Re: virus: Autocatalytic Idea System Examples

Chitren Nursinghdass (Chitren.Nursinghdass@ens.insa-rennes.fr)
Sat, 31 May 1997 13:38:37 +0200


> Questioning the justification for such a meme's existence
>("is there such a thing as a soulmate?"), rather than utilizing that
>adaptive quality of the new meme, gets you where? Nowhere.

I think it enables you to juggle with a "new" meme set or space as
Richard brodie calls it. You get on to philosophyzing about the
possiblity or not of existence of "soulmate" and explore a whole new area
of link memes.

> You're still
>stuck in your rut, sitting alone in a cafe thinking too much. But if you
>provisionally except the new meme and *test* it instead of trying to
>justify it using an overabundance of reason, you'll soon find that your
>interest in discovering if a new person you meet (or have yet to meet) is
>that elusive "soulmate", has motivated you to get off you ass (and out of
>your rut) and talk to people you might never have bothered meeting
>otherwise. And, as a result, your memeset gets changed and maybe you
>attach distinction memes to someone that include the newly defined
>"soulmate".
>
>Maybe it was just a flaw in your example, but I think the root of
>stagnation lies more in rigorously checking new memes against existing
>ones than in not thinking about them. It's a question of theory vs.
>practice, I think.

I think ou're right and I'm right as well, because in fact the only difference
is what we mean by stagnation :

I was talking of stagnation of the meme set, that is you have a stagnation
of the autocatalytic set of memes, whereas you are talking about
stagnation from the genetic point of view, that is ACTION deriving
from less time spent in justifying.

I wasn't speaking of ACTION at his level at all. I was just talking
about meme set expansion.

Of course, the same time spent in justifying new memes (applying a
virus filter) could be used to find a person with which I could fuse
my chromosomes and produce many small mutable forms of meself, yep
(action in such a way as to benefit the genes).

But that wasn't the subject of the discussion.

Yash.