From that last one, there is a quote from a book by Daniel Dennett (who my friend John - Hi John! - used to always talk about) that is totally amazing:

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages — with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure. . .

Okay! Back to my list. Wait no, heres another sentence that I like:

“In defense, some large companies go so far as to set aside one “miner’s canary'’ among their fleet of computers, and advance its internal calendar a week so that any time-bomb viruses will reveal themselves prematurely before the big day. “

HOLY CRAP! This is JUST like what I was talking about when i was saying all that shit about that kid Greg being an AOL market research hologram (well, okay, not JUST, but similar enough to “spook” me):

The company could send out a questionnaire asking all these questions, but the customers that replied would be a biased sample and, in any case, their own assessment of their computer-using behavior might be inaccurate. A better solution would be a market-research computer program. Customers would be asked to load this program into their system where it would unobtrusively sit, quietly monitoring and tallying key-presses and mouse movements. At the end of a year, the customer would be asked to send in the disk file containing all the tallyings of the market-research program. But again, most people would not bother to cooperate and some might see it as an invasion of privacy and of their disk space.

The perfect solution, from the company’s point of view, would be a virus. Like any other virus, it would be self-replicating and secretive. But it would not be destructive or facetious like an ordinary virus. Along with its self-replicating booster it would contain a market-research warhead. The virus would be released surreptitiously into the community of computer users. Just like an ordinary virus it would spread around, as people passed floppy disks and e-mail around the community. As the virus spread from computer to computer, it would build up statistics on users behavior, monitored secretly from deep within a succession of systems. Every now and again, a copy of the viruses would happen to find its way, by normal epidemic traffic, back into one of the company’s own computers. There it would be debriefed and its data collated with data from other copies of the virus that had come “home.'’

Have you ever noticed this happening? You read something very closely for a long stretch of time by a given author, and then you stop reading for a few minutes, for whatever reason. And then, in your running internal monologue, you find yourself composing in the same sort of linguistic style and patterns as whatever you were just reading? Its almost like its running by itself, like the authors voice was operating directly on its own in your mind. Freaky!

I was just thinking another thing: that I don’t think we’ll ever evolve “artificial intelligence” as a thing of its own, separate from us. I think it will be more the sort of thing, where our minds become so integrated with a new style of intelligence, that there can no longer be any clear division between where one lets off and the other begins.

More from that essay:

It is intriguing to wonder what it might feel like, from the inside, if one’s mind were the victim of a “virus.'’ This might be a deliberately designed parasite, like a present-day computer virus. Or it might be an inadvertently mutated and unconsciously evolved parasite. Either way, especially if the evolved parasite was the memic descendant of a long line of successful ancestors, we are entitled to expect the typical “mind virus'’ to be pretty good at its job of getting itself successfully replicated.

Progressive evolution of more effective mind-parasites will have two aspects. New “mutants'’ (either random or designed by humans) that are better at spreading will become more numerous. And there will be a ganging up of ideas that flourish in one another’s presence, ideas that mutually support one another just as genes do and as I have speculated computer viruses may one day do. We expect that replicators will go around together from brain to brain in mutually compatible gangs. These gangs will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism or Voodoo. It doesn’t too much matter whether we analogize the whole package to a single virus, to each one of the component parts to a single virus. The analogy is not that precise anyway, just as the distinction between a computer virus and a computer worm is nothing to get worked up about. What matters is that minds are friendly environments to parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information, and that minds are typically massively infected.

Damn! He just lost my trust in him. Section four is called “Is Science a Virus?” Instead of examining the puzzle from the bottom up, like he does with the rest, he starts with the ending, and says “No.” Right away. First word. “No” is the whole sentence. Then he goes on to say how transmission of ideas in science may look like its viral, but its JUST NOT. Its only two paragraphs, no evidence, and then he goes on. Science is totally a virus! What a bitch this guy is! He’s totally under its sway! Man, thats awesome though. I always wondered why I didn’t agree with him (Richard Dawkins, inventor of the term “meme”) and the reason I don’t like him is that he’s lieing to himself somehow. Just what is he under the sway of, and what does he represent. Wow! This is really interesting. Wow!

Here’s a bunch of cheesy definitions of words related to memes. May be useful for me to help deconstruct and reverse engineer what these people think. For some reason, I like the idea of memeplexes better than I like the idea of memes themselves. I think memes just seem cheesy and almost like a scientific spiritualism, but not in the kind of fashion that I like. Memeplexes on the other hand are cool cause they somehow relate to my idea of story-systems. I’m not totally sure how, but I’ll figure it out, believe you me. I also don’t like everyone’s emphasis with means on “selection” and “transmission” and “evolution” and “success” cause it makes all this stuff into some weird competitive game, which just feels all wrong to me.

This is a decent article I think, but I also think this guy’s view is slightly askew. Its called Religion, Memes, Language. He says:

One reason why religions have such a strong hold on human societies is that they are based not primarily on intellectual beliefs but on narratives. Story-telling accesses the human psyche not at the intellectual but at the emotional level, where it is more powerful; probably the brain pathways are different for narrative response and belief formation.

You can tell by his word choices though, that he think that the “emotional” level is subservient, lower and less useful, and that he doesn’t quite understand what it really is. I mean, I only kind of do, but I know its not what he’s getting at.

Okay! Okay! My brain is totally cooked! I have to stop for a little while and get some distance from all this.