Re: virus: Memetic sex

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Thu, 27 Feb 1997 19:26:04 GMT


>From: Tony Hindle <t.hindle@joney.demon.co.uk>
>Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 02:19:38 +0000
>Subject: Re: virus: Memetic sex
>
>Dave pape wrote
>> When you think of organisms as kind
>>of like ecologies (interacting colony networks) it's not so hard to think of
>>the Earth as behaving like a kind of huge meta-organism (which is Lovelock's
>>Gaia theory, a theory that struggles because its main media proponents are
>>shit British pop-techno band The Shamen).
> And the most sophisticated "cell" in the earth meta-
>organism is a human being. Human beings are the nerve cells of
>the meta-organism. I am one nerve cell and you are another. This
>e-mail (and others tonight) is my axon touching your dendrite.
>The internet is a powerful psychoactive stimulant for the
>meta-organism.

This is the "Megamind"/"Gaia-mind" thing again... Keeps cropping up man...
in my usual anti-human manner, I'm not sure we're the ONLY neurons. I reckon
any nervous-systemed organism that interacts with any other is kind of
involved in the process, but at a really shit and localised level. I think
the history of human cultural evolution has been the history of a
meta-nervous system developing broader and broader linkages between (groups
of) neurons. Like a single brain does... kind of... erm...

I think that as you grow older, you tend to link simple ideas together to
make more complex, abstract ideas. This is like associations forming between
ideas, and so is (is it?) a bit like groups of nerve cells becoming
associated into bigger meta-groups. The funky thing is, it's also the same
diagram as villages becoming linked to form towns... towns to form nations
to form continents...

> What are memes in this context? neurotransmitters?
>perhaps Electric pulses?
> I await you axon.

Ooo... if the analogy's still holding, I'd actually say that memes are the
encoded information being passed across synapses, and the transmission
medium would be sound/electrical signals etc.

Dave Pape
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