Re: virus: Memetic sex

Tony Hindle (t.hindle@joney.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 28 Feb 1997 07:21:34 +0000


>>Dave pape wrote

>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...
Yesterday I thought we were the nerve cells of the meta
organism. Today I think we are the cancer cells.
>
>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.
Isnt all this another way of saying more complex memes
evolve in our own personal meme-spaces (minds).
>> What are memes in this context? neurotransmitters?
>>perhaps Electric pulses?
>
>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.
Ok. What is in the conscious awareness part of the metamind
lately? Millenium anxiety, Global warming, Aids, Life on mars (the
metamind is lonely and wants desperately to meet another).
I do like to stretch an analogy to it's limits, until it
snaps, flinging bits of broken analogy everywhere.
Tony Hindle.