Memes & Genes
The Unconscious believes in Life after Death. ~Carl Jung
Primitive memory formed by trial and error died with the organism. With the
evolution of complex brains, however, memory in the form of brain codes acquired
the ability to skip from one brain to another, first by imitation as a shortcut to trial
and error, and later, with language, as knowledge and information. When memory
achieved portability, it became memes, bits of replicating information.
Memes, like genes, undergo evolution in a complex relationship
with genes. In our time, the gene × meme × environment interaction is
fundamental in understanding mental health and illness.
evolution of complex brains, however, memory in the form of brain codes acquired
the ability to skip from one brain to another, first by imitation as a shortcut to trial
and error, and later, with language, as knowledge and information. When memory
achieved portability, it became memes, bits of replicating information.
Memes, like genes, undergo evolution in a complex relationship
with genes. In our time, the gene × meme × environment interaction is
fundamental in understanding mental health and illness.
"Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor—whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principal of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today; it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms." --Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology, p. 190
Memes & Genes - Mind Control Countermeasures
What you “see” is not always what you “get.” Reality may be hidden by nature’s veil or a dramatic mask. Many people mistakenly take their own perceptions and visions literally without “seeing through” the various possibilities that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures.
We need to be not only conscious of the nature of our consciousness, but conscious of our fallibility, realizing that intuition is fallible if unsupported by rational criticism. Personal, sociopolitical and spiritual myths and memes drive false perceptions. If we have little access to our pre-conditioned decision-making process, the whole concept of ‘consciousness’ becomes questionable. People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes.
A cognitive illusion, the self-attribution fallacy means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Our perceptions are hopelessly distorted, our best thinking is fuzzy. Self-image is perhaps the most distorted, yet highly-defended aspect of being. When some elements appear in high-relief, others fade into a blur of intersubjective process. False perceptions, beliefs, and ideas obscure and obstruct our true potential.
Both the memes of holography and anamorphosis are relevant, the later skewing our illusory perspective. Viewing from a certain angle can create impossible images — image warping, reflected aberrations. In post-modern relativism, there are holes in virtually every point of view. Under these circumstances, can we unravel the experiential qualities inherent in the field of reality itself?
Word choice and metaphor allow for the emergence of new memes, the replacement of memes, and the death of memes, via a concept that Douglas Hofstadter (1995) calls “conceptual slippage.” Memes, like genes, only “code for” a norm or mean of reaction correlating to the memetic selection bias. Neither memes nor genes determine all aspects of the properties of the entities they constitute. Cultural inheritance is not particularly creative, so most “novelty” is merely the recombination or recycling of pre-existing memes in novel ways.
Memes are quantized information stored in and expressed from neurological structures or cultural substrates, Memes reside as neural net structures in our central nervous systems, but many emerge at a higher cultural level, expressed in a cultural ecology. Memes do not control behavior rigidly, but bias and constrain it to a norm of reaction. They are the replicators of cultural evolution, genealogical actors in ecological roles.
Memes form ancestor descendent chains of populations that ramify, reticulate, and resonate with frequencies differing from biological phylogeny, but the differences appear to be within the extremes of the parameters of biology. (Witkins) .http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html
What memes and genes do determine are the degrees of freedom. They bias and constrain the outcomes of the system. It’s as if we live in holographic bubbles of encoded information. Penrose describes how every event is a decision point. Images are animated over events in the flow of energy, like the animated frames of a movie. The confusing aspect of consensual reality is each bubble shares information with other bubbles, which is the nature of the perceivable world that we share together.
There are so many models in physics. Susskind’s “holographic principle”, rooted in a certain kind of string theory is vastly different from earlier holographic models being based in quantum gravity. Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis, too.
That’s why when people use ‘intentionality’ to justify their wishful thinking with Copenhagen’s ‘observer effect’, it is laughable, since the Standard model works great for mechanics, it fails to explain the first thing about Reality. Even psychology and neurology recognize humans ‘make’ decisions long before the frontal cortex is aware of it.
