Meme theory: Do we come up with ideas or do they, in fact, control us?

Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you? What exactly are ideas? Are they divine sparks of inspiration, the accidental by-products of our weird ape brains, neuronal fireworks displays that find meaning in our lives – or are they more than all these things?

One idea that I've spent the past three years of my life investigating is that ideas are, to a very real extent, 'alive' in their own right – surviving, reproducing, evolving, going extinct, just like living things.

It sounds a harmless proposition, but the implications are quite startling. If ideas are just like living things, then they are subject to Darwinian rules – inherently selfish entities, doing anything and everything they must to survive and propagate. And in this scenario, what are we? Little more than their hosts, their habitats? Vehicles to carry them from one parasitic generation to the next, coerced accomplices to their wild ambitions? If this idea has any substance at all, it will upset a lot of people.

www.independent.co.uk... 077.html

It could simply be that we live in a universe where the imperative to exist is manifested by memes. These memes could be the spark of life and we have evolved to sustain, convey and transmit memes.

If this theory is correct, one has to wonder if memes have an intelligence and a sentience.

reply to post by Ilovecatbinlady


First of all, everyone. Watch the movie "Pontypool"

its on netflix.

enjoy.


AND NOW FOR SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT:

>go home
>see this

>nope
>run away
>open the door
>get on the floor
>everybody walk the dinosaur
>but first visit aunti
>go to bel air
>accidentally all the spaghetti
>wet mattress in pool
>usually takes a crane to get it out

No. Why does there have to be a conspiracy in everything?

Every meme originated from a normal person, usually on 4chan, it became popular because people found it funny.

Originally posted by SpearMint
No. Why does there have to be a conspiracy in everything?

Every meme originated from a normal person, usually on 4chan, it became popular because people found it funny.

No offense but the news report appears to have flown over your head. We are not talking about 4chan's belaboured and juvenile ideas of memes. The thread is about heavy weight concepts like democracy, social contracts and complex and evolving ideas that are not easily articulated but understood.

Originally posted by SpearMint
No. Why does there have to be a conspiracy in everything?

Every meme originated from a normal person, usually on 4chan, it became popular because people found it funny.

BUT it is possible.


watch pontypool

Originally posted by Ilovecatbinlady

Originally posted by SpearMint
No. Why does there have to be a conspiracy in everything?

Every meme originated from a normal person, usually on 4chan, it became popular because people found it funny.

No offense but the news report appears to have flown over your head. We are not talking about 4chan's belaboured and juvenile ideas of memes. The thread is about heavy weight concepts like democracy, social contracts and complex and evolving ideas that are not easily articulated but understood.

edit on 15-7-2012 by Ilovecatbinlady because: (no reason given)

Sorry, I misunderstood, that's what I get for just skimming.

Memetics is a very interesting and complicated theory. One thing is for sure, if you dislike darwinian evolution you will absolutely hate the ideas in memetics. It basically says we are all just the lesser partner in a symbiotic relationship that has been playing out since we first started walking upright. The end point of which will be networked artifical intelligence that no longer requires our existance for it's own evolutionary progress.

Imagine what the religious will make of that

Here is an interesting TED talk about memetics from one of it's leading proponents Susan Blackmore.

Ideas are independent of people. An idea or "meme" will land on someone for a time and if they do nothing with it then it will go to someone else and keep on until it lands on someone who does something with it. Take music for example. I write many phrases of music as a child. Many little ditties. I invented many things. The tablet computer was my idea in 1982. I even tried to patent it, but we did not have the technology to build one and no one took me seriously. The music I wrote went on and landed on Beck and it made him rich. But I wrote it 20 years before he did. Hotwax, Beercan, Loser, the entire Stereopathic Soul Manure album was stuff I wrote years and years before Beck recorded it.

But Beck did something with it. I did not. There is no way he could know what I wrote. It was a meme with a life of it's own and it left me and went to him. The tablet idea left me and roamed the world until now we have them.

No idea can be killed or destroyed. No invention can be stopped by killing it's inventor. it will just go to someone else until it becomes manifest.

Meme theory is certainly fascinating, although it does have it's opponents, with some saying it's reductionist and that culture can't really be broken down into individual units as memetics suggests, and therefore culture and ideas can only be examined holistically

What I find particularly interesting is how memetics could tie into Jungian ideas, for example archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Originally posted by SpearMint

Originally posted by Ilovecatbinlady

Originally posted by SpearMint
No. Why does there have to be a conspiracy in everything?

Every meme originated from a normal person, usually on 4chan, it became popular because people found it funny.

No offense but the news report appears to have flown over your head. We are not talking about 4chan's belaboured and juvenile ideas of memes. The thread is about heavy weight concepts like democracy, social contracts and complex and evolving ideas that are not easily articulated but understood.

edit on 15-7-2012 by Ilovecatbinlady because: (no reason given)

Sorry, I misunderstood, that's what I get for just skimming.

No problem friend. I hope you enjoyed the idea of memes using humans for their own needs. A radical thought. A meme!

Is this not the same idea L.Ron Hubbard proposed? I cannot remember the title of the book but it was one of the more popular of his works. do I need to state I am not a scientologist but am open to the views and opinions of all. I found it an interesting work which covered many of the ideas proposed in the OP. if I remember correctly a large amount of the work was based on the ideas of others but it does provide a readers digest version of those concepts borrowed from others. cheers for sharing.

reply to post by usernamehere


L.Ron Hubbard did not invent the meme. The meme invented him

Jokes aside, I mean to say that memetics was a popular scifi theme in the 1950s and it was developed by several authors.