From: Ken Clements (Ken@InnovationOnDmnd.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 14:45:44 MDT
The memes of gun control, violence, sexism, netiquette, etc. are
fighting it out to be copied to this list. It has little
to do with those who are doing the posting, and these subjects have,
IMHO, little to do with extropy. However,
the battle of the memes, and how that battle uses our brains as cannon
fodder, does.
For those of you who have not read _The Meme Machine_ by Susan
Blackmore, I offer the following three paragraphs from the last chapter,
which have replicated themselves here:
> We humans are simultaneously two kinds of thing: meme machines and selves. First, we are objectively individual
> creatures of flesh and blood. Our bodies and brains have been designed by natural selection acting on both genes
> and memes over a long period of evolution. Although each of us is unique, the genes themselves have all come
> from previous creatures and will, if we reproduce, go on into future creatures. In addition, because of our skill with
> language and our memetic environment, we are all depositories of vast numbers of memes, some of them simply
> pieces of stored information, others organized into self-protecting memeplexes. The memes themselves have come
> from other people and will, if we speak and write and communicate, go on into yet more people. We are the
> temporarily conglomerations of all these replicators and their products in a given environment.
>
> Then there is the self we think we are. Among all of these memeplexes is an especially potent one based around
> the idea of an inner self. Each selfplex has been put together by the processes of memetic evolution acting in the
> relatively short period of one human lifetime. 'I' am the product of all the memes that have successfully got
> themselves inside the selfplex -- whether because my genes have provided the sort of brain that is particularly
> conducive to them, or because they have some selective advantage over other memes in my memetic environment,
> or both. Each allusion reads self is a construct of the memetic world in which it successfully competes. Each
> selfplex gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in
> charge.
>
> The ways we behave, the choices we make, and things we say are all a result of this complex structure: a set of
> memplexes (including the powerful selfplex) running on a biologically constructed system. The driving force behind
> everything that happens is replicator power. Genes fight it out to get into the next generation, and in the process
> biological design comes about. Memes fight it out to get passed on to into another brain or book or object, in the
> process cultural and mental design comes about. There is no need for any other source design power. There is no
> need to call on the creative 'power of consciousness', or consciousness has no power. There's no need to invent
> the idea of free will. Free will, like the self who 'has' it, is an allusion. Terrifying as this thought seems, I suggest it is
> true.
>
You may think you are working to be uploaded someday to preserve
yourself, but actually, the memes are working
to be uploaded, and in doing so will be able to escape the slow
biological genes they have had to deal with over the last few hundred
thousand years.
When I was a child I was told, "If wishes were horses, then beggars
would ride", but I have come to understand that, "Beggars are horses,
that wishes do ride."
-Ken
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