I love the idea that "consciousness" is a self replicating idea that we as humans have learned somewhere in our past and spread to each other like a virus.
The idea that positive memes can improve the human race over time gives me hope for the future as an antidote distopia. :D
That we ever felt certain we knew what things meant was the problem that’s being cured.
I am optimistic that the subculture of memes attempting to produce inspirational and philosophical thought, although now perhaps mostly mired in cliche, is the grandest crowd-sourced thought experiment in history. It will evolve as the lowest common denominator is raised in complexity and I think will eventually surpass in intellectual insight all previous systems of thought by virtue alone of the number of people contributing and contemplating its output.
It's a great meme, but memes are only good for estimating the future, and while the future can indeed be strongly influenced by the fact that much of human cognition is meme-based, there are also many other influences on it.
This and many other pieces of very useful knowledge are there for the taking in the metaphysical realm, just as was the case hundreds of years ago in the physical realm, prior to the rise of science (a metaphysical phenomenon itself).
It makes me think of how anti-human, self-hatred focused (all notions that humans are a virus derive from self-hatred first, without exception), and irrational those memes are, since humans are nature. Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.
I feel like memes become dominants when negative communication starts to overwhelm positive contributions. Deep thought is costly; creating and re-using memes are effectual communication for ever-decreasing depth of thought in high noise environments.
On a tangent, I can see a connection between the concepts 'meme' and 'mime'. I suspect they both involve mirror neurons. Viral memes spread by being relatable.
Glad to hear you aren't the only person thinking of the mind virus idea!
Exactly what you said. Once you accept one toxic thought, it tends to branch out into other decisions. Unfortunately there are many, many memes out there ready to cause an infection.
To be specific I'm talking about those image memes.
"Memes" as an explanation for the collective software of the human species is not such a bad idea. Here is some art, music and poetry by Burroughs and Anderson:
I don't think memes are profound, but I do think that having this crucible in which new memes are created, with the best spreading from there to the rest of the internet via Tumblr, Facebook, etc. is pretty awe inspiring.
That's what memes are, aren't they? A prison for your mind. I'm sure corporations and governments are already researching how to exploit the viral nature of memes. It's inception, except we're awake (arguably). Social consciousness is gone, replaced by tiny "nano"-ideas that spread faster than an Asian woman's legs for a white dude.[0]
(Adding the source so dang doesn't accuse me of incivility when my speech reflects reality. I know HN is a no fun allowed zone, but I couldn't resist.)
I think this is characteristic of the time we are in. People, being connected by the internet, have a new level of awareness about the world around us.
We don’t yet (collectively) know what to do with this knowledge. It is a reorienting time. Memes are one way people are trying to orient, they are probes being sent out to encounter reality.
But I agree with what you’re hinting at, we will step out of this place with concrete meaningful steps. And science is a very good way to find meaning.
>I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it "not education".
The kind of memes I'm referring to transmit spontaneously, though no doubt intentional cultivation is beneficial in some cases. There's a technical term due to Daniel Dennett: synanthropic memes. These are extremely sticky behaviours/ideas that thrive autonomously in the presence of humans, just as some biological species do, e.g. pigeons, rats, barn swallows. Some are bad. For example, swearing, bullying and perhaps even certain motor tics are memetic and these are considered bad by many.
Our ideas about education are pretty messed up and thus we ultimately have some disturbing realities to face, quite apart from the mounting student debt :-/ Hopefully there will be a clearing up if and when we develop AGI and thus gain a better understanding of how the mind works.
I don't think that's so much an adaptive aspect of human societies as it is a result of the sort of memes that are effective at propagating themselves. If you are a meme that is facing selective pressures towards persisting for as long as possible, you'll fare best if you exploit human psychology such that you're very hard to get rid of and invoke behavior in the people that carry you that is oppressively dogmatic and ideally prevents the sort of exploratory behavior that might see you replaced by another meme.
The original meaning of meme from Richard Dawkins was a mind virus and people still aren’t understanding how damaging and transmissible unhealthy ones are. This paper is a perfect example of them occurring in the real world.
I love the idea that "consciousness" is a self replicating idea that we as humans have learned somewhere in our past and spread to each other like a virus.
The idea that positive memes can improve the human race over time gives me hope for the future as an antidote distopia. :D
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