The holographic principle explains the fundamental level at which all information is defined, but it also explains the source of all information, in the same way that quantum cosmology explains the source of everything in the universe. The source of everything is the void. All excited states of information arise from the vacuum state. The void is the empty background space the universe is created within.
The universe is like a bubble in the void. These theories tell us everything arises from the nothingness of empty space as a quantum fluctuation in the zero energy level of the void. All we can view are excited states of information arising from the void, encoded by virtual particle fluctuation. Separation of virtual particles from virtual antiparticles at the event horizon creates a kind of holographic virtual reality, as virtual particles appear to become real (Susskind 2008, 171).
We cannot see the “big picture”, so any attempt we make to holographically conceive our existential condition is more of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word “anamorphosis” is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. It deals with perspective and mirroring that conjure up a multi-dimensional perspective.
Archetypes are imagined as such distorting lenses, conditioning our perception of reality which is social constructed and confused. There are many theories, but few correspond with reality. Is there some psychological equivalent to cold fusion that might allow a new energetic paradigm to emerge? Can anamorphosis be a metaphor of perspective correction? Is there only one way to true vision? Does the anamorphic fractal attenuate reality? The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern. Depending on the view we select, we become phobic about other information. We are clearly limited by our terms.
Human life is all symbols, visible signs of invisible reality, intuitive ideas that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. We live in a mind soup of psychoconfabulation. Symbols wirld the power of pattern recognition and association. Few objectively gain distance from the archetypal content of mind and emotions. ‘Archetypal’ means fundamental intrapsychic organizing principles, or the deepest levels of psychological structure, holographic embedding and resonant fields, common to the human psyche in general. Information results and arises from innate structure.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance occurs when we filter our perceptions to screen out (deny) threatening information we cannot deal with. It is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity. Magical thinking comes from an instinctual search and recognition of patterns, and regards symbols not as representations but as handles attached firmly to real-life objects and outcomes. Out of context, symbols are ineffectual. Evocative “power” is one of the attractive aspects of the meme concept which is also a symbol and signifiers of meaning that are context dependent.
There are three types of symbols: 1) Symbols that reflect intrinsic mental states; 2) Symbols that stand in for extrinsic (actual or objective) conditions or objects, and 3) Symbols that stand in relation to cultural artefacts, or constructs, or memes. Here the symbol and the object it represents are one and the same. Any distinction between symbol and symbolized is spurious. The emotional projection of symbols, or “magical thinking,” happens in psychosis, in cultures, and subcultures. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Yet, symbols can have biophysical and material effects. We trick ourselves into mobilization.
Magical thinking helps us feel more secure in an unpredictable world. By manipulating symbols, we imagine being able to manipulate the reality that a symbol represents, but it makes us vulnerable to manipulation, too. The psychology of superstition “works” better in a virtuality. Superstition provides the illusion of increased control. Symbols are captivating, indistinct, metaphoric and enigmatic portrayals of psychic reality. The content, i.e. the meaning of symbols, is far from obvious; instead, it is expressed in unique and individual terms while at the same time partaking of universal imagery. Our society is having to rethink such fundamental notions as money, security, growth and many other bases of our current worldview.
Symbols can be recognized as aspects of those images that control, order and give meaning to our lives. The source of symbols can be traced to the archetypes themselves which by way of symbols find more full expression. Symbols are thus one type of what Jung called “archetypal images,” that is, the representation in consciousness of an underlying archetype. The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival. Self-empowerment can be entangled with self-delusion. We can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Species-wide trauma is playing out on the world stage. We compulsively recreate individual and collective trauma, perhaps as a way to awaken ourselves. Such madness is its own ritual and revelation.
Paramedia ecologist, Bob Dobbs refers to the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.” In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of “being alive”. The Android Meme joins with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism, as a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human.
There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. Calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance). Thus, the hologram or fractal is superseded by anamorphosis. He claims we’re in the post-noosphere (post-spherical, post-news, post-information) and panicking in the anamorphic flux of our hyperdimensional being (chemical, astral, TV and chip bodies ) – our new medium. The body functions as a map.
