Memes can be best understood in analogy with unicelluar life. In my perception, as a "dialectecal materialist" rather than a Cartesian "All is dead matter" naturalist, I do not see a single cell as an organism. Unicellular reproduction generally results in virtual clones, so a population of unicells is almost as genetically uniform as a multicellular one. These unicells communicate with each other by means of hormones and pheromes, and act as a unit.
Recent studies have shown deep similarities between the way natural language functions among groups and the way other natural systems function (such as a disease virus). Language systems behave as living organisms in the way they maintain homeostasis across their populations. The mechanism by which they transmit the information is the same way group perception is maintained, "chatter", like a cloud of pheromes, which constitutes the routine 90 % of communication. This living being, language, may itself have less awareness than a virus or a photon, or it may have a deeper structure. I have seen a few maps and models which might describe such, but I am literally agnostic about that question. What I am nearly 100% confident of, in terms of verifiable knowledge, is the lifelike behavior of language.
Memes can be best understood in analogy with unicelluar life. In my perception...
Language arose well before individual group consciousness became the norm. The ancestors originally thought by means of images. Image. or archtype dominated awareness prevailed for a long time after we started productively chattering and growing the base of routine universal code. Slowly, individuals bagan to actually use this language internally to think. When this state spread thruough the majority of the popluation, a quantum jump occured. A measure of the difference in mentality between verbal thinkers as they evolved, and surviving image dominated populations, is remembered in stories of soul-less elves, "who know not what they do, or why!" I suspect, such jumps occured time and again as language evolved and or linguistic consciousness devloped. I think some people today are "Philosophical zombies" or "skinnerian robots" and one such variety may be those who still think only in images, archetypes, and gut.
This is my third post tonite if you missed the one at the bottom of page two. I will continue.
From what I have read of the populations of Australia, and to a lesser extent, the Americas, such group onsciousness may have dominated until contact. But it also appears that such mimetic systems, once they have evolved, spread by contagion, transforming even populations that are not yet otherwise cuulturally, or possibly even psychologically adapted to it.
The phenomenae Jayne observed in his work on the bicameral mind was the emergence of the concept embodied in the pronoun "I", which he saw indicative of the emergence of individual consciousness, yet does not appear in the earlist books of Genesis or the entire Illiad. I suspect by this time the change was linguistic, and represented a focusing of individual consciousness so exstreme it made the memes of an individual more important than the group meme. Before this, in the Illiad and Odyssey, they speak of shame, which is something one feels in relation to others. After that, they speak of guilt, which follows one to the wastelands. The actual transition to verbal consciousness, much less its first emergence in some twinspeak, were, I suspect, much earlier.
continued...
What comes next? I am having a hard enough time time figuring out what is going on now. Writing and reading, which reconnects language to visual imagery, made for a powerful intensification of mental imagery. In my own personal experience, I started habitually running an internal dialogue only after I had learned to run one by visualizing imagery to accompany what I read, and words in my thoughts are, on a subliminal level that occasionally makes itself obvious, always accompanied by an image, even if that image is only the letters which spell it. Marshall McLuhan, whose account of historical psychology starts where Jaynes stops, said the printing press was caused by people reading more, rather than visa versa, and that each subsequent media invented revolutionized our thought processes and social relations.
To take any more about the future, I would have to change my analogy for the life-like qualities of language from the "emotional plague" model of Wilhelm Reich to the mimetic ecology theories of Robert Anton Wilson and others, and even then I would just be laying groundwork before I could make any meaningful predictions about the future. All that I can say for sure about the future is that the future is...
>Memes can be best understood in analogy with unicelluar life.
Misunderstanding (and typo) in first sentence
Rest of acres of shit ignored
discursive analysis provides a better framework than this
I am sorry for omitting the "l", I hope you can forgive me my friend
can you elaborate a little, please? are you referring to foucault?
The missing "l" was not as much of a problem as your misunderstanding of meme theory. Memes are not analogous to unicellular life, they are analogous to genes.
Worse than Dawkins.
Never publish.
>Memes are not analogous to unicellular life, they are analogous to genes.
very interesting. care to elaborate further?
what makes you say that? I have not read Dawkins, what is so bad about him?
I know you are really invested in making this bait work, but it isn't working. So you can stop now.
Try harder next time.
nothing about this thread is bait. all I did was copy & paste some gibberish hoping to start a productive discussion about nothing.
the idea of the thread is to have seinfield: the thread. I do not think it's a bad idea. why do you?
I'll bite. Memes originate from a field called memetics, a sort of sister concept to genetics. In the fashion that a "survival of the fittest" pretense governs the development of genes from a biological standpoint, the same goes for memes--the cultural and behavioral equivalent. It's a theory of conditioning-based evolution, basically.
With gibberish this bad? Yes.
who are some theorists in this field you would recommend? of course I am familiar with the work "memetics", but I have not done any reading on it.
Dawkins. And then 9Gag.
Susan Blackmore is one of Dawkins contemporaries and pioneers in the idea. Stirner if you want a system for controlling the memes lest you be controlled. You could argue that the scripts and games of Eric Berne are memetic systems that drive people. Buddhist phenomenology and psychology discusses aspects of them and their formation and mechanism of action, but doesn't come all the way together and identify them as a reproductive system of scripts that propagate by feeding or quelling mental formations such as anxiety or greed and spread by blind action.
>Buddhist phenomenology and psychology discusses aspects of them
Wut?
You mean stuff like "mind weeds"? Or illusions in general?
I figured that using quality gibberish would then in turn inspire a potent discussion, that's why I opted for lower quality gibberish.
>Stirner if you want a system for controlling the memes lest you be controlled.
I've been meaning to get into Stirner for a long time, this may be the final straw
>Buddhist phenomenology and psychology discusses aspects of them and their formation and mechanism of action, but doesn't come all the way together and identify them as a reproductive system of scripts that propagate by feeding or quelling mental formations such as anxiety or greed and spread by blind action.
a member of my family is a practicing buddhist, but sadly I am not familiar with their teaching. could you, very briefly and in layman terms, elaborate to me the connection between buddhist phenomenology and memetics?
what exactly do you mean when you say "buddhist psychology"?
I mean the actual in depth analyses like the 5 aggregates, the skandhas, sankhara, or the shaivist vikalpas. They have the mechanism of action down to a science. Essentially all mental formations are memes in that they survive by taking our attention.
I can't really elaborate on the first question as I've only just started exploring it, but much of Buddhism is dememeing yourself by looking at the root of mental phenomena.
Buddhist psychology generally means theory of mind and its processes.
why thank you. have you read schopenhauer, or what was it that sparked your interest in buddhism?
>I have not read Dawkins
>care to elaborate further?
my further elaboration is that you should read Dawkins
no more b8 now please
Crippling anxiety and existential nihilism.