From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Mon Jan 20 1997 - 13:02:54 MST
Roderick A. Carder-Russell wrote:
>
> Forgive me if I misinterpret you Mike, but it seems as though you
> missed the point...
>
> >
> > While Christianity's main meme of "do unto others as you would have done
> > to you" is a very good meme [snip]
>
> I was not making reference to the ethical value of the meme, but
> rather it's ability to spread. Christianity could state "kill all farm
> animals and torture your neighbor continually", and whereas that wouldn't
> be "ethically" good, as long as the meme spreads and people follow the
> word, it is a "good" meme.
>
Thisis understood. Where I am coming from is that everthing humans do is
done with the best of intentions (possibly excepting an extremely small
fraction that know that they are doing evil and willfully continue), and
that, as it is said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Successful memes are so because they are seen by a large enough
percentage as beneficial and for the good of all. A meme that is
recognized by at least a majority to be wholly evil will never be
successful. While one may counter that communism is such an example of a
successful evil meme that was opposed by a large percentage, this is
not the case. For starters, communism has enjoyed nowhere near the
success as a meme as say, Christianity has (less than 5% proportionate
life), nor has penetrated as deeply into as many societies for as long
as Christianity.
A more comparative meme is capitalism. It has been a successful meme
even longer than christianity, beacuse it also works inconcert with
humanity's basic instinctual and other prior memscapes to a far greater
extent. Communism sought to reverse human behavior, and died as a
result.
To relate this to extropy, we can take two roads:
1) if we assume that human history only has a few hundred years at most,
if not less than a century of life left to it, we can take the low less
principled road, and adapt the practical aspects of extropy to
interweave with the existing memescape, to take on and mold our
civilization by storm, which is essentially what it will take (it took
communism 50-70 years to take over half the world, using any means that
achieved the goals).
2) if we assume that the principle of transhuman singularities are only
relative to the past, and we will still be subjectively "human" (while
our prior selves will look like barbarians, or infants) then we can take
a more principled approach, with a long view of taking centuries to
reach a level of saturation to become the dominant memplex in the
memeography.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL
@k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_
]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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