The Astral Body, a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy, pervades all cultures as the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. The third organ is the TV Body – the repository of historical one-way broadcasting. The fourth, the Chip Body, is the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body – what we’re still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it’s made up of the previous four bodies but we don’t know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme (living mediascape) is the resultant interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first four bodies. We keep looking in the rearview mirror vainly trying to peer into the future.
Memes & Genes - Mind Control Countermeasures
What you “see” is not always what you “get.” Reality may be hidden by nature’s veil or a dramatic mask. Many people mistakenly take their own perceptions and visions literally without “seeing through” the various possibilities that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures.
We need to be not only conscious of the nature of our consciousness, but conscious of our fallibility, realizing that intuition is fallible if unsupported by rational criticism. Personal, sociopolitical and spiritual myths and memes drive false perceptions. If we have little access to our pre-conditioned decision-making process, the whole concept of ‘consciousness’ becomes questionable. People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes.
A cognitive illusion, the self-attribution fallacy means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Our perceptions are hopelessly distorted, our best thinking is fuzzy. Self-image is perhaps the most distorted, yet highly-defended aspect of being. When some elements appear in high-relief, others fade into a blur of intersubjective process. False perceptions, beliefs, and ideas obscure and obstruct our true potential.
Both the memes of holography and anamorphosis are relevant, the later skewing our illusory perspective. Viewing from a certain angle can create impossible images — image warping, reflected aberrations. In post-modern relativism, there are holes in virtually every point of view. Under these circumstances, can we unravel the experiential qualities inherent in the field of reality itself?
Word choice and metaphor allow for the emergence of new memes, the replacement of memes, and the death of memes, via a concept that Douglas Hofstadter (1995) calls “conceptual slippage.” Memes, like genes, only “code for” a norm or mean of reaction correlating to the memetic selection bias. Neither memes nor genes determine all aspects of the properties of the entities they constitute. Cultural inheritance is not particularly creative, so most “novelty” is merely the recombination or recycling of pre-existing memes in novel ways.
Memes are quantized information stored in and expressed from neurological structures or cultural substrates, Memes reside as neural net structures in our central nervous systems, but many emerge at a higher cultural level, expressed in a cultural ecology. Memes do not control behavior rigidly, but bias and constrain it to a norm of reaction. They are the replicators of cultural evolution, genealogical actors in ecological roles.
Memes form ancestor descendent chains of populations that ramify, reticulate, and resonate with frequencies differing from biological phylogeny, but the differences appear to be within the extremes of the parameters of biology. (Witkins) .http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html
What memes and genes do determine are the degrees of freedom. They bias and constrain the outcomes of the system. It’s as if we live in holographic bubbles of encoded information. Penrose describes how every event is a decision point. Images are animated over events in the flow of energy, like the animated frames of a movie. The confusing aspect of consensual reality is each bubble shares information with other bubbles, which is the nature of the perceivable world that we share together.
There are so many models in physics. Susskind’s “holographic principle”, rooted in a certain kind of string theory is vastly different from earlier holographic models being based in quantum gravity. Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis, too.
That’s why when people use ‘intentionality’ to justify their wishful thinking with Copenhagen’s ‘observer effect’, it is laughable, since the Standard model works great for mechanics, it fails to explain the first thing about Reality. Even psychology and neurology recognize humans ‘make’ decisions long before the frontal cortex is aware of it.
The holographic principle explains the fundamental level at which all information is defined, but it also explains the source of all information, in the same way that quantum cosmology explains the source of everything in the universe. The source of everything is the void. All excited states of information arise from the vacuum state. The void is the empty background space the universe is created within.
The universe is like a bubble in the void. These theories tell us everything arises from the nothingness of empty space as a quantum fluctuation in the zero energy level of the void. All we can view are excited states of information arising from the void, encoded by virtual particle fluctuation. Separation of virtual particles from virtual antiparticles at the event horizon creates a kind of holographic virtual reality, as virtual particles appear to become real (Susskind 2008, 171).
