harari authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 202 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to Yuval Noah Harari's — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
How Yuval Noah Harari resolves each dilemma
57 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 15 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
4 mainstream positions
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
32 mainstream positions
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Films Referencing This Persona (8)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.