>What I have been thinking of is a meta-meme, loosely based on the
>Prisoners Dilemma and Brin's essay about memes. It goes roughly like
>this: "Accept the presence of all belief systems which accept your
>presence", essentially a meme of tolerance. Hosts with this meme would
>have reason to defend themselves together against all hosts who do not
>accept it (or groups with the meme but incompatible beliefs), a distinct
>advantage since it both provides protection, an internal memetic ecology
>for other memes to spread and moves the conflict to the meta-meme level
>instead (where there is presumably less competition).
>
>What do you think?
I think the meta-meme has a lot of merit from a game theoretic perspective
(as you alluded to by your mention of the Prisoners Dilemma). Tolerating
other complexes that tolerate you is analogous to cooperating on the
first move. Still (if I may anthropomorphize a bit), I wonder if there
are any other religions that would tolerate Virus if they really knew
about it.
-- David McFadzean dbm@merak.com Memetic Engineer http://www.merak.com/~dbm/ Merak Projects Ltd.