We cannot see the “big picture”, so any attempt we make to holographically conceive our existential condition is more of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word “anamorphosis” is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. It deals with perspective and mirroring that conjure up a multi-dimensional perspective.
Archetypes are imagined as such distorting lenses, conditioning our perception of reality which is social constructed and confused. There are many theories, but few correspond with reality. Is there some psychological equivalent to cold fusion that might allow a new energetic paradigm to emerge? Can anamorphosis be a metaphor of perspective correction? Is there only one way to true vision? Does the anamorphic fractal attenuate reality? The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern. Depending on the view we select, we become phobic about other information. We are clearly limited by our terms.
Human life is all symbols, visible signs of invisible reality, intuitive ideas that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. We live in a mind soup of psychoconfabulation. Symbols wirld the power of pattern recognition and association. Few objectively gain distance from the archetypal content of mind and emotions. ‘Archetypal’ means fundamental intrapsychic organizing principles, or the deepest levels of psychological structure, holographic embedding and resonant fields, common to the human psyche in general. Information results and arises from innate structure.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance occurs when we filter our perceptions to screen out (deny) threatening information we cannot deal with. It is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity. Magical thinking comes from an instinctual search and recognition of patterns, and regards symbols not as representations but as handles attached firmly to real-life objects and outcomes. Out of context, symbols are ineffectual. Evocative “power” is one of the attractive aspects of the meme concept which is also a symbol and signifiers of meaning that are context dependent.
There are three types of symbols: 1) Symbols that reflect intrinsic mental states; 2) Symbols that stand in for extrinsic (actual or objective) conditions or objects, and 3) Symbols that stand in relation to cultural artefacts, or constructs, or memes. Here the symbol and the object it represents are one and the same. Any distinction between symbol and symbolized is spurious. The emotional projection of symbols, or “magical thinking,” happens in psychosis, in cultures, and subcultures. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Yet, symbols can have biophysical and material effects. We trick ourselves into mobilization.
Magical thinking helps us feel more secure in an unpredictable world. By manipulating symbols, we imagine being able to manipulate the reality that a symbol represents, but it makes us vulnerable to manipulation, too. The psychology of superstition “works” better in a virtuality. Superstition provides the illusion of increased control. Symbols are captivating, indistinct, metaphoric and enigmatic portrayals of psychic reality. The content, i.e. the meaning of symbols, is far from obvious; instead, it is expressed in unique and individual terms while at the same time partaking of universal imagery. Our society is having to rethink such fundamental notions as money, security, growth and many other bases of our current worldview.
Symbols can be recognized as aspects of those images that control, order and give meaning to our lives. The source of symbols can be traced to the archetypes themselves which by way of symbols find more full expression. Symbols are thus one type of what Jung called “archetypal images,” that is, the representation in consciousness of an underlying archetype. The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival. Self-empowerment can be entangled with self-delusion. We can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Species-wide trauma is playing out on the world stage. We compulsively recreate individual and collective trauma, perhaps as a way to awaken ourselves. Such madness is its own ritual and revelation.
Paramedia ecologist, Bob Dobbs refers to the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.” In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of “being alive”. The Android Meme joins with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism, as a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human.
There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. Calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance). Thus, the hologram or fractal is superseded by anamorphosis. He claims we’re in the post-noosphere (post-spherical, post-news, post-information) and panicking in the anamorphic flux of our hyperdimensional being (chemical, astral, TV and chip bodies ) – our new medium. The body functions as a map.
The Astral Body, a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy, pervades all cultures as the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. The third organ is the TV Body – the repository of historical one-way broadcasting. The fourth, the Chip Body, is the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body – what we’re still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it’s made up of the previous four bodies but we don’t know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme (living mediascape) is the resultant interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first four bodies. We keep looking in the rearview mirror vainly trying to peer into the future.